CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

May 7, 2019May 7, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

ARBOR IoT-800N Android/Ubuntu Panel PC Targets Automotive Applications, Industrial Automation

Rockchip PX30 is a low cost low power quad core Arm Cortex-A35 processor mostly designed for car infotainment systems. Last month, we also found the processor in ARBOR SOM-RP301 system-on-module designed for retails kiosks such as automated currency exchange machines, electronic restaurant menus, , ticketing kiosks, etc… ARBOR has now launched another Rockchip PX30 platform with their IoT-800N 8″ Panel PC running Android 8.1 or Ubuntu 16.04, and designed for automotive applications such as fleet management or driver fatigue monitoring thanks to interfaces like OBD-II, as well as industrial automation. ARBOR IoT-800N specifications: SoC – Rockchip PX30 Quad-core Arm Cortex-A35 processor System Memory – 2GB DDR4 memory soldered on board Storage – 16GB eMMC flash soldered on board, microSDHC/microSDXC/microSD card socket up to 128GB Display – 8” TFT LCD display with 1024 x 600 resolution, 5-point projected capacitive touchscreen Camera – 8MP front-facing MIPI CSI camera with auto-focus Audio – […]

May 7, 2019May 7, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments

MORPHEUS Claims to be an Unhackable RISC-V Processor Architecture

Code gets continuously written and updated for new features, optimizations and so on. Those extra lines of code sometimes come at a cost: a security bug gets inadvertently introduced into the code base. The bug eventually gets discovered, a report is filled, and a software fix is committed to solve the issue, before the new software or firmware to push to the end user. This cycle repeats ever and ever, and this means virtually no software or device can be considered totally secure. The University of Michigan has developed a new processor architecture called MORPHEUS, and that blocks potential attacks by encrypting and randomly reshuffling key bits of its own code and data several times per second through a “Churn Unit”. The new RISC-V based processor architecture does not aim to solve all security issues, but focuses specifically on control-flow attacks made possible for example by buffer overflows: Attacks often […]

Graperain Samsung, Rockchip, and Qualcomm CPU modules, SBCs, and carrier boards

May 7, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Gets a Linux Kernel, Faster File System, Docker Support

Microsoft first introduced Windows Subsystem for Linux in 2016 in order to let developers runs bash command from Ubuntu user space without having to install Ubuntu in a virtual machine or container. It relies on the Windows kernel with a library converting Linux system calls into ones compatible with Windows. Performance is great until you start to involve file systems calls, for example during code compilations, something that’s fairly common for developers… Microsoft has been working on solving this performance issue, and compatibility issues with software such as Docker, and is now close to releasing Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL 2) featuring its own Linux 4.19 kernel instead of the Windows kernel plus a translation layer. WSL 2 uses virtualization technology to run its custom Linux kernel inside of a lightweight utility virtual machine (VM) which takes just 2 seconds to boot. That also means there will be separate […]

May 6, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

miriac MPX-LS1028A NXP QorIQ LS1028A SoM Targets TSN Applications with HMI Display

NXP QorIQ LayerScape LS1028A communication SoC was first unveiled in March 2017 with two Armv8 cores, GPU and LCD controller for HMI systems, as well as Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) capabilities useful in industrial settings. As usual it takes a while before the company finalize their design and software support, but LS1028A has started to appear at least in one hardware platform that’s supposed to launch this quarter (Q2 2019): MicroSys miriac MPX-LS1028A system-on-module. miriac MPX-LS1028A SoM specifications: SoC – NXP QorIQ LS1018 / LS1028 single / dual core Arm Cortex-A72 clocked at up to 1.3 GHz with MXC Vivante GPU, Mali Display Processor, configurable cryptographic offload engines (Optional: LS1017/LS1027 without GPU for cost saving) System Memory – Up to 4GB 32 Bit DDR4 with ECC RAM at up to 1600 MT/s Storage – Up to 256MB Serial NOR Flash & up to 4GB Serial NAND Flash; EEPROM MXM 2.0 edge […]

May 6, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Aconno Bluetooth Beacons Come with Various Sensors, Nordic Semi nRF52 BLE SoC

We first covered products from Aconno is 2017 with their Bluetooth LE development board powered by the company’s ACN52832 BLE module based on Nordic Semi nRF52832 ARM Cortex-M4 multi-procotol wireless SoC. Since then they’ve launched several small Bluetooth beacon modules based on ACN52832, and the company has what they call a presale promotion until May 21st, but it looks really like a group buying event for their existing BLE modules where the price goes down as more people purchase modules. Six Bluetooth modules are offered: acnSENSA multisensor Bluetooth tag with temperature, light, humidity, barometer, accelerometer, magnetometer, gyroscope acnBEACON programmable Bluetooth tag acnACT BLE beacon with button and RGD LED, magnetometer, phototransistor acnNFC programmable Bluetooth tag with NFC tag emulator acnRANGE distance measuring beacon with time-of-flight sensor acnFIND Bluetooth smart tag with LED, sound and accelerometer All modules come with a replaceable CR2450 battery, and IP65 enclosure. Pricing currently ranges from […]

May 6, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Linux 5.1 Release – Main Changes, Arm, MIPS & RISC-V Architectures

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 5.1: So it’s a bit later in the day than I usually do this, just because I was waffling about the release. Partly because I got some small pull requests today, but mostly just because I wasn’t looking forward to the timing of this upcoming 5.2 merge window. But the last-minute pull requests really weren’t big enough to justify delaying things over, and hopefully the merge window timing won’t be all that painful either. I just happen to have the college graduation of my oldest happen right smack dab in the middle of the upcoming merge window, so I might be effectively offline for a few days there. If worst comes to worst, I’ll extend it to make it all work, but I don’t think it will be needed. Anyway, on to 5.1 itself. The past week has been pretty calm, […]

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

May 5, 2019May 5, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Grove AI HAT Helps Raspberry Pi Run Edge Computing Workloads

Last year we wrote about Kendryte K210 dual core RISC-V processor specifically designed for for machine vision and machine hearing as well as the corresponding Kendryte KD233 which enables inference at the edge, e.g. tasks such as face recognition or object detection. Latter on we found the processor in Sipeed M1 module which went for as low as $5 in a crowdfunding campaign, and was fitted to some low cost boards now selling for $12.90 on Seeed Studio. The latter company has now designed Grove AI HAT that aims to assist Raspberry Pi in running the edge computing workloads previously described, as exposes 6 Grove interfaces to extend functionality with some of the Grove add-on modules. Grove AI HAT specifications: AI Module – Sipeed “MAIX” M1 with Kendryte K210 dual core RISC-V processor @ 600 MHz, KPU Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) hardware accelerator, APU audio hardware accelerator, 8 MB general […]

May 4, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 27 Comments

Pinebook Pro Arm Laptop Video Demo

Pine64 first revealed working on Pinebook Pro Arm Linux laptop at FOSDEM 2019 back at the end of January. The first Pinebook laptop had limited hardware resources, and as such was meant for simple tasks, but Pinebook Pro equipped with Rockchip RK3399 processor, 4GB RAM, 64GB to 128GB flash, and a 14″ Full HD display is designed to be used as your main laptop. That means everything needs to work from 3D graphics acceleration, to hardware video decoding, and USB-C video output. Lukasz Erecinski very recently shot a demo of the laptop in action, and everything looks very good, meaning the laptop should be come available soon. You can watch the demo further below, but if you are in a rush here’s what has been tested and works: Ubuntu & Debian with MATE desktop 4K video playback 3D graphics acceleration for games (Quake demo) 3D graphics acceleration in Chromium web […]