Processors Category - Page 743 of 1183 - CNX Software

April 12, 2017April 12, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

ESP8266, Mongoose OS & Grove Sensors – An Alternative Solution for Hackathons

CNXSoft: This is a guest post by Cesanta If you walked into any Hardware hackathon over the last year, you would see they are about innovation and bringing new ideas to this world and most of them are centered around the connected devices nowadays. However, just walk the floor, talk to the teams and you can quickly see an elephant in the room. The Hackathons are about connected devices, but with the ‘recommended’ and frequently sponsored hardware distributed to the teams such as Intel Galileo, Raspberry Pi, etc…. developers may struggle for a long time to even connect it to the cloud! Not to mention the innovation is usually hindered by a tedious environment setup which takes hours, things to learn about the specific hardware and how it can be programmed using low level languages. So many teams spent most of the time fighting with those issues and oftentimes still […]

April 11, 2017April 11, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 9 Comments

Zidoo X10 Android & OpenWrt TV Box with 3.5″ SATA Bay Sells for $229

Zidoo has sold two TV boxes based on Realtek RTD1295 so far with Zidoo X9S and Zidoo X8, and the company has done a pretty good job based on my review of Zidoo X9S. Both models run Android 6.0 with HDMI input recording and broadcasting functions, as well as OpenWrt for NAS functions, with X8 model relying on USB 3.0 storage, and X9S adding an external SATA port. It would be nice to have a model with an internal SATA bay, and it’s exactly what Zidoo X10 brings to the table. Zidoo X10 specifications with highlights in bold showing differences with Zidoo X9S: SoC – Realtek RTD1295 quad core Cortex A53 processor with ARM Mali-T820 MP3 GPU System Memory – 2GB DDR3 Storage – 16GB eMMC flash + micro SD slot up to 32GB + SATA 3.0 bay for 3.5″ hard drives Video I/O – HDMI 2.0a output up to […]

April 11, 2017April 11, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

No Case for Orange Pi Zero or Other Tiny Development Boards? No problem: Use an Old Mouse

There now plenty of tiny ARM Linux boards, which are normally sold without case, but usually it’s not to hard to find a 3D printed case. But if you have small board, and don’t feel to purchase a case for it, there’s an other solution: use an old mouse. That’s exactly what Slider2732 has done with his Orange Pi Zero board to convert it to a mini PC running Armbian, or a game console running RetroOrangePi. So after the keyboard PC, here comes the mouse PC! So what did he exactly use for the mouse PC? Orange Pi Zero board An old Logitech mouse for the case and cable An 8GB micro SD card to flash the operating system A 4.3″ car reversing monitor (optional) acting as the display with composite input An Rii wireless keyboard/mouse, as the mouse function is not included with the mouse PC… A PAM8403 based […]

April 11, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

OpenELEC 8.0 Released with WeTek Play 2 & Hub, and Raspberry Pi Zero W Support

In recent months, I’ve written more about LibreELEC, a fork of OpenELEC, but the latter project is still being worked on, and OpenELEC 8.0 has been released adding builds for WeTek Play 2 & WeTek Hub TV boxes, as well as Raspberry Pi Zero W board, and upgrading to Kodi 17.1. and newer packages such as Linux 4.9 and ffmpeg 3.2. The developers also removed some unused or dropped features such as HFS and HFS+ filesystem, iSCSI, NFS/NBD/iSCSI network boot, and LIRC. X11 AMDGPU, ATI (Radeon) and Intel GPU driver driver has been replaced by X11 Modesettings GPU driver. They also updated some drivers & firmware files for WLAN and DVB, as well as update Nvidia Legacy driver to xf86-video-nvidia-340 (VDPAU only supported now). You can download or update OpenELEC 8.0, not only for the new WeTek and Raspberry Pi platforms, but for also x86 64-bit images for Intel & […]

April 10, 2017April 26, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 16 Comments

