radxa News - Page 14 of 15 - CNX Software

March 25, 2015 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Radxa Rock 2 Square is a Rockchip RK3288 Development Board for Hobbyists

When Radxa Rock 2 was first unveiled, it became clear it was not aimed at the hobbyist market, as it includes lot of features such as SATA, 3G modem, dual Gigabit Ethernet, up to 4GB memory and so on, and is likely to cost a few hundred dollars. The company is now working a cheaper baseboard called Radxa Rock 2 Square leveraging the same Radxa Rock 2 SoM used with the full-featured baseboard (now also called Radxa Rock 2 Full), but with less features and at price point that should be more affordable to individuals. Preliminary Rock 2 square specifications (derived from picture above): Processor/Memory/Storage – Via Rock2 SoM including Rockchip RK3288 quad core Cortex A17 processor, 2 to 4 GB RAM, and 16GB eMMC. External Storage – SATA and micro SD slot Video Output – HDMI, LVDS connector Audio I/O – HDMI, headphone jack, built-in microphone, and optical S/PDIF […]

March 13, 2015March 13, 2015 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 15 Comments

Radxa Rock Lite Board Price Drops to $39

When the new Radxa Rock Lite was announced for $59 in September 2014, it was one of the most inexpensive quad core ARM Linux development board available on the market. But ODROID-C1 board in December 2014, and especially Raspberry Pi 2 board in February 2015 changed all that, as these two quad core boards sell for $35 before shipping and taxes. So the company has now decided to drop the price to $39 for the Radxa Rock Lite board. Let’s remind us of Radxa Rock Lite specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3188 ARM Cortex-A9 quad core @ 1.6Ghz + Mali-400 MP4 GPU System Memory – 1GB DDR3 @ 800Mhz Storage – micro-SD SDXC up to 128GB Video Output – HDMI 1.4 up to 1080p@60hz, and AV output. LVDS interface. Connectivity – 10/100M Ethernet port, WiFi 150Mbps 802.11b/g/n with antenna Audio I/O – Audio S/PDIF, headphone jack Camera – CSI interface USB […]

December 24, 2014December 24, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments

WebGL Demos in Radxa Rock Pro Board Running Firefox OS 2.1

Radxa Rock Pro is a development board powered by Rockchip RK3188 quad core Cortex A9 processor, and although 2D/3D graphics acceleration via Mali-400MP4 is shown to be possible in Linux with tools like es2gears and glmark2-es2, full integration is seldom worked on, and things like WebGL may not work in web browsers. But thanks to the work of naobsd and MatchStick team, Firefox OS has been ported to this Rockchip development board, and as you’ll see in the video below, some WebGL demos work amazingly well. The hardware setup for this demo is comprised of Radxa Rock Pro development board, a 7″ LCD display with touchscreen, and some lego bricks :). WebGL demos can be found @ https://developer.mozilla.org/ja/demos/tag/tech:webgl, so you could try your own platform to see how it performs. If you own a Radxa Board Pro (or Lite), you can even build Firefox OS by yourself by following the […]

November 27, 2014November 27, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 21 Comments

Firefly-RK3288 Development Board in Mass Production, Selling for $140

Firefly-RK3288 development board has been an interesting, yet confusing story, at least to me. We’ve first heard about the Firefly board on July, but I was privately told in September that the board would only be sold in China by a T-Chip sales person, only to see it become available for $189 on Ebay, as well as on Taobao a few days later. But those first boards may have only been engineering sample, or more likely from a limited trial runs, as the company has now announced mass production had started. Let’s refresh our memory with the specifications: SoC – Rockchip 3288 quad core ARM Cortex A12 / A17 up to 1.8 GHz with Mali-T764 GPU supporting OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0 /3.0, and OpenCL 1.1 System Memory – 2G DDR3 Storage – 16 GB eMMC flash + micro SD slot Video Output HDMI 2.0 up to 3840×2160@60p VGA out (D-SUB connector) Dual MIPI, Dual LVDS and and […]

