pine64 News - CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

October 3, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Quartz64 Zero – A customizable, cost-optimized Rockchip RK3566T SBC with Raspberry Pi PCIe connector

The Quartz64 Zero is a thinner, cheaper version of the Quartz64 Model B with a Rockchip RK3566T quad-core Cortex-A55 SoC clocked at 1.6 GHz, 1GB LPDDR4, and HDMI and USB ports. The Quartz64 Zero has almost the same design as the Quartz64 with footprints for optional components (more on that later). Two noticeable differences are the presence of the 20-pin PCIe connector compatible with the one found on the Raspberry Pi 5 instead of a mini PCIe socket, and WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.4 support instead of just WiFi 5/Bluetooth 5.0. Quartz64 Zero specifications (changes highlighted in bold and strikethrough when items have been removed): SoC – Rockchip RK3566T CPU – Quad-core Cortex-A55 processor up to 1.6 GHz GPU – Arm Mali-G52 GPU supporting OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0/3.2, OpenCL 2.0, Vulkan 1.1 NPU – 0.8 TOPS NPU for AI acceleration (Unclear whether it’s present, not listed in the specs) System Memory […]

June 26, 2024June 26, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 9 Comments

Pine64 Oz64 RISC-V+Arm SBC to support NuttX RTOS and Debian Linux

Pine64 Oz64 is an upcoming credit card-sized SBC based on the SOPHGO SG2000 RISC-V+Arm(+8051) processor that currently runs NuTTX RTOS, and a Debian Linux image is also in the works. With a name likely inspired by the earlier Pine64 Ox RISC-V SBC, the Oz64 is a more powerful embedded board with 512 MB of DRAM integrated into the SG2000, a microSD card, an eMMC flash module connector, Ethernet port, WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2, a USB 2.0 Type-A host port, and a 26-pin GPIO header. Pine64 Oz64 specifications: SoC – SOPHGO SG2000 Main core – 1 GHz 64-bit RISC-V C906 or Arm Cortex-A53 core (selectable) Minor core – 700 MHz 64-bit RISC-V C906 core Low-power core – 25 to 300 MHz 8051 MCU core with 8KB SRAM NPU – 0.5 TOPS INT8, supports BF16 Integrated 512MB DDR3 (SiP) Storage MicroSD card slot eMMC flash module connector Display – Optional 2-lane […]

May 13, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Linux 6.9 release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 6.9 on LKML: So Thorsten is still reporting a few regression fixes that haven’t made it to me yet, but none of them look big or worrisome enough to delay the release for another week. We’ll have to backport them when they get resolved and hit upstream. So 6.9 is now out, and last week has looked quite stable (and the whole release has felt pretty normal). Below is the shortlog for the last week, with the changes mostly being dominated by some driver updates (gpu and networking being the big ones, but “big” is still pretty small, and there’s various other driver noise in there too). Outside of drivers, it’s some filesystem fixes (bcachefs still stands out, but ksmbd shows up too), some late selftest fixes, and some core networking fixes. And I now have a more powerful arm64 machine […]

April 30, 2024April 29, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

SBC Case Builder v3.0 can create thousands of cases for popular SBCs and standard motherboards (mini-ITX, Pico-ITX, NUC…)

SBC Case Builder V3.0 case design utility has just been released with the ability to create over 1,000 standard cases – not including customization – for popular SBCs from Raspberry Pi, Hardkernel, Orange Pi, Radxa, and others, as well as standard motherboards following Mini-ITX, Pico-ITX, NUC, Nano-ITX, etc.., and SBC adapters following these standards, meaning you could install a Raspberry Pi 5 into a mini-ITX case if needed. SBC Case Builder started as a command line utility for designing DIY case for SBCs relying on OpenSDAD in April 2022, but Edward Kisiel (hominoids) quickly released version 2 with a GUI in October or the same, and has now further improved the utility with the release of SBC Case Builder v3.0. Version 3.0 comes with many improvements but the main focus was to reuse existing and new PC standard form factor cases by creating SBC adapters and custom I/O Shields since […]

