Getting Started with ANAVI Light pHat Starter Kit with RGB LED Strip, Light Sensor

ANAVI Light pHAT is an expansion board best suited for Raspberry Pi Zero (W/WH) boards, but also working with any other Raspberry Pi boards with a 40-pin header, that can control a 12V RGB LED strip and sensors. The project’s crowdfunding has just been successfully completed on CrowdSupply with 82 pledges, but you can still pre-order the board or kits for $25 and up. The developer – Leon ANAVI – had sent me a starter kit a little while ago, and this week-end I had time to test the basic functionalities of the board. The package includes the pHAT board itself, a one meter RGB LED strip, an I2C sensor, and some stickers. The sensor is based on BH1750 ambient light intensity sensor. The light pHAT boards include a 4-pin 12V/RGB blue terminal, EEPROM, three I2C connecter, a 3.3V UART connector to access the serial console for debugging / running […]

Review of GOLE 10 Mini PC with 10.1″ Touchscreen Display – Part 2: Windows 10 Pro

Depending on your point of view, GOLE 10 is a mini PC with a touchscreen display, or a really thick tablet with an inclined display.  I’ve already received a sample, and had a look at the hardware in the first part of the review, so in the second I tested the performance and stability, and thought about and test some use cases for this type of products. GOLE 10 (aka F6) Setup and System Info There are various way to use the mini PC, either as a standalone screen without any peripheral connected using the touchscreen, or as a mini PC with USB keyboard and mouse and potential other accessories, or in a dual display setup with the device connected to an HDMI TV or monitor. I decided to connect it to my “test” TV, add a USB 3.0 drive, USB keyboard and mouse, Ethernet cable, and of course the […]

Ikascope WS200 Oscilloscope and ScanaQuad SQ50 Logic Analyzer & Pattern Generator Review – Part 1: Unboxing

IkaScope WS200 WiFi oscilloscope fits in your hand like a pen, and works with devices running desktop or mobile operating systems, namely Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, Android, and iOS. I covered the tool last September, and IkaLogic – the French startup behind the project –  has now sent me a sample for review, as well as their ScanaQuad SQ50 4-channel logic analyzer and pattern generator. Since I had never checked out the latter, I’ve decided to start the review with an unboxing post, before reporting my experience actually using the tools next month. IkaScope WS200 Wireless Oscilloscope Probe The oscilloscope comes with a ground clip, a micro USB to USB cable for charging, and a getting started guide with a QR code to download IkaScope program or app. Once you open it, it really looks like an over-sized Stabilo highlighter. The only needed hardware connection needs is the ground […]

MINIX NEO N42C-4 Pro Review – Part 3: Ubuntu / Linux

In the second part of MINIX NEO N42C-4 review (and on linuxium website), we looked at the device and the performance using Windows.  In this third part, we will look at how to install and the performance of using Linux (Ubuntu). The BIOS does not include an option to select Linux as a boot OS and a standard Ubuntu ISO written to a USB will not boot. So to install Ubuntu to the eMMC as dual-boot first it was necessary to respin a standard Ubuntu ISO using my ‘isorespin.sh’ script with the ‘–apollo’ option, and which after creating a LiveUSB using the ‘dd’ command was used to boot and install Ubuntu. First let’s remind ourselves of the hardware configuration by running some standard Linux commands:

This shows the memory will be dual-channel once the second slot (bank:1) is populated and also confirms that the eMMC 5.1 (mmc0) is running […]

MINIX NEO N42C-4 Mini PC Review – Part 2: Windows 10 Pro

MINIX NEO N42C-4 is the first Apollo Lake mini PC from the company, which also happens to be their first one with a fan, using internal antennas for WiFi and Bluetooth, and offering user-upgradeable storage and memory thanks to M.2 and SO-DIMM slots. The device also features three video output via HDMI 2.0, mini DiplayPort, and USB Type C  ports supporting up to three independent display. I’ve received a sample and already checked the hardware, and showed how to install an M.2 SSD and SO-DIMM RAM to the device in the first part of the review entitled  MINIX NEO N42C-4 Triple Display Capable Mini PC Review – Part 1: Unboxing and Teardown, so I’ll report my experience with Windows 10 Pro in the second part of the review, and there should also be a third part specifically dealing with Linux support. MINIX NEO N42C-4 Setup, System Info, BIOS The device […]

Intel Apollo Lake Windows 10 Benchmarks Before and After Meltdown & Spectre Security Update

So this week, there’s been a fair amount of news about Meltdown & Spectre exploits, which affects all major processor vendors one way or another, but especially Intel, and whose mitigations require operating systems and in some case microcode updates that decrease performance for some specific tasks. Microsoft has now pushed an update for Windows 10, and since I’m reviewing MINIX NEO N42C-4 mini PC powered by an Intel Pentium N4200 “Apollo Lake” processor, and just happened to run benchmarks before the update, so I decided to run some of the benchmarks again to see if there was any significant difference before and after the security update. First I had to verify I had indeed received the update in the “installed update history”, and Windows 10 Pro was updated on January 5th with KB4056892, which is what we want, so let’s go ahead. Benchmarks before Update PCMark 10 is one […]

Help Testing TLS 1.3 Compatibility for a More Efficient & Secure Internet

Transport Layer Security (TLS) is the protocol that allows for secure websites (via https), and currently, TLS 1.2 is the version most commonly used today, with 1.0 and 1.1 still supported by many servers for backward compatibility with older browsers, including the one running this blog. TLS 1.3 is the next version, already supported in libraries and server software such as wolfSSL or nginx, and promises to be more efficient – important for battery operated devices (IoT) – thanks to features like zero-RTT (0-RTT) mode, speedy with a restructured handshake state machine, and more secure. However, changes in security protocol may mess up connection with some browsers or middleboxes, as I experience when I enabled https on CNX Software using Let’s Encrypt with nginx and Cloudflare, with around 0.5% of users losing access due to using older web browsers and operating systems such as Internet Explorer on Windows XP. According […]

How to Use Khadas VIM2 Board with VTV Expansion DTV Board as a Live TV Streaming Server

Khadas-VIM2-Heatsink

Khadas VIM2 is the first and only Amlogic S912 based hobbyist development board on the market, which makes it interesting by itself, but the company also added some interesting features such as an SPI flash for network boot, Wake-on-LAN support, and more. Last month the company sent me a sample of the Khadas VIM2 Basic (2GB RAM/16GB flash) together with VTV Extension DTV Board featuring a DVB-T2/C and DVB-S2 tuner. I’ve already checkout the hardware and shown how to assemble the kit, so for the second part of the review it seemed like a good idea to use the board as a Live TV streaming server broadcasting satellite, cable or terrestrial TV to devices connected to the local network. At first I wanted to use Linux operating system, because I could have run other Linux server services, but SuperDVB, the company that makes and supports the tuner board, only have […]

UP 7000 x86 SBC