low power News - Page 22 of 41 - CNX Software

November 8, 2022November 8, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 48 Comments

ODROID-N2L is a smaller, low-cost variant of ODROID-N2+ Arm SBC

ODROID-N2L SBC is a smaller and cheaper version of the ODROID-N2+ single board computer powered by an Amlogic S922X hexa-core Cortex-A73/A53 processor and offered with 2GB or 4GB single-chip LPDDR4X memory. While the ODROID-N2+ is the most popular board from Hardkernel, it’s also fairly larger than most hobbyist SBCs on the market, and following requests from customers, the company designed the ODROID-N2L with a compact form factor that is smaller than Raspberry Pi Model B SBCs and sold at a lower price at the cost of missing some of the features of its big brother. ODROID-N2L specifications: SoC – Amlogic S922X hexa-core big.LITTLE processor with 4x Arm Cortex A73 cores @ up to 2,208/2,400 MHz, 2x Arm Cortex A53 cores @ 1,908/2,016GHz, Arm Mali-G52 GPU @ 846MHz; 12nm manufacturing process System Memory – 2GB or 4GB LPDDR4 @ 3216 MT/s Storage – eMMC flash module socket up to 128GB, microSD […]

October 29, 2022February 27, 2023 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Everactive launches batteryless IoT devkit using Evernet low-power protocol

Everactive has launched a batteryless IoT devkit to let engineers evaluate its ultra-low-power energy harvesting solution and the Evernet wireless protocol for the “Hyperscale” Internet of Things. The kit is comprised of two environment sensors (ENV+ Eversensor) with a low-light photovoltaic harvester, one USB Evergateway, and an unlimited number of accounts to the Everactive developer console for data visualization. The ENV+ Eversensor features temperature, humidity, and pressure sensors, as well as a 3-axis accelerometer, supports the Evernet IoT protocol, and instead of using a battery for power, the device relies on a photovoltaic cell that provides enough energy for continuous data streaming to the USB gateway at a rate of once every 15 seconds. The public details about the development kit are rather light, but developers will have access to a developer console for data visualization, the ability to sandbox data & add virtual sensors, as well as access to […]

October 27, 2022October 27, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Easily add face detection to your project with the Person Sensor module

It’s now much easier to AI features to your project thanks to better tools, but as we’ve experienced when trying out Edge Impulse machine learning platform on the XIAO BLE Sense board, it still requires some effort and the learning curve may be higher than some expect. But for common tasks like face detection, there’s no reason for the solution to be hard-to-use or expensive, and Pete Warden (Useful Sensors) has designed the $10 Person Sensor fitted with a camera module pre-programmed with algorithms that detect nearby faces and reports the results over an I2C interface. Person Sensor specifications: ASIC – Himax HX6537-A ultra-low-power AI accelerator @ 400 MHz with 2MB SRAM, 2MB flash Camera Image Sensor – 110 degrees FOV Image scan rate – 7Hz with no facial recognition Image scan rate – 5Hz with facial recognition active Host interface Qwiic connector for the I2C interface up to […]

October 12, 2022October 12, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Arduino-shaped development board ships with a Nordic Semi nRF9160 module

Actinius Icarus SoM DK development board follows the Arduino Uno form factor and is equipped with the company’s Icacus SoM based on Nordic Semi nRF9160 system-in-package with LTE Cat-M, NB-IoT, and GPS connectivity. The development kit provides an eSIM on the module and an additional Nano SIM socket on the mainboard, Arduino headers for a wide range of I/Os and compatibility with Arduino Shields, a set of user LEDs, reset and user buttons, and a battery charging port. Icarus SoM DK specifications: Icarus SoM SiP – Nordic Semi nRF9160-SICA system-in-package with Arm Cortex-M33 MCU, 1024 KB flash, 256 KB SRAM, and LTE Cat-M1 (eMTC), Cat-NB1 (NB-IoT), and GPS connectivity Storage – 64Mbit SPI flash On-board eSIM Antennas – 2x u.FL connectors for LTE and GPS Sensor – Low power 3-axis accelerometer I/Os – 2x 20 castellated holes with GPIOS, I2C, SWD, Reset, SIM card signals, and power pins Supply Voltage […]

