Product development often occurs in different location over the world, there may be one team in Asia, and another in Europe and the US. At the beginning, the number of working samples for a board may be limited, so the project manager may have to decide who gets the boards since those may not be available to all teams. So it would be great if somehow there was a way to do remote testing of boards, so maybe the team in Asia could setup the testbed, used it during there time, and once they are back home, the US team can take over remotely to carry on their own development work on the hardware. That’s exactly what MuxPi board is all about. The solution provide remote access via the Ethernet port of a NanoPi NEO board, and connects to the DUT (Device under Test) via HDMI, Ethernet, USB and other […]
Embedded Linux Conference Europe & OpenIoT Summit Europe 2018 Schedule
The Embedded Linux Conference & OpenIoT Summit 2018 took place in March of this year in the US, but the European version of the events are now planned to take place on October 21-24 in Edinburg, UK, and the schedule has already been released. So let’s make a virtual schedule to find out more about some of interesting subjects that are covered at the conferences. The conference and summit really only officially start on Monday 22, but there are a few talks on Sunday afternoon too. Sunday, October 21 13:30 – 15:15 – Tutorial: Introduction to Quantum Computing Using Qiskit – Ali Javadi-Abhari, IBM Qiskit is a comprehensive open-source tool for quantum computation. From simple demonstrations of quantum mechanical effects to complicated algorithms for solving problems in AI and chemistry, Qiskit allows users to build and run programs on quantum computers of today. Qiskit is built with modularity and extensibility […]
Linux 4.18 Release – Main Changes, Arm and MIPS Architecture
Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 4.18: One week late(r) and here we are – 4.18 is out there. It was a very calm week, and arguably I could just have released on schedule last week, but we did have some minor updates. Mostly networking, but some vfs race fixes (mentioned in the rc8 announment as “pending”) and a couple of driver fixes (scsi, networking, i2c). Some other minor random things (arm crypto fix, parisc memory ordering fix). Shortlog appended for the (few) details. Some of these I was almost ready to just delay to until the next merge window, but they were marked for stable anyway, so it would just have caused more backporting. The vfs fixes are for old races that are really hard to hit (which is obviously why they are old and weren’t noticed earlier). Some of them _have_ been seen in real […]
How to Build an Orange Pi Zero LoRa Gateway
LoRa gateways tend to be fairly expensive, especially because of the radio part, but anything that may help lower the cost is probably welcomed. And one way to to do that is to use dirt cheap boards like Orange Pi Zero as Edzelf did, by combining the low cost Arm Linux board ($15 shipped) with Rak wireless RAK831 concentrator module kit ($143) via a custom cable, and a power supply board. All assembled into a metal case. RAK831 communicates with Orange Pi Zero over an SPI connection. While some other Orange Pi boards are suitable for the project, note that Orange Pi Zero Plus lacks a spare SPI interface, and can’t be used with this particular application. A fan was also added for cooling, a well as a USB serial debug board for debugging purpose, but it can be removed once the gateway is in the field. Software-wise, Edzelf installed […]
Neutis N5 Allwinner H5 CPU Module and Development Kit are now up for pre-order
Emlid Neutis N5 system-on-module (SoM) powered by Allwinner H5 processor was unveiled right before Embedded World 2018 in February with an expected launch date scheduled for April. There have been some delays but the Allwinner H5 CPU module and corresponding development kit are now up for pre-order with delivery slate for the end of August. Neutis N5 SoM Neutis N5 specifications: SoC – Allwinner H5 quad core Arm Cortex-A53 processor @ up to 1.3 GHz with Arm Mali-450MP4 GPU System Memory – 512 MB DDR3 RAM Storage – 8 GB eMMC flash Connectivity – Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n. Bluetooth 4.0 dual-mode BLE with on-board antenna and u.FL connector for optional external antenna HW Security – Tamper-resistant dedicated crypto chip (secure element) for storing cryptographic keys, unique ID, random number generation and more 2x DF40 80-pin board to board X1 and X2 connectors with 38x GPIOs 4x UART, 3x I2C, 2x SPI, […]
Banana Pi BPI-P2 Zero Board Combines PoE, Camera Interface, and Allwinner H2+ Processor
Allwinner H2+ quad core Cortex A7 processor has enabled some of the cheapest Arm Linux boards on the market with products such as NanoPi Duo or Orange Pi Zero with the latter now selling for about $9 and up. SinoVoIP also had their own inexpensive – and Raspberry Pi Zero compatible – Allwinner H2+ board with Banana Pi M2 Zero, and the company has now been working on another model dubbed BPI-P2 Zero which includes support for PoE (Power-over-Ethernet) as well as a CSI camera interface. Banana Pi BPI-P2 Zero specifications: SoC – Allwinner H2+ quad core Arm Cortex A7 processor with Mali-400MP GPU. System Memory – 512MB DDR3 SDRAM. Storage – 8GB eMMC flash, micro SD card slot Video Output – mini HDMI port Connectivity 10/100M Ethernet with PoE support WiFi & Bluetooth via AP6212 module Camera I/F – CSI camera interface USB – 1x USB OTG port Expansion […]
Bootlin Releases Open Source VPU Driver for Allwinner Processors with MPEG2 and H.264 Video Decoding
At the beginning of the year, Bootlin – formerly Free Electrons – launched a crowdfunding campaign to bring open source Allwinner VPU driver to mainline Linux. VPU (Video Processing Unit) drivers are used to encode and decode videos. They were successfully in raising enough money from small donors, as well as several companies manufacturing Allwinner development boards including Olimex, Pine64, Libre Computer, FriendlyELEC, and Xunlong Software (Orange Pi). The amount raised (€31,612) was enough to assign two engineers to work on the main goals, as well as some stretch goals namely support for newer Allwinner H3, H5, and A64 processors, and H.265 video decoding. The good news is the company has now delivery the first release for their work on the main goals. The photo above illustrated a demo of Kodi running with bootlin open source Cedrus VPU driver on top of Linux 4.18-rc kernel. Both MPEG2 and H264 are […]
NetBSD ARM64 Images Now Available with SMP for Raspberry Pi 3, Some NanoPi Boards, and Pine64 Boards
NetBSD on Arm started in 2014 with the release of version 7.0, and last year device tree support was implemented and tested on some Allwinner H3 boards. But apparently, so far NetBSD only supported 32-bit Arm, with initial support for 64-bit Arm (ARM64) committed last April, but good progress has been made, and NetBSD ARM64 bootable firmware images are now available with SMP (multi-core) support. Eight different NetBSD ARM64 images can be downloaded: Generic NetBSD 64-bit image for Raspberry Pi 3 and NVIDIA Tegra X1 Two images for FriendlyELEC boards namely NanoPi NEO2 and NEO Plus2 boards Five images for the following Pine64 boards and hardware platforms Pine A64/A64+ Pine A64-LTS / Sopine with baseboard Pine H64 Pinebook laptop ROCK64 (ROCK64Pro not yet supported) The supported hardware matrix shows most features are supported, but there are still a few things missing such as GPU, crypto and MIPI CSI on all […]