Anet A8 was one of the first sub $200 3D printer I found last last year, reviews were surprisingly positive. It is now sold for around $150 shipped (with A8PRINT coupon), and experienced reviewers often recommend it to people wanting to get started with 3D printing on a budget. But last week, as I browsed products on Banggood, I found something even cheaper with 101Hero PYLON 3D printer going for $107.99 shipped with coupon 349da5, and further research lead me to the official website where they sell it for $99 excluding shipping, and provide documentation and video tutorials. 101Hero PYLON 3D printer specifications: Printing technology – FDM (Fused deposition modeling) Host Material – Steel + ABS XYZ Bearings – Steel Print Size – 100 x 100mm Layer thickness – 0.1mm Nozzle diameter – 0.4mm Printing material – PLA Material Diameter – 1.75mm Power Supply – 20W Dimensions – 260 x […]
MACCHIATOBin based DIY ARM Desktop, DragonBoard 820c based DIY ARM Laptop (Video)
2017 may be the year of the (ARM based) Linux desktop, sort of. We’ve already seen GIGABYTE ARM development PC powered by a Socionext SC2A11 Synquacer 24-core ARM Cortex A53 processor that will be available in December, and apparently working fairly well already. But there are even more options, as Bernhard Rosenkränzer (Bero) from the Linaro Mobile Group, and unofficial Linaro superstar, has decided to create his own ARM based desktop and laptop, based on respectively MACCHIATOBin board with a Marvell ARMADA 8040 quad core Cortex A72 processor, and DragonBoard 820c board with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 quad core Krait processor. Since MACCHIATOBin board complies with mini-ITX form factor, he could simply use off the shelf parts with a standard desktop case with power supply, NVIDIA or AMD Radeon graphics card, 16GB memory modules, and a 2 TB SSD drive. The AMD Radeon card fried due to overheating, so the […]
HeartyPatch is an Open Source Wireless ECG Patch Powered by ESP32 WiSoC (Crowdfunding)
Smart health gadgets will soon have a bigger part to play in our lives, especially for health monitoring. It mainly started with fitness trackers, but now we are starting to see connected devices such as blood pressure monitors, including the upcoming watch like Omron HeartVue, thermometer, scales, vital sign monitoring systems, certified medical SBC‘s to allow engineers to developer their own medical applications, and even open source surgical robots. HeartPatch is one of those medical board that specifically aims at measuring ECG data, and sent it over Bluetooth or WiFi thanks to Espressif ESP32 WiSoC. HeartPatch specifications: SoC – Espressif Systems ESP32 dual core Tensilica LX6 processor with Wi-Fi/Bluetooth ECG Chip – Maxim MAX30003 analog front-end USB – 1x micro USB connector for programming, data, power, and battery charging Debugging – USB-UART bridge based on CP2104 Misc – Onboard Snap-on Buttons for disposable electrode pads, RGB LED, Battery – 450 […]
Sonoff B1 Smart Light Bulb Review – Part 1 : eWeLink Android App and Teardown
ITEAD Studio has a popular family of home automation devices call Sonoff with WiFi switches, smart sockets, RF to WiFi bridges and so on. All WiFi devices are based on Espressif ESP8266 or ESP8285, and while the company provide a stock firmware working with eWelink app, at least two communities have formed around Sonoff and other similar devices providing two open source firmware alternatives: ESPurna and Sonoff-Tasmota. The company has sent me Sonoff B1 smart RGB light bulb for review. Today, I’ll check out the light with eWelink app for Android, and do a teardown, before trying one of the open source firmware in the second part of the review. Sonoff B1 Unboxing Some Chinese products come in a blank cardboard boxes, but Sonoff’s light bulb comes with in a nice looking retail package that would look good on store’s shelves. One of the side lists the specifications with an […]
Nokia 3310 3G Dumb Phone Works with 2G & 3G Networks
Many people use smartphones now, but “dumb” feature phones are still being sold, as they are cheaper, some may find smartphones too complicated to use, while others wary about privacy issues. However, most feature phones comes with 2G connectivity, and with 2G sunset in many countries, I’ve recently realized it’s not so easy to find a simple phone with 3G cellular connectivity. The good news is that Nokia 3310 3G has just been announced by HMD global. Nokia 3310 3G specifications: SoC – TBD System Memory – TBD Storage – 64 MB storage; MicroSD card slot supporting up 32GB Display – 2.4” QVGA (320×240) color display Keyboard – “beautiful push buttons and iconic, shaped design” Camera – 2MP camera with LED flash Audio – Headphone jack Cellular Connectivity 2G/ 3G connectivity: dual band 900/1800 MHz +3G Band 1 and 8 (Single SIM) quad band GSM 850/900/1800/1900 + 3G Band 1, […]
Amazon Introduces Echo 2, Echo Plus, Echo Connect, and Echo Spot Alexa Devices
Beside their “all-new” Amazon Fire TV 2017, Amazon has made a bunch of other announcements mostly related to their Alexa services with four new or updated Echo devices: the “all-new” Echo, the Echo Plus, Echo Connect, and the Echo Spot. 2017 Amazon Echo (aka Echo 2) The new second generation of the Alexa based Echo has a new smaller design, improved sound with Dolby processing, and a lower price at just under $100. Some of the key features include: Speakers – 2.5″ woofer and 0.6″ tweeter Connectivity Dual band 802.11 b/g/n WiFi for streaming music from Amazon Music, Spotify, Pandora, etc…, controlling smart devices Bluetooth LE Audio 3.5mm audio jack 7-mic array using beamforming technology and enhanced noise cancellation. Improved wake-word (“Alexa”) detection Various designs with 6 different fabrics Dimensions – 148 x 88 x 88 mm Weight – 821 grams The Echo can make free calls to the US, […]
Short Demo with 96Boards SynQuacer 64-bit ARM Developer Box
Even if you are working on ARM platforms, you are still likely using an Intel or AMD x86 build machine, since there’s not really a good alternative in the ARM world. Linaro talked about plans to change that at Linaro Connect Budapest 2017 in March, and a few days ago, GIGABYTE SynQuacer software development platform was unveiled with a Socionext SynQuacer SC2A11 24-core Cortex-A53 processor, and everything you’d expect from a PC tower with compartment for SATA drives, PCIe slots, memory slots, multiple USB 3.0 ports, and so on. The platform was just demonstrated a Linaro Connect San Francisco right after Linaro High Performance Computing keynotes by Kanta Vekaria, Technology Strategist, Linaro, and Yasuo Nishiguchi, Socionext’s Chairman & CEO. If you have never used a system with more than 14 cores, you’d sadly learn that the tux logos at boot times will only be shown on the first line, skipping […]
Qt/QML vs HTML5/AngularJS User Interfaces Showdown (Video)
We now live in a world where there’s a push for higher level programming languages either based on web technologies like HTML5 or JavaScript, or other interpreted languages such as Python, and lower level languages such as C, C++, or – maybe more understandably – Assembler are often avoided by newcomers. But there are advantages of using native code, as demonstrated by Sequality, a software engineering company, who asked a developer familiar with HTML and C++ to develop a demo of an embedded systems using HTML5 + AngularJS and Qt/QML. The developer had 160 hours to develop the user interface for each framework, and with the resulting demos running on a Raspberry Pi 3 board with Raspbian, it was found that the Qt/QML implementation delivered a more responsive and functional user interface compared to the HTML5 version which tended to lag, and lacked support for touchscreen and a software keyboard […]