96Boards SoM Carrier Board
Posted on

TB-96AI & TB-96AIoT are the First 96Boards Systems-on-Module

First introduced in 2015, 96boards specifications define mechanical, electrical, and software specifications for single board computers, but in 2017 Linaro asked companies to provide some feedback on what they’d like for a 96boards system-on-module standard. And for the first day of Linaro Connect Bangkok 2019, the 96Boards SoM specifications have now been announced, together with the introduction of Rockchip RK3399Pro powered TB-96AI and Rockchip RK1808 based TB-96AIoT, the first compliant 96Boards SoMs, and corresponding 96Boards SoM Carrier Board. 96Boards System-on-Module Specifications Two 96Boards SoM specifications have been unveiled with the Compute Module Specification and the Wireless Specification. The 96boards Compute Module Specification defines a SoM with up to four 100-pin connectors, but only one is mandatory (X1), and two form factors are specified: SOM-CA (85 x 50 mm) and SOM-CB (50 x 50 mm). List of signals associated to each connectors: X1 – SoM managements, 1x UART, 2x I2C, 1x […]

Linux 5.0 Changelog
Posted on

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 […]

ArmSoM RK3588 AIModule7 NVIDIA Jetson Nano-compatible SOM
NanoPC T4 Connected
Posted on

NanoPC-T4 Review with Android 7.1 Firmware

NanoPC-T4 is one of the many Rockchip RK3399 SBCs now available, and as we’ve seen in the “unboxing review” the company sent me two samples. So far, I’ve been reviewing RK3399 boards with Linux distributions in posts such as “Checking Out Debian and Linux SDK for VideoStrong VS-RD-RK3399 Board” and more recently “AIO-3399J Development Board Review with Ubuntu 16.04“. But in this NanoPC-T4 review, I’ll switch to Android, specifically Android 7.1, as I’ll soon try Android 8.1 on Firefly-RK3399 which might make for an interesting comparison between the two versions of the OS, before switching to Linux with Pine64 RockPro64 board which I received yesterday. First Boot with NanoPC-T4 Development Board I had already assembled  the board in the first part of the review, so I just added the two WiFi antennas, the optional USB to serial debug board, and connected various accessories and cables from left to right: USB […]

NanoPC T4 Case
Posted on

FriendlyELEC NanoPC-T4 Board Kit Unboxing and Assembly

FriendlyELEC introduced NanoPC-T4 RK3399 SBC (Single Board Computer) last May for $129. The board comes with a Rockchip RK3399 hexa-core processor, 4GB RAM, 16GB eMMC flash, dual-band WiFi module and an M.2 socket with NVME (PCIe) SSD support. The company has now sent me the device with accessories for review / evaluation. In this post, I’ll check out all items received, and show how to assemble all components. NanoPC-T4 Board Kit Unboxing Let’s getting started, and open the package… I received two identical kits with two NanoPC-T4 boards, acrylic enclosure with spacers, screws and nuts, 12V/2A power supply, heatsink, and an RC-100 IR remote control. In theory, I also expected two WiFi antennas per kit since that’s part fo the kit in their website, but I did not see any. The remote control is an optional item. [Update: Ooops. I found the antennas inside the package for NanoPC-T4 board.] I’ve […]

ROC-RK3328-CC
Posted on

Firefly Team Mailbag – Rockchip Development Boards and Accessories

T-Chip Intelligent Technology Co. is a hardware and software technology services company, and a few years ago they setup the “Firefly Team” to provide development boards running Android and/or Linux distributions to the maker community. If I remember correctly the company started with Firefly-RK3288 development board powered, as its name implies, by Rockchip RK3288 processor. Since then they’ve launched several other Rockchip development boards and modules, which I’ve covered on this blog. The company decided to send me some of their recent boards and accessories, so let’s have a look at what I received in my “mailbag”. I’ve also taken a few photos for those who did not watch the video or prefer close up photos. ROC-RK3328-CC “Renegade” Development Board The first board is ROC-RK3328-CC “Renegade” board which was first launched via a crowdfunding campaign by Libre Computer.  Both companies have been collaborating on some boards, and Libre Computer makes […]

Posted on

RockPro64 Board is Now Available for $59.99 and Up for Early Adopters & Developers

Several Rockchip RK3399 development boards and SBCs were announced or launched in Q4 2017 / Q1 2018, including Orange Pi RK3399, ODROID-N1, Rock960, etc… RockPro64 was the most aggressively priced of the lot as it was expected to launch for about $60. The good news is that Pine 64 is now selling the first production batch for $59.99 (2GB RAM) or $79.99 (4GB RAM). The less good news is that software is still being worked on so the company only recommends it for early adapters and developers. RockPro64 specifications have changed a bit since the board now comes with LPDDR4 memory instead of LPDDR3: SoC – Rockchip RK3399 hexa-core processor with 2x ARM Cortex A72 cores up to 2.0 GHz, 4x Cortex A53 cores, and an Arm Mali-T860 MP4 GPU System Memory – 2 or 4 GB LPDDR4, dual channel Storage – eMMC flash module (up to 128 GB), micro […]

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

Linux 4.16 Release – Main Changes, Arm and MIPS Architectures

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 4.16: So the take from final week of the 4.16 release looks a lot like rc7, in that about half of it is networking. If it wasn’t for that, it would all be very small and calm. We had a number of fixes and cleanups elsewhere, but none of it made me go “uhhuh, better let this soak for another week”. And davem didn’t think the networking was a reason to delay the release, so I’m not. End result: 4.16 is out, and the merge window for 4.17 is open and I’ll start doing pull requests tomorrow. Outside of networking, most of the last week was various arch fixlets (powerpc, arm, x86, arm64), some driver fixes (mainly scsi and rdma) and misc other noise (documentation, vm, perf). The appended shortlog gives an overview of the details (again, this is only the small stuff in […]

Hikey-970
Posted on

96Boards Unveils Four A.I. Developer Platforms: HiKey 970, Ultra96, ROCK960 PRO & Enterprise Edition

Many new processors include a Neural Processing Unit (NPU) – aka Neural Network Accelerator (NNA) – in order to speed up talks associated with artificial intelligence, such as object or other patterns recognitions. With Linaro Connect Hong Kong 2018, 96Boards has just unveiled four development boards specifically designed for artificial intelligence solution with Hikey 970 powered by Hisilicon Kirin 970 processor, Ultra96 based on Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ ZU3EG ARM+ FPGA SoC,  and ROCK960 PRO & Enterprise Edition featuring the upcoming Rockchip RK3399Pro processor. Hikey 970 Preliminary specifications: SoC – Kirin 970 with 4x Cortex A73 @ 2.36GHz,  4x Cortex A53 @ 1.8GHz, Arm Mali G72-MP12 GPU, NPU with 256MAC/cycle @ 960MHz System Memory – 6GB 1866MHz, 4 Channel LPDDR4x Storage  -64GB UFS storage, micro SD card slot Video Output – HDMI 1.4 up to 1080p60 Camera – 4 lanes CSI + 2 lanes CSI Connectivity – Gigabit Ethernet, wireless module, […]

Boardcon CM3588 Rockchip RK3588 System-on-Module designed for AI and IoT applications