Blaustahl USB storage device features 8KB FRAM with up to 200 years of data retention

Blaustahl USB FRAM drive

Machdyne’s Blaustahl is a USB storage device equipped with a Raspberry Pi RP2040 MCU and 8KB of FRAM with a potential lifespan of over 200 years and designed for long-term storage of text up to about 8,000 characters. FRAM (Ferroelectric RAM) has been around for years delivering ultra-low power consumption, faster writes, and ultra-long write endurance (one million billion read/write cycles) compared to EEPROM or NOR flash, but the cost is quite higher and it’s mostly used in applications that require ultra-low power consumption and non-volatile storage write capabilities such as data logging, sensor networks, batteryless applications. The Blaustahl storage device and USB text editor is one of those. Blaustahl speciications: Microcontroller – Raspberry Pi RP2040 dual-core Cortex-M0 processor at 133MHz and 264kB RAM. Storage 4MB (32Mbit) NOR flash for firmware 8KB (64Kbit) FRAM (Fujitsu MB85RS64) Lifespan – 95 years @ +55°C, over 200 years @ +35°C Endurance – 10^12 […]

GEEKOM A8 (AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS) AI mini PC review – Part 1: Specs, unboxing, teardown, and first boot

GEEKOM A8 review Windows 11 Pro

GEEKOM A8 is an AI mini PC based on the powerful AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS (or Ryzen 7 8845HS) AI processor with AMD Radeon 780M Graphics, up to 64GB DDR5 memory, up to 2TB M.2 NVMe SSD support for up to four display up to 8K resolution, and comes preloaded with Windows 11 Pro operating system. The mini PC is equipped with two HDMI 2.1 ports, two USB-C ports with DisplayPort Alt mode, 4x USB 3.2 Type-A ports, 2.5GbE, a WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 module, and a stereo headset jack. GEEKOM sent us a sample of the A8 Mini PC with an AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS 8-core/16-thread processor, 32GB DDR5, and a 2TB M.2 NVMe SSD with Windows 11 Pro for review this time. We’ll start by listing some specifications, doing an unboxing, going through a teardown, and booting Windows 11. In the second and third parts of the […]

ardEEG shield works with Arduino UNO R4 WiFi for biosignals measurement

ardEEG Shield Arduino UNO R4

PiEEG has launched the ardEEG shield specially designed for the Arduino UNO R4 WiFi and capable of measuring biosignals such as those used in electroencephalography (EEG), electromyography (EMG), and electrocardiography (ECG). PiEEG, led by Ildar Rakhmatulin, Research Associate at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, launched the PiEEG shield for Raspberry Pi to enable brain-computer interfaces last year, and now the company has been working on the equivalent design for Arduino with the ardEEG shield equipped with eight channel taking input from wet or dry electrodes. ardEEG shield key features and specifications ADC – Texas Instruments ADS1299 Analog-to-Digital Converter for biopotential measurements Supported board – Arduino UNO R4 WiFi 8 channels for connecting wet or dry electrodes (Electrodes are positioned according to the International 10-20 system) Host interface – Arduino headers with SPI used for data transfer with a frequency from 250 SPS to 16 kSPS and a resolution of 24 bits […]

Arduino Alvik is a 3-wheel robot designed for STEAM education

Arduino Alvik

Arduino Education’s Arduino Alvik is a 3-wheel educational robot that was initially unveiled at the Bett 2024 show in London and designed to teach robotics, programming, and other STEAM subjects. The robot is based on an Arduino Nano ESP32 board and comes with a set of nineteen lessons designed by Arduino Education’s team in collaboration with teachers so that students can learn the basics of IoT, get started with MicroPython, and get themselves familiar with various physics and engineering concepts. The company has yet to provide the full specifications for the Alvik robot, but here’s what we know at this stage: Mainboard – Arduino Nano ESP32 2x wheels plus 1x ball wheel Sensors – “High-quality sensors” that include a ToF ranging sensor, line-following sensors, a 6-axis accelerometer & gyroscope, a proximity sensor, and color sensors. Expansion 2x Grove I2C connectors 2x Qwiic connectors 6-pin servo motor header for up to […]

