CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

March 18, 2019October 16, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Getting Started with Temperature & Humidity Sensors on ESP8266 using ANAVI Thermometer

ANAVI Thermometer Air / Humidity / Water

ANAVI Thermometer was launched on CrowdSupply in January. It is an ESP8266 WiFi board with a built-in DHT22 temperature and humidity sensor, support for external DS18B20 waterproof temperature sensor, as well as other sensors thanks to three I2C sensors. I received the ANAVI Thermometer starter kit last month, and I’ve only found time to play with it in the last few days. I’ll start with a unboxing, assembly guide, before showing it action, and I’ll try to make it interface with Home Assistant over MQTT. ANAVI Thermometer Starter Kit Unboxing The kit comes with ANAVI Thermometer board, a plastic stand, a USB to TTL debug board, an I2C OLED display, a few nuts and bolts, and a couple of KiCad and ANAVI stickers. Leon ANAVI also added a traffic light board and LEDs, but it’s not normally part of the kit 🙂 ANAVI Thermometer board include an ESP8266 module, AM2302 […]

March 17, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

GearBest Database Was Left Unsecured For 2 Weeks

GearBest is one of the most popular Chinese online stores, and we often feature products sold by the company on the website. However, VPNMentor research team headed by Noam Rotem, a hat hacker and activist, discovered a serious security breach in Gearbest, where their database was completely unsecured for a period of time. Specifically the research team was able to access the following databases in March 2019: Orders database with products purchased, shipping address and postcode, customer name, email address, phone number Payments and invoices database with order number, payment type, payment information, email address, name, IP address Members database with name, address, date of birth, phone number, (unencrypted) email address, IP address, national ID and passport information, (unencrypted) account password They discovered 1.5+ million records in total. They managed to login successfully to two accounts from the database breach for testing. Payment information included data related Boleta (used in […]

March 16, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments

How to Import Google+ Account and Communities to MeWe

Google+ for consumers is going to definitely shutdown on April 2nd, and as written previously I had been looking for an alternative, and ended-up going with MeWe Ad-free, Privacy Focused Social Network. I created my own account, as well as two groups for development boards & SBCs and mini PCs & TV boxes. Many users have joined MeWe because of Google+ upcoming closure, so it made sense for the company to create an importer so that all posts, and communities can be imported from Google+ into MeWe. Mark Weinstein, MeWe CEO & founder, has now announced the release of Google+ Importer and instructions in a PDF sadly written in Microsoft Word… The steps are fairly simple: Go to https://takeout.google.com and click on “Deselect All” Select Google+ Circles, Google+ Communities, and Google+ Stream (apparently Google+ Likes is not needed), and make sure to check the format to JSON whenever possible as […]

March 16, 2019March 17, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments

Vnopn K1 Fanless AMD Mini PC Sells for $134 and Up

There are plenty of sub-$200 Intel powered fanless mini PCs, but if you’re looking for AMD models it’s more of a struggle. Vnopn K1 is one of the rare low cost fanless AMD mini PCs, and the good news is that it’s sold for just $133.68 on Aliexpress plus a few extra dollars for shipping. There are few tricks to achieve this low price. First that’s a barebone model, and if you want memory, storage, and WiFi, the cost climbs to $168.67 with 2GB RAM, and a 32GB SSD. The 8W AMD A6-1450 quad core processor APU found in the mini PC is rather old as well since it was launched in 2013, or almost 6 years ago. Vnopn K1 specifications: APU – AMD A6-1450 quad core “Jaguar” processor @ 1.0 / 1.4 GHz (Turbo) with 2MB L2 cache, Radeon HD 8250 GPU; 8W TDP System Memory -2GB, 4GB, or […]

March 15, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Turnip is an Open Source Vulkan Driver for Adreno GPU

Qualcomm Adreno GPUs have one of the best open source GPU driver for Arm SoC thanks to Freedreno driver. The driver relies on OpenGL ES API however, and nearly four of years ago, Khronos introduced the Vulkan API that aims to reduce CPU resources usage, and adds support multiple command buffers. The good news is there has been development of a Vulkan driver for Adreno 500 and 600 series GPU called Turnip, also referred to as Freedreno_vk (Freedreno Vulkan) in the code. The Turnip driver has been developed by Bas Nieuwenhuizen, a Site Reliability Engineer at Google who also happens to be RADV (Radeon Vulkan) lead developer, Chia-I Wu, a Google software engineer working on Android graphics, Chad Versace, Intel’s software engineer working on Linux OpenGL stack, and others as revealed by a recent merge into Mesa 19.1 slated to be released next quarter. Via Phoronix

March 15, 2019November 24, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Cypress PSoC 64 Microcontrollers Target Secure IoT Applications

If you are like me, you probably don’t remember, but back in 2017 Arm announced the Platform Security Architecture (PSA) that defines a set of requirements to secure low cost Internet of Things devices. There’s now at least one PSA compliant microcontroller, as Cypress Semiconductor introduced their PSoC 64 Secure MCU at Embedded World 2019 last month. The press release claims that PSoC 64 MCU family is one of “the first Arm Cortex-M processors to be certified as Level 1 compliant within the Arm Platform Security Architecture (PSA) certification scheme, PSA Certified, utilizing a secure Trusted Firmware-M (TF-M) implementation integrated into the Arm Mbed OS open-source embedded operating system”. PSoC 64 secure MCU key features and specifications: Arm Cortex-M4F core with 22‑µA/MHz active power consumption Optional Arm Cortex-M0+ core with 15‑µA/MHz power consumption System Memory – 160KB to 1MB SRAM Storage – 512KB to 2MB flash Security HW Cryptography – […]

March 15, 2019March 15, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 13 Comments

Seco SBC-C43 SBC Features NXP i.MX 8 QuadMax Processor, 8GB RAM

When NXP unveiled their first 64-bit i.MX processors in 2016, we had three families: i.MX 8 Cortex-A72/A53 for high performance, i.MX 8M Cortex-A53 for audio/video application, and i.MX 8X Cortex-A53 for low power applications. Most of the designs we’ve seen so far are based on i.MX 8M family, and we’ve seen few hardware platforms based on the top of the line i.MX 8 QuadMax SoC with two Arm Cortex-A72 cores, four Cortex-A53 cores, two Cortex-M4F real-time cores, and two GC7000XS/VX GPUs. We did cover several modules based on i.MX 8 QuadMax processor including Advantech ROM-7720 Qseven 2.1 Computer-on-Module, Toradex Apalis i.MX 8 CoM, and Congatec conga-SMX8 SMARC 2.0 SoM among others, but AFAICR I had yet to see an i.MX 8 QuadMax single board computer. So Seco SBC-C43 appears to be the first SBC powered by NXP’s most powerful i.MX 8 processor, coupled with up to 8GB DDR4, 32GB eMMC […]

March 14, 2019March 15, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 35 Comments

Samsung ARTIK Product Line Discontinued

Everyday I read hundreds of articles trying to find something interesting to write on CNX Software blog, and one way I keep track of news is to subscribe to RSS feeds using Thunderbird. From time to time, feeds get broken due to updates making them fail RSS validation, and today I noticed Samsung ARTIK feed had stopped working, so I went to the website, and… Wait… What closure of ARTIK business? It turns out Samsung Electronics decided to shutdown their ARTIK product line in December 2018 as reported by Business Korea: Samsung Electronics will pull the plug on its ARTIK project in four years after starting to develop the internet of things (IoT) platform. … IT industry experts say that Samsung decided to halt the ARTIK project because of its poor results. Samsung wanted to build an IoT ecosystem and lead the IoT market through the ARTIK project but it […]