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

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

Mekotronics R57 – A Rockchip RK3576 Edge AI fanless mini PC with HDMI input/output, dual GbE, RS232, RS485, DIO…

Mekotronics R57 is a fanless edge AI mini PC powered by a Rockchip RK3576 octa-core Cortex-A72/A53 SoC with a 6 TOPS NPU, 4GB LPDDR5, a 32GB eMMC flash, and features such as RS485 and dual gigabit Ethernet that makes it suitable for industrial automation. I initially thought it was a cost-down version of the Mekotronics R58 mini PC that I reviewed with Android 12 as my first ever Rockchip RK3588 device. But while the mechanical design is similar and some of the ports are in the same position, there are some changes with the new model equipped with only one HDMI output, one HDMI input, two GbE jacks, and a terminal block with RS232, RS485, and digital inputs and outputs. Mekotronics R57 specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3576 CPU 4x Cortex-A72 cores @ 2.2GHz, four Cortex-A53 cores @ 1.8GHz Arm Cortex-M0 MCU at 400MHz GPU – ARM Mali-G52 MC3 GPU with […]

June 3, 2024June 3, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Conexio Stratus Pro – A battery-powered nRF9161 development kit with LTE IoT, DECT NR+, GNSS connectivity (Crowdfunding)

Conexio Stratus Pro nRF9161 IoT prototyping kit

Conexio Stratus Pro is a tiny IoT development kit based on Nordic Semi nRF9161 system-in-package (SiP) with LTE-M/NB-IoT, DECT NR+, and GNSS connectivity and designed to create battery-powered cellular-connected electronic projects and products such as asset trackers, environmental monitors, smart meters, and industrial automation devices. Just like the previous generation Conexio Startus board based on the Nordic Semi nRF9160 cellular IoT SiP, the new Conexio Stratus Pro board supports solar energy harvesting and comes with a Feather form factor and Qwiic connector for each expansion. Conexio Stratus Pro specifications: System-in-package – Nordic Semi nRF9161 SiP MCU – Arm Cortex-M33 clocked at 64 MHz with 1 MB Flash pre-programmed MCUBoot bootloader, 256 KB RAM Modem Transceiver and baseband 3GPP LTE release 14 LTE-M/NB-IoT support DECT NR+ ready GPS/GNSS receiver RF Transceiver for global coverage supporting bands: B1, B2, B3, B4, B5, B8, B12, B13, B17, B18, B19, B20, B25, B26, B28, […]

June 2, 2024June 17, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

TOOCAA L2 Review – A fully enclosed 20W laser engraver & cutter with a focus on safety

TOOCAA L2 review 20W laser engraver cutter

TOOCAA L2 is a fully enclosed laser engraver and cutter with a 10W or 20W laser module using orange acrylic covers and various sensors for additional safety. The laser module complies with Class 1 Laser Safety certification and the engraving and cutting machine works with a range of materials suitable for creators who want to cut or/and carve workpieces or manufacture high-resolution parts. The company sent us a sample of the TOOCAA L2 with a 20W laser model, an air assist pump, a honeycomb plate, and a few consumables for review. We’ll first go through an unboxing of all items and assembly, before testing the laser engraver and cutter under various scenarios. TOOCAA L2 unboxing The review kit we received includes three packages from TOOCAA. Each package contains various components. with foam drilled into shape to support each part and right-angled cardboard along all four corners of the package to […]

June 1, 2024June 1, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 14 Comments

Espressif releases Arduino ESP32 Core 3.0.0, but PlatformIO support is in doubt

We previously noted the ESP32 Arduino Core 3.0.0 Alpha release added support for ESP32-C6 and ESP32-H2 among other changes. The good news is that Arduino ESP32 Core 3.0.0 is now considered stable, and was released a few days ago based on the ESP-IDF 5.1.4 framework. Users of the Arduino IDE can use it straight away, but as we’ll discuss in more detail below it’s unclear whether PlatformIO will be (officially) supported. There have been many changes since we wrote about the Alpha2 release in November 2023 with 327 commits from 96 contributors. Some of the most recent changes (compared to RC3) include: Updated ESPDuino with extra options (CPU freq and Partition) Add support for WeAct Studio ESP32C3 Attach ETH events at the correct place Enable the possibility to use SPI ETH with only 4 wires Fix ETH.end() Fix ETH.stop() with IDF SPI Nano ESP32: delete programmer.default entry (on main) due […]

