Last year, we wrote about Socionext MN87900 24 GHz radio wave radar module for IoT with Rx & Tx antennas and a crytal unit that measured just 12×7 mm. The module is made for IoT equipments, security systems, smart home appliances, autonomous vehicles and drones, medical devices, and more. Basically any application that requires distance measurement up to 8 meters (expandable to 30 meters with a radome horn), rough location, or motion detection may leverage the technology. The company has now uploaded a video showing a demo of their 24 GHz radar sensor. Socionext did not explain which exact solution they used, and it’s probably not the full module above, but either one of their sensors based on the link provided in the video description: SC1232AR3 – All-in-one RADAR sensor for Entry Motion & Distance Detection SC1233AR3 – All-in-one RADAR sensor for Entry Motion & 2D Detection I suspect SC1232AR3 […]
RAKWireless Introduces RAK7200 LoRa Tracker | Features & Specifications
RAK7200 is a LoRa Tracker node built around the AcSIP S76G chip. It integrates the ultra-low-power STM32L073 micro-controller, the SX1276 LoRa long range modem, and the CXD5603GF GPS receiver. The RAK7200, being a fully functioning LoRaWAN device, is particularly suited for IoT applications. Such as asset tracking, smart vehicle management, location-based service, etc. According to the device manufacturers, RAKWireless, a leading Chinese IoT solutions company, based in Shenzhen, RAK7200 requires minimal setup. Just pop in the included battery, close the housing and you can start sensing your GPS data over LoRaWAN. Furthermore, there are sensors built-into the board: a 9-axis accelerometer and pressure sensor. The new GPS Tracker node is an upgrade over the company’s earlier offering in the GPS tracker space, the RAK7205. Now, the earlier version, the RAK7205, was mostly aimed at developers, with its larger more robust casing and solar panel. But the RA7200 is more of […]
CutiePi Open Source Tablet uses Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3
The announcement of the CutiePi, an open source tablet-based on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 comes a bit late for the Pi-based tablet/laptop space. We have reported on some of the more versatile tablets using the Raspberry Pi platform, the Diskio Pi 13.3” DIY Tablet and the RasPad tablet kit, with a few more Raspberry Pi-based tablet/laptop kits also listed in the same article. Timeline and Pricing CutiePi Tablet has no firm release date, but the company is saying late 2019 for launch. The development team is also saying everything is subject to change, but look for the pricing to be USD $150 – $250. Click to Enlarge How CutiePi is Different The tablet is different in its thinner design and in the software designed specifically to use Linux Raspbian OS for a touch screen platform. There are readily available source code and case plans for the ambitious developer […]
BFQ (Budget Fair Queuing) I/O Scheduler Improves Linux Systems Responsiveness (Video)
Storage is normally the slowest part of a system, and operating systems such as Linux try to limit I/O access with “tricks” like caching. The I/O scheduler may also matter if you have multiple programs accessing the same drive, and in Linux 4.12 implemented two new multi-queue block I/O schedulers, namely BFQ (Budget Fair Queuing) and Kyber that are meant to improve the performance of the systems. If you’re using Linux 5.2 you may even get further improvements since performance tweaks make application start-up times under load to be up to 80% faster. I have never seen BFQ in action so far, but earlier this year, Paolo Valente, who is working for Linaro, made a video with an Acer Chromebook 15 showing Google Chrome launch time using the default mq-deadline schedule, and bfq-mq scheduler. The test involves writing a 1.5GB file to the drive with dd, and clicking on the […]
PhyWhisperer-USB Python Controlled USB 2.0 Sniffer Enables USB Security Testing (Crowdfunding)
PhyWhisperer-USB is a hardware USB sniffer & triggering platform that allows users to test the security of USB devices using side-channel power analysis and fault injection using a Python 3 interface, beside simply capturing packets. This has become especially important now as some USB devices include Bitcoin Wallets, FIDO2 keys, and encrypted drives with valuable data. PhyWhisperer-USB hardware specifications: FPGA – Xilinx Spartan 7S15 with 12,800 logic cells USB USB 2.0 Low/Full/High Speed mode PC connection – Micro-USB 2.0 HS port Host connection – Micro-USB port Target connection – USB-A female connector Trigger pattern – 1 – 64 bytes with mask Trigger delay – 0 – 1048576 cycles of 240 MHz internal clock derived from USB clock USB sniffer FIFO – 8192 bytes (FPGA block RAM, adjustable depending on FPGA utilization) Expansion – Spare digital I/O: 8 data pins, 1 clock pin routed to FPGA (on front panel) Clock output […]
Arduino Partners with Chirp to Enable Data-Over-Sound M2M Connectivity
Announced on August 12, 2019, Arduino has partnered with the London-based Chirp, a wireless data-over-sound software solution for machine-to-machine connectivity. The system has the ability to work online or offline, as long as there is a loudspeaker and a microphone available. The software works with the Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense board in send and receive mode, while most Arduino MKR boards and Arduino Nano 33 IoT will also be supported by the SDK, but only to send data. The software and board are fully compatible with SDKs from a wide variety of platforms. The Nano 33 BLE Sense is available for purchase from the Arduino website, for $29.50. The sensor-rich Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense is application-ready right out of the box, and Chirp is ready to start sending encoded data from a device fitted with an audio speaker, to the board’s built-in microphone, where it is encoded and […]
Somu Tiny Open Source FIDO2 Security Key Enables Passwordless Login & Two-factor Authentication (Crowdfunding)
Tomu is a tiny, open source USB connector-sized board powered by a Silicon Labs Happy Gecko Cortex-M0+ MCU that adds two keys to your computer and can work as a Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) token to support two-factor authentication (2FA). But the board is not secure enough for FIDO2 support, and Tomu’s developer worked on a secure USB key called Solokey, and shrank it to Tomu form factor. Meet Somu open-source and secure key with FIDO2 support for compatibility with your Google, Twitter, and GitHub accounts for two-factor authentication, or your Microsoft account passwordless login. Somu hardware specifications: Secure MCU – STMicro STM32L432KC Arm Cortex-M4 microcontroller with TRNG, security isolation for keys, two levels of locked flash Crypto Algorithms – ECC P256 (as per FIDO2 standard) Supported Protocols – FIDO2, U2F Host Interface – USB type-A port Misc – Two touch buttons ( in FIDO2 firmware the two buttons behave […]
Rock Pi 4 SBC Runs GNOME & KDE Plasma using Panfrost Open Source GPU Driver & Wayland
One of the highlights of Linux 5.2 release was support for two new Arm Mali GPU open-source drivers, namely Lima for Mali-4xx GPU, and Panfrost for the Midgard Mali-T6xx/7xx/8xx series, and the more recent Bifrost Mali-Gxx GPUs. Collabora worked on the release and was donated a few Rock Pi 4 boards from Radxa directly to work on the project. For those who are not familiar, Rock Pi 4 board is powered by a Rockchip RK3399 processor with a Mali-T860MP4 GPU that is supported by Panfrost open source GPU driver. The company managed to have Debian 10 Buster running on Rock Pi 4 using 3D graphics acceleration thanks to Panfrost drivers on both GNOME and KDE Plasma desktop environment, as well as Weston Wayland compositer. The good news is that you can build Rock Pi 4 images by yourself using Debos with the following commands:
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git clone https://gitlab.collabora.com/rockpi/rockpi4 cd rockpi4 docker run --rm --interactive --tty --device /dev/kvm --workdir /recipes --mount "type=bind,source=$(pwd),destination=/recipes" --security-opt label=disable godebos/debos --scratchsize=8G rockpi4.yml |
Alternatively, you could directly download […]