OpenHarmony development board borrows BBC Micro:bit edge connector

OpenHarmony development board BBC micro bit

HopeRun’s HiHope development board features a HiSilicon Hi3861V100 32-bit RISC-V microcontroller compatible with OpenHarmony OS and looks very much like the BBC Micro:bit educational board notably with its edge connector. The board is also designed for youth education (in China) and comes with similar sensors, but there are some differences such as a 0.96-inch OLED instead of an LED matrix and support for offline voice recognition. There’s no wireless connectivity apart from NFC support. HiHope board specifications: MCU – HiSilicon Hi3861 32-bit microcontroller @ up to 160 MHz with 352 KB SRAM and 288 KB ROM, 2 MB flash memory Display – 0.96-inch OLED display with 128×64 resolution (SSD1306) Connectivity – NFC with R/W mode, card emulation,  and bidirectional mode USB – 1x USB Type-C port for power and programming Sensors – Temperature & humidity sensor, light sensor, microphone, 6-axis motion sensor Expansion – Edge connector with 5x rings (3x […]

HiPo batteryless NFC-powered 3.52-inch e-Paper display also comes with an SPI interface (Crowdfunding)

HiPo display NFC reader

HiPo is a 3.52-inch black and white e-Paper Display that can be updated through NFC without the need for external power and offers an alternative to the 4.2-inch and 7.5-inch NFC-powered e-Paper displays from Wareshare that also operate without battery only using the data and power from NFC to update the image. Alternatively, Guangdong SID Technology’s HiPo display can also be connected to an SPI adapter board allowing the users to connect it to an STM32 board provided by the company, but it could also be used with Arduino boards, ESP8266 & ESP32 hardware platforms, Raspberry Pi SBCs and MCU boards, or any platform with an SPI interface. HiPo specifications: Controller – Ultrachip UC8251 all-in-one driver IC with timing controller for E-tag applications Display 3.52-inch B&W e-Paper display with 360 x 240 resolution (model name: SE0352N01-MNG-A0) 3 seconds refresh time On-chip display RAM White reflectance above 30% Contrast ratio above […]

Nordic Thingy:53 is a dual-core Arm Cortex-M33 platform for IoT prototyping

Nordic Thingy:53

As one should have expected after Nordic Thingy:52 and Thingy:91 IoT devkits were introduced in 2017 and 2019 respectively, the Norwegian company has now launched the Thingy:53 platform based on Nordic Semi nRF5340 dual-core Arm Cortex-M33 SoC for IoT prototyping with Bluetooth Low Energy, Thread, Matter, Zigbee, IEEE 802.15.4, NFC, and Bluetooth mesh RF protocols. The development kit also incorporates the nPM1100 PMIC and nRF21540 Front End Module (FEM), a power amplifier/low noise amplifier (PA/LNA) range extender, as well as multiple motion and environmental sensors, as well as a rechargeable 1350 mAh Li-Po battery for power. Nordic Thingy:53 specifications: SoC – Nordic Semi nRF5340 SoC with 128 MHz Arm Cortex-M33 Application core with 1 MB Flash + 512 KB RAM, and a 64 MHz Arm Cortex-M33 Network core with 256 KB Flash + 64 KB RAM Wireless connectivity RF front-end nRF21540 FEM Protocols – Bluetooth LE, Bluetooth Mesh, NFC, Thread/Zigbee, […]

Higole F7G Plus Review – An affordable rugged tablet tested with Ubuntu 20.04 & Windows 11

Higole F7G Plus rugged tablet review

Ruggedized industrial-use PCs are typically expensive so it is refreshing to see Higole F7G Plus, an Intel Gemini Lake Refresh tablet, being offered at an affordable price. Higole kindly sent one for review and I’ve looked at functionality and performance running on Ubuntu and also its Windows performance. Hardware Overview The Higole F7G Plus is a 10.1 inch IPS touch screen rugged industrial fanless tablet that uses Intel’s 14 nm Gemini Lake Refresh N4120 processor which is a quad-core 4-thread 1.10 GHz Celeron processor boosting to 2.60 GHz with Intel’s UHD Graphics. Designwise, meeting the MIL-STD-810G standard which is the de facto ‘ruggedized’ standard for consumer products and covers whether the device can work in a broad range of environmental conditions including surviving dropping, is evidenced by the thick protective shell around the tablet. To ensure its IP67 Certification for waterproofing each of the ports are covered by detachable rubber […]

