Versalogic Owl Small Form Factor Apollo Lake Embedded Computer Targets Military & Industrial Applications

VersaLogic Owl VL-EPU-4012 Embedded System Computer  In October 2019 we reported on the VersaLogic Harrier computer that was slightly bigger than a credit card. Just announced by the company is a new embedded computer system is being developed, the Owl. Basics of the VersaLogic Owl The intended uses are again industry and military-grade applications. The system uses ECC memory and the Embedded Processing Unit (EPU) format. The processing unit is an Intel Atom E39xx Platform,  5th Gen Apollo Lake processor with dual or quad-core options. Strength and Resilience The ECC memory is fixed to the board and can be up to 8 GB in size. This reduces the damage that can be caused by vibration and shock, making the system tough and resilient. Available Ports and Security Hardware-based security is through a TDM 2.0 chip. There are onboard power conditioning, mini-PCIe expansion sockets, analog inputs, standard USB 3.0 and 4x […]

ROCK PI N10 RK3399Pro SBC Sells for $99 and up

Rock Pi N10 RK3399Pro SBC

Rockchip RK3399Pro processor is based on the popular Rockchip RK3399Pro hexa-core Arm Cortex-A72/A53 processor plus an embedded neural processing unit (NPU) delivering up to 3 TOPS for AI acceleration. So far you had to spend over $200 to get either Toybrick RK3399Pro board or 96Boards RK3399Pro development kit to get started with the processor. Some other companies announced their own RK3399Pro SBC such as Pine64  RockPro64-AI, or Khadas Edge board, but those are not available yet. But there’s now a more affordable Rockchip RK3399Pro SBC courtesy of Radxa’s  Rock Pi N10 available on Seeed Studio in three variants: $99 model A with 4GB RAM (3GB for CPU/GPU + 1GB for NPU), 16GB eMMC flash $129 model B with 6GB RAM (4GB for CPU/GPU + 2GB for NPU), 32GB eMMC flash $169 model C with 8GB RAM (4GB for CPU/GPU + 4GB for NPU), 64GB eMMC flash Rock Pi N10 specifications: […]

Run Raspberry Pi 4 Cooler with a New Firmware & One Easy Trick

Raspberry Pi 4 Power Consumption

Raspberry Pi 4 launched last June with a lot of buzz as it offered much better performance, more memory, and faster I/Os compared to Raspberry Pi 3 model B+. Benchmarks confirmed the improved performance but also revealed a heatsink was necessary to ensure optimal performance under heavy loads.  Some companies also launched an oversized heatsink+fan combo for the board, but it’s really over the top and absolutely not necessary unless possibly in higher room temperature (50°C?). The Raspberry Pi Foundation also worked on improving the video to lower CPU temperature and power consumption, and a few days later released a beta version of VLI firmware that dropped the temperature by 3 to 5°C. Good effort but sadly the updated VLI firmware (used for the PCIe to USB controller) also had the side-effect of much slower USB performance. A new VLI firmware was released in September offering both a lower temperature […]

Orange Pi 4/4B Board with RK3399, 4GB RAM Launched for $50 and Up

Orange Pi 4

Orange Pi 4 is yet another Rockchip RK3399 SBC with 4GB RAM, while Orange Pi 4B adds Gyrfalcon Lightspeeur 2801A AI Accelerator. Both models were announced about 10 days but were not for sale just yet. The company has now launched the board on both Aliexpress and their newly opened Amazon store with three options: Orange Pi 4 with no eMMC flash – $49.90 Orange Pi 4 with 16GB eMMC flash – $59.90 Orange Pi 4B with 16GB eMMC flash, Gyrfalcon NPU – $69.90 Quick reminder of Orange Pi 4/4B specifications: SoC – Rockchip K3399 hexa-core big.LITTLE processor with two Arm Cortex A72 cores, four Cortex A53 cores, and an ARM Mali-T860 MP4 GPU with support for OpenGL ES 1.1 to 3.1 support, OpenVG1.1, OpenCL and DX 11 System Memory – 4 GB LPDDR4 Storage – Optional 16 GB eMMC flash, micro SD card NPU (Orange Pi 4B only) – Gyrfalcon […]

