Clarity Android Speaker with Touchscreen Display Supports Both Alexa and Google Assistant (Crowdfunding)

Android speakers with a touchscreen display has been around for a while,  but Clarify speaker adds support for both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant’s “OK Google”. The 5W stereo speaker also comes with a quad core processor coupled with 16GB storage and 1GB RAM, a 7″ touchscreen display, and a battery. Clarity specifications: SoC – Unnamed Quad core processor System Memory – You wish you knew Storage – 16GB flash + micro SD slot Display – 7″ touchscreen display with 1280×800 resolution Video Output – HDMI output (added with $250,000 stretch goal) Audio – 2x 5W speaker, built-in microphone, AUX port Connectivity – Dual band WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0 Camera – 2MP front-facing camera USB – 1x mini USB port Misc – Control buttons Power Supply 12V/1.5A via power barrel 1.600 mAh / 7.4V LiPo battery good for 6 hours of music playback or 2.5 hours of video playback. Dimensions – […]

Open Source ARM Compute Library Released with NEON and OpenCL Accelerated Functions for Computer Vision, Machine Learning

GPU compute promises to deliver much better performance compared to CPU compute for application such a computer vision and machine learning, but the problem is that many developers may not have the right skills or time to leverage APIs such as OpenCL. So ARM decided to write their own ARM Compute library and has now released it under an MIT license. The functions found in the library include: Basic arithmetic, mathematical, and binary operator functions Color manipulation (conversion, channel extraction, and more) Convolution filters (Sobel, Gaussian, and more) Canny Edge, Harris corners, optical flow, and more Pyramids (such as Laplacians) HOG (Histogram of Oriented Gradients) SVM (Support Vector Machines) H/SGEMM (Half and Single precision General Matrix Multiply) Convolutional Neural Networks building blocks (Activation, Convolution, Fully connected, Locally connected, Normalization, Pooling, Soft-max) The library works on Linux, Android or bare metal on armv7a (32bit) or arm64-v8a (64bit) architecture, and makes use […]

Khadas Edge2 Arm mini PC

NanoPi NEO2 Board Benchmarks with Ubuntu 16.04.2 using Linux 3.10 and Linux 4.10

I’ve received NanoPi NEO 2 boards, add-boards and sensor modules last week, where we could see how small the boards were, and how it could be suitable for IoT projects or “hardware hacking” education.  Before testing the board with the add-ons, I have to select the image to run on the board, and currently we have two choices: Ubuntu 16.04.2 FriendlyELEC image with Linux 3.10 “legacy” kernel, or Armbian Ubuntu 16.04.2 Xenial nightly build with Linux 4.10 “mainline” kernel. So I decided to try both: dfssf nanopi-neo2-ubuntu-core-qte-sd4g-20170329.img.zip (296 MB) is the image from FriendlyELEC (previously FriendlyARM) Armbian_5.27.170401_Nanopineo2_Ubuntu_xenial_dev_4.10.0.7z (222 Mb) is the image from Armbian, which I downloaded on March 31st despite the filename including “170401” string You can flash the image with Win32DiskImager (Windows) or dd (linux) to a micro SD card the usual way, and while I’ve never personally had troubles with dd, I’ve been told Etcher was better, […]

Allwinner H6 Processor for 4K HDR Set-Top Boxes Supports USB 3.0, PCIe, and Smart Card Interfaces

Allwinner H6 is a new quad core Cortex A53 processor designed for 4K set-top boxes. It will support “6K” video decoding for 10-bit HEVC, VP9, and H.264, integrate HDR10 and HLG video processing, support high speed interfaces like USB 3.0 and PCIe, as well as security features like two ISO7816 smart card interfaces and DRM solutions. Allwinner H6 specifications: CPU –  Quad-core ARM Cortex A53 with NEON, hardware Java acceleration, and FPU 3D GPU – Dual shader ARM Mali-T720 with support for OpenGL ES3.1/3.0/2.0/1.1, OpenCL 1.1/RenderScript, Microsoft DirectX 11 FL9_3 Memory I/F – DDR4/DDR3/DDR3L interface Storage I/F – 1x eMMC 5.0 flash interface, 1x NAND Flash interface for SLC/MLC/TLC flash memory with up to 80-bit error-correcting code (ECC), 1x SPI NOR Flash interface, 1x SD Card 2.0 Multimedia via Allwinner Phoenix 3.0 VE Engine Video Decoder H265/HEVC Main/Main10 [email protected] High-tier ;4K@60fps, up to 6Kx4K@30fps H264/AVC BP/MP/[email protected], MVC, 4K@30fps VP9,Profile 0/2, […]

Is NodeMCU ESP-32S Board Now Selling for $8.50 Shipped?

