Review of SONOFF ZBCurtain Zigbee Smart Curtain Motor

SONOFF ZBCurtain Review

Recently, Sonoff has released a new Zigbee product – called ZBCurtain – that turns your ordinary curtains into smart curtains. With this product, you can experience new benefits when using your curtains, such as automatic opening/closing, remote control through your mobile device, or setting up advanced automation to control your curtains based on factors such as temperature, humidity, or even using input from the other sensors. These smart capabilities provide benefits for your home or workplace, such as increased safety, energy savings, and convenience. The Sonoff Zigbee Curtain Motor (or ZBCurtain for shorts) can be integrated with your existing ordinary curtains, transforming them into smart curtains that can be controlled remotely via your smartphone, your voice commands, or even from a traditional remote controller. ZBCurtain Unboxing Within the package, we can find a wireless remote control, main motor units with a 3.5-meter long cable, and mounting brackets to attach the […]

MobileTrans – A secure phone-to-phone transfer solution (Sponsored)

Wondershare mobiletrans phone transfer

If you have just purchased a new phone and feel daunted by the task of transferring data from your old phone, Wondershare MobileTrans secure phone-to-phone transfer solution could be a lifesaver. Trusted by more than 500,000 users worldwide, the MobileTrans program can help you transfer WhatsApp data, photos, apps, messages, videos, and more between your new and old phone, no matter if you’ve switched from Android to iPhone or vice versa, or kept faithful to the same operating system. WhatsApp Data Transfer The software allows users to migrate WhatsApp data easily from iPhone to Android and vice versa including messages, stickers, media such as photos, videos, and audio messages, as well as documentation, locations, emojis, and contacts. It’s also possible to restore WhatsApp backups from Google Drive to an iPhone. MobileTrans also works with Whatsapp Business Transfer and GBWhatsApp, as well as other messaging apps such as LINE. Kik and […]

Picovoice on-device speech-to-text engines slash the requirements and cost of transcription

Speech-to-text benchmarks accuracy

Picovoice Leopard and Cheetah offline, on-device speech-to-text engines are said to achieve cloud-level accuracy, rely on tiny Speech-to-Text models, and slash the cost of automatic transcription by up to 10 times. Leopard is an on-device speech-to-text engine, while Cheetah is an on-device streaming speech-to-text engine, and both are cross-platform with support for Linux x86_64, macOS (x86_64, arm64), Windows x86_64, Android, iOS, Raspberry Pi 3/4, and NVIDIA Jetson Nano. Looking at the cost is always tricky since companies have different pricing structures, and the table above basically shows the best scenario, where Picovoice is 6 to 20 times more cost-effective than solutions from Microsoft Azure or Google STT. Picovoice Leopard/Cheetah is free for the first 100 hours, and customers can pay a monthly $999 fee for up to 10,000 hours hence the $0.1 per hour cost with PicoVoice. If you were to use only 1000 hours out of your plan that […]

Khadas Tea – A MagSafe Hi-Fi headphone amplifier to play lossless audio on smartphones (Crowdfunding)

Khadas Tea magnetic headphone amplifier

From this side of the Internet, Khadas is better known for their single board computer, but the company has also made Hi-Fi audio products starting with the Khadas Tone in 2018 as an add-on board for Khadas VIM/VIM2 SBC, followed by Khadas Tone 2 Pro mini desktop Hi-Fi system in 2020. The latest audio product from Khadas is a smartphone accessory with Khadas Tea being a thin MagSafe-compatible magnetic Hi-Fi headphone amplifier based on aptX HD and LDAC capable Qualcomm QCC5125 Bluetooth SoC and ESS ES9281AC Pro DAC that sticks to the back of your phone. Khadas Tea specifications: Bluetooth Audio SoC – Qualcomm QCC5125 Bluetooth 5.0 audio chipset USB DAC – ESS ES9281AC Pro Amplifier – RT6863D (Buffer Stage) Audio I/O 3.5mm headphone jack Built-in stereo microphone for making and receiving calls over Bluetooth Sampling Rate USB: up to 32bit 384KHz @ PCM, or DSD 256 (Native) Bluetooth: up […]

