Testing Category - Page 56 of 168 - CNX Software

January 22, 2020January 22, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

GOLE F7 Rugged Tablet Review – Part 1: Unboxing and Charging Dock

GOLE F7 is a rugged Windows 10 Pro tablet with a 10.1″ touchscreen display, an Intel Atom x5-Z8350 Cherry Trail processor, and “triple-proofed” with resistance to shocks, waterproofness, and dustproofness (see full specs). The tablet also comes with various features that can be useful to industrial use cases. The company sent me a sample fitted with 4G, a QR and bar code scanner, and a fingerprint print, as well as a separate charging dock. I’ll first have a look at the device and its hardware features in the first part of the review before trying it out with Windows 10 Pro in the second part that will focus on special features and ruggedness. The tablet comes with a rubber cover to protect all sides. All ports are covered to make the tablet dust-and-waterproof, and I could easily pull those to reveal USB, Ethernet and a COM port on one side… […]

January 13, 2020January 13, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Getting Started with Amlogic NPU on Khadas VIM3/VIM3L

Shenzhen Wesion released the NPU toolkit for Khadas VIM3/VIM3L last November, so I decided to try the latest Ubuntu 18.04 image and the NPU toolkit on Khadas VIM3L, before switching to VIM3 for reasons I’ll explain below. I’ve followed two tutorials from the forum and wiki to run pre-built samples and then building a firmware image and samples from source. Khadas VIM3L and VIM3 Have Different & Optional NPUs This will be obvious to anyone who read the specs for Khadas VIM3 and VIM3L that the former comes with a 5 TOPS NPU, while the one in the latter only delivers up to 1.2 TOPS. But somehow, I forgot about this, and assume both had the same NPU making VIM3L more attractive but this type of task, Obviously I was wrong. But the real reason I stopped using Khadas VIM3L can be seen in the photo below. My board is […]

January 9, 2020January 9, 2020 by Karl Johnson - 9 Comments

Virtual Desktop and Oculus Quest Tips & Tricks

Hey, Karl here. I wanted to share some experimenting I did with the Oculus Quest we purchased as a family gift for Christmas. One of the features I was looking forward to was wirelessly streaming VR games from my PC. It is not officially supported by Oculus but Virtual Desktop allows you to do this. Virtual Desktop is an app that can be purchased through the Oculus store. Unfortunately, there are a couple of steps that need to be taken to stream VR to the headset. Oculus forced VD to remove the emulated VR feature in its official store version. Once it is purchased you can then sideload the emulated VR version through Side Quest. Side Quest is a simple tool that makes sideloading apps easy and has a bunch of demo and games that aren’t in the Oculus store. The instructions are easy to follow on the Side Quest […]

January 3, 2020 by Ian W MORRISON (Linuxium) - 6 Comments

Beelink BT4 Mini PC Review – Slow, Buggy, Fan-cooled, and Overheating

Intel’s low-cost chip shortage has been so bad that Beelink has had to demothball some Atom chips when creating their new mini PC the Beelink BT4. This is one of the cheapest new mini PCs recently launched and uses the somewhat now old Cherry Trail Intel Atom x5-Z8500 CPU which was launched at the start of 2015 and is a quad-core 4-thread 1.44 GHz processor boosting to 2.24 GHz with Intel’s HD Graphics. The BT4 is the same form factor as the more recent Beelink mini PCs being a half-thick ‘NUC’ style device physically consisting of a 120 x 120 x 22 mm (4.72 x 4.72 x 0.87 inches) plastic rectangular case. This is not a passive device as it contains a small fan that stays on after the device has been shut down. The front panel has only a blue ‘power’ LED and the rear panel includes the power […]

