After checking out Radxa Fogwise Airbox hardware in the first part of the review last month, I’ve now had time to test the SOPHGO SG2300x-powered AI box with an Ubuntu 20.04 Server image preloaded with CasaOS as well as Stable Diffusion and Llama3 containers. I’ll start the second part of the review by checking out the pre-installed Stable Diffusion text-to-image generator and Llama3 AI chatbot, then manually install imgSearch AI-powered image search engine in CasaOS web dashboard, test the Python SDK in the command line, and run some AI vision models, namely Resnet50 and YOLOv8. Radxa Fogwise Airbox OS installation Radxa only provided an Ubuntu Server 20.04 image last month with only the basics pre-installated. The company has now improved the documentation and also made two images available for the Radxa Fogwise Airbox: Base image (1.2GB) – Based on Ubuntu Server 20.04; contains only Sophon base SDK and backend. Full […]
SBC software news – Armbian 24.5.1, DietPi 9.4, and Otii server for the Raspberry Pi 4/5
There’s been some notable software news for single board computers (SBCs) in the last few weeks with the release of Armbian 24.5.1 Havier with a focus on stability and UX improvement, the release of DietPi 9.4 lightweight Debian distritions for SBCs, and Otii server, the software for Qoitech Arc power supply, meter, and DAQ, has been finally released for the Raspberry Pi 4/5. Armbian 24.5.1 Havier Armbian announced 24.5.1 Havier on May 25 with bug fixes and improvements as a point release, but also some new boards. Here are some of the highlights. New boards Orange Pi 5 Pro FriendlyElec CM3588 NAS board Radxa ROCK 5 ITX Radxa Zero 3E/3W Avaota A1 SBC SK-AM68 board tqma8mpxl board CSC Hinlink H6xk boards RK3588-based Cool Pi CM5 EVB Improve Khadas support Resolve Rockchip patch maintenance nightmare Add functionality to freeze git resources Improve support for Radxa Rock S 0 and test USB […]
Radxa Fogwise Airbox edge AI box review – Part 1: Specifications, teardown, and first try
Radxa Fogwise Airbox, also known as Fogwise BM168M, is an edge AI box powered by a SOPHON BM1684X Arm SoC with a built-in 32 TOPS TPU and a VPU capable of handling the decoding of up to 32 HD video streams. The device is equipped with 16GB LPDDR4x RAM and a 64GB eMMC flash and features two gigabit Ethernet RJ45 jacks, a few USB ports, a speaker, and more. Radxa sent us a sample for evaluation. We’ll start the Radxa Fogwise Airbox review by checking out the specifications and the hardware with an unboxing and a teardown, before testing various AI workloads with Tensorflow and/or other frameworks in the second part of the review. Radxa Fogwise Airbox specifications The specifications below come from the product page as of May 30, 2024: SoC – SOPHON SG2300x CPU – Octa-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor up to 2.3 GHz VPU Decoding of up to […]
Radxa ROCK 5C (Lite) SBC features Rockchip RK3588S2 or RK3582 SoC, WiFi 6, Raspberry Pi PCIe FFC connector
First came the ROCK 5B pico-ITX SBC, then the Raspberry Pi 4-sized ROCK 5A board, and now Radxa has launched the Radxa ROCK 5C and 5C Lite single board computers powered by respectively Rockchip RK3588S2 octa-core and RK3582 hexa/octa-core “Lottery” processors. The ROCK 5C (Lite) design is very similar to the ROCK 5A, but there are some notable differences. First, it replaces the two micro HDMI ports with a single HDMI port, then it removes the Key M socket for M.2 wireless modules to make place for a built-in WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.4 module plus a Raspberry Pi PCIe FFC connector, and finally, the ROCK 5C does not support an SPI flash module anymore. The specifications of the ROCK 5C and ROCK 5 Lite SBC can be found in the table below. Both processors are new, so let’s have a look. First, how does RK3588S2 differ from RK3588S? They […]
Radxa Zero 3E SBC offers gigabit Ethernet and PoE in Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W form factor
Last December, we wrote about the Rockchip RK3566-powered Radxa Zero 3W WiFi 6 SBC and noted that the Radxa Zero 3E with gigabit Ethernet and optional PoE supports would be coming soon with about the same dimensions as the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. “Soon” is now as the Radxa Zero 3E is now available on Aliexpress or Amazon with RAM capacities from 1GB to 8GB LPDDR4. The small SBC also comes with optional eMMC flash up to 64GB, a microSD card slot for storage, a micro HDMI video output port, a MIPI CSI connector compatible with Raspberry Pi Camera V1 and V2, two USB-C ports, and a 40-pin GPIO header for expansion. Radxa Zero 3E specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3566 CPU – Quad-core Arm Cortex-A55 processor @ 1.6 GHz GPU – Arm Mali G52-2EE GPU with support for OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0/3.2, Vulkan 1.1, OpenCL 2.0 NPU – 0.8 TOPS […]
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 […]
LibreELEC 12 released with Kodi 21, 64-bit Arm support for Raspberry Pi 4/5, and platforms
As one should have expected after the Kodi 21 “Omega” release last month, the LibreELEC 12 lightweight Linux media center distribution is now out with many devices updated to 64-bit, including the Rasberry Pi 4 and 5 SBCs. LibreELEC 11 was released last year based on Kodi 20 “Nexus” and bringing back support for Amlogic devices. LibreELEC 12 builds on that and benefits from the new features added to Kodi 21 such as FFmpeg 6 and works on Arm platforms based on Allwinner, Amlogic, Broadcom (Raspberry Pi), and Rockchip processors, as well as generic x86 computers. It’s an easy option to create a dedicated HTPC based on a range of hardware with all the features brought by Kodi 21 media center. Since so many platforms are supported there are always some limitations for each and known problems: Raspberry Pi – 50/60fps H.264 HW decoding may need force_turbo=1 or core_freq_min=500 in […]
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 […]