Home Assistant has announced “Home Assistant Blue” hardware with an enclosure designed by Hahn Werke housing Hardkernel ODROID-N2+ SBC, and software supported by BayLibre who helped upstreaming the code. The goal is to make Home Assistant Blue a fully open-source platform with long-life support. The device was officially announced during the Home Assistant Conference 2020 held a couple of days ago. Home Assistant Blue home automation gateway uses the 4GB DDR4 version of the Amlogic S922X SBC, ships with a 128GB eMMC flash module, and offers Gigabit Ethernet and four USB 3.0 ports. As I understand it, the gateway will run the latest Home Assistant Core 2020.12 that was announced at the conference with a new feature called Blueprints defined as “pre-created automation with user-settable options”, as well as new neural voices for Nabu Casa Cloud TTS (Text-to-Speech), the ability to temporarily disable devices, and more. The release was initially […]
Linux 5.10 LTS release – Main changes, Arm, MIPS and RISC-V architectures
Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 5.10: Ok, here it is – 5.10 is tagged and pushed out. I pretty much always wish that the last week was even calmer than it was, and that’s true here too. There’s a fair amount of fixes in here, including a few last-minute reverts for things that didn’t get fixed, but nothing makes me go “we need another week”. Things look fairly normal. It’s mostly drivers – as it should be – with a smattering of fixes all over: networking, architectures, filesystems, tooling.. The shortlog is appended, and scanning it gives a good idea of what kind of things are there. Nothing that looks scary: most of the patches are very small, and the biggest one is fixing pin mapping definitions for a pincontrol driver. This also obviously means that the merge window for 5.11 will start tomorrow. I already have a couple […]
Banana Pi BPI-M5 SBC with 4GB RAM, 16GB flash launched for $53
Last September, we wrote Banana Pi team was working on an Amlogic S905X3 SBC called BPI-M5 and very similar to Hardkernel ODROID-C4 board launched in April 2020. At the time, we noted the Banana Pi BPI-M5 did add a 16GB eMMC flash on-board by default, while ODROID-C4 requires booting from a MicroSD card or a separate eMMC flash module. We also pointed out software and community support is usually much better for the ODROID board, and it was brought to our attention that BPI-M5 board uses 5V voltage only via USB-C, while the Hardkernel board support a wider 5.5V to 17V via a power barrel jack, and this could lead to potential power issue for customer connecting drives to USB 3.0 ports. The good news is that you can now buy Banana Pi BPI-M5 SBC on Aliexpress for $53 plus shipping. Banana Pi BPI-M5 specifications haven’t changed, and we can […]
Khadas VIM3 & VIM3L SBC’s become Android reference boards
If you need to work on the very latest development version of Android or AOSP, you can either get one of the supported phones such as Google Pixel 5, one of the reference boards for Android which should be better for development and also fairly cheaper. We previously reported about Hikey, Hikey960, and DragonBoard 845c single board computers being part of the short list of reference boards for the Android Open-Source Project (AOSP), but Amlogic powered Khadas VIM3 and VIM3L have recently been added to the official devices page which makes them the first AOSP reference boards with a dedicated NPU / AI accelerator. As a quick reminder, Khadas VIM3 is the most powerful board with an Amlogic A311D hexa-core Cortex-A73/A53 processor with up to 4GB RAM and 32GB flash, and Khadas VIM3L is the light version with an Amlogic S905D3 quad-core Cortex-A55 processor with 2GB RAM and 16GB flash. […]
CarDongle replaces Android Auto with an Android 9.0 USB computer (Crowdfunding)
[Update Feb 16, 2021: CarDongle used to be called CarDroid, but the company had to change the product name. The rest of the post still uses CarDroid] Many cars now sell with Android Auto support but infotainment systems compatible with Google’s mobile app may have limitations and that’s why we have started to see third-party solutions such as AAWireless adapter to enable wireless Android Auto on more cars. Since Android Auto compatible hardware can’t be easily or cheaply upgraded, CarDroid Innovations has introduced CarDroid USB computer that works with Android Auto but instead runs Android 9.0 on a quad or octa-core Cortex-A53 processor clocked at up to 2.0 GHz with improved performance and access to more apps. CarDroid specifications: SoC – Unnamed quad or octa-core Cortex-A53 processor @ 2.0 GHz (Likely Amlogic S912 octa-core processor, advertised at 2.0 GHz, but whose real max frequency is 1.5 GHz, and maybe Amlogic […]
Amlogic S905X4 Android TV & RDK developer kit ships with ATSC, DVB, or ISDB tuners
SEI Robotics has launched an Amlogic S905X4 developer kit for Android TV & RDK development under their DroidLogic brand. The devkit looks like a standard TV box, and the company also provides a choice of tuners with DVB-S2, DVB-T2/C, DVB-S2+DVB-T2/C Combo, ISTB-T, or ATSC-T. We were expecting Amlogic S905X4 TV boxes with products like Ugoos X4 or Mecool KM6 by the end of last month, but due to supply issues manufacturing has been delayed. So SEI Robotics could be a good device to get started with your own project as soon as possible, for example, to work on AV1 hardware decoding implementation. DroidLogic Amlogic S905X4 developer kit specifications: SoC – Amlogic S905X4 quad-core Cortex-A55 processor with Arm Mali-G31MP2 GPU (Amlogic S905X3 as option) System Memory – 2GB DDR4 Storage – 8GB eMMC flash Video Output – HDMI 2.1 up to 4Kp60 with CEC, HDR, and HDCP 2.2 support; CVBS (composite […]
ODROID-HC4 low-cost dual NAS comes with 4GB RAM, supports 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch SATA drives
[Edit: Hardkernel has now updated their documentation to clarify the NAS uses ASM1061 PCIe to SATA controller instead of JMB582] It’s hard to find low-cost NAS platforms often because of the mechanism to insert drives and the enclosure add to the cost. An alternative is to use boards like Hardkernel ODROID-HC1 for 2.5-inch drives or ODROID-HC2 for 2.5- and 3.5-inch drives, but each board supports only one drive. The designs are stackable, but you’d need one Linux board per drive, so it’s not ideal. The Korean company has now launched a new model with ODROID-HC4 powered by an Amlogic S905X3 processor and shipping with a case supporting two 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch SATA drives that will start selling later this month for just $65 and up. ODROID-HC4 specifications: SoC – Amlogic S905X3 quad-core Cortex-A55 processor @ 1.8 GHz with Mali-G31 MP2 GPU System Memory – 4GB DDR4 Storage 128 Mbit SPI […]
Linux 5.9 Release – Main Changes, Arm, MIPS & RISC-V Architectures
Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 5.9 on lkml: Ok, so I’ll be honest – I had hoped for quite a bit fewer changes this last week, but at the same time there doesn’t really seem to be anything particularly scary in here. It’s just more commits and more lines changed than I would have wished for. The bulk of this is the networking fixes that I already mentioned as being pending in the rc8 release notes last weekend. In fact, about half the patch (and probably more of the number of commits) is from the networking stuff (both drivers and elsewhere). Outside of that, the most visible thing is a reinstatement of the fbdev amba-clcd driver – that’s a noticeable patch, but it’s basically just mainly a revert. The rest is really really tiny (mostly some other minor driver updates, but some filesystem and architecture fixes […]