Picovoice Cobra Voice Activity Detection Engine shown to outperform Google WebRTC VAD

PicoVoice Cobra VAD

Picovoice Cobra Voice Activity Detection (VAD) engine has just been publicly released with support for Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone, NVIDIA Jetson Nano, Linux 64-bit, macOS 64-bit, Windows 64-bit, Android, iOS, and web browsers that support WebAssembly. Support for other Cortex-M and Cortex-A based SoCs can also be made available but only to enterprise customers. Picovoice already offered custom wake word detection with an easy and quick web-based training and offline voice recognition for Raspberry Pi, and even later ported their voice engine to Arduino. Cobra VAD is a new release, and, like other VADs, aims to detect the presence of a human voice within an audio stream. Picovoice Cobra can be found on Github, but note this is not an open-source solution, and instead, libpv_cobra.so dynamic library is provided for various targets, together with header files and demos in C, Python, Rust, and WebAssembly, as well as demo apps for iOS […]

Review of FamiSafe Phone Tracking & Parental Control App (Sponsored)

Android Phone Tracking

CNXSoft here. I’ve been tasked with reviewing Famisafe parental control app for Android and iOS acting both as a parental control app and phone tracker app and designed for parents who want to track their kids’ location and better control when to use the phone and what content they may access. The first thing to get started is to download the free trial on either Android or iOS. I actually downloaded both versions for FamiSafe for this review, since I used Huawei Y9 Prime 2019 (Android 10) as the “parent” smartphone, and an iPhone 6 as the “kid” phone. Famisafe Initial Configuration We’ll have to start with the “parent” phone. After a welcome screen explaining some of the main features including offensive content detection, device & app usage rules, web filter, etc.. you’ll be asked to select whether it’s the parent or kid device. Once we select “Parent” we’ll be […]

ESP RainMaker Eases Cloud Integration & Mobile App Development for ESP32-S2 SoC

ESP RainMaker Android App

Espressif Systems is well-known for its low-cost, well-supported WiFI and Bluetooth SoC for IoT products and projects. But in recent years, the company has also come up with application-specific development boards and corresponding software frameworks to help customer develop their own. Those boards include ESP32-LyraTD-MSC for smart audio applications, or for ESP32-S2-Kaluga-1 multimedia applications using display and camera. The company is now offering another solution to help makers integrate ESP32-S2 secure WiSoC with the cloud and create a mobile app. Meet ESP RainMaker. Specifically, ESP RainMaker provides four main components:: Device Agent SDK to perform network provisioning, OTA updates and facilitate communication with the cloud. Based on the ESP-IDF SDK. Amazon’s AWS powered Transparent Cloud Middleware makes the device’s attributes accessible to the user’s phone applications or other third-party services via RESTful APIs. iOS/Android phone apps to configure and manage the connected device. The apps are “self-adapting”, meaning they can […]

$7 Sonoff D1 Smart Dimmer Switch Supports Mobile App, RF433 Remote, and Voice Assistants

Sonoff D1 Smart Dimmer Switch & RF433 Remote

ITEAD Studio Sonoff is a family of WiFi or/and 433 MHz RF connected smart home switches, sockets, light bulbs or other products for home automation. They are usually based on ESP8266 WiSoC and while the pre-loaded firmware works with eWelink Android/iOS app and popular voice assistant, it’s also possible to load open-source firmware such as Sonoff-Tasmota or ESPurna to add MQTT and other protocols in order to integrate those with home automation solution such as Domoticz, or something control those from your web browser. The company has now launched another Sonoff device, namely Sonoff D1 smart dimmer switch which – as its name implies – will allow you to dim incandescent and dimmable LED lights. Sonoff D1 smart dimmer switch specifications: Connectivity – RF433 and 802.11b/g/n WiFi 4 Max Current – 1A Max Power – 400W for Incandescent lamp, and 150W for LED light Power Supply – 110V-230V AC input […]

UP 7000 x86 SBC