ZS1100A IoT Power Meter Supports Sigrok Open-Source Software (Crowdfunding)

ZS110A power meter

A few months ago, I tested Qoitech Otii Arc power meter & DAQ system designed for developers of IoT devices, and fount out it would be incredibly useful to developers of battery-operated devices since it shows voltage and current graphs synchronized with the serial output making it easy to see where software might be optimized. The system can also capture analog and digital signals from the DUT and emulate batteries with user-defined characteristics. But this weekend, I’ve come across a very similar solution with ZS1100A IoT power meter that also happens to be compatible with Sigrok open-source signal analysis software, and the corresponding Pulseview GUI. ZS1100A IoT power meter specifications: Measurements Output Voltage Range – 0 to 6 V programmable in 10 mV steps with +/- 5mV accuracy, Current Measurement Range – -0.5 A to 1.5 A (linear range) with < 0.1 μA resolution,  accuracy of 1% of measured value […]

Getting Started with Qoitech Otii Developer Tool using ESP8266 and Raspberry Pi 4 Boards

Qoitech Otii Arc Raspberry Pi 4

Last month, I received Qoitech Otii Arc power supply, power meter, and DAQ unit that aims at helping hardware and software engineers develop energy-efficient products. I’ve now had time to test the unit with an ESP8266 board and Raspberry Pi 4 SBC, so I’ll show how to get started and my overall experience with the hardware and program. Requirements and Initial Setup The unit takes a 9V power supply or micro USB adapter as power input, but power output is done through banana plugs. I did not have any cables with banana plugs so I bought one on eBay for about $5 shipped. This cable is really convenient with output to USB (female connector), crocodile clips, and hook clips. However, as we’ll see below it may not be suitable for all types of loads, and you may have to make your own with a higher rated cable. You’ll need to […]

Linaro Connect San Diego 2019 Schedule – IoT, AI, Optimizations, Compilers and More

Linaro Connect San Diego 2019

Linaro has recently released the full schedule of Linaro Connect San Diego 2019 that will take place on  September 23-27. Even if you can’t attend, it’s always interested to check out the schedule to find out what interesting work is done on Arm Linux, Zephyr OS, and so on. So I’ve created my own virtual schedule with some of the most relevant and interesting sessions of the five-day event. Monday, September 23 14:00 – 14:25 – SAN19-101 Thermal Governors: How to pick the right one by Keerthy Jagadeesh, Software Engineer, Texas Instruments With higher Gigahertz and multiple cores packed in a SoC the need for thermal management for Arm based SoCs gets more and more critical. Thermal governors that define the policy for thermal management play a pivotal role in ensuring thermal safety of the device. Choosing the right one ensures the device performs optimally with in the thermal budget. […]

Arm Techcon 2019 Schedule – Machine Learning, Security, Containers, and More

Arm Techcon 2019

Arm TechCon will take place on October 8-10, 2019 at San Jose Convention Center to showcase new solutions from Arm and third-parties, and the company has now published the agenda/schedule for the event. There are many sessions and even if you’re not going to happen it’s always useful to checkout what will be discussed to learn more about what’s going on currently and what will be the focus in the near future for Arm development. Several sessions normally occur at the same time, so as usual I’ll make my own virtual schedule with the ones I find most relevant. Tuesday, October 8  09:00 – 09:50 – Open Source ML is rapidly advancing. How can you benefit? by Markus Levy, Director of AI and Machine Learning Technologies, NXP Over the last two years and still continuing, machine learning applications have benefited tremendously from the growing number of open source frameworks, tools, […]

Linux 5.2 Release – Main Changes, Arm, MIPS & RISC-V Architectures

Linux 5.2 Changelog

Linus Torvalds announced the release of Linux 5.2 last Sunday: So I was somewhat pre-disposed towards making an rc8, simply because of my travels and being entirely off the internet for a few days last week, and with spotty internet for a few days before that [*]. But there really doesn’t seem to be any reason for another rc, since it’s been very quiet. Yes, I had a few pull requests since rc7, but they were all small, and I had many more that are for the upcoming merge window. Part of it may be due to the July 4th week, of course, but whatever – I’ll take the quiet week as a good sign. So despite a fairly late core revert, I don’t see any real reason for another week of rc, and so we have a v5.2 with the normal release timing. There’s no particular area that stands […]

Android Patch Brings Bluetooth SBC Codec Audio Quality on-par with aptX

Android Bluetooth SBC HD Audio

In the context of CNX Software’s topics, SBC usually stands for “Single Board Computer”, but SBC also stands for “SubBand Codec“, a standard and mandatory Bluetooth codec which is supported by all headphones, portable speakers, car head units, and basically everything that plays audio over Bluetooth. SBC is known as a basic and low-quality Bluetooth codec, so people will often recommend using other codecs such as aptX, AAC or LDAC wherever possible, but ValdikSS has submitted a patch for Android which improves Bluetooth SBC codec audio quality on most existing devices, allegedly making it as good as the high quality aptX HD codec. ValdikSS explains this basically works by increasing the bitrate: My patchset bypass Android Bluetooth stack limitations and increase bitrate from stock 328 kbps to 452 or 551 kbps, depending on device speed capabilities. It’s already merged into LineageOS 15.1 and 16.0, Resurrection Remix and crDroid alternative Android […]

Embedded Linux Conference & Open Source Summit 2019 Schedule

Embedded Linux Conference 2019 Schedule

In the last few years, I covered the Embedded Linux Conference and IoT Summit schedules since both were happening at the same time and in the same location. But the Linux Foundation have recently announced the Embedded Linux Conference will combine with the Open Source Summit, so the IoT Summit appears to have been phased out. The full schedule for the events taking place on August 21 – 23, 2019 at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront, USA, has also been released, so I’ll create a virtual schedule with some of the sessions most relevant to this blog. Wednesday August 21, 2019 11:30 – 12:05 – What’s New with U-Boot? by Simon Glass, Google LLC U-Boot is a widely used bootloader in embedded systems. Many users are unaware of the wide feature-set of U-Boot, particularly features added in the last few years. This talk aims to bring users (and prospective users) […]

A Look at a Small NanoPi NEO4 Build Farm

NANOPI NEO4 Build Farm

FriendlyElec NanoPi NEO4 is currently the cheapest and smallest SBC powered by Rockchip RK3399 hexa-core processor which packs two Cortex A72 “fast” 64-bit cores, and four Cortex-A53 “efficiency” cores, so it should be an obvious candidate if you plan on building an Arm build farm costs to its low cost, small form factor, and relatively good performance. As part of his work on HAProxy load balancer, Willy Tarreau often has to run time-consuming builds for Arm targets, and to speed up the builds he’s put together several Arm based build farms powered by low cost development boards / SBCs. Up to now he had a build farm powered by five MIQI boards featuring Rockchip RK3288 processor with four Cortex-A17 “fast” 32-bit processor, and controlled with a ClearFog Pro networking board. He’s now decided to build another similar build farm but with NanoPi NEO4 boards instead. Willy goes through the hardware […]

EDATEC Raspberry Pi 5 fanless case