Author: Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 20 Comments on DeepSeek shown to run on Rockchip RK3588 with AI acceleration at about 15 tokens/s

DeepSeek shown to run on Rockchip RK3588 with AI acceleration at about 15 tokens/s

Rockchip RK3588 DeepSeek R1 NPU acceleration

DeepSeek R1 model was released a few weeks ago and Brian Roemmele claimed to run it locally on a Raspberry Pi at 200 tokens per second promising to release a Raspberry Pi image “as soon as all tests are complete”. He further explains the Raspberry Pi 5 had a few HATs including a Hailo AI accelerator, but that’s about all the information we have so far, and I assume he used the distilled model with 1.5 billion parameters. Jeff Geerling did his own tests with DeepSeek-R1 (Qwen 14B), but that was only on the CPU at 1.4 token/s,  and he later installed an AMD W7700 graphics card on it for better performance. Other people made TinyZero models based on DeepSeekR1 optimized for Raspberry Pi, but that’s specific to countdown and multiplication tasks and still runs on the CPU only. So I was happy to finally see Radxa release instructions to […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments on OpenWrt 24.10 released with Linux 6.6, TLS 1.3 by default, and 1970 supported devices

OpenWrt 24.10 released with Linux 6.6, TLS 1.3 by default, and 1970 supported devices

OpenWrt 24.10

OpenWrt 24.10 open-source lightweight Linux operating system for routers has just been released. It’s been upgraded to Linux 6.6 from Linux 5.15 in OpenWrt 2023.05, supports TLS 1.3 by default, improves support for WiFi 6 (802.11ax), and adds initial support for WiFi 7 (802.11be). After over one year of work since the release of OpenWrt 23.05, OpenWrt 24.10 adds over 5400 commits, and the total number of supported devices is now close to 2,000 at 1,970. It’s also the first stable release supporting OpenWrt One, the router directly designed by OpenWrt developers in collaboration with Banana Pi. OpenWrt 24.10 highlights: TLS 1.3 support in default images with MbedTLS 3.6 Activate POSIX Access Control Lists and file system security attributes for all file systems on devices with big flash sizes. Needed by docker. Note this is not enabled for all targets with the small_flash feature flag, including ath79/tiny, bcm47xx/legacy, lantiq/ase, lantiq/xrx200_legacy, […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments on Nuvoton introduces the first security chip based on OpenTitan open-source silicon Root of Trust

Nuvoton introduces the first security chip based on OpenTitan open-source silicon Root of Trust

OpenTitan demo board Nuvoton open source security chip

Google has announced the start of the fabrication of a Nuvoton security chip featuring OpenTitan open-source silicon Root of Trust (RoT), the first such production-ready chip. It will soon be available in lowRISC’s Voyager 1 demo board, and later this year in Chromebooks and data centers. We first wrote about OpenTitan open-source Root of Trust (RoT) chips in 2020 as a collaboration between Google, Seagate, Nuvoton, Western Digital, lowRISC, as well as some other companies, projects, and universities that aimed at “building a transparent, high-quality reference design and integration guidelines for silicon root of trust (RoT) chips”.  OpenTitan itself reached commercial availability last year, after the first engineering samples were released in 2023, and Google now says the Nuvoton chip (yet to have a proper name) is the first production-ready OpenTitan chip. Hardware Root of Trust (RoT) are small secure microcontrollers that are the equivalent of Certificate Authorities (CAs) to […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment on CPico RP2350 is another Raspberry Pi Pico 2 alternative with USB-C, 8MB flash, 2MB PSRAM, BConnect I2C & debug ports

CPico RP2350 is another Raspberry Pi Pico 2 alternative with USB-C, 8MB flash, 2MB PSRAM, BConnect I2C & debug ports

iLabs CPico RP2350

iLabs CPico RP2350 is a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 alternative with the same form factor, still based on the Raspberry Pi RP2350 microcontroller but equipped with a USB-C port, 8MB flash, 2MB PSRAM, a Reset button, and Bconnect I2C and debug ports. Apart from that, the CPico RP2350 retains the other features of the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 including the two 20-pin PGIO headers, and BOOT button. It joins other Raspberry Pi Pico 2 alternatives like the Waveshare RP2350-Plus adding battery support. CPico RP2350 specifications: SoC – Raspberry Pi RP2350 CPU Dual-core Arm Cortex-M33 @ 150 MHz with Arm Trustzone, Secure boot Dual-core RISC-V Hazard3 @ 150 MHz Up two cores can be used at any given time Memory – 520 KB on-chip SRAM Security 8KB of anti-fuse OTP for key storage Secure boot (Arm only) SHA-256 acceleration Hardware TRNG Fast glitch detectors Package – QFN-60 Memory – 2 MP […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments on FOSSASIA 2025 – Operating systems, open hardware, and firmware sessions