NanoPi NEO2 Black Arm Linux SBC for Headless Applications Launched for $20 and Up

NanoPi NEO2 Black CNC Metal Case

NanoPi NEO2 Black is an Allwinner H5 SBC designed for headless applications that improves on the existing NanoPi NEO2 board by adding an eMMC flash module support, and higher memory capacity (up to 1GB RAM). The board was announced last month, but it’s now available for purchase for $19.99 plus shipping on FriendlyElec website. Here’s a reminder of the specifications: SoC – Allwinner H5 quad-core Cortex A53 processor with an ARM Mali-450MP GPU System Memory – 1GB DDR3 Storage – MicroSD card slot, eMMC flash module connector Connectivity – Gigabit Ethernet (via RTL8211E-VB-CG chip) USB – 1x USB 2.0 host port, 1x micro USB OTG port, 1x USB via headers Expansion headers 10-pin header with I2C, UART, GPIOs, and power signals (5V in/out + GND) 6-pin header with 1x USB, Line Out (stereo), 1x GPIO Debugging – 2-pin unpopulated header for serial console / debugging Misc – Power and system […]

NanoPi M4B Rockchip RK3399 SBC Drops the USB 3.0 Hub, Adds Bluetooth 5.0, an ADB Switch

NanoPi M4B

NanoPi M4 was launched last year (2018) as a Rockchip RK3399 SBC following Raspberry Pi 3B+ form factor with 2 or 4GB DDR3 RAM, and was followed by NanoPi M4V2 this September with 4GB LPDDR4 memory, and power & recovery buttons. FriendlyELEC has been working on yet another revision with NanoPi M4B mixing some of the features of M4 and M4V2 such as DDR3 memory and power & recovery buttons, but the biggest change is the removal of the USB 3.0 hub which allowed for four USB 3.0 port, and now the company is going native leveraging the two USB 2.0 interfaces and two USB 3.0 interfaces inside Rockchip RK3399 processor which should lower the BoM cost, and in some cases improve performance. NanoPi M4B specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3399 big.LITTLE hexa-core processor with 2x Arm Cortex-A72 @ up to 2.0GHz, 4x Cortex-A53 @ up to 1.5GHz, a Mali-T864 GPU […]

Lenovo Enters the SBC Market with Leez LP710 RK3399 Board

Lenovo Leez P710 SBC

It’s always interesting to look into mainline Linux changelog either to find out about new software features, but also new hardware platform. And earlier today, I wrote about Linux 5.4 release, I noticed comments about “Leez RK3399 P710 SBC“. After searching a bit, it turns out it’s a single board computer by Lenovo, which the company apparently showcased at World Mobile Congress in Spain last February. Leez is apparently a team part of Lenovo. Lenovo Leez P710 board specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3399 hexa-core processor with 2x Cortex-A72 cores @ up to 2.0 GHz, 4x Cortex-A53 cores, and an Arm Mali-T860MP4 GPU System Memory – 2 or 4GB LPDDR4 Storage – 16GB eMMC flash, MicroSD card slot Video Output – HDMI 2.0a up to 4K @ 60 Hz, 4-lane MIPI DSI, DisplayPort via USB-C port Audio – Audio jack + digital audio output via HDMI Camera I/F -2x 4-Lane MIPI-CSI […]

Linux 5.4 Release – Main Changes, Arm, MIPS & RISC-V Architectures

Linux 5.4 Changelog

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 5.4: Not a lot happened this last week, which is just how I like it. And as expected, most of the pull requests I got were for the 5.5 merge window, which I’ll obviously start working through tomorrow. What little there is here is mostly some networking updates (mix of network drivers and core networking), and some minor GPU driver updates. Other than that it’s a small collection of random other things all over. The appended shortlog is small enough that you might as well just scroll through it. Anyway, this obviously opens the merge window for 5.5. It’s not ideal timing with Thanksgiving week coming up, but it hopefully shouldn’t be too much of an issue. If I fall behind (not because I’m all that big of a fan of the indiscriminate and relentless turkey-killing holiday) it’s because we’ve got […]

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