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USB 3.0 Connectors and Receptacles Explained

The other day, I opened one of the products I received for review, and I found a blue connector on the board with no description. USB 3.0 connectors are blue this connection seemed “funny” with two internal connectors, and I though it must have been something else, and asked on Google+. It turned out this is a USB 3.0 Standard-B receptacle. As my knowledge about USB 3.0 connectors was obviously lacking, I’ve decided to investigate and have a look at the different existing and upcoming USB 3.0 connectors that we should find in different types of devices and computers now or very soon. Standard-A USB 3.0 connectors and receptacles This is the easy one, it looks very similar to the USB 2.0 connectors, except it’s blue and adds 5 pins for USB 3.0 connectivity. It’s backward compatible with USB 2.0, and the receptacle is used for hosts. Most people must have […]

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ITEAD Studio IBOX AllWinner A20 mini PC Review

ITEAD Studio IBOX is an AllWinner A20 based mini PC currently running Android or Linux distributions currently featured on Indiegogo. I’ve already written about IBOX in a separate post, where you can get all the specifications, but the company has also sent me a unit (engineering sample) for review. Since the system is still in development, and it’s mostly a development platform, I won’t do a review with video testing, system performance, etc… as usual, but rather show the progress and current issues in terms of hardware and software, and I’ll also mention documentation, and shortly try Android 4.2 (pre-installed) and the Debian 7.0 image released by the company. IBOX Unboxing Pictures I’ve received the device in a cartoon box containing the device itself and a 9V/2A power supply. If you are or become a backer on Indiegogo you’ll also receive an add-on board providing access to a SATA connector,  […]

ArmSoM RK3588 AIModule7 NVIDIA Jetson Nano-compatible SOM
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Mi World PCS is a Portable ARM mini PC with the Specifications of an High-end Smartphone (Crowdfunding)

Most ARM based mini PCs sell because they are cheap, low power and come in a small form factor. At about $600, Mi World PCS (Portable Computer System) is not cheap, but thanks to its battery it’s fully portable, and it has specifications similar to the latest flagship smartphones with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 quad core processor, 2 GB RAM, wireless charging support, and more. Mi World PCS specifications: SoC – Qualcommon Snapdragon 800 (8074) quad core Krait processor up to 2.4 GHz with Adreno 330 GPU, Hexagon QDSP6 DSP System Memory – 2 GB DDR3 memory Storage – 64 to 512 GB hot swappable SD RAID storage Video Output – Micro-HDMI for output in displays up to 4k Connectivity – Wi-Fi (802.11 AC),  Bluetooth 4.0, and GPS IZat location technology USB – USB 3.0 Battery –  Capacity N/A, up to 30 hour battery life Dimensions – N/A Weight – […]

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Selecting the Best Adobe Flash Player in Linux for x86 and ARM

I’ve had countless and recurrent crashes caused by Adobe flash plugin either in Firefox and Chromium, mainly while playing videos from YouTube or other online video services that still mostly use flash, instead of HTML5. Adobe flash death is certain, but up to now it has been soooo slow, so I doubt that thing will truly die any time soon, and unfortunately it will probably be with us for many years to come. To work around the issue, I started by enabling Youtube HTML5 player, and try to play embedded videos inside YouTube instead of the orignal website. I still had crashes from time to time, and this method did not help with other video services. So I decided to check out what I could do to fix the issue. When you go to http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/ you can check your flash version, and Adobe will also list the player version for […]

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Mali-400 GPU Is Now Working in Linux for Rockchip RK3188 Devices

Accelerated 3D graphics in Linux with Mali-400 via OpenGL ES has been possible for nearly a year on RK3066 devices,  but there was no such support for RK3188. This week however, both Naoki FUKAUMI and omegamoon have reported OpenGL ES to work in in their respective RK3188 devices. I don’t know which device omegamoon used, but Naoki did so in Radxa Rock, and even posted instructions to build it yourself. They’ve mostly followed the work done by olegk0 for Rockchip, and Mali drivers build instructions provided in linux-sunxi community, and it can be summarize in 3 main steps: Cross-compile drm.ko, mali_drm.ko, ump.ko, mali.ko in a Linux machine Copy and load the four modules to your RK3188 based board or device. Install dependencies and binary Mali drivers from sunxi-linux in your Rockchip device Once this is done you can try some OpenGL ES demos such as esgears2 or glmark2-es to test […]

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ITEAD Studio IBOX Powered by AllWinner A20 Features a 32-Pin Hacker-Friendly Connector (Crowdfunding)