Rockchip RK2118G/RK2118M dual-core Star-SE Armv8-M microcontrollers target smart audio applications

Rockchip RK2118G microcontroller block diagram

Rockchip RK2118G and RK2118M smart audio microcontrollers based on a dual-core Star-SE Armv8-M processor, an NPU for smart AI audio processor, three DSPs, 1024KB SRAM, optional DDR memory in package, and a range of peripherals. I first noticed the RK2118M in slides from the Rockchip Developer Conference 2024 last March, but I did not have enough information for an article at the time. Things have now changed since I’ve just received a bunch of datasheets including the one for the RK2118G and RK2118G microcontrollers, which look identical except for the DDR interface and optional built-in 64MB RAM for the RK2118G. The datasheets have only one reference to Arm with the string “Arm-V8M” and nothing else, and Cortex is not mentioned at all. But the slide above reveals the STAR-SE core looks to be an Arm Cortex-M33 core. We also learn the top frequencies for the “STAR-M33″/”STAR-SE” core  (300MHz) and the […]

Radxa Zero 3E SBC offers gigabit Ethernet and PoE in Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W form factor

Radxa Zero 3E

Last December, we wrote about the Rockchip RK3566-powered Radxa Zero 3W WiFi 6 SBC and noted that the Radxa Zero 3E with gigabit Ethernet and optional PoE supports would be coming soon with about the same dimensions as the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. “Soon” is now as the Radxa Zero 3E is now available on Aliexpress or Amazon with RAM capacities from 1GB to 8GB LPDDR4. The small SBC also comes with optional eMMC flash up to 64GB, a microSD card slot for storage, a micro HDMI video output port, a MIPI CSI connector compatible with Raspberry Pi Camera V1 and V2, two USB-C ports, and a 40-pin GPIO header for expansion. Radxa Zero 3E specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3566 CPU – Quad-core Arm Cortex-A55 processor @ 1.6 GHz GPU – Arm Mali G52-2EE GPU with support for OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0/3.2, Vulkan 1.1, OpenCL 2.0 NPU – 0.8 TOPS […]

New NXP i.MX 93-based system-on-modules launched by MYiR, Variscite, and Compulab

MYIR MYD-LMX9X development board

We have covered announcements about early NXP i.MX 93-based system-on-modules such as the ADLINK OSM-IMX93 and Ka-Ro Electronics’ QS93, as well as products integrating the higher-end NXP i.MX 95 processor such as the Toradex Titan Evaluation kit. Three additional NXP i.MX 93 SoMs from Variscite, Dart, and Compulab are now available. Targeted at industrial, IoT, and automotive applications, the NXP i.MX 93 features a 64-bit dual-core Arm Cortex-A55 application processor running at up to 1.7GHz and a Cortex-M33 co-processor running at up to 250MHz. It integrates an Arm Ethos-U65 microNPU, providing up to 0.5TOPS of computing power, and supports EdgeLock secure enclave, NXP’s hardware-based security subsystem. The heterogeneous multicore processing architecture allows the device to run Linux on the main core and a real-time operating system on the Cortex-M33 core. The processor is designed for cost-effective and energy-efficient machine learning applications. It supports LVDS, MIPI-DS, and parallel RGB display protocols […]

Linux 6.9 release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linux 6.9 release

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 6.9 on LKML: So Thorsten is still reporting a few regression fixes that haven’t made it to me yet, but none of them look big or worrisome enough to delay the release for another week. We’ll have to backport them when they get resolved and hit upstream. So 6.9 is now out, and last week has looked quite stable (and the whole release has felt pretty normal). Below is the shortlog for the last week, with the changes mostly being dominated by some driver updates (gpu and networking being the big ones, but “big” is still pretty small, and there’s various other driver noise in there too). Outside of drivers, it’s some filesystem fixes (bcachefs still stands out, but ksmbd shows up too), some late selftest fixes, and some core networking fixes. And I now have a more powerful arm64 machine […]

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