October 7, 2022October 7, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments

Olimex ESP32-C3-DevKit-Lipo is a tiny RISC-V board with WiFi 4, Bluetooth 5.0, and a LiPo battery charger

Olimex has just launched the ESP32-C3-DevKit-Lipo board based on ESP32-C3 RISC-V wireless microcontroller offering WiFI 4 and Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity, some I/Os, as well as USB and JTAG. As its name implies, the board can be powered by a LiPo battery and charged through a USB Type-C port. It offers up to 15 GPIO for expansion and comes with an ICSP connector in case you need to reflash or debug the bootloader through a JTAG interface. ESP32-C3-DevKit-Lipo specifications: Wireless module – Espressif Systems ESP32-C3-MINI-1-N4 module with: ESP32-C3 (ESP32-C3FN4) 32-bit RISC-V single-core processor up to 160 MHz with 4 MB embedded flash, 384 KB ROM, 400 KB SRAM (16 KB for cache), 8 KB SRAM in RTC Connectivity – 2.4 GHz 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi 4 1T1R up to 150 Mbps & Bluetooth LE 5.0 with PCB antenna USB – 1x USB Type-C port for programming and JTAG debugging Expansion – 2x 9-pin […]

October 4, 2022October 11, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Khadas Edge2 review with Android 12

We’ve already reviewed Khadas Edge2 Pro with Ubuntu 22.04, and I’ve now had time to test the ultra-thin Rockchip RK3588S SBC with Android 12, so I’ll report my experience checking out the features, running some benchmarks, playing videos and games, etc… Flashing Android 12 to Khadas Edge2 board Our board was running Ubuntu 22.04, so in order to enter OOWOW firmware system, I had to keep pressing the function key (middle), then shortly press the reset button, before releasing the function key and entering the OOWOW interface. We can see the Android 11 image from the list we saw last month is gone for good, and a new Android 12 image dated September 20, 2022 is available. I selected that one, and OOWOW downloaded the files and flashed it to the board. Within five minutes, Android 12 was up and running on the board. As somebody who had spent several […]

September 30, 2022October 4, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments

T-Embed is a battery powered WiFi controller with display and rotary encoder

LilyGo has launched yet another product based on the ESP32 family of microcontrollers with the T-Embed WiFi IoT controller powered by an ESP32-S3 dual-core processor, equipped with a color display and a rotary encoder, and powered by a battery. The device is programmable and can be used to control Smart Home and IoT devices connected over WiFi or Bluetooth. It also integrates a microphone and speaker, a microSD card for data logging, as well as a Grove connector and an 8-pin GPIO header for expansion. T-Embed specifications: Wireless module – ESP32-S3-WROOM-1 module with an ESP32-S3 dual-core Xtensa LX7 processor with WiFi 4 and Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity, 4 to 16MB QSPI flash, up to 8MB PSRAM, PCB antenna; (Note it’s unclear which exact version is used) Storage – MicroSD card socket Display – 1.9-inch IPS color TFT LCD with 320 x 170 resolution (ST7789 driver), 350 Cd/m2 brightness Audio – 2x […]

September 28, 2022September 29, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 13 Comments

3D game running on FPGA shown to be 50x more efficient than on x86 hardware

Sphery vs. shapes is an open-source 3D raytraced game written in C and translated into FPGA bitstream that runs 50 times more efficiently on FPGA hardware than on an AMD Ryzen processor. Verilog and VHDL languages typically used on FPGA are not well-suited to game development or other complex applications, so instead, Victor Suarez Rovere and Julian Kemmerer relied on Julian’s “PipelineC” C-like hardware description language (HDL) and Victor’s CflexHDL tool that include parser/generator and math types library in order to run the same code on PC with a standard compile, and on FPGA through a custom C to VHDL translator. More details about the game development and results are provided in a white paper. Some math functions were needed, including: floating point addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, reciprocals, square root, inverse square roots, vector dot products, vector normalization, etc. Fixed point counterparts were also used for performance reasons and to […]