MeLE PCG03 Apo is a Fanless Apollo Lake mini PC with HDMI 2.0 Output

Many Apollo Lake mini PCs have come to market, but it’s still pretty hard to find a fanless consumer mini PC based on Intel Apollo Lake processor, and even harder if you also want HDMI 2.0 output for 4K @ 60 Hz support. MeLE has been working on an upgrade of their PCG03 mini PC that brings all those features. PCG03 Apo fanless mini PC is powered by an Intel Celeron N3350 dual core processor with 4GB RAM, 32GB storage, and features HDMI 2.0 and VGA ports. MeLE PCG03 Apo mini PC specifications: SoC – Intel Celeron N3450 quad core “Apollo Lake” processor @ 1.10 / 2.20 GHz with 12 EU Intel HD Graphics 500 (6W TDP) System Memory – 4GB DDRL3L (soldered) Storage – 32GB eMMC 5.0 flash (soldered), 1x M.2 SSD slot, 1x SD slot Video Output – HDMI 2.0 up to 4K @ 60 Hz, and VGA […]

April 10, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Rikomagic RKM R1 Mini Projector Review – Part 2: Android Firmware, Kodi, Touchpad, and HDMI Input

Rikomagic RKM R1 is a projector running Android 4.4.4, and powered by Rockchip RK3128 quad core Cortex A7 processor with 1GB RAM, and 32GB storage. It has a particular feature as it comes with a touchpad on the top of the case as we’ve seen in the unboxing and teardown part of the Rikomagic R1 review. Today, I’ll report my experience with the projector playing games in Android, 1080p videos with Kodi 14.2, using the touchpad, and connecting a laptop through the HDMI input port. I’ll also run some benchmarks as usual. RKM R1 Android User Experience and HDMI Input I wanted to relax and use the projector on the bed pointing to the ceiling. RKM R1 comes with a tripod, but it’s quite small, not the projector would fall off, so I used my own tripod, connected a USB keyboard, and the USB RF dongle for Tronsmart Mars G01 […]

April 9, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments

ESPurna-H is a Compact Open Source Hardware Board with ESP8266 WiSoC, a 10A Relay, HLW8012 Power Monitoring Chip

ESPurna is an open source firmware for ESP8266 based wireless switch as such Sonoff POW, which I’ve been personally using to monitor my office’s power consumption. The developer, Xose Pérez (aka tinkerman), has now developed his own hardware with ESPurna-H board, as existing wireless switches with power monitoring functions would not fit into a gang box. ESPurna-H board specifications: WiFi Module – ESP12 with Espressif ESP8266 WiSoC Relay – Songle SRD-05VDC-SL-C 10A relay with NO and NC connection Power Monitoring – HLW8012 chip as found in Sonoff POW Expansion – 2x 5-pin header with the programming GPIOs, and two connections for external button and LEDs Misc – Reset button Power Supply Input – 100 ~ 240V AC Output – 5V up to 600 mA via Hi-Link HLK-PM01 Safety – Optical isolation between the logic circuit and the relay circuit Dimensions – 50x50x20mm Xose designed the board with Eagle 8.0 and released […]

April 7, 2017April 7, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments

Transform Your ESP8266 Board into a USB to Serial Board Easily with Arduino Serial Bypass Sketch

USB to serial boards are necessary to program and debug boards, and/or access the serial console, and while they are very cheap, you may be in a situation where you don’t have any around, but you do have some Arduino compatible boards. It’s been possible to transform an Arduino board into a USB to TTL debug for several years using ArduinoSerialBypass.ino sketch, but I’ve been informed this also works on ESP8266 boards such as Wemos D1 Mini. The sketch could not be simpler:

void setup()
{
  pinMode(0,INPUT);
  pinMode(1,INPUT);
}
void loop()
{

}

void setup()

{

pinMode(0,INPUT);

pinMode(1,INPUT);

}

void loop()

{

}

The code simply makes sure that Tx and Rx pins are set as inputs in order not to disturb the serial connection as explained below: This code makes the Arduino not interfere with pins 0 and 1 which are connected to RX and TX on the FTDI chip. This allows the data coming from the FTDI USB 2 Serial chip to flow directly to another device. […]