Allwinner A-Series Category - CNX Software

July 16, 2024 by Debashis Das - 1 Comment

Recore A8 – An Allwinner A64-powered 3D printer control board with TMC2209 stepper drivers

Recore A8 all in one desktop 3D printers control board

The Recore A8 is an all-in-one 3D printer control board built around the Allwinner A64 SoC. The board includes six soldered TMC2209 stepper motor drivers, cooled by an 8-layer PCB for durability. To make the connection better the board features industry-standard JST PH connectors for secure cable connections. Most of the connectors are flexible and support end-stops, Neopixels, servos, inductive probes, and BLTouch. Two Expansion headers on the board allow for two additional stepper motor drivers. Additionally, the board supports various temperature sensors, including regular thermistors, thermocouples, and PT100/PT1000 sensors (PT100 requires an extra board). Elias Bakken has been working on this board since 2019 and in our post about the earlier Recore A5, we have seen how Elias leverages Allwinner A64’s 300 MHz AR100 core to control real-time I/Os. Recore A8 specifications: SoC – Allwinner A64 quad-core Cortex-A53 processor running at 1 GHz, with AR100 32-bit core @ 300 MHz, Mali-400MP2 […]

June 29, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

RAUC open-source OTA update solution for embedded Linux ported to Rock Pi 4 SBC

RAUC open-source OTA update solution enabling A/B updates for embedded Linux images has recently been ported to the Radxa Rock Pi 4 Model B SBC powered by a Rockchip OP1 SoC by the project’s maintainer, Leon Anavi working for Konsulto Group. If you run a Linux distribution like Ubuntu, Debian, or Fedora, packages and OS images are taken care of automatically or by running a few commands. However, software engineers who build custom embedded Linux images with the Yocto Project or Buildroot must handle this themselves. Luckily, there are already open-source OTA firmware update solutions such as Mender, Balena, Torizon, OSTree, Snap, or RAUC, and we’ll look at the latter today. RAUC (Robust Auto-Update Controller) was started by Pengutronix in 2015 and eventually adopted by the community. It’s a lightweight update client that runs on an Embedded Linux device and controls the A/B update procedure when a new firmware revision […]

April 2, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 11 Comments

Avaota A1 open-source hardware SBC is powered by Allwinner T527 octa-core Cortex-A55 SoC

Avaota A1 open-source hardware Allwinner T527 SBC

We’ve recently covered MYiR Tech MYD-LT527 industrial development board based on Allwinner T527 octa-core Cortex-A55 AI SoC and noted Orange Pi is working on one that should even get mainline Linux support. The Avaoto A1 offers another Allwinner T527 hardware option with an SBC design that’s fully open-source. The board is equipped with up to 4GB RAM, 128GB eMMC flash, HDMI and DisplayPort video outputs, two gigabit Ethernet ports, a WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.4 module, a few USB ports, a 3.5mm audio jack and the usual 40-pin GPIO header for expansion. Avaota A1 specifications: SoC – Allwinner T527 (or Allwinner A527 with Avaota A1C board, not sure what the differences are between the two) CPU Octa-core Arm Cortex-A55 processor with four cores @ 1.80 GHz and four cores @ 1.42GHz XuanTie E906 RISC-V core up to 200 MHz GPU – Arm Mali-G57 MC1 GPU with support for OpenGL ES […]

March 29, 2024March 31, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 15 Comments

Orange Pi Developer Conference 2024, upcoming Orange Pi SBCs and products

Orange Pi held a Developer Conference on March 24, 2024, in Shenzhen, China, and while I could not make it, the company provided photos of the event where people discussed upcoming boards and products, as well as software support for the Orange Pi SBCs. So I’ll go through some of the photos to check out what was discussed and what’s coming. While Orange Pi is mostly known for its development boards the company has also been working on consumer products including the Orange Health Watch D Pro and the OrangePi Neo handheld console. The Orange Pi Watch D Pro is said to implement non-invasive blood glucose monitoring, blood pressure monitoring, one-click “micro-physical examination” and other functions to to help users monitor their health monitoring. The Watch D Pro uses a technique that emits a green light to measure glucose levels in the blood, and we’re told it’s accurate enough to […]

January 24, 2024January 23, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

FOSDEM 2024 schedule – Open-source embedded, mobile, IoT, robotics, RISC-V, etc..