December 21, 2019February 29, 2020 by Ian W MORRISON (Linuxium) - 5 Comments

Beelink T45 Review with Windows and Linux, and Tweaking BIOS Power Limits

[Update December 23, 2019: We’ve been informed by Beelink that the T45 has been updated to the 6W Celeron N4200 processor instead, and the system is now cooled with a fan. The model reviewed in this post is the fanless version with a 10W Intel J4250 processor, which was never sold] [Update January 30, 2020: We’ve now posted a review of the new model at Beelink Gemini T45 Pentium N4200 Mini PC Review] Beelink have further extended their ‘Gemini’ range of mini PCs by adding the T45. This is a passively cooled mini PC that is effectively a companion to the J45 as it again uses the slightly older Apollo Lake Intel Pentium J4205 CPU which is a quad-core 4-thread 1.50 GHz processor boosting to 2.60 GHz with Intel’s HD Graphics 505. Although the T45 is a ‘NUC’ style mini PC physically consisting of a 119 x 119 x 17.7 […]

December 20, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 9 Comments

MCCI Sells a $795 USB4 Switch for USB4 Product Development

The USB4 specification was officially released last September with the new standard promising speeds of up to 40 Gbps and up to 100 Watts power delivery over USB-C connectors. MMCI is now offering a 2:1 USB4 switch, the first computer-controlled USB4 mux according to the company, that can control 1 or 2 products up to 20 Gbps. Model 3141 USB4 Switch is not designed for consumers, as there aren’t any USB4 devices around at this time, but for electronics designers, firmware and software developers to enable them to test & debug their USB4 implementations. MCCI Model 3141 USB4 Switch key features and specifications: USB Specifications/Features USB4 Thunderbolt 3 USB 3.2 gen2 (x2 and x1), gen 1 (x2 and x1) USB 2.0 high speed, full speed, and low speed USB Power Delivery VCONN-powered devices (up to 0.5A) Alternate modes like DisplayPort. 2:1 switch, connecting two USB Type-C receptacles to a single […]

December 14, 2019December 14, 2019 by Ian W MORRISON (Linuxium) - 9 Comments

Ubuntu 18.04 on Beelink Gemini J45 Mini PC (Fix and Review)

When I recently reviewed the Beelink J45 (aka Beelink Gemini J), a mini PC that uses the slightly older Intel Apollo Lake Pentium J4205 processor, whilst Windows 10 Pro ran fine it was unsuitable for Ubuntu because after installation the system became unstable and problems were encountered when running anything that loaded the system. The main issue was that when connected via wired-ethernet performing a command like ‘sudo apt upgrade’ would cause the ethernet to drop after which only a reboot would restore the connection. At the time it, was unclear what the cause was however a solution to the issue was posted by ‘gambetta’ on the Beelink forum. Basically it consists of installing the r8168 module which is the Linux device driver released for RealTek RTL8168B/8111B, RTL8168C/8111C, RTL8168CP/8111CP, RTL8168D/8111D, RTL8168DP/8111DP and RTL8168E/8111E Gigabit Ethernet controllers with PCI-Express interface. To paraphrase the ‘README.Debian’ file, you use ‘r8168-dkms because the in-kernel […]

December 12, 2019 by Ian W MORRISON (Linuxium) - 1 Comment

A Look at Ubuntu on MINIX NEO G41V-4 and J50C-4 Mini PCs

MINIX Technology Limited recently released two new Gemini Lake mini PCs running Windows 10 Pro namely the MINIX NEO J50C-4 actively-cooled mini PC with an Intel Pentium Silver J5005 processor and the MINIX NEO G41V-4 fanless mini PC powered by an Intel Celeron N4100 processor. Whilst each mini PC comes with 64GB of eMMC with pre-installed Windows 10 Pro together with 4GB of RAM they also support the addition of an optional 2280 M.2 drive and the MINIX NEO J50C-4 allows optional memory upgrades. Prior to testing their performance under Ubuntu, I established a comparison baseline by updating Windows to version 1903 and then running my standard set of benchmarking tools first with the default configuration of each mini PC and then repeated having installed the official MINIX 2280 M.2 240GB drives for each device together with adding an extra 4GB RAM to the MINIX NEO J50C-4. The results can […]