Allwinner A-Series Category - Page 23 of 53 - CNX Software

May 8, 2015June 18, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 62 Comments

CHIP is a $9 Linux Development Board Powered by Allwinner R8 (Crowdfunding)

It’s quite common to find MCU board for less than $10, but if you want to run Linux, you’ll need to spend a bit more, unlessit’s sponsored, and today, the cheapest you can get is probably the $20 Raspberry Pi Model A+, unless you go with some OpenWRT compatible routers. But there’s now a new board in development, called CHIP, with Allwinner R8 Cortex A8 processor, 512MB RAM, and 4GB NAND flash, as well as wireless connectivity, that will bring cost even lower, as you can pledge $9 on Kickstarter to fund its development. C.H.I.P specifications: SoC – Allwinner R8 Cortex A8 processor @ 1 GHz with Mali-400 GPU (Compatible with Allwinner A13) System Memory – 512 MB RAM Storage – 4GB NAND flash Connectivity – 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi + Bluetooth 4.0 Video Output – 3.5mm jack for composite video and audio (HDMI and VGA available via adapters) USB – […]

May 1, 2015May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Linaro 15.04 Release with Linux 4.0 and Android 5.1

Linaro 15.04 has been released with Linux 4.0 (baseline), Linux 3.10.74 and 3.14.39 (LSK), and Android 5.1.1. Other noticeable changes include support for the new DragonBoard 410c 96boards compliant board, the addition of A80 Optimusboard (Allwinner A80) to Android Kitkat build, Hisilicon D01 support added to the Debian installer, and support for Ubuntu ARM64 Gnome rootfs. Highlights of the release: Linux Linaro 4.0-2015.04 updated linaro-android topic: aosp/android-3.18 branch has been merged GATOR topic: version 5.20.1 updated integration-linaro-vexpress64 topic by ARM LT (FVP Base and Foundation models, and Juno support) updated topic from Qualcomm LT (IFC6410 and DB410c boards support): Resource Power Manager (RPM) – MSM Shared Memory Driver (SMD) driver quite some changes under drivers/gpu/drm/ related to adv7511 and adv7533 support ASoC support for QCOM platforms external Connector Class (extcon) support (used for USB VBUS and ID detection) Linaro builds of AOSP 15.04 baseline updated to android-5.1.1_r1 updated Nexus 10 […]

April 23, 2015May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 11 Comments

TBS 2980 Matrix 2 AllWinner A80 Android TV Box Will Support USB Tuners

TBS launched their Matrix 2910 media player based on Freescale i.MX6 Quad processor in 2013, and what made the platform especially interesting was support for the company’s USB DVB tuners in their Android and Ubuntu images. The company has now unveiled its successor with TBS 2980 Matrix 2 powered by Allwinner A80 octa core processor that will also support USB DVB-T2, DVB-C & DVB-S2 tuners. TBS Matrix 2 specifications: SoC – AllWinner A80 4x Cortex 15, 4x Cortex A7 big.LITTLE processor with PowerVR GC6230 GPU System Memory – 2GB DDR3 Storage – 8GB eMMC + micro SD card slot Video Output – HDMI + AV port Audio – HDMI, AV, and optical S/PDIF Connectivity – Gigabit Ethernet, dual band Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0 USB – 1x USB 3.0 port, 2x USB 2.0 host ports Misc – IR receiver, reset button Power Supply – 5V/3A Dimensions – 101 x 101 […]

April 15, 2015May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 12 Comments

Linux 4.0 Release – Main Changes, ARM and MIPS Architectures

Linus Torvalds “Ima Sheep” released Linux Kernel 4.0 on Sunday: So I decided to release 4.0 as per the normal schedule, because there really weren’t any known issues, and while I’ll be traveling during the end of the upcoming week due to a college visit, I’m hoping that won’t affect the merge window very much. We’ll see. Linux 4.0 was a pretty small release both in linux-next and in final size, although obviously “small” is all relative. It’s still over 10k non-merge commits. But we’ve definitely had bigger releases (and judging by linux-next v4.1 is going to be one of the bigger ones). Which is all good. It definitely matches the “v4.0 is supposed to be a_stable_ release”, and very much not about new experimental features etc. I’m personally so much happier with time-based releases than the bad old days when we had feature-based releases. That said, there’s a few […]