May 31, 2024May 31, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

M5Stack CoreS3 SE cost-down ESP32-S3 IoT controller features a 2-inch touch display, a microSD card slot, a speaker, two microphones

M5Stack CoreS3 SE ESP32-S3 IoT controller

The M5Stack CoreS3 SE, also called M5CoreS3 SE, is a cost-down version of the M5Stack CoreS3 IoT controller based on the ESP32-S3 wireless microcontroller with a 2-inch capacitive touch display, a microSD card slot, a USB-C port, a speaker, two microphones, and one Grove connector for expansion. The M5Core S3 SE loses the DIN Base so the associate features are gone and DIN rail mounting is not possible by default anymore. That also means the M5Stack CoreS3 SE controller is about twice as thin, and the color is also different (medium grey vs black grey). Major internal changes include the removal of the camera and the three sensors found in the original model. M5Stack CoreS3 SE specifications with highlights in bold and strikethrough showing differences against the CoreS3 model: Wireless MCU – Espressif Systems ESP32-S3FN16R8 CPU – Dual-core 32-bit Xtensa LX7 microcontroller with AI vector instructions up to 240MHz, RISC-V […]

May 31, 2024June 23, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 19 Comments

Radxa Fogwise Airbox edge AI box review – Part 1: Specifications, teardown, and first try

Radxa Fogwise Airbox, also known as Fogwise BM168M, is an edge AI box powered by a SOPHON BM1684X Arm SoC with a built-in 32 TOPS TPU and a VPU capable of handling the decoding of up to 32 HD video streams. The device is equipped with 16GB LPDDR4x RAM and a 64GB eMMC flash and features two gigabit Ethernet RJ45 jacks, a few USB ports, a speaker, and more. Radxa sent us a sample for evaluation. We’ll start the Radxa Fogwise Airbox review by checking out the specifications and the hardware with an unboxing and a teardown, before testing various AI workloads with Tensorflow and/or other frameworks in the second part of the review. Radxa Fogwise Airbox specifications The specifications below come from the product page as of May 30, 2024: SoC – SOPHON SG2300x CPU – Octa-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor up to 2.3 GHz VPU Decoding of up to […]

May 30, 2024May 30, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Leveraging GPT-4o and NVIDIA TAO to train TinyML models for microcontrollers using Edge Impulse

Edge Impulse using NVIDIA TAO and GPT-4o LLM to run model on Arduino Nicla Vision

We previously tested Edge Impulse machine learning platform showing how to train and deploy a model with IMU data from the XIAO BLE sense board relatively easily. Since then the company announced support for NVIDIA TAO toolkit in Edge Impulse, and now they’ve added the latest GPT-4o LLM to the ML platform to help users quickly train TinyML models that can run on boards with microcontrollers. What’s interesting is how AI tools from various companies, namely NVIDIA (TAO toolkit) and OpenAI (GPT-4o LLM), are leveraged in Edge Impulse to quickly create some low-end ML model by simply filming a video. Jan Jongboom, CTO and co-founder at Edge Impulse, demonstrated the solution by shooting a video of his kids’ toys and loading it in Edge Impulse to create an “is there a toy?” model that runs on the Arduino Nicla Vision at about 10 FPS. Another way to look at it […]

May 30, 2024May 30, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 18 Comments

Arm unveils Cortex-X925 and Cortex-A725 CPUs, Immortalis-G925 GPU, Kleidi AI software

Arm SoC with Cortex-X925 Cortex-A725 Cortex-A520 CPU with Immortalis-G925 GPU

Arm has just announced new Armv9 CPUs and Immortalis GPUs for mobile SoCs, as well as the Kleidi AI software optimized for Arm CPUs from Armv7 to Armv9 architectures. New Armv9.2 CPU cores include the Cortex-X925 “Blackhawk” core with significant CPU and AI performance improvements, the Cortex-A725 with improved performance efficiency, and a refreshed version of the Cortex-A520 providing 15 percent efficiency improvements. Three new GPUs have also been introduced namely the up-to-14-core Immortalis-G925 flagship GPU which delivers up to 37% 3D graphics performance improvements over last year’s 12-core Immortalis-G720, the Mali-G725 with 6 to 9 cores for premium mobile handsets, and the Mali-G625 GPU with one to five cores for smartwatches and entry-level mobile devices. Arm Cortex-X925 The Arm Cortex-X925 delivers 36 percent single-threaded peak performance improvements in Geekbench 6.2 against a Cortex-X4-based Premium Android smartphone, and about 41 percent better AI performance using the time-to-first token of tiny-LLama […]