FOSDEM – which stands for Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting – is a free-to-participate event where thousands of developers meet in Brussels on the first week-end of February to discuss open-source software & hardware projects. FOSDEM 2024 will take place on February 3-4 with 880 speakers, 818 events, and 66 tracks. Although I won’t attend, I’ve created a virtual schedule like every year with sessions most relevant to the topics covered on CNX Software from the “Embedded, Mobile and Automotive” and “Open Hardware and CAD/CAM” devrooms, but also other devrooms including “FOSS Mobile Devices”, “ Energy: Reimagining this Ecosystem through Open Source”, “RISC-V”, and others. FOSDEM Day 1 – Saturday, February 3, 2024 10:30 – 10:55 – Screen Sharing on Raspberry Pi 5 Using VNC in Weston and Wayland with the Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded by Leon Anavi In 2023, embedded Linux developers received eagerly awaited news: […]

December 31, 2023December 31, 2023 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 18 Comments

2023 Year in review – Top 10 posts, statistics, and what to expect in 2024

It’s the last day and last article of the year, so we will look at some highlights of 2023, some traffic statistics on the CNX Software website, and speculate what interesting developments may happen in 2024. Looking back at 2023 The semiconductor shortage that had happened since 2020 started to fade away in early 2023, and supplies for most electronics components and devices seem to be adequate at this time, so that was a bright spot this year, and hopefully, it will stay that way in 2024 despite geopolitical tensions. We did not have any super exciting new Arm application processors from Rockchip, Amlogic, or Allwinner announced this year, although the Amlogic S928X penta-core Cortex-A76/A55 CPU started to show up in some 8K TV boxes. The launch of the Raspberry Pi 5 SBC with a Broadcom BCM2712 quad-core Cortex-A76 processor was probably the main highlight for Arm on this side […]

November 10, 2023 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Ubuntu Touch 20.04 OTA-3 release adds support for PinePhone and PineTab devices

UBPorts has just released Ubuntu Touch 20.04 OTA-3 based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS with the latest security updates and beta support for PinePhone, PinePhone Pro, PineTab, and PineTab 2, adding to the smartphones already supported by Ubuntu Touch 20.04 OTA-2. As a reminder, Ubuntu Touch was initially handled by Canonical for desktop/mobile convergence, but it was dropped when the company decided to refocus its efforts on cloud and IoT, and the UBPorts community took over and eventually outed the first stable Ubuntu Touch release in June 2017. The developers kept on improving the OS since then with new releases from time to time, but note that it should still be considered experimental only for most devices, and will not be suitable as a daily driver for the majority of people. The PinePhone and PineTab have been supported by Ubuntu Touch for a few years, but they had their own branch […]

October 30, 2023January 8, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Linux 6.6 LTS release – Highlights, Arm, RISC-V and MIPS architectures

The Linux 6.6 release has just been announced by Linus Torvalds on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML): So this last week has been pretty calm, and I have absolutely no excuses to delay the v6.6 release any more, so here it is. There’s a random smattering of fixes all over, and apart from some bigger fixes to the r8152 driver, it’s all fairly small. Below is the shortlog for last week for anybody who really wants to get a flavor of the details. It’s short enough to scroll through. This obviously means that the merge window for 6.7 opens tomorrow, and I appreciate how many early pull requests I have lined up, with 40+ ready to go. That will make it a bit easier for me to deal with it, since I’ll be on the road for the first week of the merge window. Linus About two months ago, […]