FOSSASIA 2025 – Operating systems, open hardware, and firmware sessions

FOSSASIA Summit 2025

The FOSSASIA Summit is the closest we have to FOSDEM in Asia. It’s a free and open-source event taking place each year in Asia, and FOSSASIA 2025 will take place in Bangkok, Thailand on March 13-15 this year. It won’t have quite as many speakers and sessions as in FOSDEM 2025 (968 speakers, 930 events), but the 3-day event will still have over 170 speakers and more than 200 sessions. Most of the sessions are for high-level software with topics like AI and data science, databases, cloud, and web3, but I also noticed a few sessions related to “Hardware and firmware” and “Operating System” which are closer to what we cover here at CNX Software. So I’ll make a virtual schedule based on those two tracks to check out any potentially interesting talks. None of those sessions take place on March 13, so we’ll only have a schedule for March […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments on IBASE IB839 3.5-inch SBC features Intel Atom x7211RE, Atom x7433RE, or Processor N97 CPU

IBASE IB839 3.5-inch SBC features Intel Atom x7211RE, Atom x7433RE, or Processor N97 CPU

IBASE IB839 3.5-inch Atom x7000RE SBC

IBASE Technology IB839 is a 3.5-inch single board computer (SBC) powered by Intel Atom x7211RE or x7433RE Amston Lake processors for industrial temperature range or Processor N97 Alder Lake-N processor for commercial temperature range, and designed for edge computing, IoT, and automation systems. The IB839 supports up to 16GB DDR5-4800 SO-DIMM memory, offers three display interfaces via two DisplayPort (DP++) and eDP or LVDS, dual 2.5GbE, SATA III storage, four COM ports, up to six USB interfaces, and can be expanded through M.2 sockets (M-key, E-key, and B-key) for SSDs, WiFi, and WWAN modules. IBASE IB8939 specifications: SoC (one or the other) Intel Atom x7211RE dual-core Amstom Lake processor @ 2.0 to 3.4 GHz with 6MB cache, 16EU Intel UHD graphics; TDP: 9W Intel Atom x7433RE quad-core Amston Lake processor @ up to 3.4 GHz with 6MB cache, 32EU Intel UHD Graphics; TDP: 9W Intel Processor N97 quad-core Alder Lake-N […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments on YOLO-Jevois leverages YOLO-World to enable open-vocabulary object detection at runtime, no dataset or training needed

YOLO-Jevois leverages YOLO-World to enable open-vocabulary object detection at runtime, no dataset or training needed

YOLO-Jevois general object detection by typing words

YOLO is one of the most popular edge AI computer vision models that detects multiple objects and works out of the box for the objects for which it has been trained on. But adding another object would typically involve a lot of work as you’d need to collect a dataset, manually annotate the objects you want to detect, train the network, and then possibly quantize it for edge deployment on an AI accelerator. This is basically true for all computer vision models, and we’ve already seen Edge Impulse facilitate the annotation process using GPT-4o and NVIDIA TAO to train TinyML models for microcontrollers. However, researchers at jevois.org have managed to do something even more impressive with YOLO-Jevois “open-vocabulary object detection”, based on Tencent AI Lab’s YOLO-World, to add new objects in YOLO at runtime by simply typing words or selecting part of the image. It also updates class definitions on […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment on iWave Systems iW-RainboW-G54S credit card-sized SBC features an STM32MP133/MP135 OSM Size-S module

iWave Systems iW-RainboW-G54S credit card-sized SBC features an STM32MP133/MP135 OSM Size-S module

iW-RainboW-G54S credit card-sized OSM SBC

iWave Systems iW-RainboW-G54S is a credit card-sized SBC fitted with an OSM Size-S (30x30mm) system-on-module based on STM32MP133 or STM32MP135 Cortex-A7 SoC with up to 1GB RAM, and up to 128GB flash. Interfaces include a Gigabit Ethernet port, a USB Type-A port, an 18-bit RGB LCD display interface, and three 100-pin high-density connectors for additional I/Os. The iW-RainboW-G54S SBC is designed for industrial applications with a temperature range of -40 to +85°C. While it’s fitted with an OSM Size-S module, we’ll also notice the carrier board has a footprint for OSM Size-M (45x30mm) and OSM Size-L (45x45mm) modules indicating it will be used with other OSM modules in the future. iWave Systems iW-RainboW-G54S specifications: System-on-Module – iW-RainboW-G54M SoC (one or the other) STMicro STM32MP133 single-core Cortex-A7 with or without Secure boot + Cryptography; for headless applications STMicro STM32MP135 single-core Cortex-A7 with or without Secure boot + Cryptography; supports LCD-TFT parallel […]

EmbeddedTS embedded systems design