Like many people, I access Internet via an ADSL connection at home. ADSL stands for “Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line”, with Asymmetric being the key word here, as it just mean your download speed will be (much) higher than your upload speed. My ISP promises a theoretical 10 Mbps download speed, and 512 Kbps upload speed, and this is pretty close in reality: Data Rate: 10240 (downstream), 509 (upstream) kbps. Assuming a 265MB video, in the very best case (63 KB/s), it would take 1 hour and 12 minutes to upload a video to YouTube, but in practice it’s often closer to 2 or 3 hours. If it’s a video you’ve shot yourself, and copied inside your computer, there’s very little you can do, except processing the video with tools such as HandBrake to make it smaller before upload. But if the video files are located somewhere in the Internet, and […]
Building eLinks Text-based Web Browser with (Some Sort of) JavaScript Support
Yesterday, I’ve spend some time trying to find a text-based web browser with support for JavaScript. Although I doubt many people would need that, I’ll post my findings, and show how to build and enable Javascript in eLinks web browser to access the web from a terminal in Linux (Ubuntu/Debian). Bear in mind that the implementation is far from complete, and most pages won’t work, at least for now. Initial research pointed me to three potential candidates: links2, w3m + w3m-js extension, and elinks. Links2 used to have JavaScript, but support was poor, so they decided to remove it. w3m-js is an experimental patch to add JavaScript to w3m, but the link is broken, so we are left with elinks. If you just want a text based web-browser, and do not care about JavaScript, you can just install links2, w3m, or elinks with apt-get. The versions I’ve tried in Ubuntu […]
Congatec Announces conga-QA3 QSeven and conga-TCA3 COM Express CoMs Powered By Intel “Bay Trail” Celeron and Atom SoCs
Congatec has announced several computers-on-module (CoM) powered by Intel “Bay Trail” Celeron and Atom SoCs compliant with either QSeven (conga-QA3 CoM), or COM Express (conga-TCA3 CoM) standards to be used for embedded applications. conga-QA3 and conga-TCA3 specifications: SoC (Processor + Intel HD graphics + Chipset) Intel Atom E3845 (4 x 1.91 GHz, 2MB L2 cache, 10 W) Intel Atom E3827 (2 x 1.75 GHz, 1MB L2 cache, 8 W) Intel Atom E3826 (2 x 1.46 GHz, 1MB L2 cache, 7 W) Intel Atom E3825 (2 x 1.33 GHz, 1MB L2 cache, 6 W) Intel Atom E3815 (1.46 GHz, 512kB L2 cache, 5 W) Intel Celeron N2920 (4 x 1.86 GHz, 2MB L2 cache, 7.5 W) Intel Celeron J1900 (4 x 2 GHz, 2MB L2 cache, 10 W) System Memory conga-QA3 – Up to 8 GB onboard DDR3L 1333 MT/s conga-TCA3 – 2x SO-DIMM sockets for DDR3L memory modules up to […]
Wibtek TJ1800G & TJ1900G “Thin mini-ITX” Boards with Bay Trail-D Processors for DIY All-in-One Computers and mini PCs
Intel has made great progress in the low cost low power computer space thanks to Bay Trail based mini-ITX motherboards such as MSI J1800i and BIOSTAR J1800NH both with an Intel Celeron J1800 processor (10 W TDP) and selling for around $60, or the latest Intel NUC mini PC selling for $140 with a 7.5W TDP Celeron N2820. One of the requirements of mini-ITX specifications suggest boards to feature 20- or 24-pin “original ATX” power connectors, which requires a an ATX PSU, and adds to costs. One reader pointed out that another type of mini ITX boards dubbed “thin mini-ITX” do not require an ATX power supply, and could be powered by a standard 12V power supply just like Intel NUC. Thin mini-ITX Standard Thin mini-ITX has been defined by Intel a couple of years ago, and target the DIY market for All-in-One PC where you can buy an AIO […]
ZYBO Development Board Features Xilinx Zynq-7010 FPGA + ARM SoC, VGA and HDMI Output