April 21, 2024April 21, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 15 Comments

Rockchip RK3588’s NPU open-source driver performs object detection at 30 FPS

Tomeu Vizoso has been working on an open-source driver for NPU (Neural Processing Unit) found in Rockchip RK3588 SoC in the last couple of months, and the project has nicely progressed with object detection working fine at 30 fps using the SSDLite MobileDet model and just one of the three cores from the AI accelerator. Many recent processors include AI accelerators that work with closed-source drivers, but we had already seen reverse-engineering works on the Allwinner V831’s NPU a few years ago, and earlier this year, we noted that Tomeu Vizoso released the Etvaniv open-source driver that works on Amlogic A311D’s Vivante NPU. Tomeu has now also started working on porting his Teflon TensorFlow Lite driver to the Rockchip RK3588 NPU which is closely based on NVIDIA’s NVDLA open-source IP. He started his work in March leveraging the reverse-engineering work already done by Pierre-Hugues Husson and Jasbir Matharu and was […]

January 24, 2024January 23, 2024 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

FOSDEM 2024 schedule – Open-source embedded, mobile, IoT, robotics, RISC-V, etc..

FOSDEM – which stands for Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting – is a free-to-participate event where thousands of developers meet in Brussels on the first week-end of February to discuss open-source software & hardware projects. FOSDEM 2024 will take place on February 3-4 with 880 speakers, 818 events, and 66 tracks. Although I won’t attend, I’ve created a virtual schedule like every year with sessions most relevant to the topics covered on CNX Software from the “Embedded, Mobile and Automotive” and “Open Hardware and CAD/CAM” devrooms, but also other devrooms including “FOSS Mobile Devices”, “ Energy: Reimagining this Ecosystem through Open Source”, “RISC-V”, and others. FOSDEM Day 1 – Saturday, February 3, 2024 10:30 – 10:55 – Screen Sharing on Raspberry Pi 5 Using VNC in Weston and Wayland with the Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded by Leon Anavi In 2023, embedded Linux developers received eagerly awaited news: […]

November 10, 2023 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Ubuntu Touch 20.04 OTA-3 release adds support for PinePhone and PineTab devices

UBPorts has just released Ubuntu Touch 20.04 OTA-3 based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS with the latest security updates and beta support for PinePhone, PinePhone Pro, PineTab, and PineTab 2, adding to the smartphones already supported by Ubuntu Touch 20.04 OTA-2. As a reminder, Ubuntu Touch was initially handled by Canonical for desktop/mobile convergence, but it was dropped when the company decided to refocus its efforts on cloud and IoT, and the UBPorts community took over and eventually outed the first stable Ubuntu Touch release in June 2017. The developers kept on improving the OS since then with new releases from time to time, but note that it should still be considered experimental only for most devices, and will not be suitable as a daily driver for the majority of people. The PinePhone and PineTab have been supported by Ubuntu Touch for a few years, but they had their own branch […]

August 17, 2023August 18, 2023 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Star64 RISC-V SBC can now boot Apache NuttX real-time operating system

Most of the software development efforts on the more powerful RISC-V boards like Pine64 Star64 or StarFive VisionFive 2 have been focusing on Linux, but Lup Yuen Lee tried something different and managed to boot Apache NuttX real-time operating system on the StarFive JH7110-powered Star64 SBC. NuttX may not often make the news, but they are plenty of supported platforms, and we previously played with it on the Sony SPresense board, and reported about NuttX RTOS on ESP32, so it’s good seeing the open-source real-time operating system add support for the RISC-V architecture. [Update: RISC-V support was added many years ago, sometimes around 2016] The main trick to boot NuttX on the Star64 is to make U-boot think the NuttX kernel is the Linux kernel. That means a Linux image such as sdcard.img for the VisionFive 2 board will be used to get OpenSBIU and U-boot bootloaders, and the NuttX […]