Allwinner A-Series Category - Page 10 of 53 - CNX Software

June 6, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

MOVI Shield Enables Offline Speech Recognition of 150 Sentences on Arduino and Raspberry Pi

Smart speakers normally work both offline and online, but their offline ability is usually limited to just one or two wake words, that when detected let the speakers listen to speech that it will send the cloud for further processing. It’s done that way because the speakers would not have enough resources, e.g. processing power, storage to contain the whole data required for natural speech processing, and wake words reduce the number of requests to the cloud, and improve privacy. But in some cases, you may not need the full language, and instead would like to use several voice commands to control a device without the need or the ability to connect to the Internet/Cloud. So Audeme has designed an Allwinner A13 based Arduino shield named MOVI (My Own Voice Interface), and that can recognize and/or synthesize up to 150 full sentences of your choice in English, Spanish or German. […]

June 6, 2019June 7, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 12 Comments

Software Development on Librem 5 and PinePhone Linux Phones is Progressing Nicely

Several Linux phones are expected this year including Purism Librem 5 and Pine64 PinePhone. Both companies have sent phone development kits out to developers a few months ago, and we are starting to see some nice progress for both phones. What made me write this post is an update from Purism comparing the boot time on Librem 5 running PureOS Linux distribution without specific optimizations yet, and HTC One Android smartphone. Librem 5 smartphone devkit takes 13 seconds to get to the lockscreen, while the Android phone takes over 40 seconds. Fair enough, most people won’t boot their phone often, but it still nice to know it won’t take long to turn on the phone from power off state. They also posted a progress report at the end of May saying calls are now working with better audio quality, fixed various issue with messaging in Chatty, work on Linux […]

May 13, 2019May 14, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 34 Comments

How One Line of Code Tripled Allwinner A20 SATA Write Performance

If you’ve been following this blog long enough, you may remember that all linux-sunxi community work aiming at improving u-boot and Linux software support on Allwinner processors started with Allwinner A10 processor found in MeLE A1000 TV box back in 2012, which at the time provided an interesting alternative to Raspberry Pi board that was in short supply at launch time and several months after. One of the most interesting feature found in Allwinner A10 single core Arm Cortex-A8 processor was its SATA interface, and Allwinner A20 was announced a few months later with a dual core Cortex-A7 processor and virtually the same peripherals as Allwinner A10, including SATA. However when I tested CubieTruck board connected to a mechanical drive, I noticed sequential SATA performance was fine for reads (~180MB/s), but writes were fairly slow at around 36 MB/s. Other people complained about it, and some looked into it, and […]

May 11, 2019May 12, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments

Volumio Motivo is a Gorgeous Audio Streamer Powered by SOPINE A64 SoM

Volumio is a well-known Linux based open source music player for Raspberry Pi, UDOO, Cubox-I, Beaglebone Black, and other single board computers. Some companies even made audiophile boards with support for Volumio including Khadas Tone high-resolution audio board for VIM/VIM2 SBC’s, and the tiny VoltaStream ZERO following Raspberry Pi Zero form factor. But Volumio team has decided to make their own hardware with Motivo, an awesomely looking audio streamer designed in collaboration with Yottamusic engineering firm, and Design Narratives industrial design company. Motivo was introduced at High-End Munich, the world’s biggest Hi-Fi trade fair, and Pine64 posted some photos in a tweet claiming it was powered by their SOPINE A64 system-on-module. The full details about the device have not been published at the time of writing, but we can still derive some of Volumio Motivo specifications and key features from the photos and a few bits of public information: System-on-Module […]

May 6, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Linux 5.1 Release – Main Changes, Arm, MIPS & RISC-V Architectures

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 5.1: So it’s a bit later in the day than I usually do this, just because I was waffling about the release. Partly because I got some small pull requests today, but mostly just because I wasn’t looking forward to the timing of this upcoming 5.2 merge window. But the last-minute pull requests really weren’t big enough to justify delaying things over, and hopefully the merge window timing won’t be all that painful either. I just happen to have the college graduation of my oldest happen right smack dab in the middle of the upcoming merge window, so I might be effectively offline for a few days there. If worst comes to worst, I’ll extend it to make it all work, but I don’t think it will be needed. Anyway, on to 5.1 itself. The past week has been pretty calm, […]

April 28, 2019May 5, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 16 Comments

Allwinner Tablet SoC Roadmap 2019 – 2020

Both Rockchip and Amlogic have some pretty interesting processors coming down the pipe with for example Rockchip RK3588 Cortex A76/A55 or Amlogic S922D Cortex A73/A53 SoCs both featuring an neural processing unit (NPU) for AI workloads acceleration at low power. The companies also have updated entry-level quad Arm Cortex-A55 processors with RK3530 and S905X3 models which are planned to launch later this year. But this made me wonder what was going with Allwinner since the company got really quiet, except for the “launch” of renamed processors for a specific business unit. That’s the only company among the three to have yet to announce a Cortex-A7X 64-bit Arm processor. The good news is that the company has released a roadmap of sort for their A-Series processors for tablets. The less good news is that very few details are available for the processors except for one: Allwinner A50 – Quad core Cortex-A7 […]

April 22, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Pioneer Edition FreedomBox Home Server Launched with Olimex A20-OLinuXino-LIME2 Board

Olimex works on open source hardware boards, while the FreedomBox Foundation has been developing FreedomBox, a free and open source private server system, since 2010 with the goal of empowering regular people to host their own internet services, like a VPN, a personal website, file sharing, encrypted messengers, a VoIP server, a metasearch engine, and more. When you mix open source hardware, open source software, and a bit of Internet freedom it gives birth to a product called “Pioneer Edition FreedomBox Home Server” based on Olimex A20-OLinuXino-LIME2 board and running FreedomBox software. Pioneer Edition FreedomBox Home Server specifications: SoC – Allwinner A20 dual-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU @ 1.0 GHz with dual-core Mali 400 GPU System Memory – 1GB DDR3 Storage – microSD slot fitted with 32GB class 10 card loaded with FreedomBox, SATA data and power connectors, 2KB EEPROM for MAC address and custom data Connectivity – Gigabit Ethernet Video […]

March 22, 2019March 22, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 19 Comments

Allwinner MR133 Processor Targets Robot Vacuum Cleaners

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a new processor from Allwinner, so today I got curious and visited the company website hoping to find maybe some news about the first Cortex-A7x processor from the company. But instead I found something else intriguing with the new Allwinner MR133 processor specifically designed for “SLAM/VSLAM intelligent robot sweeper solutions”. In other words, Allwinner has just launched a processor for robot vacuum cleaners… Allwinner MR133 key features and specifications: CPU – Quad-core Arm Cortex-A7 processor @ 1.8GHz with 32KB L1 I-cache + 32KB L1 D-cache per core, 512KB L2 cache, low-power CoolFlex power management architecture GPU – Arm Mali 400MP2 with support for OpenGL ES 2.0/1.1, Direct3D 11.1, OpenVG 1.1 Memory I/F – 32-bit DDR4/DDR3/DDR3L/LPDDR3/LPDDR4 Storage I/F – eMMC 5.0 flasj, compatible with eMMC 5.1, support Full Disk Encryption(FDE) 8-bit TLC/MLC/SLC/EF NAND flash, supports FDE LDPC/80-bit BCH/1024bytes Video Engine – H264 HP encoder […]