Digilent ZYBO (ZYnq BOard) is a low cost development board powered by Xilinq Zynq-7010 SoC featuring a dual core ARM Cortex A9 processor and FPGA fabric. It’s using the same SoC as MicroZed, is in the same price range as it costs $189 ($125 for academic purpose), but adds video interfaces, namely bi-directional HDMI and VGA, that are not available in MicroZed. It does come however with less RAM (512 MB vs 1GB). Digilent ZYBO specifications: SoC – Xilinx ZYNQ XC7Z010-1CLG400C dual core Cortex A9 processor + FPGA with 28K Logic Cells (~430K ASIC gates). System Memory – 512MB x32 DDR3 w/ 1050Mbps bandwidth Storage – 128Mb Serial Flash w/ QSPI interface, MicroSD slot for Linux file system, EEPROM programmed with 48-bit globally unique EUI-48/64™ compatible identifier. Video I/O – Dual-role (Source/Sink) HDMI port, 16-bits per pixel VGA output port Audio I/O – Audio codec with headphone out, microphone and […]
$74 RIoTBoard Development Board Features Freescale i.MX 6Solo
RIoTBoard, which stands for “Revolutionizing the Internet of Things Board”, is a new Android & GNU/Linux development board sold by Element14 /Newark powered by Freescale i.MX6Solo Cortex A9 processor. The board also features 1GB DDR3 RAM, 4GB eMMC and plenty of ports including Gb Ethernet, HDMI, and more. The board can be used to design netbooks , nettops, mobile internet devices (MIDs), PDAs, portable media players (PMP) with HD video capability, portable navigation devices (PNDs), industrial control and test and measurement (T&M), and single board computers (SBCs). RIoTBoard specifications: SoC – Freescale i.MX 6Solo ARM Cortex A9 MPCore Processor @ 1 GHz with Vivante GC880 and GC320 GPUs for 3D & 2D graphics, and HD video processing unit. System Memory – 1GB DDR3 RAM Storage – 4GB eMMC, microSD and SD card slots Video Output – HDMI, LVDS, and parallel RGB interfaces Audio I/O – Analog headphone/microphone, 3.5mm audio jack […]
Cute Embedded Nonsense Hacks, Nouveau Driver for Tegra K1, and Android Defaults to ART
There’s been some news at the end of this week that may not warrant a full article, but are still fun and/or interesting nonetheless: comments by the lead developer of Fedora ARM led to “Cute Embedded Nonsense” meme on Google+, preliminary commit for open source drivers for Tegra K1’s GPU, and Android Open Source Project defaults to ART instead of Dalvik. If you have a Google+ account, and circled a few people involved in ARM Linux, you must have seen a few postings about “Cute Embedded Nonsense Hacks” in your feed. It all started when Jon Masters posted about Red Hat’s ARM SBSA platform requirements, and in particular one comment that reads: I am all for people installing their own kernels if they want to. I support aggressively defined standard platforms (not cute embedded nonsense hacks) but not locked platforms. You can keep both parts when it breaks, of course. […]
Linaro 14.01 Release with Linux Kernel 3.13 and Android 4.4.2
The first release of the year, Linaro 14.01, is now out with Linux Kernel 3.13 (baseline), Linux Kernel 3.10.28 (LSK), Android 4.4.2, and Ubuntu Linaro 14.01. The most important part of this release is support for Arndale Octa, which makes big.LITTLE processing code available to a low cost platform. Android 4.4.x is now on par with Android 4.3 in terms of support. Linaro has also decided to provide quarterly stable released with GCC, and Linaro GCC 4.7-2014.01 is the first quarterly stable release with the next one planned with Linaro 14.04. Here are the highlights of this release: Linaro Stable Kernel (LSK) 3.10.28-2014.01 with latest version of GTS patch set for big.LITTLE, and Android support Linux Linaro 3.13-2014.01: gator version 5.17 updated linaro-android-3.13-merge topic by John Stultz, the “Revert “PM / Sleep: Require CAP_BLOCK_SUSPEND to use wake_lock/wake_unlock” patch included uprobes v4 updated big-LITTLE-pmu topic from ARM Landing Team (LT) updated […]