Testing Category - Page 150 of 169 - CNX Software

July 15, 2013July 16, 2013 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Freescale SABRE Lite i.MX6 Development Board Unboxing, Wandboard Quad Comparison, and Quick Start Guide

Freescale SABRE Lite is a development board powered by i.MX6 Quad processor with 1GB RAM, SATA, GbE Ethernet, and more. You can get SABRE Lite specifications in my first post about the board. I recently participated in Element14’s “brainteaser” competition for the 4th birthday of their community, where the company offered 9 SABRE Lite development kit to randomly selected participants, and I got lucky. The board can be purchased for $179 from Element14 (MCIMX6Q-SL). I’ll start by showing what in the package, followed by a side-by-side comparison with Wandboard Quad, and show how to getting started by following the Quick Start Guide provided with the board. SABRE Lite i.MX6 Development Kit Unboxing I received the board about 5 days after I provided my address in a large staple carton box with a few goodies. Beside SABRE Lite devkit, the package comes with Element14’s T-Shirt (not my size), double walled tumbler, […]

July 11, 2013May 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 9 Comments

Firmware Update for CS868 mini PC Version 2.06 (Android 4.1.1)

If you’ve got a Rockchip RK3188 mini PC, there’s usually no issue with finding firmware updates, or even custom ROMs. But if you’ve bought an AllWinner A31 mini PC, such as CS868, you may feel everybody dropped the ball, as the system is not stable, and it seemed there would never be any upgrade. I’ve recently been made aware that there’s some activity on a Chinese bulletin board, and a new firmware is available for CS868: V2.06-4.1.1-20130610. As the name implied, the firmware is based on Android 4.1.1, and has been release on the 10th of June 2013. Here’s the Changelog against V2.05: Add video color brightness, contrast and saturation settings Output to HDMI output by default Other systems optimization and the Changelog against V2.04 (22nd of May): Reduce DDR frequency to improve system stability. Fixed potential sound failure. Optimize USB OTG interface to fix issues with Air mice. Increase […]

July 10, 2013July 10, 2013 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Hacking MK908 mini PC for Serial Console Access

Thanks to Omegamoon (and this brother) we already have instructions to connect the UART pins on MK808 in order to access the serial console. He’s done it again with MK908 mini PC featuring Rockchip RK3188. Tx and Rx pads are located on the RAM chips side, and he has connected the green wire to Tx (Going to Rx on TTL debug board), and a yellow wire to Rx (Tx on debug TTL board). A ground pad is available on the other side of the board. Since I got a sample for review from Geekbuying, I decided to give a try myself. The pad are quite small, so this may require patience, but it’s perfectly feasible. I wanted to keep the device closed, so I passed the wires through the ventilation holes (enlarging them a bit with a precision screwdriver), put back the main heatsink on RK3188, and reassembled the enclosure. […]

July 10, 2013 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments

Play HEVC/H.265 Videos and Embed HEVC Streams into MP4 and TS Files with openHEVC and GPAC

I wrote an introduction to H.265 (aka HEVC) at the end of last year, including instructions showing how to encode videos to HEVC using the reference implementation. It worked but since it was not optimized for speed, it was extremely slow. Today I’ve stumbled across openHEVC, a open source compliant HEVC video decoder written in C, created as a fork of Libav. This is supposed to work pretty well as the implementation was used at Roland Garros Tennis tournament to playback an 720p50 HEVC stream transmitted over DVB-T2, IPTV, and MPEG DASH. Today I’ll mainly tried out the instructions provided on openHEVC github repo including: Build the source and playing a raw HEVC stream with hevc utility Build GPAC (open source multimedia framework), to get MP4Box, mp42ts, and MP4Client utilities. Import a raw HEVC stream into MP4 and TS containers, and play it back with GPAC tools. I’ve performed the […]

July 9, 2013July 9, 2013 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 10 Comments

Zyxel NSA310 / NSA320 Hackable Network Access Storages Run Debian Linux

Yesterday, we saw how to make a NAS enclosure for the Cubieboard, but DesertF0x commented “Better take a NSA-310 or NSA-320. It is easy to install Debian and it has Gigabit!”, and I decided to have a look. The 2 devices appear to have been released at the end of 2011, and are powered by a Marvell ARMv5 compatible processor. Many NAS are expensive kits, but NSA310 (1 bay) is currently available for $88.50 and NSA320 (2 bays) for $95.34 on Amazon, which is just a little cheaper than the DIY Cubieboard NAS solution (~100 USD). Price looks attractive, now let’s have a look at some technical details, and instructions to install Debian. Both NAS more or less share the same hardware specifications except for a few details: Processor – Marvell Kirkwood 88f6281 ARMV5-TE compliant processor @ 1.2 GHz (Hardware datasheet) System Memory – 256 MB (NAS310) or 512 MB […]

July 8, 2013July 8, 2013 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Linaro Connect Europe 2013 Sessions and Mini-Summit

Linaro Connect Europe 2013 (LCE13) is taking place in Dublin, Ireland on July 8 – 12, 2013. If you are not there, you can still follow the event remotely as the event schedule is available with tracks focused on Android, Builds and Baselines, Enterprise, Graphics and Multimedia, Linux Kernel, Network, Project Management Tools and Training, and the Testing and Validation mini-summit will also take place at the same time. There will be hacking and lab sessions each day (except on Friday) where you can expect to learn useful skills. I’ve selected 2 sessions per day that I think might be particularly interesting. Monday 10:00 – 10:45 – ARMv8 Status and Updates Current Status of v8 tree What’s merged? What’s features are next priorities? Platform Updates What members should know about adding new v8 platforms 12:00 – 13:00 – How to make Android more efficient for entry level products The main objective of […]

July 6, 2013December 3, 2013 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 10 Comments

Cloud Media FreeOTT Player Review

Syabas was a company designing set-top boxes such as Popcorn Hour Media Tank that were relatively popular before the Android media player invasion. The company is now called Cloud Media, and they offer a tiny media player called FreeOTT that connects to their Apps Market and bring online video, Internet radio, social media and other streaming media to your television. The device is free (as in free beer), as it’s not actually available for sale to the general public, and the only ways to get it is to have your ISP or telecom provider set it to you, or win one from the regular giveaways organized by the company. I won one via a giveaway announced on their Facebook page, and I had just to pay $5 (via Paypal) for shipping. The company does not provide detailed specifications for their device but we do know it’s a Linux based media […]

July 1, 2013 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Tuxera FAT Embedded Boasts Faster and Better FAT32 Implementation for Embedded Linux and Android

Tuxera has announced their “FAT Embedded” implementation of the FAT file system specifically optimized for embedded Linux and Android. The company claims their commercial solution delivers much faster data transfers than competing FAT implementations. Beside providing better performance, it also includes features such as fail-safe operation, and lower power consumption. They’ve benchmarked different file systems including Tuxera FAT Embedded with different I/O buffer sizes on two embedded hardware: Marvell 6192 @ 800 MHz with 512 MB RAM and a 120 GB Corsair Force GT SSD (SATA 3) The write speed of Tuxera exFAT and FAT appears to clearly outperform even ext-4 in this particular system. As a side note, I also evaluated 2 embedded systems based on the same low-end CPU: one using NTFS-3G, and the other Tuxera NTFS back in 2010, and there’s was a massive performance difference at the time. NTFS-3G is a different beast as it uses […]