Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft), Author at CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

August 18, 2024August 19, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 14 Comments

Radxa ROCK 5 ITX RK3588 mini-ITX motherboard review – Building an Arm PC and NAS with Debian KDE

ROCK 5 ITX Review: Build Arm Computer NAS

In this review, I’ll show how I installed Debian on the ROCK 5 ITX mini-ITX motherboard powered by a Rockchip RK3588 octa-core Arm Cortex-A76/A55 processor, before building a computer/NAS with the Arm mini-ITX motherboard, testing various features and running benchmarks. In the first part of the review, we checked out the Radxa ROCK 5 ITX (Arm) and Jupiter (RISC-V) mini-ITX motherboards with specifications and unboxing, and the Auriga 6-Bay NAS mini-ITX chassis used in this review. I already built the computer with the Jupiter RISC-V mini-ITX motherboard, so here I simply switched the RISC-V motherboard with the Radxa ROCK 5 ITX Arm motherboard and installed a few SATA drives. Radxa ROCK 5 ITX first boot – A tricky start… Radxa provides getting started instructions on the documentation website which I mostly follow to hopefully boot within a few minutes. I had to prepare the hardware first. So I installed a […]

August 17, 2024August 17, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments

CrowView Note Review – A 14-inch laptop shell designed for Raspberry Pi 5 and Jetson Nano Developer kit

Elecrow CrowView Note is a laptop shell with a 14-inch Full HD display, an 84-key QWERTY keyboard with a touchpad, built-in speakers and microphone, and a 5,000 mAh battery that’s specially designed for the Raspberry Pi 5 and the Jetson Nano Developer Kit thanks to adapters. However, it can be used with any machine with either a full-featured USB-C port or spare USB and HDMI ports. So it works with any Raspberry Pi model, Windows, Mac OS, or Linux computers, Android smartphones, PS4/PS5 game consoles, and more. This type of laptop shell has been around for years with the first one being the Laptop shell for the Motorola Atrix 4G smartphone introduced in 2011, and more recently Nexdock launched a range of laptop shells such as the Neckdock XL 15.6-inch touchscreen display and wireless charging. The CrowView Note differentiates itself with its low price and direct compatibility with the Raspberry […]

August 16, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 14 Comments

Luckfox Pico Mini – A tiny Arm Linux camera board based on Rockchip RV1103 SoC with 64MB on-chip RAM

Luckfox Pico Mini is a tiny (28 x 21 mm) board based on the Rockchip RV1103 Cortex-A7 camera SoC with a built-in 0.5 TOPS NPU, 64MB on-chip DDR2 RAM, USB-C port for power and data, two rows of headers with up to seventeen GPIOs, and five castellated holes for Ethernet. Two versions are offered: the Pico Mini A with a microSD card slot or the Pico Mini B with an extra 128MB SPI NAND flash. Both boards are a shorter version of the Luckfox Pico with similar features but additional GPIOs and the Luckfox Pico Plus model also adds an RJ45 Ethernet port. Luckfox Pico Mini A and B specifications: SoC – Rockchip RV1103 SoC CPU – Arm Cortex-A7 processor @ 1.2GHz + RISC-V core Memory – 64MB DDR2 NPU – 0.5 TOPS NPU with support for INT4, INT8, and INT16 ISP – 4M @ 30 fps ISP Storage MicroSD […]

August 16, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 17 Comments

Radxa ROCK E20C “Mini Network Titan” features 2.0 GHz Rockchip RK3528A SoC, dual GbE, metal case

Radxa ROCK E20C, also “dubbed Mini Network Titan”, is a router with dual Gigabit Ethernet, a USB 2.0 host port, and a microSD card slot powered by a Rockchip RK3528A quad-core Cortex-A53 processor clocked at 2.0 GHz. Housed in a CNC aluminum alloy case, the ultra-compact fanless router is offered with 1GB to 4GB LPDDR4 memory, 8GB to 32GB eMMC flash, and also exposes two USB-C ports, one for power and the other for serial console access without having to tear down the device. Radxa ROCK E20C specifications: Processor – Rockchip RK3528A CPU – Quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 @ 2.0 GHz GPU – Arm Mali-G450 GPU with support for OpenGL ES1.1, ES2.0, and OpenVG 1.1 APIs VPU H.264, H.265, and AVS2 decoder up to 4Kp60 H.264 and H.265 encoder up to 1080p60 NPU – 1 TOPS NPU (TBC) Memory – 1GB, 2GB, or 4GB LPDDR4 Storage 8GB, 16GB, or 32GB eMMC flash […]

August 16, 2024September 28, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Abluetech PTR7002 WiFi 6 and PTR5302 WiFi 6 and BLE 5.4 modules feature Nordic Semi nRF7002/nRF5340 wireless chips

