CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

March 5, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Acute Angle AA is a Triangle Shaped Mini PC with a Wooden Finish

Most mini PCs are boring black boxes, and maybe that’s the way it should be, but if you are looking for something a bit fancier Acute Angle AA is an Apollo Lake mini PC with a triangular shaped enclosure made of aluminum and something that looks like wood… The mini PC is equipped with an Intel Celeron N3450 quad core processor, 8GB RAM, 64GB eMMC flash, 128GB SSD, and is currently sold for $199.99 shipped on GearBest. Acute Angle AA was apparently launched at CES 2018 riding the cryptocurrency wave, and selling for $600 as a dual use machine: a standard mini PC and an Ethereum mining machine during idle time working together with other Acute Angle AA mini PCs as part of the Acute Angle Cloud. None of the Ethereum / cryptocurrency mining / cloud options are mentioned in the specifications, but you still get a uniquely designed machine […]

March 4, 2019March 5, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 21 Comments

Privacy Badger and QuantCast Choice GDPR Compliance Popup

Privacy Badger QuantCast GDPR Compliance

So last year, the European Union enacted a new privacy law called the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) that give users more control about their privacy settings (handling of cookies etc..), and that come with the threat of heavy fines for non-compliance starting at up to €10 million, or 2% of the worldwide annual revenue of the prior financial year, whichever is higher. Small blogs like CNX Software will never make that kind of money over the course of their life time, but we must still comply. After discussing with other bloggers, I activated Quantcast Choice plugin for European users last year in order to be in compliance to the best of my knowledge. That means the first time a European user visits the website he/she should be presented with the following window to either accept the default use of cookies, or click on “Show Purposes” to either decline all […]

March 4, 2019March 4, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Pycom Pygate is a 50 Euros 8-channel LoRa Gateway Board

Semtech SX1308 digital baseband Chip for indoor LoRaWAN pico gateways was announced a few years ago, but it took a while before multi-channel gateways integrated the new low cost chip, and 2019 appears to be the year where pico LoRa gateway will be launched. We covered the $69 The Things Indoor Gateway a few weeks ago, but there will be soon another option, although geared towards developers, with Pycom Pygate low-cost 8-channel gateway board that connects to LoRa or the company’s Pymesh network. Pycom Pygate gateway board preliminary features and specifications: Dual SX1257 transceivers for a total of 8 channels support Frequencies – 863-870 MHz and 902-928 MHz Baseband processor: Semtech SX1308 Ultra-low power standby mode Ethernet with PoE via the optional daughter board Powered via USB, LiPo Battery and Ethernet via the optional daughter board LiPo battery charging via the USB port USB to serial connection for the Pycom […]

March 4, 2019April 13, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Google to Launch Edge TPU Powered Coral Development Board and USB Accelerator

Several low power neural network accelerators have been launched over the recent years in order to accelerator A.I. workloads such as object recognition, and speech processing. Recent announcements include USB devices such as Intel Neural Compute Stick 2 or Orange Pi AI Stick2801. I completely forgot about it, but Google also announced their own Edge TPU ML accelerator, development kit, and USB accelerator last summer. The good news is that Edge TPU powered Coral USB accelerator and Coral dev board and are going to launch in the next few days for respectively $74.99 and $149.99. Coral Development Board Coral dev board is comprised of a base board and SoM wit the following specifications: Edge TPU Module SoC – NXP i.MX 8M quad core Arm Cortex-A53 processor with Arm Cortex-M4F real-time core, GC7000 Lite 3D GPU ML accelerator – Google Edge TPU coprocessor delivering up to 4 TOPS System Memory – […]

March 4, 2019April 22, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Linux 5.0 Release – Main Changes, Arm, MIPS & RISC-V Architectures

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 5.0: Ok, so the last week of the 5.0 release wasn’t entirely quiet, but it’s a lot smaller than rc8 was, and on the whole I’m happy that I delayed a week and did an rc8. It turns out that the actual patch that I talked about in the rc8 release wasn’t the worrisome bug I had thought: yes, we had an uninitialized variable, but the reason we hadn’t immediately noticed it due to a warning was that the way gcc works, the compiler had basically initialized it for us to the right value. So the same thing that caused not the lack of warning, also effectively meant that the fix was a no-op in practice. But hey, we had other bug fixes come in that actually did matter, and the uninitialized variable _could_ have been a problem with another compiler. Regardless – all […]

March 3, 2019March 4, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

GameShell Kit Review – Part 2: An Hackable Retro Gaming Console

ClockworkPi GameShell is an hackable retro gaming console combining Arm Linux and Arduino boards that happens to come in kit form, and that’s lot of fun to assemble as we’ve seen in the first part of the review of ClockworkPi GameShell. Since then I’ve had time to have more fun, play some games, and experiment with the device, so I’ll report my experience and point out the good parts, as well as some of the shortcomings I came across. We can press the power button to start it up, and after a few seconds we get to the main menu with several icons including… the self-describing Settings, Retro Games with MAME, MGBA, NESTOPIA, and PCxs emulators that require your own ROMs/BIOS, as well as Indie Games with ready to play games like OpenTyrian spaceship shooting game, or NyanCat. Moving on to the right of the menu we’ve got the famous […]

March 2, 2019March 2, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 40 Comments

Orange Pi Software Releases – Android 9.0 Firmware, Linux Source Code for RK3399 / MT6737

Shenzhen Xunlong Software is used to release many different variations of their Orange Pi boards, and more often than not they tend to launch their boards fairly early before the software is fully ready. Many of their boards get supported by the community thanks to Armbian, linux-sunxi, etc… but sometimes the company does release firmware or source code themselves, as they did in the last two days with Android 9.0 firmware for one of their Allwinner H6 board, and Linux source code for Orange Pi 4G-IoT and Orange Pi RK3399. Android 9.0 for Orange Pi One Plus Launched in 2017, Orange Pi One Plus was the very first Allwinner H6 SBC launched on the market, and supported Android 7.0 at the time. But following the release of Android 9.0 for Allwinner H6 TV boxes a few weeks ago, you can now also upgrade your Orange Pi One Plus to Android […]

March 1, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Oxalis 96Boards Enterprise Edition Board Targets Low Power IoT and Networking Applications

Most 96Boards on the market follow 96Boards Consumer Edition (CE) specification, and while 96Board Enterprise Edition (EE) specification was first announced in 2015 we had yet to have a board available for purchase after previous failed attempts with AMD Opteron (Arm Cortex-A57) powered Cello board. But there’s finally a 96Board Enterprise Edition available today thanks to Systart Oxalis board powered by NXP LayerScape LS1202 Cortex-A53 processor with a packet accelerator, designed for low power IoT and networking applications, and following 96Boards EE “standard” form factor. Systart Oxalis key features and specifications: SoC – NXP Layerscape LS1012A single core Arm Cortex-A53 processor with hardware packet forwarding engine System Memory – Up to 3GB RAM Storage – 64MB SPI Flash for bootloader and RCW, MicroSD Card slot, 1x mSATA connector Networking – 2x Gigabit Ethernet ports (RJ45) USB – 2x USB 3.0 ports Expansion 40-pin low speed (LS) expansion connector with +1.8V, […]