CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

August 15, 2019August 15, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

The Visible Lisp Computer Runs on Adafruit ItsyBitsy M0 Board

Specified in 1958, Lisp is one of the oldest programming languages, and it does not appear to be widely used anymore. But if you want to play around with the 61 years old language, you may want to do so in a neat way via the Visible Lisp Computer, a Lisp interpreter that displays the contents of the Lisp workspace on an OLED display. It is a modified version of Technoblogy’s uLisp interpreter for Arm boards designed to run on Adafruit ItsyBitsy M0, or other boards based on Microchip ATSAMD21E MCU on a prototyping board, connected to a 64×48 OLED display over I2C. uLisp gives you a workspace of 3072 free Lisp objects (each of 8 bytes) on this hardware, which exactly matches the 3072 pixels (64×48) from the display. Having said that the program would also work on larger SSD1306-based OLED displays. The display shows free Lisp objects in […]

August 15, 2019August 15, 2019 by Ayo Ayibiowu - 8 Comments

PiVoyager is a UPS for the Raspberry Pi With a Real-Time Calendar Clock

PiVoyager: the smart UPS for the Raspberry Pi.

The Raspberry Pi is a powerful SBC (Single Board Computer), and aside from being used for everyday computing stuff, the Raspberry Pi can be embedded as the brain of various projects. Using the Raspberry Pi for standalone projects do create some concerns about power. How do I power the Pi? Should I get a power bank? Or maybe I need a longer wired connector. If powering your Raspberry Pi based project has always being a concern to you, then you don’t have to worry about it again with the introduction of the PiVoyager. The PiVoyager is an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) for the Raspberry Pi specially designed to work with standard Li-Ion or LiPo batteries. It is shaped in the form a Pi Zero HaT making it fully compatible with PiZero form factor, but nevertheless, it will still work with any Raspberry-PI having the conventional 40-pin header found in the Pi […]

August 15, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) Europe 2019 Schedule – October 28-30

Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2019 Schedule

I may have just written about Linaro Connect San Diego 2019 schedule, but there’s another interesting event that will also take place this fall: the Embedded Linux Conference Europe on October 28 -30, 2019 in Lyon, France. The full schedule was also published by the Linux Foundation a few days ago, so I’ll create a virtual schedule to see what interesting topics will be addressed during the 3-day event. Monday, October 28 11:30 – 12:05 – Debian and Yocto Project-Based Long-Term Maintenance Approaches for Embedded Products by Kazuhiro Hayashi, Toshiba & Jan Kiszka, Siemens AG In industrial products, 10+ years maintenance is required, including security fixes, reproducible builds, and continuous system updates. Selecting appropriate base systems and tools is necessary for efficient product development. Debian has been applied to industrial products because of its stability, long-term supports, and powerful tools for packages development. The CIP Project, which provides scalable and […]

August 15, 2019March 31, 2020 by Stephen Vicinanza - 2 Comments

Commell LE-37N 3.5″ SBC is Powered by Intel Whiskey Lake-U Core i7-8665UE Processor

Commell has announced its 3.5” LE-37N SBC run by the 8th generation Whiskey Lake-U quad-core processor. The board has support for triple displays, 4x USB 3.1 Gen 2, 2x SATA III 2x GbE, M2 and Mini-PCIe. Previously we reported on the ASRock IMB-1216 mini-ITX board powered by a choice of Whiskey Lake-U SoCs, as well as the crowdfunded UP Xtreme Whiskey Lake-U SBC. LE-37N Whiskey Lake-U SBC The LE-37N miniboard platform is specifically designed for the Whiskey Lake-U Intel processors with the FCBGA1528 sockets. But it was built with the quad-core, 8-thread, 1.7 GHz Core i7-8665UE with an 8MB cache, 15W TDP and 24 EU Intel Generation 9.5 HD Graphics. It supports DDR4 memory in two SO-DIMM 2400 MHz slots for up to a total of 32GB. The 8th Generation Whiskey Lake-U i7 processor is more power-efficient and supports Linux and Windows OSes. Extra Features and Display Options There is […]

August 14, 2019August 14, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 9 Comments

BFQ (Budget Fair Queuing) I/O Scheduler Improves Linux Systems Responsiveness (Video)

