Testing Category - Page 59 of 168 - CNX Software

October 3, 2019December 17, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

MINIX NEO J50C-4 (64GB) Mini PC Review – Part 1: Unboxing & Teardown

MINIX demonstrated their latest fanless NEO G41V-4 mini PC at IFA 2019 together with a MINIX NEO J50C-4 mini PC that I thought was last year’s model since I reviewed it last September with Windows 10 Pro and the company’s MINIX NEO W2 air mouse for computers. So when I received another MINIX NEO J50C-4 sample for review I was confused but noticed the eMMC flash capacity was increased from 32GB to 64GB. So I asked, and it’s a relaunch due to the shortage of Intel Gemini Lake processors: The increased storage capacity, from 32GB to 64GB eMMC, is the only difference from the sample you received last year. While we announced NEO J50C-4 last year, due to the Intel CPU shortage we never actually officially released. The Intel CPU shortage meant we only sold a couple of hundred units that we managed to produce before the CPU stock ran […]

September 30, 2019October 28, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

NanoPi M4V2 Metal Case Kit Review – Part 1: Unboxing and Assembly

Earlier this month FriendlyELEC released two new products namely NanoPi M4 metal case with heatsink and optional NVMe SSD adapter, and NanoPi M4V2 SBC, a minor upgrade to the original Rockchip RK3399 powered NanoPi M4 board with faster LPDRR4 memory, the addition of power & recovery buttons, and microphone input is now inside the audio jack instead of solder pads. I received both this weekend, in the first part of the review I’ll show the items part of the package and then show how to assemble the kit. In the second part, I’ll focus on the new features of the board like memory bandwidth, as well as the thermal performance of the complete solution in both Android and Linux. Unboxing Instead of one kit, I actually received two. One kit basically includes NanoPi M4V2 board with internal antennas (which we won’t use here), and the metal case which comes with […]

September 28, 2019December 14, 2019 by Ian W MORRISON (Linuxium) - 23 Comments

Beelink J45 Mini PC Review – Windows 10 Works as Expected, but Linux is Unstable

[Update December 14, 2019: We’ve now found out that Ubuntu 18.04 can work fine on Beelink J45, but the Realtek Ethernet driver needs to be manually installed] Beelink has added a new mini PC to their ‘Gemini’ range (X45 and X55) namely the Beelink J45 (aka Beelink Gemini J45). What is rather unusual about the naming of this mini PC is that it uses the slightly older Intel Apollo Lake 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. The J45 is another ‘NUC’ style mini PC and physically consists of a 115 x 102 x 43 mm (4.53 x 4.02 x 1.69 inches) box case with a front panel that includes the power button, a headphone jack and a couple of USB 3.0 ports and then on the rear, two more USB 3.0 ports, two HDMI (1.4)ports up […]

September 25, 2019 by Karl Johnson - 6 Comments

Sovol SV01 Review – A 3D Printer that Prints like a Boss

Howdy, Karl here. Let’s do this backward today and give final thoughts first …I like the SV01 3D printer. With a print volume of 280x240x300mm, it’s a good size printer. I think I could get several more centimeters in height if I relocated the filament sensor. I have had it for several months and have printed with it quite a bit and had a really good experience. It is a keeper. By that I mean I have reviewed quite a few printers and I don’t have enough space to keep them all. I find the less desirable ones good homes with friends and family. BTW I plan on doing a follow up soon for all the past articles. Just a few highlights per past article. I think it would be interesting. It is hard to truly review some products in a short amount of time. Back to the SV01…IMO, likes […]

September 13, 2019September 12, 2019 by Ian W MORRISON (Linuxium) - 3 Comments

CHUWI GBOX Pro Review – Intel Atom x7-E3950 mini PC Tested with Windows 10 & Ubuntu 18.04

CHUWI has released a new mini PC called the GBox Pro. This is a passively cooled mini PC that uses the slightly older Apollo Lake Intel Atom x7-E3950 CPU which is a quad core 4-thread 1.60 GHz processor boosting to 2.00 GHz with Intel’s HD Graphics 505. The GBox Pro is somewhat physically larger than typical recent mini PCs and consists of a 189 x 139 x 39 mm (7.44 x 5.47 x 1.54 inches) rectangular case with a front panel that includes the power button, micro SD slot, a couple of USB 3.0 ports and a Type-C USB port and then on the rear, a headphone jack, two USB 2.0 ports, a Gigabit ethernet port, an HDMI (2.0) port and a VGA interface. The full specifications include: The GBox Pro comes with 64GB of eMMC with pre-installed Windows 10 Home (version 1809 OS build 17763.316) together with 4GB of […]

September 5, 2019July 8, 2020 by Karl Johnson - 57 Comments

How to Easily Calibrate Retraction in 3D Printers

[Update July 2020: It is now recommended to use Calibration Generator program instead of the Google Doc Spreadsheet in this article] Hey, Karl here with a short article on retraction tuning. I really enjoy reviewing 3D printers and all things 3D printing with one exception…. when I have to calibrate retraction (aka retraction tuning). It takes so much time. What is Retraction? While 3D printing on a standard FDM printer, the filament is pushed with an extruder motor that has a gear attached. It pushes the filament, either directly into the hotend assembly or through a Bowden tube to the hotend. Molten plastic is then layered to produce a model. When it is printing nearly all prints require non-extruding movements. During the extruding moves pressure builds up and in order to stop stringing and blobbing during non-printing moves, a retraction happens. There are 2 main variables that affect this: the […]