RAKwireless introduces 16 new WisBlock modules with LoRaWAN, NFC reader, etc…

Wisblock LoRaWAN & NFC Reader wireless modules

RAKwireless will add new modules to its WisBlock IoT modular system every quarter. Last July, WisBlock family welcomed 14 new modules, and in September 2021, RAK11310 Raspberry Pi RP2040 LoRaWAN core was introduced together with a new baseboard and various sensor modules. This time around, the company launched 16 new Wisblock modules with two wireless modules, one adding LoRaWAN to an ESP32 core module, the other acting as an RFID and NFC card reader, as well as six sensor modules, and eight “interface” modules ranging from barcode scanners to keypads. WisBlock Wireless modules RAK13300 WisBlock LPWAN module based on Semtech SX1262 transceiver extends the communication abilities of the RAK11200 ESP32 WiFi & Bluetooth LE module with LoRa / LoRaWAN. RAK13600 WisBlock NFC Reader enables reading and writing of NFC tags like RFID cards and other NFC enabled devices using NXP PN532 chip. WisBlock Sensor modules RAK12013 WisBlock Radar Sensor – […]

Unsurv offline – An ESP32 GNSS receiver board with NFC, accelerometer (Crowdfunding)

unsurv offline

Unsurv offline is a compact and lightweight board with ESP32 WiSoC, a GNSS receiver, an accelerometer, and NFC capabilities to help developers/users collect and analyze location data in a privacy-friendly way. Unsurv Technologies initially developed the board to better understand offline video surveillance with OpenStreetMap (OSM) data. It does so by using a database of camera locations from the OSM on the SD card, “counts” surveillance cameras as you walk past them, and you can then transmit data via NFC and visualize it on your smartphone. The accelerometer is used to wake up the board from deep sleep upon detection of motion. The company has now made the board open-source and other applications are also possible. Unsurv offline specifications: Wireless modules TTGO T-micro32 WiFi 4 and Bluetooth 4.2 module based on ESP32-PICO-D4 SiP with dual-core ESP32 processor, 4MB FLASH, ceramic antenna U-blox CAM-M8C (aka u-blox M8) module with concurrent reception […]

Chhavi – An ESP32-based fingerprint sensor with optional NFC, battery (Crowdfunding)

ESP32 Fingerprint sensor

Chhavi is a compact, wireless, touch-capacitive fingerprint sensor based on ESP32 WiFi and Bluetooth SoC that is offered with optional NFC connectivity and a battery. The Arduino programmable fingerprint sensor is equipped with Fingerprints‘ FPC BM-Lite fingerprint capacitive biometric sensor that’s much more compact and power-efficient than traditional optical fingerprint sensors. Chhavi specifications: SiP – ESP32-PICO-D4 system-in-package with ESP32 dual-core processor @ 240 MHz, 4 MB SPI flash Fingerprint sensor FPC BM-LITE Module with 99% accurate fingerprint sensing Sensor matrix: 160 x 160 pixels Number of pixels: 25,600 pixels Active sensing area: 8 x 8 mm Features – Automatic finger detection, one-to-one verification mode Durability – 10 million finger placements Connectivity 2.4 GHz 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi via ESP32 Bluetooth BLE 4.2/5.x via ESP32 Optional 13.56 MHz NFC via NXP PN7150 NFC I2C controller 3D antenna Display – FPC connector for display USB – 1x Micro USB port for power/charging, and […]

cuplTag battery-powered NFC tag logs temperature and humidity (Crowdfunding)

cuplTag NFC Tag sensor

Temperature and humidity sensors would normally connect to a gateway sending data to the cloud, the coin-cell battery-powered cuplTag NFC tag instead sends data to your smartphone after a tap. CulpTag is controlled by an MSP430 16-bit microcontroller from Texas Instruments which reads and stores sensor data regularly into an EEPROM, and the data can then be read over NFC with the tag returning an URL with the data from the sensor and battery, then display everything on the phone’s web browser (no app needed). cuplTag specifications: MCU – Texas Instruments MSP430FR2155 16-bit microcontroller @ 24 MHz Storage – 2K bytes EEPROM part of NT3H2111 for up to 188 temperature & humidity data points or 376 temperature-only data points Connectivity – Passive NFC, tap-to-read via NXP NT3H2111 NFC tag Sensors – HDC2021  temperature and humidity sensors Measurement interval – 3 minutes to 65535 minutes (Default: 10 minutes) Battery – CR1220 battery […]

UP 7000 x86 SBC