November 5, 2014March 25, 2015 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 9 Comments

Radxa Rock 2 Development Board Pictures and Specifications

Radxa Rock 2 is an upcoming development board based on Rockchip RK3288 quad core Cortex A12/A17 processor, which will run Android, and I would expect it to have better support for Linux desktop distributions than the original Radxa Rock board thanks to the current work done by Rockchip and Google on Chromium OS, which could bring 2D/3D graphics, and hardware video decoding to the platform. The board is not available for purchase yet, but pictures have been published, and specifications released. So the new board is comprised of a baseboard and a system-on-module (SoM), which should help Radxa’s customers design their own products, while using Radxa SoM, and doing early development on Radxa Rock 2 board. Radxa SoM specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3288 quad core ARM Cortex-A17 [email protected] with ARM Mali-T764 GPU with support for OpenGL ES1.1/2.0/3.0, OpenCL 1.1, DirectX 11 System memory – 2GB (4GB optional), 64bit DDR3@800Mhz Storage […]

October 24, 2014October 24, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 18 Comments

Radxa Rock Pro / Lite Development Boards are Now Open Source Hardware

Many projects claim to be “open source hardware” (OSHW) after they’ve released the schematics in PDF format, and source code. But the definition of OSHW has a few more requirements, which is practise means you’ve got to release schematics and PCB layout in the native format, not only in PDF, as well as the gerber files, and the bills of materials. Open Source Hardware can also truly be useful, if you can source the components. and for example, Broadcom BCM2835 processor might be impossible to procure, especially in small quantities, and that makes the Raspberry Pi unsuitable as an open source hardware platform. Existing companies / associations dedicated to OSHW include Arduino, Beagleboard.org, Olimex, etc.., and today Radxa has joined the club by releasing all hardware designs files for Rockchip RK3188 based Radxa Rock Pro and Lite development boards (2014 version) under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. This […]

September 22, 2014 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 15 Comments

The New Radxa Rock Lite Rockchip RK3188 Development Board Sells for $59

You may have heard about Radxa Rock Lite development board before, so let’s clear up the different versions of the Radxa Rock first. There’s a total of four Radxa Rock models: Radxa Rock (2013) – The original version with 2GB RAM, 8GB NAND Flash, and Wi-Fi/Bluetooth Radxa Rock Lite (2013) – 1GB RAM, 4GB NAND Flash, and Wi-Fi only Radxa Rock Pro (2014) – An evolution of the Radxa Rock still with 2GB RAM, 8GB NAND flash, Wi-Fi/Bluetooth but adding LVDS and camera interfaces. Radxa Rock Lite (2014) – 1GB RAM, no NAND flash, and Wi-Fi only The fist two versions appear to have been phased out, as they are not listed for sale on Radxa Rock website, and today, I’ll write about Radxa Rock Lite (2014). Radxa Rock Lite (2014) specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3188 ARM Cortex-A9 quad core @ 1.6Ghz + Mali-400 MP4 GPU System Memory – 1GB […]

May 18, 2014May 21, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments

Ubuntu 14.04 and Slitaz on Radxa Rock

Various Android and Linux images are available on Radxa Rock download page, but if you’d like to get newer images or other options, two developers have provided binaries and posted instructions to get Ubuntu 14.04 and Slitaz operating systems, the later currently booting with Linux kernel 3.10. Naoki FUKAUMI has published a miniroot how-to install a Ubuntu 14.04 Core (minimal headless installation) on Radxa Rock and Radxa Rock Lite. Installation should be relatively easy as he provide the update.img for both board so your can use the usual method in Windows (RkBatchTool) or upgrade_tool in Linux. If you don’t have serial console, you’ll have need to flash the parameter file requiring RkAndroidTool in Windows, and the same upgrade_tool in Linux. If once the installation and configuration is complete, you want a desktop environment,you can always run “apt-get install lubuntu-desktop” to install LXDE. SliTaz is a lightweight Linux distribution. I previously […]