CHUWI Minibook Amber Lake mini Laptop to sell for $499 and Up (Crowdfunding)

CHUWI Minibook

We’ve already covered several Intel Amber Lake mini laptops with the likes of One Netbook One Mix 3 Yoga or GPD Pocket 2 Max both powered by Intel Core m3-8100Y and equipped with respectively 8.4″ and 8.9″ displays with 2560×1600 resolution. Those are ultra-compact yet powerful machines, which come at a relatively high cost, with for instance the Mix 3 Yoga going for about $760. But there’s another model coming up with CHUWI minibook with similar specifications and an 8″ display that will be offered for as low as $499. The trick is that only 300 pieces part of the “Super Early Birds Perk” will be available at that price when the product launches on Indiegogo on June 19. The retail price should be around $669 since the discount is said to be around 25%. There will also be a cheaper Intel Celeron N4100 Gemini Lake model, but price has […]

$69.99 Gyrfalcon 2803 Plai Plug Delivers 24 TOPS per Watt

2803 Plai Plug

Last year we covered an alternative to Intel Movidius Neural Compute Stick with Orange Pi AI Stick 2801 powered by Gyrfalcon Lightspeeur 2801S neural processor, and delivering up to 5.6 TOPS, or 2.8TOPS @ 300mW for $69.  Since then Gyrfalcon introduced Lightspeeur 2803(S) AI accelerator delivering up to 24 TOPS, or 16.8 TOPS @ 700 mW. We’ve recently seen the new neural processor will be integrated into SolidRun  i.MX 8M Mini & Nano systems-on-module, and today the company published a press release to announce their latest 2803 Plai Plug providing an upgrade to their existing 2801 Plai Plug (Orange Pi AI Stick 2801) for about the same $69.99 price tag. Gyrfalcon 2803 Plai Plug preliminary specifications: AI Accelerator – Gyrfalcon Lightspeeur 2803S with 2-dimensional Matrix Processing Engine (MPE) and AI Processing in Memory (APiM) Storage – eMMC flash Host interface – USB 3.0 port Power Consumption – 700mW at 16.8 […]

UP Xtreme Whiskey Lake-U SBC Launched for €249 and up (Crowfunding)

UP Extreme SBC

Back in March, I was tipped about AAEON’s upcoming UP Xtreme Whiskey Lake board equipped with Intel’s latest 15W processors, and providing a boost in performance compared to their previous UP boards, including UP Squared board introduced in 2016 with a choice of Apollo Lake processors. The company has now finally launched a Kickstarter campaign to let the public pledge for UP Xtreme SBC for €249 and up. UP Xtreme Whiskey Lake-U SBC specifications: SoC (one or the other) Intel Celeron 4305UE dual-core processor @ up to 2.2 GHz with 2MB cache, Intel UHD 610 graphics Intel Core i3-8145UE dual-core 4-thread processor @ up to 2.1 GHz / 3.9 GHz (Turbo) with 4MB cache, Intel UHD 620 graphics Intel Core i5-8365UE quad-core 8-thread processor @ up to 1.6 GHz / 4.1 GHz (Turbo) with 6MB cache, Intel UHD 620 graphics Intel Core i7-8665UE quad-core 8-thread processor @ up to 1.9 […]

MOVI Shield Enables Offline Speech Recognition of 150 Sentences on Arduino and Raspberry Pi

MOVI Shield Arduino

Smart speakers normally work both offline and online, but their offline ability is usually limited to just one or two wake words, that when detected let the speakers listen to speech that it will send the cloud for further processing. It’s done that way because the speakers would not have enough resources, e.g. processing power, storage to contain the whole data required for natural speech processing, and wake words reduce the number of requests to the cloud, and improve privacy. But in some cases, you may not need the full language, and instead would like to use several voice commands to control a device without the need or the ability to connect to the Internet/Cloud. So Audeme has designed an Allwinner A13 based Arduino shield named MOVI (My Own Voice Interface), and that can recognize and/or synthesize up to 150 full sentences of your choice in English, Spanish or German. […]

Software Development on Librem 5 and PinePhone Linux Phones is Progressing Nicely

PinePhone LuneOS

Several Linux phones are expected this year including Purism Librem 5 and Pine64 PinePhone. Both companies have sent phone development kits out to developers a few months ago, and we are starting to see some nice progress for both phones. What made me write this post is an update from Purism comparing the boot time on Librem 5 running PureOS Linux distribution without specific optimizations yet, and HTC One Android smartphone.  Librem 5 smartphone devkit takes 13 seconds to get to the lockscreen, while the Android phone takes over 40 seconds. Fair enough, most people won’t boot their phone often, but it still nice to know it won’t take long to turn on the phone from power off state.  They also posted a progress report at the end of May saying calls are now working with better audio quality, fixed various issue with messaging in Chatty, work on Linux […]

HT-102 is a $130 Thermal Camera for Android Phones

HT-102 Thermal Camera for Android Phone

Thermal cameras are useful to accurately monitor the temperature of electronics components, people,  fires, houses, and so on. Thermal imaging cameras can be relatively expensive and one way to lower the cost and make sharing of results easier is to get a model that connects to your smartphone. The ones listed on Amazon cost $200 and up, but you’ll find HT-102 thermal camera for Android phones on Chinese websites such as GearBest or Banggood for around $130. HT-102 specifications: Material: metal Capture Temperature Range – -20 to 300°C Accuracy – ±3℃ or ±5% of reading Resolution – 0.1℃ or 0.1℉ Working band – 8-14μm Horizontal viewing angle / vertical viewing angle – 43°±1°/ 43°±1° Infrared image resolution – 32 x 32 Visible image resolution – 640 x 480 Phone I/F – USB type-C port for data and power Dimensions – 60  x 30 mm Weight – 19 grams Temperature Range […]

Bye Bye Camera Notch, Hello Under Display Camera

Death of the camera notch

As phone manufacturers tried to stretch the screen to body to the theoretical limit of 100%, some not-always-broadly popular design choices had to be made. And so the camera notch was born to expand the screen, which resulted into an ultra-thin top bezel, combined with a small cut-out for the front-facing camera that many people dislike. If you are one of those people, I have good news: the death of the camera notch could be near thanks to under display cameras. Xiaomi was the first company to release a demo this morning through a tweet by Alvin Tse, Head of Pocophone Global for Xiaomi. Check this out from our R&D team! @Xiaomi continues to innovate and we have some exciting tech up our sleeves. RT if you love under display camera! #xiaomi pic.twitter.com/4Rlzt9uRAd — Alvin T (@atytse) June 3, 2019 We can see two nearly identical poco phones above, except […]

Silicon Labs Demonstrates Bluetooth 5.1 Location Technology (Video)

Bluetooth 5.1 Location Base Station

Recently there are been advancements related to precise indoor positioning with the announcement for Bluetooth 5.1 and 802.15.4z. Both can provide 1 to 10 centimeters accuracy with minimal lag, and Bluetooth 5.1 achieves this through Angle of Arrival (AoA) and Angle of Departure (AoD) features and an antenna array. I had never seen the new feature in action, but Silicon Labs recently demonstrated Bluetooth 5.1 location technology at Arrow IoT summit with a DMX-512 connected light following a person carrying a Bluetooth 5.1 tag. It looks fairly accurate, and it does not have a 3-6 seconds lag like previous solutions based on earlier versions of Bluetooth? So what does one need to enable Bluetooth 5.1 location finding? First, we’ll need a Bluetooth 5.1 base station with an antenna array, The one used above includes a 16 antenna array (4×4 grid) used to calculated angles of departure and arrival and ultimately […]

EmbeddedTS embedded systems design