Video Category - Page 109 of 328 - CNX Software

January 30, 2020January 30, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Semtech LoRa Asset Tracking Reference Kit Includes one LoRaWAN Gateway, Six Waterproof GPS Trackers

LoRa Asset Tracking Reference Kit Gateway

The Things Conference is taking place now until January 31, so we should expect a few LoRaWAN announcements, and yesterday we covered Semtech LLCC68 LoRa transceiver for smart home applications, but the company also introduced a LoRa asset tracking reference kit to ease the deployment and evaluation of LoRa based tracking solutions. The kit is comprised of one LoRaWAN gateway, and six waterproof trackers with GPS and LoRa connectivity which everything supposed to work out of the box. The gateway, as shown above, comes with LoRa, cellular and GPS antennas, as well as a PoE power supply. It ships with a pre-configured SIM card to connect to the cloud platform over 3G/4G. Six industrial LoRaWAN-based GPS trackers are also included with the kit. Each comes with a battery but the trackers need to be activated by the user. Interestingly they are not using a button to turn on and off […]

January 29, 2020January 31, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

LibreRouter is an Open-Source Hardware Router for Community Networks

Battlemesh (aka the Wireless Battle of the Mesh) is an event that aims at bringing together people from across the world to test the performance of different routing protocols for ad-hoc networks. While BattleMesh v12 took place in Paris in July 2019, I’ve just been informed that presentation videos were now out. There are talks about OpenWrt, mesh networks, and communities, but one talk brought a project I had not looked into details yet. Originated from Argentina, LibreRouter is described as an open-source hardware router designed for community networks that are organized by a group of people such as neighbors in order to share local and other content without a profit motive. LibreRouter LR1 specifications: SoC – Qualcomm Atheros QCA9558 MIPS processor @ 750 MHz System Memory – 128 MB DDR RAM Storage – 16 MB Flash MCU – Microchip ATTiny13 8-bitAVR MCU used as hardware watchdog to handle failed […]

January 26, 2020January 26, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

ESP Open Source Research Platform Enables the Design of RISC-V & Sparc SoC’s with Accelerators

FOSDEM 2020 will take place next week, and there will be several interesting talks about open-source hardware and software development. One of those is entitled “Open ESP – The Heterogeneous Open-Source Platform for Developing RISC-V Systems” with an excerpt of the abstract reading: ESP is an open-source research platform for RISC-V systems-on-chip that integrates many hardware accelerators. ESP provides a vertically integrated design flow from software development and hardware integration to full-system prototyping on FPGA. For application developers, it offers domain-specific automated solutions to synthesize new accelerators for their software and map it onto the heterogeneous SoC architecture. For hardware engineers, it offers automated solutions to integrate their accelerator designs into the complete SoC. If we go to the official website, we can see ESP (Embedded Scalable Platform) actually supports both 32-bit Leon3 (Sparc) and 64-bit Ariane (RISC-V) cores, and various hardware accelerators from the platform or third parties. Highlights: […]

January 24, 2020July 25, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 9 Comments

Hisense A5 5.84″ e-Paper Android Smartphone Promises Up to 10-Day Battery Life

We’ve previously covered smartphones with a black and white e-Paper display usually placed on the back of the phone, while a traditional full-color display is placed at the front. Some models include Yotaphone 2 and Hisense A2, and the advantage of the e-Ink display is that you can extend battery life, quickly check notifications without unlocking your phone, reads book even in bright lights, etc.. but the cost goes up quite a bit since the manufacturers have to integrate two displays in their devices. Hisense A5 does completely away with the traditional color display and replaces it with a 5.84″ e-Paper display with 1440×720 resolution. The display is black and white, and the slow refresh rate of such display will make it impractical to watch videos and play most games, but if all you do is check emails, browsing the web, reading e-books, accessing social networks, and making phone calls […]

January 23, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Google Envelope Aims to Reduce your Smartphone Addiction

Smartphones are useful tools, but they can also be addictive as people may start checking the phone each time they receive a notification, visit their Facebook page to check how many likes they got, or just want to check their emails a bit too frequently. Google has been working on addressing the issue with the Digital Wellbeing app launched as part of Android 9 aims to help you take some time away from your phone. The company has now launched a new Digital Wellbeing experiment with Google Envelope. Those are actual paper envelopes housing your phone in order to convert it either in a phone that can only make or receive phone calls, or camera with only the ability to take photos or shot videos. There’s also an accompanying app that will detect the taps on the button. You’ll need to start the app first, then slide your phone into […]

January 22, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 20 Comments

Mecool M8S Plus W TV Box Sells for Less than $15 (Promo)

Mecool M8S Plus W is just another Amlogic S905W based Android 7.1 TV box fitted with 1GB RAM, and 8GB eMMC flash. I would certainly not recommend this device for the best user experience, but if you’d just like to play some videos or tinker with the box, the price is hard to beat as the TV box currently goes for $14.96 plus shipping (around $1 extra here) Mecool M8S Plus W specifications: SoC – Amlogic S905W quad-core Cortex A53 processor with Mali-450MP GPU System Memory – 1GB DDR3 Storage – 8GB eMMC flash, no MicroSD card slot Video & Audio Output – HDMI 2.0 output, AV port with composite video and stereo audio Video Decoding – H.265, H.264, and VP9 up to 4K @ 30 fps Connectivity – 2.4GHz 802.11b/g/n WiFi 4, no Bluetooth, no Ethernet USB – 2x USB 2.0 port Misc – Power LED, IR receiver Power […]

January 22, 2020 by Stephen Vicinanza - 1 Comment

V-Powerbuds Pro TWS Earbuds Support Heart Monitoring & Oxygen Tracking (Crowdfunding)

Vimai V-Powerbuds Pro Multi-function Sport Earbuds Vimai’s V-Powerbuds Pro TWS (True Wireless Stereo) earbuds are multi-function wireless earbuds. In the past, we had reported on the Misfit Specter Bluetooth earbuds that could track fitness input, such as steps, calories, and sleep duration. V-Powerbuds Pro also tracks heart rate, oxygen, and respiration, and supports online & offline voice control. The Component Basics The V-Powerbud Pro are TWS earbuds and have a built-in pulse oximeter to capture heart rate and oxygen levels right from within the ear. The hook design holds the earbuds tightly in place, within the ear, to get an accurate measurement independent of the effects of light. Other types of fitness tracking devices like those located on the wrist, can be affected by light. The Difference From Other Sport Earbuds Although the uses during exercise aspect of this wearable are probably more likely to be a selling point, the […]

January 20, 2020January 20, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Piksey Atto is a Tiny Arduino Compatible Board with Castellated Holes (Crowdfunding)

Atto is a unit prefix in the metric system denoting a factor of 10−18, so it’s unsurprising that at least one company, namely Nionics, made a small Arduino compatible board called Atto. But somebody must have forgotten to do a web search, as BitsNBlobs Electronics created their own tiny Arduino compatible board, also named “(Piksey) Atto“, and based on the same Microchip ATmega32U4 8-bit AVR MCU. But there are some important differences as we’ll see below. Piksey Atto specifications: MCU – Microchip ATmega32U4 8-bit AVR microcontroller @ 16 MHz with 32KB flash, 2.5KB SRAM, 1KB EEPROM Expansion – 18x castellated through holes for 11 digital I/Os, 4x PWM, and 4x analog inputs, USART/SPI/I2C USB – Micro USB port for power and programming Power Supply – 5V via micro USB port Dimensions – 20.32 x 12.7mm Weight – 1.3 grams Piksey Atto is about twice the size and weight of Nionics […]