Posted on

Variscite DART-6UL SoM, an Alternative to Intel Edison Module

Intel recently announced it will discontinue manufacturing and selling all SKUs of the Intel® Edison compute modules and developer kits. The initial version of Edison was released in the beginning of 2014, with a second version being released by the end of 2014. It was intended for the IoT market, with dimensions of 35.5x25x3.9mm. The Edison features an Intel Atom processor, consisting of two Atom Silvermont cores running at 500MHz. It includes a fixed configuration of 1GB integrated RAM, and 4GB eMMC flash on-board. Dual-band (2.4GHz and 5GHz) Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0 and USB controllers complete the package. According to Intel’s announcement, the last shipment of Edison family boards is planned for December 2017. This announcement will have a critical impact on companies that already integrated the Edison board in their products, as well as the many companies that engaged in the development process of integrating the Edison board into their products. While some of these companies are rushing to place […]

Posted on

Sonoff G1 AC Powered Smart Power Switch Works Over 2G GSM/GPRS

Today, I’ve searched for AC powered wireless switched similar to Sonoff devices, but with ESP32 instead in order to get WiFi and Bluetooth, since the latter is better to use with a battery powered buttons. I did find a DC powered board, but no AC powered ones yet. However, as I visited ITEAD website to check if they had anything of the sort, I discovered they had a new model called Sonoff G1, similar to Sonoff TH16, but instead of using WiFi, you can use 2G GSM/GPRS to control the switch remotely. Sonoff G1 specifications: Wireless Module – ST86 quad band GSM/GPRS module GSM/GPRS connectivity GSM850, EGSM900, DCS1800 and PCS1900 MHz support GPRS multi-slot class 10, GPRS mobile station class B 1.8V, 3V  SIM card slot Transmit power: Class 4 (2W): GSM850, EGSM900; Class 1 (1W): DCS1800, PCS1900 Relay – Up to 16A (3000 Watts max) Terminals – 6 terminals […]

ArmSoM RK3588 AIModule7 NVIDIA Jetson Nano-compatible SOM
Posted on

Phoenix OS 2.1 Android 7.1 based Desktop OS Released for 32-bit and 64-bit x86 Platforms

With Jide’s announcement that they’d stop working on Remix OS for the consumer market, focusing on the enterprise market instead, people who like to use Android as a desktop OS lost an option. Luckily, others have not given up on the concept yet, and Phoenix OS 2.1 based on Android 7.1 with desktop improvements has just been released for computers based on Intel/AMD 32-bit and 64-bit x86 processors. Phoemix OS user interface is a mix between Windows desktop with a desktop, a taskbar, and a start menu, and Android with notifications, and Back/Home/Recent buttons. The OS also supports Android apps, multi-window, window resizing, better multi-tasking, and so on. Changelog for Phoenix OS 2.1: Keyboard mapping updates to version 2.5 with smart casting for Strike of Kings. The bug that window size won’t be saved after restart has been fixed. Enhance the hardware compatibility, including: sound card, network adapter, etc. “Start […]

Posted on

Intel’s Movidius Neural Compute Stick Brings Low Power Deep Learning & Artificial Intelligence Offline

Intel has released several Compute Stick over the years which can be used as tiny Windows or Linux computer connected to the HDMI port of your TV or monitor, but Movidius Neural Computer Stick is a complete different beast, as it’s a deep learning inference kit and self-contained artificial intelligence (A.I.) accelerator that connects to the USB port of computers or laptops. Intel did not provide the full hardware specifications for the kit, but we do know the following specifications: Vision Processing Unit – Intel Movidius Myriad 2 VPU with 12 VLIW 128-bit vector SHAVE processors @ 600 MHz optimized for machine vision, Configurable hardware accelerators for image and vision processing; 28nm HPC process node; up to 100 gigaflops USB 3.0 type A port Power Consumption – Low power, the SoC has a 1W power profile Dimensions – 72.5mm x 27mm x 14mm You can enter a trained Caffe, feed-forward […]

