CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

September 28, 2017September 28, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 10 Comments

$69.99 Amazon Fire TV 2017 TV Box Supports 4K HDR-10 Video Playback

Amazon has just announced a new Fire TV TV box with support for 4K Ultra HD and HDR (High Dynamic Range), and a cheaper price, as it is selling for $69.99 on Amazon US with delivery scheduled to start on October 25, 2017. Amazon Fire TV 2017 specifications: SoC – Amlogic S905Z quad core ARM Cortex-A53 processor @ 1.5 GHz with penta-core Mali-450MP3 GPU System Memory – 2GB RAM Storage – 8GB flash Video & Audio Output – HDMI 2.0a up to 4K 60 Hz with HDCP 2.2, Doby Atmos support Video – HDR-10. H.265, H.264 Connectivity – Dual band 802.11 b/g/n/ac WiFi + Bluetooth 4.1 LE USB – 1x micro USB port for power (and optional USB Ethernet adapter) Dimensions – 65 x 65 x 15 mm Weight – 87 grams Amazon just mentions “Amlogic Quad-core 1.5GHz | ARM 4xCA53” for Fire TV processor, so it first assumed it could […]

September 27, 2017September 27, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

TECHBASE Moduino X Series Industrial IoT Modules / Endpoints are Based on ESP32 WiSoC

We’ve previously covered TECHBASE ModBerry industrial IoT gateways leveraging Raspberry Pi 3, FriendlyELEC NanoPi M1 Plus, or AAEON’s UP Linux boards. The company has now launched Moduino X series modules powered by Espressif ESP32 WiFi + Bluetooth SoC to be used as end points together with their ModBerry gateways. Two models have been developed so far, namely Moduino X1 and X2, with the following specifications: Wireless Module – ESP32-WROVER with ESP32 dual-core Tensilica LX6 processor @ 240 MHz, 4MB pSRAM (512KB as option), 4MB SPI flash; External Storage – X2 only: micro SD card slot Connectivity 802.11 b/g/n WiFi up to 16 Mbps + Bluetooth 4.2 LE with u.FL antenna connector X2 only: 10/100M Ethernet Options: LoRa (Semtech SX1272); Sigfox (TI CC1125); LTE Cat M1/NB1; Zigbee Serial – 2x RS-232/485 Display – Optional 0.96″ OLED display with 128×64 resolution Expansion I/Os 4x Digital I/O (0 ~ 3V) 2x Analog Input: […]

September 27, 2017October 4, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 12 Comments

Mecool VS-RK3399 Board Linux Benchmarks

I’ve just showed how to install Debian, and build a Linux image from source on VS-RD-RK3399 board (aka Mecool VS-RK3399) last week-end, but at the time I did not run any benchmarks on the board. We already have plenty of benchmarks for Rockchip RK3399 in Android, so instead I started by installing the latest Phoronix Test Suite in Debian:

sudo apt install php-cli php-gd php-xml php-zip 
wget http://phoronix-test-suite.com/releases/repo/pts.debian/files/phoronix-test-suite_7.4.0_all.deb 
sudo dpkg -i phoronix-test-suite_7.4.0_all.deb

sudo apt install php-cli php-gd php-xml php-zip

wget http://phoronix-test-suite.com/releases/repo/pts.debian/files/phoronix-test-suite_7.4.0_all.deb

sudo dpkg -i phoronix-test-suite_7.4.0_all.deb

… and ran the tests I did on NanoPi NEO 2 earlier:

phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1704029-RI-1704017RI65

1	phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1704029-RI-1704017RI65

For whatever reasons OpenSSL and Mafft failed to download, but we still have the other benchmarks to compare with. Note that the Debian image is likely not optimized, and while the system runs an Aarch64 kernel, the rootfs is only 32-bit, which may have affected some of the benchmarks.

linaro@linaro-alip:~$ file /bin/ls
/bin/ls: ELF 32-bit LSB shared object, ARM, EABI5 version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib/ld-linux-armhf.so.3, for GNU/Linux 3.2.0, BuildID[sha1]=f10ece941515bd40f6aa48dd28ba481c8a17cace, stripped
linaro@linaro-alip:~$ uname -a
Linux linaro-alip 4.4.55 #474 SMP Tue Sep 5 09:09:33 CST 2017 aarch64 GNU/Linux
linaro@linaro-alip:~$

linaro@linaro-alip:~$ file /bin/ls

/bin/ls: ELF 32-bit LSB shared object, ARM, EABI5 version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked, interpreter /lib/ld-linux-armhf.so.3, for GNU/Linux 3.2.0, BuildID[sha1]=f10ece941515bd40f6aa48dd28ba481c8a17cace, stripped

linaro@linaro-alip:~$ uname -a

Linux linaro-alip 4.4.55 #474 SMP Tue Sep 5 09:09:33 CST 2017 aarch64 GNU/Linux

linaro@linaro-alip:~$

But let’s see what’s we’ve got, starting with John the Ripper password cracker, a multi-threaded benchmark. We’d normally expect hardware platforms based on Rockchip RK3399 SoC to […]

