$5 Longan Nano GD32V RISC-V Development Board Comes with LCD Display and Enclosure

Longan Nano

There’s been some exciting news about RISC-V microcontrollers recently with Gigadevice announcing GD32V, one of the first RISC-V general-purpose microcontrollers, which outperforms its Arm Cortex-M3 equivalent in terms of performance and power consumption. The company also announced some development boards, but they are not quite that easy to purchase being listed on Tmall website in China. The good news is that Sipeed has introduced Longan Nano development board powered by GD32VF103CBT6 microcontroller, and it’s up for sale on Seeed Studio for $4.9. Longan Nano board specifications: MCU – Gigadevice GD32VF103CBT6 32-bit RISC-V (rv32imac) microcontroller @ 108 MHz with 128KB Flash, 32KB SRAM Storage – MicroSD card slot Display – 0.96″ 160×80 IPS RGB LCD connected via SPI USB – 1x USB Type-C port for power and programming Expansion – 2x 16 through holes (2.54mm pitch) exposing 3x USART, 2x I2C, 3x SPI, 2x I2S, 2x CAN, 1x USBFS (OTG), 2x […]

AndesCore N22 RISC-V Core Supports RV32IMAC or RV32EMAC Instruction Sets

Andes N22 RISC-V vs Arm Cortex M3 / M0+

We covered Gigadevice GD32V general-purpose microcontroller with a RISC-V “Bumblebee” core last week, and I was informed that Andes Technology had recently introduced AndesCore N22 RISC-V “Bumblebee” IP core capable of supporting either RV32IMAC or RV32EMAC instruction sets. A web search did not reveal any specific information about what “Bumblebee” RISC-V cores are exactly, or maybe it’s in reference that many can be coupled in parallel. But that’s just a small detail, let’s check out in some details what AndesCore N22 core has to offer. The RISC-V core is designed for entry-level MCUs found in IoT devices and wearables, and is capable of deeply embedded protocol processing for I/O control, storage, networking, AI and AR/VR. Highlights of AndesCore N22: AndeStar V5 (RV32IMAC) / V5e (RV32EMAC) Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), compliant to RISC-V technology plus Andes extensions architectured for performance and functionality enhancements 32-bit, 2-stage pipeline CPU architecture 16/32-bit mixable instruction […]

Nordic Thingy:91 Cellular IoT Prototyping Platform Comes with 16 Sensors

Nordic Thingy:91

Nordic Semiconductor launched the Nordic Thingy:52 back in mid-2017 in the hopes of bringing app and web developers into the hardware ecosystem as fast and easy as possible.  The Nordic Thingy:52 was a Bluetooth 5 IoT sensor development kit based on the company’s nRF52832 WiSoC. Although the Nordic Thingy:52 kit is still very much available for purchase and support always available, Nordic Semiconductor has gone further launching a new development kit called the Nordic Thingy:91 targeting cellular IoT applications. The Nordic Thingy:91 is a cellular IoT prototyping platform with support for LTE-M, NB-IoT plus GPS option. Even though IoT connectivity standards like LoRaWAN, BLE, WiFi, ZigBee, and others are very much growing and expanding, Nordic Semi is fully backing cellular technology, something that has very much been available and most likely will still keep been available, and the adoption of 5G is another testimony to that. Cellular is here, and […]

Fairphone 3 Socially Responsible Android Smartphone Launched for 450 Euros

Fairphone 3

Most phones today are disposable items, and if yours stops working for whatever reason it’s hard to repair it yourself work, and repairing it at the shop may prove to be too expensive. They are not really expandable either,  so if you want a new feature, you may have to buy a completely new phone instead of simply adding a module with the functionality. The difficulty in repairing the phone and the lack of modularity leading to electronics waste. Finally, consumer products are cost-optimized, and that’s great for your wallet, but it may come at the cost of being made by slave labor either directly at the factory, or indirectly through the mining of materials. Aren’t you already feeling bad being complicit in destroying the planet and sponsoring human suffering while reading this on your device? Good! But luckily there’s a solution with Fairphone that aims to be an ethical […]

MPEG Video Coding for Machines (VCM) is in the Works

VCM Video Coding for Machines

A video codec for machines seems like a good topic for the first of April, or an article on the Onion. But based on a recent press release by Gyrfalcon Technology, this may become a real thing as the company partnered with China Telecom, and proposed a new video codec called “Video Coding for machines” (VCM) that provides compression coding for machine vision and human-machine hybrid vision. Apparently a recent study published by Cisco in 2018, humans will become bit players in the “video watching business”, and Machine-to-Machine (M2M) applications will represent the greatest usage of Internet video traffic over the next four years. So the goal of the VCM group will be to establish a new standard that will improve the previous generation video coding and decoding standards such as H.264 (AVC), H.265 (HEVC) and H.266 (VVC). Few details are provided so far, and I can’t find any VCM […]

ODROID-N2 CoreELEC Edition Media Center Launched for $65 and Up

ODROID-N2 CoreELEC Edition

ODROID-N2 is an Amlogic S922X single board computer with 2GB or 4GB  RAM that’s fairly popular thanks to its great performance/price ratio, good cooling, and decent support from Hardkernel. Hardkernel have worked in collaboration with CoreELEC, and have just introduced ODROID-N2 CoreELEC Edition media center featuring the SBC. The company offers the media center at introductory prices of $65 for the 2GB RAM model, and $75 for the 4GB model with limited stocks at those discounted prices. ODROID-N2 CoreELEC Edition media center includes the following: ODROID-N2 SBC with either 2GB or 4GB RAM ODROID-N2 Case Black An 8GB Industrial MicroSD UHS-1 card pre-loaded with CoreELEC for ODROID-N2 preinstalled 12V/2A Power Supply (with chosen type of plug) CoreELEC Logo Sticker CoreELEC for ODROID-N2 supports 4K HDR10 and HLG high dynamic-range, Auto frame rate switching & dynamic range matching,  DTS-HD & Dolby-HD audio pass-through including DTS:X and Dolby Atmos. The firmware is […]

Beelink GT-King (Amlogic S922X) TV Box Review

Beelink GT-King YouTube App

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 […]

Getting Started with ANAVI Gas Detector Starter Kit and Home Assistant

ANAVI ESP8266 Gas Detector Display

ANAVI Gas Detector is an ESP8266 based board designed for MQ gas sensors supported by Arduino. This allows you to easily monitor air quality, or more accurately air conductivity using MQ-135 sensor as part of the starter kit either visually on the OLED display, or through your smartphone or computer using MQTT via automation platform such as Home Assistant. Leon Anavi sent me an ANAVI Gas Detector Starter Kit to have a look, and I’ll report my experience with the kit using it standalone, and through Home Assistant. Starter Kit Unboxing The kit contains the open-source hardware, ESP8266 based ANAVI Gas Detector board, a plastic stand, an OLED display, a USB to serial adapter, a gas sensor, and a few KiCad and ANAVI stickers. The board itself comes with an ESP8266MOD module, features a micro USB port for power, a reset button, four LEDs, a UART console, a 4-pin GPIO […]

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