This time of the year is normally a good period to buy 3D printers at a discounted prices ,as we’ve seen in the past with the popular Anet A8 model, which again is sold for $139.99 plus shipping right now, or if you are based in Europe as low as $129.99 with coupon GB23CC4. Another potentially interesting deal is the new Alfawise U30 3D printer which can be bought on GearBest for $165.99 plus shipping ($7.57 here) with coupon GBBFEX017. The 3D printer is also said to offer safety features, support for left handed people, and resume after power failure or running out of filament. Alfawise U30 main features: 2.8″ full color touchscreen placed on the left or right of the printer frame Storage – micro SD card slot, USB port Build volume – 220 x 220 x 250mm Nozzle diameter – standard 0.4mm nozzle Print speed – Up to […]
Diskio Pi 13.3″ DIY Tablet Kit for Raspberry Pi – Take 2 on Kickstarter
Diskio Pi was a DIY tablet kit for Raspberry Pi, ODROID-C2/XU4 and other compatible boards with a 13.3″ Full HD display that launched last year on Kickstarter. But the project failed likely due to the high costs (350 Euros and up for early bird pledges without battery nor SBC) and an elevated funding target of 400,000 Euros. But the team did not give up, worked on reducing costs, improved the design, and recently relaunched Diskio Pi on Kickstarter with a more achievable 52,096 Euros target, and reasonable pricing with rewards starting at 189 Euros including VAT. Diskio Pi “basic” DIY tablet kit content and main specifications: Display – Innolux 13.3″ TFT/IPS display with 1920×1080 resolution, WLED backlight + 10-point touch capacitive panel connected over USB 2.0 Video control board with HDMI 1.4 to eDP converter, stereo amplifier, and 2x 1W speakers Daughter board with Genesys USB hub, 9V to 5V/4A […]
PyGo Wearable Devices Create LoRa Mesh Networks (Crowdfunding)
Pycom has made some interesting IoT boards running MicroPython in the past starting with WiFi capable WiPy in 2015, and followed by various others supporting various wireless standard including Bluetooth, LoRa, Sigfox, and NB-IoT with LoPy and Fipy. The company launched all their boards via crowdfunding campaigns, and they are now back on Kickstarter for their PyGo plug-n-play wearable devices creating PyMesh networks with up to 12km range between nodes, and managed using Pylife mobile app. Typical use cases include basic connectivity (e.g. messaging) in remote areas without cellular access, and assets / pets / kids location tracking, There are two version of PyGo: PyGo1 with mesh networking only, and PyGo2 that adds cellular network access. Pygo hardware specifications: SoC – Espressif Systems ESP32 dual core WiFi 4 + BLE SoC System Memory – 64 Mbit (8MB) RAM Storage – 8MB flash Display – 128×36 OLED display Connectivity PyMesh up […]
Ubuntu 18.04 To Get 10 Years Long Term Support
Canonical releases new Ubuntu versions every six months, but most of those are then supported for 9 months only. If you want long term support, you need to install the LTS (Long Term Support) version released every two years such as Ubuntu 16.04 or Ubuntu 18.04 which are supported (for free) for 5 years. If for whatever reasons you cannot or do not want to update after 5 years, the system will not get any security fixes, unless you purchase a Ubuntu Advantage subscription with Extended Security Maintenance, which allows you for example to run a fully supported Ubuntu 12.04 (Server) until April 2020 (8-year support). But this will change for the better, as ZDNet reports that Mark Shuttleworth told the audience at a keynote at the OpenStack Summit in Berlin that Ubuntu 18.04 support will be extended from 5 years to 10 years “In part because of the very […]
Allwize K2 IoT Board Supports 169MHz Wize LPWAN Protocol (LoRa alternative)
LoRa, Sigfox, and NB-IoT are probably the most popular low power long range wireless protocols for the Internet of Things, but there are several others, including one I had never heard of: Wize. The Wize Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) protocol has been created in late 2017, leverages the “old and refurbished” 169 MHz frequency, support up to 20 km range, 20-year battery life, and is managed by the Wize Alliance with members including STMicroelectronics, Suez, Sagecom, Renesas, Analog Devices, Silicon Labs and many others. Despite being a recent protocol, the table below claims 3 millions of deployment for Wize, and showcases some of differences against LoRa, NB-IoT, and Sigfox. You may be confused as how the standard was created in at the end of 2017, but there are so many deployments, and 13 years experience. It appears Wize is derived from the older EN 13757 standard for gas […]
Compact Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ Launched for $25
The Raspberry Pi 3 B+ is likely the most popular maker board available today at $35, but it just got a little brother – Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ – that should also enjoy good popularity with a $25 price tag. The new model features the same BCM2837B0 quad core processor @ 1.4 GHz, and dual band WIFI connectivity, just in a smaller form factor. Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ specifications: SoC – Broadcom BCM2837B0 64-bit ARMv8 quad core Cortex A53 processor @ 1.4GHz with dual core VideoCore IV GPU System Memory – 512MB LPDDR2 Storage – micro SD slot Video & Audio Output – HDMI 1.4 and 4-pole stereo audio and composite video port Connectivity – WiFi 802.11 b/g/n/ac and Bluetooth 4.2 LE (via Cypress CYW43455 based module) USB – 1x USB 2.0 host port, 1x micro USB port for power Expansion 40-pin GPIO header MIPI DSI for Raspberry […]
MAIX Development Boards with Sipeed M1 RISC-V AI Module Launched for $5 and Up (Crowdfunding)
Sipeed M1 (aka MAIX-I)is a compact module based on Kendryte K210 dual core RISC-V processor designed for low power artificial intelligence workloads at the edge, such as face detection, object recognition, or audio processing. The module and some development boards are available on Taobao for the Chinese market, as well as YOYCart for the rest of the world, but the company has now launched several MAIX boards based on M1 module through an Indiegogo campaign with price starting at just $5 a piece. Sipeed MAIX Bit (aka MAIX Micro) is the cheapest one at $5 (early bird) / $6 with the following specifications: SoC – Kendryte K210 dual core 64-bit RISC-V processor @ 400 MHz (overclockable up to 800 MHz) with KPU CNN hardware accelerator APU audio hardware accelerator with support for up to 8 mics, up to 192 KHz sample rate FPIOA (Field Programmable IO Array) mapping 255 functions to […]
Intel Neural Compute Stick 2 with Myriad X VPU Finally Announced
Intel Neural Compute Stick was first introduced in early 2017 as a USB compute that allows AI inference at the edge with low power consumption. The stick is based on Myriad Movidius 2 VPU (Vision Processing Unit), and was found to significantly improve inference performance on Raspberry Pi 3 board over a proprietary GPU accelerated solution. However, a little later last year, Intel also announced Movidius Myriad X VPU with claims of up to 10 times DNN performance over Myriad 2 VPU. But so far, we would only see solutions launched with the latter, and it looks like Intel is finally ready to bring Myriad X VPU to the market with the company announcing Intel Neural Compute Stick 2 at Intel’s artificial intelligence (AI) developer conference in Beijing taking place on November 14 and 15. Intel NCS 2 (Neural Compute Stick 2) specifications: Processor – Intel Movidius Myriad X Vision Processing […]