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Inside LG 4K TV, and My (Unsuccessful) Attempt at Repairing It

Long time readers of this blog may remember that I organized a crowdfunding event aiming at raising funds to buy equipment to test 4K TV boxes and mini PCs in early 2015, and one of the items I ended up purchasing was LG 42UB820T 4K television. It worked well for over a year, but I started to notice a single vertical appear on the TV in June, or about 18 months after purchase. A few more lines appeared in the following week, and it appears to have stabilized as shown in the picture below. While I understand that in Europe a 2-year warranty period is legally required, I’m based in Asia, and all I got was a one year warranty for the TV. So I had three choices: Ignore the problem Pay for the repairs Try to repair it myself So far, I’ve selected solution 1. because that’s the easiest […]

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How to Customize Amlogic Android Firmware – A Tutorial with NEXBOX A95X (S905) TV Box

CNXSoft: Bear in mind that there are multiple versions of Nexbox A95X. Yesterday, I published the review of Nexbox A95X with Android 6.0, with the model based on Amlogic S905X processor. In this article, Karl had a look at Nexbox A95X with Amlogic S905 processor, which he purchased a couple of months ago, but since he was not happy with the Android 5.1 firmware, he decided to customize it. Karl here with a review of the Nexbox A95X S905 box. This took a while to even start. I received the box about 2 months ago and I dived right in and broke it. I didn’t have factory firmware, and wasn’t cautious enough and bricked it. I found some firmware that worked but it didn’t work very well for me. Email’s to Nexbox directly didn’t help and I was stuck with a bricked box… I later found someone who had factory […]

ArmSoM RK3588 AIModule7 NVIDIA Jetson Nano-compatible SOM
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NEXBOX A95X (Amlogic S905X) TV Box Review – Part 2: Android 6.0 and Kodi 16.1

Last week I publish the first complete review of an Amlogic S905X device with MINI M8S II TV box review, and while the device work in a smooth and stable manner, some features did not work as expect such as HDMI audio pass-through. I’ve now had the change to compare  it to another S905X with NEXBOX A95X, not to confuse with its “homonym”: NEXBOX A95X with Amlogic S905 processor. I’ve already taken pictures of the device and accessories, and checked out the hardware in the first part of the review,  so today, I’ll report my finding playing with Android 6.0 firmware, Kodi video and audio capabilities, and check whether bugs and issues found on MINI M8S II are also present in the device. First Boot, Settings and First Impressions NEXBOX A95X is really a tiny device, so it’s no surprise that it only comes with two USB 2.0 ports, and […]

Holtek_HT48R002
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What’s the Cheapest MCU? My Try: Holtek HT48R002 8-bit MCU Selling for $0.085

Somebody asked what was the cheapest MCU (Microcontroller) available on Google+, so I thought it would be fun to find the cheapest one regardless of specifications. It turns out there an older thread with this very question on StackExchange, and at the time (2011) Microchip PIC10F200 8-bit MCU with 256B RAM in SOP-23 package was the cheapest one among the answer, and somehow the price has not changed as it’s still $0.32 per unit for 1k orders. Not a bad price, but back in the days when I wrote on CD and DVD players, we had some price pressure from customers, so we looked for a cheaper microcontroller, and ended up using Holtek because of the competitive pricing. We suffered a bit during development due to incomplete documentation but eventually did the job. Anyway, I went to the Holtek website and found a “cost-effective I/O MCU” category, and HT48R002 appears […]

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Samsung JerryScript is a Lightweight Open Source JavaScript Engine for the Internet of Things

In the old days, micro-controller programming was all done in assembly or C, but in recent years higher level languages, included interpreted ones such as Python and JavaScript, have made their ways into MCUs with projects such as MicroPython or Espruino (JS) often running on STMicro STM32 ARM Cortex M micro-controllers, but also other platforms such as ESP8266. As I browsed through the Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2016 schedule, I discovered that Samsung worked on it own implementation of a JavaScript engine for the Internet of Things: JerryScript. It is a full implementation of ECMAScript 5.1 standard written in C that can run on micro-controllers with less than 64KB RAM, and less than 200KB storage (160KB footprint with ARM Thumb-2 compilation). JerryScript is comprised of two main components: Parser and Virtual Machine (VM), with the parser performing translation of input ECMAScript application into byte-code than is then executed by the Virtual […]

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Embedded Linux Conference & IoT Summit Europe 2016 Schedule

Embedded Linux Conference & IoT summit 2016 first took place in the US in April, but the events are now also scheduled in Europe on October 11 – 13 in Berlin, Germany, and the schedule has now been published. Even if you are no going to attend, it’s always interesting to find out more about the topic covered in that type of events, so I had a look, and created my own virtual schedule with some of the sessions. Tuesday, October 11 10:40 – 11:30 – JerryScript: An Ultra-lightweight JavaScript Engine for the Internet of Things – Tilmann Scheller, Samsung Electronics JerryScript is a lightweight JavaScript engine designed to bring the success of JavaScript to small IoT devices like lamps, thermometers, switches and sensors. This class of devices tends to use resource-constrained microcontrollers which are too small to fit a large JavaScript engine like V8 or JavaScriptCore. JerryScript is heavily […]

Rockchip RK3568, RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs and SoMs in 2025
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Development Resources for Realtek “Ameba” RTL8710, RTL8711, and RTL8195 WiFi SoCs

We were made aware of a potential ARM based ESP8266 competitor last week with Realtek RTL8710 WiFi modules selling for about $3.5 shipped per unit, and under $2 per unit for larger orders (100+ pieces). Hardware is good, but for a platform to be successful, or even just useful, you also need software support. So I started doing some research into IoT-Tech BBS and asked ICStation for an “SDK” for the module they sold. I ended up on this forum post providing an “Realtek RTL8710 SDK” via Baidu (password: brwp), which turned out to be about the same as the Google Drive link provided by ICStation, and only contain minimal documents, as well as cracked Windows IAR Embedded Workshop and JLink tools. There are also some more technical details in Chinese only in another forum post, and well as B&T RTL8710 module datasheet (PDF). However, if you don’t read Chinese […]

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QINTAIX Q912 Android TV Box is Powered by Amlogic S912 Octa-core SoC

I published pictures of Amlogic S912 TV box boards just over a month ago, and it appears companies have started to take orders from resellers for Amlogic S912 TV boxes with products such Videostrong KM8 Pro, or the one I’m going to cover in this post: QINTAIX Q912. QINTAIX Q912 specifications: SoC – Amlogic S912 octa-core ARM Cortex A53 processor @ up to 2.0GHz with ARM Mali-820MP3 @ up to 750MHz System Memory – 2GB  DDR3 Storage – 8GB or 16GB eMMC flash + micro SD slot Video Output – HDMI 2.0 and AV ports Audio Output – HDMI, AV, and optical S/PDIF Video codecs – VP9 profile 2 up to 4K @ 60 fps, H.265 MP-10@L5.1 up to 4K 60fps, H.264 AVC up to 4K @ 30 fps, H.264 MVC up to 1080p60, MPEG-4, WMV/VC-1 SP/MP/AP,  AVS-P16(AVS+)/AVS-P2 JiZhun Profile, MPEG-2 MP/HL, MPEG-1 MP/HL, and  RealVIDEO 8/9/10 all up to […]

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