CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

December 18, 2020December 18, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 14 Comments

Picovoice supports custom wake word, offline voice recognition on Raspberry Pi

ReSpeaker 4-mic array is a Raspberry Pi HAT with four microphones that can work with services such as Google Assistant or Amazon Echo. It was launched in 2017. So nothing new on the hardware front. What’s new is the expansion board is now supported by Picovoice that works much like other voice assistants except it allows people to create custom wake words and offline voice recognition. Picovoice is described as an end-to-end platform for building customized voice products with processing running entirely on-device. It is cross-platform, is said to be more resilient to noise and reverberation, and thanks to running offline, it offers low-latency and complies with HIPAA and GDPR privacy regulations. The platform is comprised of two main engines: Porcupine lightweight wake word engine that supports custom wake words trained through PicoVoice console. The engine can listen to multiple wake words and is cross-platform with support for Raspberry Pi, […]

December 18, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Onion Tau is an affordable 3D depth LiDAR camera (Crowdfunding)

Onion is better known for its Omega IoT boards running OpenWrt, but the company has now come up with a completely different product: Onion Tau 3D depth camera equipped with a 160×60 LiDAR sensor. The device plugs like a USB webcam to a host computer or board, but instead of transferring standard images, the camera produces 3D depth data that can be used to detect thin objects, track moving objects, and be integrated into other applications leveraging environment mapping such as SLAM (Simultaneous localization and mapping). Onion Tau LiDAR camera (TA-L10) specifications: Depth technology – LiDAR Time of Flight Depth stream output – 160 x 60 @ 30 fps Depth range – 0.1 to 4.5 meters Depth field of view (FOV) – 81˚ x 30° Grayscale 2D camera image sent with 3D depth map data Host interface – USB Type-C port Dimensions – 90 x 41 x 20 mm; 4x […]

ArmSoM RK3588 AIModule7 NVIDIA Jetson Nano-compatible SOM

December 18, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 14 Comments

When USB-C to USB-A adapter meets USB PD charger…

USB-C PD charger and USB-C to USB-A adapter

MINIX NEO P1 is a 66W USB-C power supply/charger that can handle up to 3 devices, but I’m already using its big brother NEO P2 (100W) to power single board computers or other compatible devices that I may have to review. So instead, I plugged it in my bedroom’s power extension since it’s so tiny and provides three extra USB ports for charging devices. The problem is that two of those are USB-C ports, and I don’t own any USB-C to USB-C cable, so I went shopping for such cables, but soon realized I could probably “save money” by purchasing USB-C to USB-A adapters for less than one dollar each as I already own several USB-A to USB-C / micro USB cables. I got two of those and inserted them in the tiny USB PD charger. Spacing between the two USB-C ports was wide enough to the adapter fitted just […]

December 17, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Cmsemicon ANT32RV56xx is a RISC-V microcontroller for wireless charging

We’ve seen RISC-V architecture used in general-purpose microcontrollers, AIoT processors, as well as WiFi and Bluetooth IoT SoC’s such as ESP32-C3 and BL602. Allwinner is also prepping a RISC-V application processor, and we’ve covered plenty of other developments in our RISC-V 2020 highlights post. But we’ve now been made aware of another application-specific RISC-V microcontroller from a Chinese fabless vendor I had never heard of. Meet Cmsemicon ANT32RV56xx RISC-V microcontroller for wireless charging applications. Cmsemicon ANT32RV56xx “tentative” key features and specifications: MCU Core – RISC-V RV32EC core @ 48MHz 32-bit hardware divider (HWDIV) Memory – Up to 32KB ILM-SRAM, up to 8KB DLM-SRAM Storage – 64KB program FLASH (APROM+BOOT), 1KB FLASH data area Peripherals Up to 46 I/Os 6x Enhanced PWM (EPWM) 1x I2C, 1x SPI/SSP, 2x UART Up to 20x 12-bit ADC up to 100Ksps Up to 20x 12-bit ADC up to 1.2 Msps Capture/compare/pulse width modulation for up […]

December 17, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Raspberry Pi gets official IQAudio audio boards, improved industrial support