ITEAD Studio IBOX is a mini computer powered by AllWinner A20 dual core Cortex A7 processor with 1GB RAM and 4GB Flash, a few USB connectors, Ethernet and video/audio connector. This mini pc can run both Android & Linux, and features a 32-pin connector that allows to connect expansion boards. Let’s have a look at the specifications: SoC- AllWinner A20 dual core ARM Cortex-A7 @ 1 GHz + ARM Mali 400 MP2 System Memory – 1GB DDR3 RAM Storage – 4GB NAND Flash + microsd slot Video Output – HDMI Audio Output – HDMI, optical S/PDIF Connectivity – 10/100M Ethernet USB – 3x USB 2.0 host port, 1x USB OTG port (full size) Expansion – 32-pin proprietary connector with TV OUT, USB, LCD, UART, IR, CSI, SPI, SATA, GPIOS and power signals. Misc – LED , IR sensor, and U-boot button (FEL mode?) Power – 5V/2A 9V/2A Dimensions – 145 x […]

Rockchip RK3568, RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs and SoMs in 2025
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Texas Instruments Tiva C Series TM4C1294 Connected Launchpad Sells for $20

There are now many ultra low cost MCU development kit selling for $15 to $25 such as STMicro Discovery Board, but for this price, they’ll usually just feature the MCU, a micro USB, pin header, maybe and maybe some sensors, and they usually lack any form of connectivity, at least without extra hardware. With Tiva C Series TM4C129 Connect Launchpad, Texas Instruments brings a board that can be used for IoT application out of the box thanks to the addition of an Ethernet port. The board sells for just $19.99, which means you could easily make something like a connected 4-relay control system for about $25. Connected LaunchPad evaluation kit specifications: MCU – Texas Instruents TM4C1294NCPDT ARM Cortex-M4 @ 120MHz with floating point, 1MB Flash, 256KB SRAM, 6KB EEPROM, Integrated 10/100 Ethernet MAC+PHY, data protection hardware, 8x 32-bit timers, dual 12-bit 2MSPS ADCs, motion control PWMs, USB H/D/O, and many […]

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Amlogic GPL Source Code Release – Kernel 3.10, U-Boot, and Drivers (Wi-Fi, NAND, TVIN, Mali GPU)

Last month, I noticed Amlogic provided links to the Android SDK for S802 / M802 on their open source website, but the only way to get the source was to share your SSH public with Amlogic, so that they give you access. It did not happen, but the company has released the source for Linux 3.10.10, U-boot 2011.03, Realtek and Broadcom Wi-Fi drivers, NAND drivers, “TVIN”drivers, and kernel space GPU drivers for Mali-400 / 450 GPU. There are also some customer board files for Meson 6 only (AML8726-MX / M6) but they do not seem to match the kernel… If you want to build the kernel, including the drivers, you’ll need to download a bunch of files: wget http://openlinux.amlogic.com:8000/download/ARM/kernel/arm-src-kernel-2014-03-06-d5d0557b2b.tar.gz wget http://openlinux.amlogic.com:8000/download/ARM/wifi/rtk8192du-2014-03-06-7f70d95d29.tar.gz wget http://openlinux.amlogic.com:8000/download/ARM/wifi/rtk8192eu-2014-03-06-9766866350.tar.gz wget http://openlinux.amlogic.com:8000/download/ARM/wifi/rtk8192cu-2014-03-06-54bde7d73d.tar.gz wget http://openlinux.amlogic.com:8000/download/ARM/wifi/rtk8188eu-2014-03-06-2462231f02.tar.gz wget http://openlinux.amlogic.com:8000/download/ARM/wifi/brcmap6xxx-2014-03-06-302aca1a31.tar.gz wget http://openlinux.amlogic.com:8000/download/ARM/wifi/wifi-fw-2014-03-06-d3b2263640.tar.gz wget http://openlinux.amlogic.com:8000/download/ARM/modules/aml_tvin-2014-03-06-fb3ba6b1c8.tar.gz wget http://openlinux.amlogic.com:8000/download/ARM/modules/aml_nand-2014-03-06-39095c4296.tar.gz wget http://openlinux.amlogic.com:8000/download/ARM/customer/aml_customer-2014-03-06-76ce689191.tar.gz wget http://openlinux.amlogic.com:8000/download/ARM/gpu/gpu-2014-03-06-0425a1f681.tar.gz You’ll need to extract these tarballs in specific directories:

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