Posted on

Onion Omega2S and Omega2S+ Linux WiFi Modules Launched for OEMs

Onion Omega2 and Omega2+ are tiny WiFi IoT development boards powered by Mediatek MT7688 MIPS processor running LEDE – OpenWrt fork – that sold for just $5 and up in Kickstarter, but are now selling for $7.50 and $9 respectively. The board also support various add-on boards, and a great for evaluation and various projects. But they may not be ideal for people who want to integrate the technology into their products, and that’s why the company have just launched Omega2S and Omega2S+ with about the same specifications, but in a package more suitable to be integrated into products for mass production. Onion Omega2S/2S+ specifications: WiSoC – Mediatek MT7688 MIPS processor @ 580 MHz System Memory / Storage Omega2S – 64MB DDR2 / 16MB flash Omega2S+ – 128MB DDR2 / 32 MB flash Connectivity – 802.11 b/g/n WiFi with u.FL antenna connector Baseboard Interface – Half holes (aka castellated holes) […]

Posted on

Manga Screen 2 is Smartphone Touchscreen Display with USB and HDMI Ports for Makers (Crowdfunding)

Most touchscreen displays aimed to be connected to a development board work through a display interface such as MIPI DSI or LCD RGB (and USB or I2C for touch support), and come with somewhat low resolution such as 800×480 which can be suitable for HMI applications. They also often don’t work with all boards due to the different interfaces used, and there’s no way to easily connect such small display to your computer. Taking those limitations into account, and since most boards and computers come with HDMI and USB ports, Elias Bakken and his team have added HDMI and USB ports to two smartphone displays, and Manga Screen 2 was born. The two displays – made by Sharp – have the following hardware specifications: Big (5.9”) Small (4.8”) Resolution 1920×1080 1280×720 FPS (max) 60 57 Color mode 24-bit PPI 376.2 307.9 Brightness 400 cd/m2 500 cd/m2 Contrast ratio 1000:1 800:1 […]

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

PROBOX2 AVA 4K TV Box, NAS, and HDMI IN DVR Sells with an Optional Air Mouse

We’ve recently come across several TV boxes based on Realtek RTD1295 SoC which offers not only typical 4K Android TV box features like H.265 & VP9 video playback, and HDR support, but acts like a NAS function thanks to a SATA interface and OpenWrt, and provides an HDMI input port that allows for DVR, PiP, and UDP broadcasting functions. PROBOX2 AVA is another one of those device with the hardware extremely similar to Beelink SEA I model, but with an external antenna, and a different user interface. The box can also ship with an optional Remote+ air mouse, which could allow you to turn on the device without using the IR remote control (TBC), as I have to do with other boxes. PROBOX2 AVA specifications: SoC – Realtek RTD1295DD quad core ARM Cortex-A53 processor @ 1.4 GHz with ARM Mali-T820MP3 GPU System Memory – 2 GB DDR4 Storage – 16 […]

Posted on

Office, Factory, Business Model, and Ambitious Plans of Shenzhen Xunlong Software, Orange Pi Maker

Parts of the article have been updated after Steven Zhao update at the end. Since Steven Zhao is the only one contact person at Shenzhen Xunlong Software, the maker of Orange Pi boards, and the company appears to be focusing on hardware development more than on software and documentation, so at one point in time, people were speculating that it could be one person operation 🙂 Last year, Steven told us there were over 10 persons working in the office. But hey, photos, or it’s fake! We now have a definite proof as Renaud Coustellier visited Steven Zhao in his Shenzhen Offices, and published a report on Minimachines (in French). I’ll provide a summary below, but visit Minimachines website, if you want the full story and more pictures. First, Shenzhen Xunlong rented a floor, or part of it, in one of the many Shenzhen office buildings, and engineers are working […]

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