Raspberry Pi IQAudio DigiAMP+ and Codec Zero

The Raspberry Pi was envisioned as an inexpensive, yet highly-features platform to teach programming to young kids, but as soon as the board was released in 2012 things quickly got out of control and many people started to use the low-cost SBC in various projects, or just as an XBMC (now Kodi) media center. Over 8 years later, that means 44 percent of Raspberry Pi boards were sold to the industrial/commercial market as opposed to individuals or the education market. Two recent announcements from the Raspberry Pi Foundation / Raspberry Pi Trading highlight the willingness of the organizations to expand the use of their boards to more markets: IQaudio audio boards and a new section of the website specific to industrial support. IQaudio audio boards for Raspberry Pi If you’ve already heard about IQaudio, that’s because the audio boards are not new. They were developed by a company called IQaudio […]

December 17, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Qualcomm unveils QCC305x/QCC3056 TrueWireless, Bluetooth LE Audio-ready SoC for earbuds

Qualcomm QCC305x TrueWireless Bluetooth LE Audio SoC

Qualcomm has some SoC families specifically designed for Bluetooth headphones, headsets, & earbuds, and we very recently covered the cute Qualcomm QCC5141 Earbud reference design made to help manufacturers design and launch earbuds with support for TrueWireless Mirroring and Hybrid ANC. The company has now introduced another family with the QCC305x SoC series aiming to “bring premium True Wireless earbud features to a broad range of tiers” such as Qualcomm Adaptive Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) and wake word activated voice assistant, as well as support for the upcoming Bluetooth LE audio standard. The first and only member of QCC305x family at this time is QCC3056 with the following key features and specifications: CPU – 32-bit programmable application core clocked at up to 80 MHz DSP – 2x Qualcomm Kalimba DSP @ 120 MHz with 112kB program RAM, 448kB data RAM Storage – External flash Connectivity Bluetooth 5.2 qualified BR, EDR, […]

Rockchip RK3568, RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs and SoMs in 2025

December 16, 2020December 13, 2021 by Ian W MORRISON (Linuxium) - No Comments

Cincoze GM-1000 Embedded GPU Computer Review

Cincoze gm-1000 embedded computer NVIDIA GPU

Cincoze GM-1000 is an industrial embedded GPU computer. It is highly expandable including supporting an embedded MXM GPU. As a rugged computer, it can either be passively cooled or actively cooled with add-on fans. It can support an operating temperature ranging from -40°C – 70°C and is also able to survive being dropped or hit with a vibration/shock tolerance of 5G/50G. It is marketed as having all the features required for a compact, reliable, and high-performance computing system for field applications in machine vision, image processing, and artificial intelligence. In this review, I’ll cover some performance metrics from both Windows and Ubuntu and also discuss the thermals. Hardware Overview The model loaned by Cincoze for review came with an Intel Core i7-9700TE which is an eight-core 8-thread 1.80 GHz Coffee Lake-R processor boosting to 3.80 GHz with Intel’s UHD Graphics 630. It also came with an NVIDIA Quadro Embedded P2000 […]

December 16, 2020February 19, 2023 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 24 Comments

Rockchip RK3566 and RK3568 datasheets and features comparison

We first covered Rockchip RK3566 processor in February, but we’ve been informed the specifications have changed since then, and earlier this month, we also wrote about RK3568 quad-core Cortex-A55 processor with the same base features but some extra I/Os. But due to NDAs, people familiar with the chips could not release too many details, so we did not get the full picture. This has just changed as the datasheets for both processors have just dropped from somewhere here and there, and we can get a much closer look. RK3566 and RK3568 specifications I’ve highlighted the obvious differences above, with the big ones being the PCIe interface and RK3568 having dual Gigabit Ethernet. The other features comparison can be found in the table below. Multiplexed interfaces. Important note. Rockchip RK3566 and RK3568 are using Multi-PHY Interfaces, and while the table above lists all possible interfaces, they can not all be used […]

Boardcon CM3588 Rockchip RK3588 System-on-Module designed for AI and IoT applications