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Giveaway Week Winners – November 2018

We just had a week of fun on CNX Software with our yearly “Giveaway Week” activity where 7 prizes – from development boards to Raspberry Pi add-on boards or solar chargers – were randomly given away to people who entered by leaving a comment. The winners are in, with Asia starting strong, but Europe quickly taking the lead, and the US ending up the giveaway with a great (again) finish. Here’s the full list of winners: Videostrong VS-RD-RK3399 development board – Việt trần, VIETNAM CHOETECH Solar Charger – Erki, ESTONIA ESP32-LyraTD-MSC audio mic HDK – Ron, The Netherlands ROC-RK3328-CC development board – Dainis, LATVIA (a second time winner having previously won during Giveaway Week 2016) ThaiEasyElec 3G GPS Raspberry Pi Hat – zmlopez, SPAIN ANAVI Infrared and RGB strip pHAT – Joe, USA NanoPC-T4 development board – Jeffrey, USA I’ve just send all 7 packages earlier this afternoon. Hopefully, the […]

Khadas Edge Captain Board
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Khadas Edge Developer Package Review – Part 1: Unboxing, Captain and Edge-IO Expansion Boards

Shenzhen Wesion recently launched an Indiegogo campaign for their Rockchip RK3399/RK3399Pro based Khadas Edge, Edge-1S and Captain boards. The Edge boards have an interesting form factor as they are both standalone boards, and system-on-modules compatible with Captain carrier board, and the smaller Edge-IO board. While the crowdfunding campaign is on-going, the company decided to send me an early version of Khadas Edge Developer Package for evaluation. I’ll start out by checking out the content of the kit, and show how to get started with assembly, before reviewing the board with Linux at a later date. Khadas Edge Developer Package Unboxing I received the developer kit in a blank carton board package, but they’ll likely have a prettier package at launch like they did for heir VIM2 board. Anyway, the important part is the content. From top left to bottom right: An IR remote control, the package for the Edge board […]

ArmSoM RK3588 AIModule7 NVIDIA Jetson Nano-compatible SOM
Linux 4.19 Changelog
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Linux 4.19 Release – Main Changes, Arm and MIPS Architectures

With Linus Torvalds taking a leave from the Linux kernel project, Greg Kroah-Hartman was the one to release Linux 4.19 last Sunday: Hi everyone! It’s been a long strange journey for this kernel release… While it was not the largest kernel release every by number of commits, it was larger than the last 3 releases, which is a non-trivial thing to do. After the original -rc1 bumps, things settled down on the code side and it looks like stuff came nicely together to make a solid kernel for everyone to use for a while. And given that this is going to be one of the “Long Term” kernels I end up maintaining for a few years, that’s good news for everyone. A small trickle of good bugfixes came in this week, showing that waiting an extra week was a wise choice. However odds are that linux-next is just bursting so […]

NanoPi Duo2 2G IoT Carrier Board
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Tiny NanoPi Duo2 Board Comes with WiFi, a Camera Interface, an Optional 2G-IoT Dock

NanoPi Duo was launched last year as an ultra-cheap ($8+) Arm Linux board that fits into a breadboard. The board was powered by Allwinner H2+ processor coupled with 256 or 512MB RAM, and the infamous XR819 802.11b/g/n WiFi chip. FriendlyElec has now launched NanoPi Duo2, that’s still breadboard compatible, but with a slightly longer form factor, Allwinner H3 processor, 512 MB RAM, better WiFi thanks to an AP6212 module, and an extra camera interface. As we’ll see further below the company also developed a carrier board for 2G cellular IoT applications. NanoPi Duo2 specifications with highlights in bold showing differences again NanoPi Duo: SoC – Allwinner H3 quad core Cortex A7 processor @ 1.2 GHz with Mali-400MP2 GPU System Memory – 512 MB DDR3 SDRAM Storage – micro SD card slot, footprint for SPI flash Connectivity – 802.11 b/g/n WiFi + Bluetooth 4.0 LE (Ampak AP6212  module) with chip antenna, […]

Rockchip PX30 Android 8.1 Car System
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Rockchip PX30 Processor Powers Android 8.1 Car Infotainment Systems

Rockchip RK3326 and RK3308 are the first Arm Cortex A35 processors from the company, and are designed for smart AI solutions such as smart speakers and smart displays. It turns out RK3326 processor has a sibling called Rockchip PX30 with most of the same features, but with dual VOP (Video Output Processor) support to handle up to two independent displays, as well as an Ethernet MAC and a USB host block. Rockchip RK30 key features and specifications: CPU – Quad-core Arm Cortex-A35 GPU – Mali-G31 MP2 GPU Memory I/F – DDR4/DDR3/DDR3L/LPDDR3/LPDDR2 Storage I/F – MLC NAND, eMMC 4.51, Serial Nor FLASH Video 1080p H.265/H.264/VC-1/MPEG/VP8 video decoder 1080p H.264/VP8 video encoder Display Interfaces – MIPI-DSI/LVDS/RGB interface, dual VOP Audio I/F – 1x8ch I2S/TDM, 1x8ch PDM, 2x2ch I2S Camera I/F – MIPI CSI and DVP; built-in 8MP ISP Networking – 10/100M Ethernet Other Peripherals – SDIO3.0, USB2.0 HOST & OTG, 4x I2C, […]

Linux Changelog 4.18
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Linux 4.18 Release – Main Changes, Arm and MIPS Architecture

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 4.18: One week late(r) and here we are – 4.18 is out there. It was a very calm week, and arguably I could just have released on schedule last week, but we did have some minor updates. Mostly networking, but some vfs race fixes (mentioned in the rc8 announment as “pending”) and a couple of driver fixes (scsi, networking, i2c). Some other minor random things (arm crypto fix, parisc memory ordering fix). Shortlog appended for the (few) details. Some of these I was almost ready to just delay to until the next merge window, but they were marked for stable anyway, so it would just have caused more backporting. The vfs fixes are for old races that  are really hard to hit (which is obviously why they are old and weren’t noticed earlier). Some of them _have_ been seen in real […]

Rockchip RK3568, RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs and SoMs in 2025
NanoPC T4 Connected
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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 […]

DevCheck-Dashboard
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Checking out DevCheck System Info App for Android on NanoPC-T4 Development Board

There are already  a few ways to get system information in Android. The most obvious is just going into the Settings menu, another solution more detailed but less convenient is to access the terminal via adb or an app and run some commands, and finally you can also install apps such as CPU-Z. I’ve been made aware of a new system info app recently called DevCheck, and decided to try it on an Android development board, namely NanoPC-T4 RK3399 SBC. Those apps are often mainly tested on smartphones, so running them on TV boxes or boards do not always yield perfect results. We’ll see. The dashboard section looks good as the app correctly detects six cores and show difference frequencies for each. The hardware part appears to show two clusters one supporting frequencies between 408 MHz and 1416 MHz (Cortex-A53 cores) and another between 408 MHz and 1800 MHz (Cortex-A72 […]

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