ESP32 SoC with WiFi and Bluetooth launched last September for around $3, followed soon after by ESP32 modules for $7, and a few weeks later, easier to use ESP32 development boards were introduced, but sold for around $20 likely due a mismatch between supply and demand. That’s not overly expensive, but in a world of $4 ESP8266 boards and $10 Raspberry Pi Zero W with Linux, WiFi and Bluetooth, it may feel that way. But today, I noticed DealExtreme sold GeekWorm ESP32 board with ESP-WROOM-32 module for just $11.64 shipped. That’s good progress, but surely Aliexpress must now have cheaper options, and sure enough, I could find NodeMCU ESP-32S board (now confirmed NOT to be an official NodeMCU devkit) sold for $6.95 + shipping, which brought the price up to about $8.50. NodeMCU ESP-32S specifications: Wireless Module – ESP-WROOM-32 with Espressig ESP32 dual core processor with 802.11 b/g/n WiFi and […]

MQMaker Koala is a Features-Packed Development Board Powered by Rockchip RK3288 Processor

MQMaker launched MiQi board based on Rockchip RK3288 quad core Cortex A17 processor last year with the hardware aimed at hobbyists and makers, but the company has been developing a higher-end board – named Koala – based on the same processor, featuring many more ports and features, and geared towards the enterprise market. Koala board preliminary specifications: SoC – Rockchip 3288 quad core ARM Cortex A17 up to 1.8 GHz with Mali-T764 GPU supporting OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0 /3.0, and OpenCL 1.1 System Memory –  2GB DDR3 (default) Storage – 16 GB eMMC flash (default) + micro SD slot Video Output / Display Interface – HDMI 2.0, header for eDP, MIPI, LVDS, LCD backlight header, touch panel header Audio – HDMI out, optical S/PDIF, 3.5mm analog stereo audio jack, microphone header, audio L/R header Connectivity – Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi or WiFi + Bluetooth module, mini PCIe slot for 3G/4G card + SIM card slot USB – 4x […]

UP 7000 SBC

Aconno Bluetooth 4.0 & 5 IoT Development Board Features an nRF52832 or nRF52840 Module, an e-Paper Display, Sensors and More

Bluetooth 5 is the latest iteration of Bluetooth with up to four times the speed and twice the range of Bluetooth 4.0 LE, and so far apart from Puck.js and Nordic Semi nRF52840 devkit, I had not seen many Bluetooth 5 IoT modules or boards. Aconno, a German startup, has designed ACD-52832 Bluetooth 4.0 / Thread / ANT+ IoT development board based on their own nRF52832 module, and equipped with some goodies like a black & white e-Paper display, a joystick, sensors, I/Os, etc… They’ve also launched an updated module with Bluetooth 5 using nFR52840 SoC. I don’t have the full details about the new module, but the nRF52832 module and devkit is interesting to look at, especially features should be similar. Aconno ACD-52832 board specifications: Wireless Module – ACN52832 based on Nordic Semi nRF52832 ARM Cortex-M4 @ 64 MHz SoC with Bluetooth Smart, ANT+, Thread, NFC, and 2.4 GHz […]

Orange Pi 2G-IoT ARM Linux Development Board with 2G/GSM Support is Up for Sale for $9.90

Orange Pi 2G-IoT was unveiled at the start of the year as an ultra cheap ($10) Linux development board with 2G cellular connectivity. The board has just launched for $9.90 + shipping on Aliexpress. Orange Pi 2G-IoT specifications have changed a little since the initial announced as WiFi is confirmed to be supported: SoC – RDA Micro 8810PL ARM Cortex A5 processor @ up to 1.0 GHz with 2Gbit (256 MB) on-chip LPDDR2 RAM, 4Gbit (512 MB) on-chip SLC NAND flash , 256KB L2 cache, Vivante GC860 3D GPU, and GSM/GPRS/EDGE Modem (Download datasheet) External Storage – micro SD slot Display I/F – LCD connector up to qHD resolution Video – Decoding up to 1080p30, encoding up to 1080p30 H.264 Audio I/F – 3.5mm audio +FM jack, built-in microphone? Connectivity – WiFi 802.11 b/g/n + Bluetooth 2.1/EDR module (RDA5991), and 2G GSM/GPRS/EDGE module with SIM card slot Camera – MIPI […]

Khadas VIM4 SBC