Armbian v5.35 Released with Linux 4.13, U-boot v2017.09, New Boards Support

Armbian v5.35 has been released last Friday as a major update that brings Linux mainline kernel to version 4.13, U-Boot mainline to version v2017.09, adds support for 7″ Raspberry Pi display, Realtek WiFi drivers (mainline), and new stable hardware support for NanoPi Duo, Pinebook, and Orange Pi R1. Some other boards got experimental support, including Le Potato, NanoPi NEO 2, Orange Pi Zero Plus, Orange Pi Zero Plus 2 (H5). The desktop version of the images gets a full featured XFCE terminal, OpenVPN connector, a new wallpaper, and various other changes and fixes. armbian-config is normally used to configure the board for example networking configuration, but the utility has become even more useful with support for Hotspot, Bluetooth, SSH server configuration, swtich between stable & beta builds and between kernel applications, adds the ability to start an RDP server, and install third party software such as SAMBA, OpenMediaVault, PiHole, Transmission […]

Amlogic S905X vs Rockchip RK3328 vs Allwinner H6 Processors – Benchmarks & Features Comparison

Amlogic S905X vs Rockchip RK3328 vs Allwinner H6

Rockchip, Amlogic, and Allwinner are all battling for the lower and mid-range segments of the TV box market, so it may be interesting to compare their solutions. We won’t look into the ultra low-end market with 32-bit ARM Cortex A7 processor, but instead compare some of the recent quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex A53 processor for 4K HDR TV box from the company with respectively Amlogic S905X, Rockchip RK3328, and Allwinner H6 SoCs. We’ll compare some of the benchmarks obtained with Android TV boxes, as well as other features like video support, USB, and Ethernet interfaces. S905X vs RK3328 vs H6 Benchmarks Let’s start with results for popular Android benchmarks: Antutu 6.x, Vellamo 3.x, and 3DMark Ice Storm Extreme v1.2 with results obtained from 3 TV boxes: Mini M8S II (Amlogic S905X), A95X R2 (Rockchip RK3328), and Zidoo H6 Pro (Allwinner H6). A score is highlighted in green is there’s a […]

Magicsee C300 is a $70 DVB-T2/C & DVB-S2 Android Set-Top Box Powered by Amlogic S905D SoC

Amlogic S905D processor is an evolution of Amlogic S905X with Gigabit Ethernet support, and TS interfaces for digital TV tuners. That explains why most devices launched with the processor come with tuners. So far, we’ve covered or reviewed a few including Sen5 STB (2x DVB-T2/C), Mecool KI Pro (T2/S2), and TX95D TV box with a single DVB-T2 tuner. Magicsee C300 is another Amlogic S905D Android STB that comes with DVB-T2/C (Terrestrial & Cable), and DVB-S2 (Satellite) tuners, and sells for just under $70 on Aliexpress, and can be found on other shops such as GearBest. Magicsee C300 specifications are quite similar to the ones for Mecool KI Pro: SoC –  Amlogic S905D quad core ARM Cortex-A53 @ up to 1.5 GHz with penta core Mali-450MP GPU System Memory – 2 GB DDR3 Storage – 16GB eMMC flash + micro SD card slot up to 32GB Video Output – HDMI 2.0a […]

Linux 4.14 Release – Main Changes, ARM & MIPS Architecture

Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux 4.14: No surprises this week, although it is probably worth pointing out how the 0day robot has been getting even better (it was very useful before, but Fengguang has been working on making it even better, and reporting the problems it has found). Sure, some of the new reports turned out to be just 0day doing things that just don’t work (ie KASAN with old gcc versions, but also doing things like loading old ISA drivers in situations that just don’t make sense – remember when you couldn’t even ask if the hardware existed or not, and just had to know), but even then it’s been all good. The appended shortlog is obviously only for the (small) haul since rc8, and it really is tiny. Not very many commits, and they are small. The biggest thing that stands out in the diffstat […]

Giveaway Week Winners – November 2017

Like every year, I’ve organized a giveaway week to send some of the items I’ve reviewed in the past year or so. There was a good mix of devices this year starting with a mini Linux NAS kit, following by some ESP32 boards, and Amlogic development boards among others. The results are in, and instead of 10 winners, I actually have 11 winners due a “timing issue”, and to make for one missing ESP32 board, a LinkIt Smart 7688 Duo board was also given away. While it started strongly for Eastern Europe, We have winners from 3 continents this year: NanoPi NEO2 NAS Kit – Hap Hapablap, Serbia Muses Beta DVB Encoder and Modulator Board – Luka, Slovenia ESP32 PICO Kit v3 boards (5 Winners): Andrius Kurtinaitis, Lithuania (2x ESP32 boards) Kebab, Turkey (2x ESP32 boards) Zoobab, Belgium (2x ESP32 boards) Sollie, Germany (2x ESP32 boards) BobR, USA (1x ESP32 […]

Khadas VIM2 Board Review – Part 1: Unboxing and Dual Tuner Board

Khadas VIM2 board is the successor of Khadas VIM board, replacing Amlogic S905X by a slightly more powerful Amlogic S912, but that’s the connectivity features that really makes it stand apart from the first version with Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11ac WiFi and Bluetooth 4.2. It also exposes a few extra I/Os via pogopins. and among the three variants, two comes with 3GB RAM, and up to 64 GB storage. The company (Shenzhen Wesion) sent me one of the boards, together with various accessories, and I’ll start the review of the board by checking out the hardware and accessories, before testing the board further in another post. I received two packages: one book-like with Khadas marked on top, and another one with various other items. The first package includes the board, a USB to USB type C cable, and a card showing the main specifications, and supported operating systems: Ubuntu 16.04, Android […]

Giveaway Week – Khadas Vim Pro Development Board

For the final day of this giveaway week, I’ll send Khadas Vim Pro development board to a new home. The board is powered by an Amlogic S905X processor coupled with 2GB RAM and 16GB storage, features 10/100M Ethernet and 802.11ac WiFi, and support 4K video playback and output via its HDMI 2.0a port. The board supports various operating systems such as Android, LibreELEC, dual boot Android/Ubuntu, etc.. and I wrote a Ubuntu review / getting started guide for the board in February. At the time, the image was still “raw” with many steps to perform by the users, and part of the documentation needing to be worked on. But the company (Szwesion) and members of the community are usually active in resolving user issues on the forums. I’ll give away the kit I’ve received with the board in an acrylic case, a USB to USB type C cable for power, […]

Lab in a Box Concept Embeds x86 Server and 6 ARM Boards into a PC Case for Automated Software Testing

The Linux kernel now has about 20 millions line of code, Arm has hundreds of licensees making thousands of processors and micro-controllers, which end up in maybe hundreds of thousands of different designs, many of which are not using Linux, but for those that do, Linux must be tested to make sure it works. The same stands true for any large software used on multiple hardware platforms. Manual testing is one way to do it, but it’s time consuming and expensive, so there are software and hardware continuous integration solutions to automate testing such as Linaro LAVA (Linaro Automated Validation Architecture), KernelCI automated Linux kernel testing, and Automotive Grade Linux CIAT that automatically test incoming patch series. Both CIAT and KernelCI focus on Linux, and rely on LAVA, with KernelCI leveraging hardware contributed by the community, and proven to be effective as since it’s been implemented, failed build configs dropped […]

EmbeddedTS embedded systems design