September 2, 2019April 26, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 26 Comments

Khadas VIM3 Linux Benchmarks and Comparison to Raspberry Pi 4

I received Khadas VIM3 Amlogic A311D SBC in early July and started testing it with Android running some benchmarks and playing games last month. I was impressed by graphics performance and overall benchmark results in Android, especially the results I got with a heatsink matched Khadas own results with heatsink + fan. So I installed the latest Ubuntu 18.04 available at the time (July 19) in order to repeat benchmarks in Linux and see how it goes. System info in Ubuntu 18.04:

khadas@Khadas:~$ cat /etc/lsb-release 
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=18.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=bionic
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS"
khadas@Khadas:~$ uname -a
Linux Khadas 4.9.179 #73 SMP PREEMPT Fri Jul 19 09:56:46 CST 2019 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux
khadas@Khadas:~$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev            305M     0  305M   0% /dev
tmpfs           187M  9.5M  177M   6% /run
/dev/rootfs      15G  2.6G   12G  19% /
tmpfs           931M     0  931M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs           931M     0  931M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs           187M   12K  187M   1% /run/user/1000
khadas@Khadas:~$ free -m
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           1861         358        1100          10         402        1479
Swap:           930           0         930

khadas@Khadas:~$ cat /etc/lsb-release

DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu

DISTRIB_RELEASE=18.04

DISTRIB_CODENAME=bionic

DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS"

khadas@Khadas:~$ uname -a

Linux Khadas 4.9.179 #73 SMP PREEMPT Fri Jul 19 09:56:46 CST 2019 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux

khadas@Khadas:~$ df -h

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on

udev 305M 0 305M 0% /dev

tmpfs 187M 9.5M 177M 6% /run

/dev/rootfs 15G 2.6G 12G 19% /

tmpfs 931M 0 931M 0% /dev/shm

tmpfs 5.0M 4.0K 5.0M 1% /run/lock

tmpfs 931M 0 931M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup

tmpfs 187M 12K 187M 1% /run/user/1000

khadas@Khadas:~$ free -m

total used free shared buff/cache available

Mem: 1861 358 1100 10 402 1479

Swap: 930 0 930

I decided to install armbianmonitor to draw some nice temperature charts as I did with Raspberry Pi 4:

wget https://github.com/armbian/build/raw/master/packages/bsp/common/usr/bin/armbianmonitor
sudo cp armbianmonitor /usr/bin/
sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/armbianmonitor
sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 2C0D3C0F
sudo wget http://goo.gl/vewCLL -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/rpimonitor.list
sudo armbianmonitor -r

wget https://github.com/armbian/build/raw/master/packages/bsp/common/usr/bin/armbianmonitor

sudo cp armbianmonitor /usr/bin/

sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/armbianmonitor

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 2C0D3C0F

sudo wget http://goo.gl/vewCLL -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/rpimonitor.list

sudo armbianmonitor -r

But I had some error during installation:

sudo armbianmonitor -r
Installing RPi-Monitor. This can take up to 5 minutes. Be patient please/usr/bin/armbianmonitor: line 189: /etc/armbian-release: No such file or directory

Now you're able to enjoy RPi-Monitor at http://192.168.1.8:8888

sudo armbianmonitor -r

Installing RPi-Monitor. This can take up to 5 minutes. Be patient please/usr/bin/armbianmonitor: line 189: /etc/armbian-release: No such file or directory

Now you're able to enjoy RPi-Monitor at http://192.168.1.8:8888

And while I can load the webpage with top menu appearing, it won’t show any data, as its name implies it may only work in Armbian. SBC Bench on Khadas VIM3 Let’s download SBC bench:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ThomasKaiser/sbc-bench/master/sbc-bench.sh

1	wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ThomasKaiser/sbc-bench/master/sbc-bench.sh

Note that I had […]

August 26, 2019 by Karl Johnson - 10 Comments

Beelink GT-King (Amlogic S922X) TV Box Review

Rant Karl here. I have been playing around with Android boxes for several years. Unfortunately, some fundamental issues from when I first started playing around with these boxes are still there. They have come a long way since the MK808 with Rockchip RK3066 processor. The MK808 was my first endeavor into Android on the TV in 2013. I can’t believe it’s been nearly 6 years. In 2014 Google introduced Android TV and the Nexus Player. It was designed for a TV and controller. The first boxes/sticks adapted the stock Android experience to run on a TV, but without a touch interface the experience was/is not optimal. Sure you get thousands and thousands of apps but a lot of them don’t work. Unfortunately, this hasn’t changed much. If these boxes came with Linux and Android I don’t think I would complain as much. I would consider it a tinkering box. But […]