April 1, 2015May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments

Cubieboard 4 Ubuntu Review – Setup, Usability, and Performance

Cubieboard4 is a development board powered by Allwinner A80 octa-core processor with 2GB RAM and 16GB eMMC. I’ve already shown how to get started with the board using the pre-installed Android 4.4 image, and run some benchmarks in Android, so now it’s time to check out the Ubuntu Linaro 14.04 image provided by CubieTech. I’ll show how to install and setup Ubuntu 14.04 on the board using a micro SD card, run desktop applications like Chromium, Libre Office, and son on on the board, and complete the review with some Linux benchmarks. Setting up Ubuntu on Cubieboard4 Firmware images for Cubiebord4 can be downloaded @ http://dl.cubieboard.org/model/cc-a80/Image/. Currently Android 4.4, Debian server, Ubuntu Linaro server, and Ubuntu Linaro desktop with LXDE desktop environment. That’s the latter I’ll use for the experiment, and two images are available: linaro-desktop-cb4-card-hdmi-v0.4.img.7z – Bootable image from micro SD card linaro-desktop-cb4-emmc-hdmi-v0.4.img.7z – Installation image to eMMC to […]

March 25, 2015May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Cubieboard4 Benchmarks in Android

Last time I tried running benchmarks in an Allwinner A80 board (A80 OptimusBoard), it either rebooted during the benchmark, or had fairly disappointing results for example for USB storage. I documented my findings in a post entitled “Current Performance and Stability Issues on AllWinner A80 OptimusBoard Development Board” which was written in October 2014. But a few months have passed, and since Cubieboard4 is another hardware platform, so I was interested in running benchmarks including storage and networking performance testing on the new board to see if any progress was made. Cubieboard4 Android Benchmarks – Antutu, Vellamo, and 3DMarks Manufacturers can add the key ro.sys.hiritsu to build.prop in order to artificially inflate their Antutu scores with Allwinner A80 processor. So before running Antutu, I checked /system/build.prop in the firmware, and found out no trace of this variable, which can only be good for CubieTech reputation. CC-A80 board, the other name […]

March 23, 2015May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 29 Comments

Allwinner CedarX Media Codec Library GPL/LGPL Compliance Update

Last month, I wrote about potential open source licenses and VP6 copyright infringement by Allwinner with their CedarX media codec library, and then since there’s been a few developments. First, Allwinner sent me an email saying they’ve now updated Cedarx library and referring my previous article. Here’s an extract: Here, I have some update of the Allwinner’s open-source status. We have done a lot of discussion with the developers from the linux-sunxi communication about the software license of CedarX. For each question or requirement asked by the developers, Allwinner has identify and try to give the best solution. Now, we believe Allwinner’s CedarX license is fully compliant and resolves concerns from the community. And you can take the announcement https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg10597.html as a reference. Allwinner is always supporting the open-source, and try to do better and better. You can see some update on the github https://github.com/allwinner-zh, and some feedback from developers: […]

March 20, 2015May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 11 Comments

Cubieboard4 (CC-A80) Unboxing and Getting Started Guide

A few samples of Cubieboard4 board may have been available in China in October 2014, but Cubietech only officially launched their Allwinner A80 development board about ten days ago, and you can buy it for $125 + shipping on sites like R0ck.me, Eleduino, Seeed Studio, and many other distributors. The company decided to send a sample for evaluation, and today I’ll start with a post showing some pictures of the kit, and explaining how to get started with assembly and first boot. Cubieboard 4 Pictures I received the board within two days after the company told me they would send a sample, as they used DHL. I also had to pay a bit of import tax and DHL’s handling fee. There should be CC-A80 box with the board and accessories, a white box for the power supply, and a power cord. There’s quite a few items to play with… The […]