friendlyarm News - Page 7 of 15 - CNX Software

November 26, 2019November 26, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 11 Comments

NanoPi M4B Rockchip RK3399 SBC Drops the USB 3.0 Hub, Adds Bluetooth 5.0, an ADB Switch

NanoPi M4 was launched last year (2018) as a Rockchip RK3399 SBC following Raspberry Pi 3B+ form factor with 2 or 4GB DDR3 RAM, and was followed by NanoPi M4V2 this September with 4GB LPDDR4 memory, and power & recovery buttons. FriendlyELEC has been working on yet another revision with NanoPi M4B mixing some of the features of M4 and M4V2 such as DDR3 memory and power & recovery buttons, but the biggest change is the removal of the USB 3.0 hub which allowed for four USB 3.0 port, and now the company is going native leveraging the two USB 2.0 interfaces and two USB 3.0 interfaces inside Rockchip RK3399 processor which should lower the BoM cost, and in some cases improve performance. NanoPi M4B specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3399 big.LITTLE hexa-core processor with 2x Arm Cortex-A72 @ up to 2.0GHz, 4x Cortex-A53 @ up to 1.5GHz, a Mali-T864 GPU […]

November 14, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Giveaway Week Winners – November 2019

We just had another of our yearly “Giveaway week” on CNX Software with 7 prizes including Arm and RISC-V development boards, NB-IoT tracker, USB-C hub, as well as development kits based on ESP32 or ESP8266 WiSoCs. People just had to comment within a 48 hours period, and we would randomly select a winner each day. We now have all confirmed winners with a strong start from Europe, Asia catching up mid-week, before with Poland and Brazil taking the week-end prizes: Balena Fin Developer Kit – Laurent H, FRANCE WisCellular NB-IoT & eMTC GPS Tracker – Jimmy, SWEDEN MINIX NEO S1 USB-C Hub with 120GB built-in SSD – Jeroen, BELGIUM Maixduino Sipeed M1 RISC-V AI Kit – Nguyen Tung, VIETNAM ANAVI Gas Detector Starter Kit – Bumsik Kim, SOUTH KOREA Particle Mesh IoT Development Kit – Wojciech Lubicz-Lapinski, POLAND NanoPi M4V2 SBC & Metal Case Kit – Thiago Tavares, BRAZIL I […]

November 11, 2019November 11, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 21 Comments

NanoPi R1S Dual Gigabit Ethernet Router Comes with 32-bit or 64-bit Arm Processor

FriendlyELEC launched NanoPi R1 SBC & Gateway earlier this year with Allwinner H3 processor, two Ethernet ports, as well as WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity. The design makes use of both Ethernet on the processor, but that also means on Gigabit Ethernet port had to be combined with a Fast Ethernet processor. The company has now added a USB to Gigabit Ethernet bridge to their latest NanoPi R1S board meaning it’s now a dual Gigabit Ethernet SBC, but with the caveat that the port behind the USB bridge is limited to USB 2.0 speed (480 Mbps), and with overhead the USB Ethernet bandwidth is around 330 Mbps. There are two versions of the board, namely NanoPi R1S-H3 and R1S-H5 with respectively Allwinner H3 32-bit processor, and Allwinner H5 64-bit processor. Apart from the different processors, both boards share the same PCBA and specifications: SoC NanoPi R1S-H3 – Allwinner H3 quad-core Arm […]

November 10, 2019November 12, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 283 Comments

Giveaway Week – NanoPi M4V2 SBC & Metal Case Kit

Let’s finish giveaway week 2019 on a high with FriendlyELEC NanoPi M4V2 single board computer, and its metal case kit. The board features a Rockchip RK3399 processor with 4GB LPDDR4 RAM, and the metal case kit allows the addition of an NVMe M.2 SSD as well. I tested the mini PC with FriendlyCore Desktop based on Ubuntu 18.04, since at the time, Armbian was still not working with the updated board equipped with LPDDR4 memory, and Android requires an eMMC flash module which was not part of the kits I received. NanoPi M4V2 performed fairly well in the case, but the fan is quite noisy, and somehow the RAM bandwidth was almost half of the one in the earlier NanoPi M4 board with DDR3 memory, which is the opposite one would expect. Probably related to some software tweaks as explained in the comments section of the review. I received two […]