PTR5302 nRF7002 nRF5340 WiFi 6 BLE module

Shenzhen-based Abluetech has launched two low-power wireless modules based on Nordic Semi nRF7002 and nRF5340 wireless chips. The PTR7002 is a dual-band WiFi 6 module based on the nRF7002 chip, and the PTR5302 module combines the nRF7002 with the nRF5340 wireless microcontroller to offer dual-band WiFi 6 and Bluetooth LE 5.4 connectivity Abluetech PTR7002 dual-band WiFi 6 module with nRF7002 PTR7002 specifications: Chipset – Nordic Semi nRF7002 Wireless Dual-band Wi-Fi 6 Tx power – Up to +21dBm Rx sensitivity – -96.5dBm @ 2.4GHz / -90.5dBm @ 5GHz PHY bandwidth – Up to 86 Mbps (MCS7) 1SISO; 20MHz bandwidth Modes – Station, Wi-Fi Direct, Soft AP (Wi-Fi 4 operation only), simultaneous Station +Soft AP/Wi-Fi Direct/Station modes. 2.4GHz and 5GHz dual-band PCB antenna Range – Up to 300 meters Host interface – SPI / QSPI; AT command set Supply Voltage – 2.9 to 4.5V Power Consumption (@ 3.6V TBC) Tx peak current […]

August 15, 2024August 15, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Firefly EC-R3576PC FD is an Embedded Large-Model Computer based on Rockchip RK3576 processor

Firefly RK3576 Embedded Large Model Computer

Firefly EC-R3576PC FD is described as an “Embedded Large-Model Computer” powered by a Rockchip RK3576 octa-core Cortex-A72/A53 processor with a 6 TOPS NPU and supporting large language models (LLMs) such as Gemma-2B, LlaMa2-7B, ChatGLM3-6B, or Qwen1.5-1.8B. It looks to be based on the ROC-RK3576-PC SBC we covered a few weeks ago, and also designed for LLM. But the EC-R3576PC FD is a turnkey solution that will work out of the box and should deliver decent performance now that the RKLLM toolkit has been released with NPU acceleration. However, note there are some caveats doing that on RK3576 instead of RK3588 that we’ll discuss below. Firefly EC-R3576PC FD specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3576 CPU 4x Cortex-A72 cores at 2.2GHz, four Cortex-A53 cores at 1.8GHz Arm Cortex-M0 MCU at 400MHz GPU – ARM Mali-G52 MC3 GPU clocked at 1GHz with support for OpenGL ES 1.1, 2.0, and 3.2, OpenCL up to 2.0, and […]

August 15, 2024August 19, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

A closer look at Raspberry Pi RP2350’s HSTX high-speed serial transmit interface

The Raspberry Pi RP2350 microcontroller adds an HSTX (High-Speed Serial Transmit) interface adding the PIOs (Programmable IOs) introduced on the Raspberry Pi RP2040 three years ago. The RP2350 MCU now has three PIOs and one HSTX interface going over 8x GPIOs. So let’s try to better understand what HSTX is exactly, what it is used for, and how it differs from PIOs. We’ll also check out some programming examples in C and MicroPython. The high-speed serial transmit (HSTX) interface is detailed in the RP2350 datasheet starting on page 1118 where it reads “The high-speed serial transmit (HSTX) interface streams data from the system clock domain to up to 8 GPIOs at a rate independent of the system clock”. Reading further, we also learn that it runs at 150 MHz enabling up to 300 Mbps per pin with DDR output operation, or a combined 2,400 Mbps over 8 pins if I […]

August 15, 2024August 15, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Akeana unveils 10 RISC-V cores suitable for microcontrollers up to data center chips

Founded about three years ago, Akeana has just officially launched and announced three 32-bit and 64-bit RISC-V processor lines and SoC IP with the Akeana 100 series for 32-bit microcontrollers, the Akeana 1000 series for 64-bit processors with MMU, and the Akeana 5000 series with much higher single-thread performance and designed for laptops, data centers, and cloud infrastructure. The company also introduced Scalable Coherent Interconnect, Interrupt Controller, and IOMMU IP for building out compute subsystems based on the aforementioned RISC-V cores, as well as AI-targeted Vector RISC-V Cores and Matrix Computation IP. The design team is said to have previously worked on Marvell’s ThunderX2 server chips. Akeana 100 Series The Akeana 100 Series is a line of highly configurable processors with 32-bit RISC-V cores that support applications from embedded microcontrollers to edge gateways, to personal computing devices. Four Akeana 100 RISC-V cores are available Akeana 110 for area- and power-constrained […]