Storage is normally the slowest part of a system, and operating systems such as Linux try to limit I/O access with “tricks” like caching. The I/O scheduler may also matter if you have multiple programs accessing the same drive, and in Linux 4.12 implemented two new multi-queue block I/O schedulers, namely BFQ (Budget Fair Queuing) and Kyber that are meant to improve the performance of the systems. If you’re using Linux 5.2 you may even get further improvements since performance tweaks make application start-up times under load to be up to 80% faster. I have never seen BFQ in action so far, but earlier this year, Paolo Valente, who is working for Linaro, made a video with an Acer Chromebook 15 showing Google Chrome launch time using the default mq-deadline schedule, and bfq-mq scheduler. The test involves writing a 1.5GB file to the drive with dd, and clicking on the […]

August 14, 2019August 14, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 12 Comments

Padauk PMS150C “3 Cents” MCU Supports SDCC Open Source Toolchain

Back in 2016, I tried to find the cheapest MCU, and discovered Holtek HT48R002 8-bit RISC MCU @ 8MHz with 1K x 14-bit OTP memory, and 64 bytes of RAM that was selling for around 8.5 cents per unit for 1k orders at the time, and about the same now. But this morning, I read a post about sub-10-cents microcontrollers where cpldcpu details offering of several mostly little known vendors including Bojuxing Industrial, Eastsoft Micro, or Puolop. But Paudauk PMS150C especially caught my attention since price starts at $0.033, or 3 cents, and EEVBlog community has been working on getting SDCC open-source toolchain to work on the MCU. PMS150C MCU specifications: CPU – Processing unit with 79 “powerful” instructions Memory – 64 Bytes data RAM Storage – 1KW (1K x 14-bit) OTP program memory Peripherals 1x hardware 16-bit timer; 1x hardware 8-bit timer with PWM generation 1x general purpose comparator […]

August 14, 2019August 14, 2019 by Stephen Vicinanza - 1 Comment

$10 Wio Lite W600 Arduino Zero Compatible WiFi Board Follows Adafruit Feather Form Factor

Seeed Studio has just released the latest Arduino compatible Wio Lite W600 a combination of the W600 WiFi module mounted on the board and an Atmel SAM D21 Arm Cortex-M0+ microcontroller. The WiFi core is a W600 2.4 GHz module featuring the Arm Cortex-M3. The SAM D21 is the same chip used by the Arduino Zero, so the Wio Lite W600 is compatible with Arduino Zero. Basic Specs The I/O level is 3.3V, and there are 6 analog pins and 14 digital pins, as well as one UART, I2C, and ICSP port. The board is powered through a USB Type C port or a 3.5V–4.2V LiPo battery. The latest feature is the W600 module is CE/FCC certified and supports 802.11 b/g/n WiFi. The WiFi module also features 1MB on-chip flash to store and run freeRTOS operating system. Seeed Studio provides a full Arduino W600 library and demos for many wireless […]

August 13, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 45 Comments

Orange Pi Zero2 is a Tiny Allwinner H6 SBC with HDMI 2.0, USB 3.0, Ethernet & WiFi

Shenzhen Xunlong Software launched a refresh of their Orange Pi Zero board, namely Orange Pi Zero LTS, a couple of weeks ago. The company is now about to launch another SBC of the “Zero” family. Slightly larger than its predecessor, Orange Pi Zero2 is also quite more powerful with an Allwinner H6 quad core Cortex-A53 processor, and more versatile thanks to the addition of a USB 3.0 port, HDMI 2.0 video output, and a built-in microphone. Orange Pi Zero2 specifications: SoC – Allwinner H6 quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor with Arm Mali T720 GPU with support for OpenGL ES3.1/3.0/2.0/1.1, Microsoft DirectX 11 FL9_3 Memory – 512MB LPDDR3 (Allwinner AW52A8G32) Storage – 4GB eMMC Flash and microSD card up to 32GB Video Output – HDMI 2.0a port Video Decoding – 10-bit H265/HEVC up tp 4K60 or 6K30; H264/AVC up to 4K30; VP9 up to 4K30; AVS+/AVS up to 1080p60 Network Connectivity 802.11 […]