October 28, 2019February 29, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 17 Comments

NanoPi M4V2 Kit Review – Part 2: FriendlyCore Desktop

We’ve already seen how to assemble NanoPi M4V2 metal case kit which offers an Arm mini PC solution with support for NVMe SSD. The new NanoPi M4V2 Rockchip RK3399 SBC is an evolution of the M4 board that brings faster LPDDR4 memory and adds power & recovery buttons. Since we’ve already tested several RK3399 SBC‘s and TV boxes, I planned to focus the review on thermal design evaluation (i.e. see how well the board cools), and see how memory bandwidth evolved from LPDDR3 to LPDDR4. I wanted to do so both with Linux and Android, since I could compare NanoPC-T4 (LPDDR3) benchmarks in Android. But this requires an eMMC flash module, and I don’t own any. So instead I planned to run Armbian because of support for armbian-monitor for nice temperature chart but it’s not working just yet, so instead I’ve done all tests with FriendlyCore Desktop (rk3399-sd-friendlydesktop-bionic-4.4-arm64-20190926.img) based on […]

October 8, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 30 Comments

NanoPI NEO2 Black Allwinner H5 SBC Adds an eMMC flash Module, Up to 1GB RAM

NanoPi NEO2, now called NanoPi NEO2 LTS, is a great little Allwinner H5 SBC designed for server/headless applications with Ethernet & USB ports, as well as I/O headers. FriendlyELEC is now about to launch a new variant called NanoPi NEO2 Black with the same form factor and Allwinenr H5 64-bit Arm SoC, but adding an eMMC flash module, supporting up to 1GB RAM, modifications to the I/O headers, and featuring a black PCB instead of the blue PCB found in NEO2-LTS. NanoPi NEO2 Black SBC specifications with changes in bold or stricken-through: SoC – Allwinner H5 quad-core Cortex A53 processor with an ARM Mali-450MP GPU System Memory – 512 MB or 1GB DDR3 Storage – MicroSD card slot, eMMC flash module connector Connectivity – Gigabit Ethernet (via RTL8211E-VB-CG chip) USB – 1x USB 2.0 host port, 1x micro USB OTG port, 2x 1x USB via headers Expansion headers 10-pin header […]

September 30, 2019October 28, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

NanoPi M4V2 Metal Case Kit Review – Part 1: Unboxing and Assembly

Earlier this month FriendlyELEC released two new products namely NanoPi M4 metal case with heatsink and optional NVMe SSD adapter, and NanoPi M4V2 SBC, a minor upgrade to the original Rockchip RK3399 powered NanoPi M4 board with faster LPDRR4 memory, the addition of power & recovery buttons, and microphone input is now inside the audio jack instead of solder pads. I received both this weekend, in the first part of the review I’ll show the items part of the package and then show how to assemble the kit. In the second part, I’ll focus on the new features of the board like memory bandwidth, as well as the thermal performance of the complete solution in both Android and Linux. Unboxing Instead of one kit, I actually received two. One kit basically includes NanoPi M4V2 board with internal antennas (which we won’t use here), and the metal case which comes with […]

September 10, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 12 Comments

$70 NanoPi M4V2 SBC Gets 4GB LPDDR4 RAM, Power & Recovery Buttons

FriendlyELEC NanoPi M4 is a Rockchip RK3399 single board computer that follows Raspberry Pi 3 form factor, and was launched in a year ago for $65 with 2GB RAM, and $95 with 4GB RAM. Raspberry Pi 4 introduction brought some more competition, and helped the prices drop to $50 and $75 respectively. But now the company has launched a revision 2 of the board, NanoPi M4V2 that replaces LPDDR3 memory with faster LPDDR4 memory, adds power & recovery buttons, and the audio jack now also support microphone input. It’s only available with 4GB LPDDR4 memory, and the price is lower at $70. The rest of the specifications are mostly identical: SoC – Rockchip RK3399 big.LITTLE hexa-core processor with 2x Arm Cortex-A72 @ up to 2.0GHz, 4x Cortex-A53 @ up to 1.5GHz, a Mali-T864 GPU with support OpenGL ES1.1/2.0/3.0/3.1, OpenVG1.1, OpenCL, DX11, and AFBC, and a VPU with 4K VP9 and […]