September 27, 2017February 19, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 40 Comments

Banana Pi BPI-W2 is a Features-Packed Realtek RTD1296 Development Board

I’ve reviewed several Realtek RTD1295 platforms with Zidoo X9S and Eweat R9 Plus, and I was generally impressed by the storage, Ethernet, and WiFi performance. 4K video playback was good too, as long you don’t have any 4K H.264 videos at 30 fps or more. Most devices would also run Android and OpenWrt side-by-side bringing the best of both operating for respectively apps & multimedia, and server functions. HDMI input – with PVR, time-shifting and PiP functions – was also a bonus, However so far, nobody cared to design a maker board powered by RTD1295 processor. Since then we’ve learned Realtek was working on RTD1296 processor with even more Gigabit Ethernet, USB 3.0, and SATA interfaces, and SinoVoIP has now designed a board based on the SoC called Banana Pi BPI-W2. Banana Pi BPI-W2 preliminary specifications: SoC – Realtek RTD1296 quad core Cortex A53 processor with ARM Mali-T820 MP3 GPU […]

September 27, 2017September 27, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 17 Comments

Short Demo with 96Boards SynQuacer 64-bit ARM Developer Box

Even if you are working on ARM platforms, you are still likely using an Intel or AMD x86 build machine, since there’s not really a good alternative in the ARM world. Linaro talked about plans to change that at Linaro Connect Budapest 2017 in March, and a few days ago, GIGABYTE SynQuacer software development platform was unveiled with a Socionext SynQuacer SC2A11 24-core Cortex-A53 processor, and everything you’d expect from a PC tower with compartment for SATA drives, PCIe slots, memory slots, multiple USB 3.0 ports, and so on. The platform was just demonstrated a Linaro Connect San Francisco right after Linaro High Performance Computing keynotes by Kanta Vekaria, Technology Strategist, Linaro, and Yasuo Nishiguchi, Socionext’s Chairman & CEO. If you have never used a system with more than 14 cores, you’d sadly learn that the tux logos at boot times will only be shown on the first line, skipping […]

September 26, 2017September 26, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

Qt/QML vs HTML5/AngularJS User Interfaces Showdown (Video)

We now live in a world where there’s a push for higher level programming languages either based on web technologies like HTML5 or JavaScript, or other interpreted languages such as Python, and lower level languages such as C, C++, or – maybe more understandably – Assembler are often avoided by newcomers. But there are advantages of using native code, as demonstrated by Sequality, a software engineering company, who asked a developer familiar with HTML and C++ to develop a demo of an embedded systems using HTML5 + AngularJS and Qt/QML. The developer had 160 hours to develop the user interface for each framework, and with the resulting demos running on a Raspberry Pi 3 board with Raspbian, it was found that the Qt/QML implementation delivered a more responsive and functional user interface compared to the HTML5 version which tended to lag, and lacked support for touchscreen and a software keyboard […]

September 26, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Linaro Connect SF 2017 Welcome Keynote – New Members, Achievements, the Future of Open Source, and More…

Linaro Connect San Francisco 2017 is now taking place until September 29, and it all started yesterday with the Welcome Keynote by George Grey, Linaro CEO discussing the various achievements since the last Linaro Connect in Budapest, and providing an insight to the future work to be done by the organization. The video is available on YouTube (embedded below), and since I watched it, I’ll provide a summary of what was discussed: Welcoming New Members – Kylin (China developed FreeBSD operating systems) joined LEG (Enterprise Group), NXP added LHG (Home Group) membership, and Xilinx joined LITE (IoT and Embedded). Achievements OPTEE open portable trusted environment execution more commonly integrated into products. Details at optee.org. LEG 17.08 ERP release based on Linux 4.12, Debian 8.9 with UEFI, ACPI, DPDK, Bigtop, Hadoop, etc… LITE group has been involved in Zephyr 1.9 release, notably contributing to LwM2M stack More projects to be found […]

September 26, 2017September 26, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 23 Comments

Allwinner SoCs with Mali GPU Get Mainline Linux OpenGL ES Support

OpenGL ES support in Linux for ARM SoC is usually pretty hard to get because of closed source binary blobs coupled with the manufacturers focus on Android. Workarounds include open driver projects such as Freedreno for Qualcomm Adreno GPU, Nouveau for Tegra, or Etnaviv for Vivante GPUs, as well as libhybris library that converts Linux calls into Android calls in order to leverage existing Android GPU binary blobs. Allwinner processors relies on either PoverVR or ARM Mali GPU, and the former does not have any open source project, while some work is still being going for the latter with Lima project, but it’s not ready yet. That means so far, you’re only option was to use libhybris for either GPU family. The good news is that Free Electrons engineers have been working on OpenGL ES support for ARM Mali GPU for Allwinner processor, and have been allowed to release the […]