Eben Upton expands on Raspberry Pi shortage

Raspberry Pi Shortage

As you may have noticed, Raspberry Pi boards may get hard to get and/or be sold at excessive prices by some resellers. Eben Upton explains the reasons behind the Raspberry Pi Shortage and provides some recommendations to work around the shortage and high prices. Raspberry Pi Trading is still manufacturing around 500,000 Raspberry Pi boards or modules per month despite the global semiconductors shortage, and the issue they face is more of a demand shock than a supply shock with demand for Raspberry Pi products having increased sharply from the start of 2021 and remains unabated as the supply chain can not handle that extra demand at this time. That means distributors have backlogs in almost all products, and it takes time for customers to get their orders. Bots are also involved in making automatic purchases as soon as stock becomes available often in order to resell those boards at […]

Add WiFi HaLow to Raspberry Pi with ALFA Network AHPI7292S HAT

WiFi HaLow Raspberry Pi HAT

ALFA Network AHPI7292S is a Raspberry Pi HAT with WiFi HaLow (802.11ah) offering low power connectivity, up to one kilometer line-of-sight range, and that’s mostly useful for security cameras, but it can also be used to extend the range of the network for other purposes. The Newracom NRC7292 expansion board adds to be few WiFi HaLow hardware we’ve seen in the past year including a mini PCIe card, a WiFi HaLow development board, and a gateway kit to extend the range of IP cameras. ALFA Network AHPI7292S specifications: Chipsets – Newracom NRC7292 WiFi HaLow SoC (IEEE 802.11ah draft 8.0 compliant) RF – Qorvo RFFM6901 front-end Frequencies – 847 MHz (TW), 866 MHz (EU), 915 MHz (US), 922 MHz (KR), 924 MHz (JP) Modulation – OFDM with BPSK, QPSK, 16QAM, 64QAM Data rate – 150 Kbps ~ 15 Mbps Channel bandwidth – 1/2/4 MHz Antenna connector – 1x IPEX/U.FL connector or […]

PiSquare enables wireless Raspberry Pi HAT control though ESP8266 and RP2040 MCUs (Crowdfunding)

PiSquare Wireless Raspberry Pi HAT RP2040 & ESP8266

SB Components PiSquare is a board following the Raspberry Pi HAT form factor, and based on Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller & ESP-12E Wireless module in order to control multiple Raspberry Pi HATs wirelessly without stacking them on their Raspberry Pi. The PiSquare uses Socket programming to control multiple Raspberry Pi HATs wirelessly, and for instance, you could connect multiple HATs with SPI or UART without the expansion boards conflicting with each other since the physical interface is handled by the Raspberry Pi RP2040 on each PiSquare connected over WiFi (ESP8266) to the Raspberry Pi SBC. PiSquare hardware specifications: MCU – Raspberry Pi RP2040 dual-core Cortex-M0+ microcontroller @ up to 133 MHz Storage – 16Mbit SPI flash Display – 0.91-inch OLED display Connectivity – 802.11b/g/n WiFi 4 via ESP-12 (ESP8266) module USB – 1x USB Type-C port 40-pin header and form factor compatible with the official Raspberry Pi HATs Power Supply […]

Kontron Pi-Tron CM4 mini PC leverages Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 for industrial applications

Kontron AL Pi-Tron CM4

Kontron Pi-Tron CM4 is a single-board computer and mini PC based on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module with a Broadcom BCM2711 quad-core Cortex-A72 processor, up to 8GB RAM, up to 32GB eMMC flash, HDMI video output, two Ethernet ports, optional WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity, and an M.2 slot for AI or wireless expansion. Designed for industrial applications, the Pi-Tron CM4 is also equipped with RS232, RS485/CAN FD bus, and GPIO terminal blocks, supports 24V input voltage, and is optionally sold as AL Pi-Tron CM4 in a housing suited for challenging environments. Kontron Pi-Tron CM4 specifications: SoM – Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 (CM4) with Broadcom BCM2711 quad-core Cortex-A72 processor @1.5 GHz, VideoCore VI GPU, H.265 (HEVC) up to 4Kp60 decode, 1080p30 encode, up to 8GB LPDDR4, up to 32GB eMMC flash Storage – MicroSD card socket (only for Raspberry Pi CM4 Lite module) Display I/F HDMI 2.0 up to 4Kp60 […]

RM500U-CN Raspberry Pi 5G HAT kit sells for under $200… for the Chinese market

low-cost Raspberry Pi 5G HAT

Waveshare has introduced a new Raspberry Pi 5G HAT kit with a Quectel RM500U-CN 5G module, four antennas, and other accessories that sells for under $200, Raspberry Pi SBC not included. On the face of it, it looks like an incredible deal, considering we’ve previously covered two other 5G development kits for the Raspberry Pi, namely Waveshare SIM8200EA-M2 HAT with a Snapdragon X55 5G modem and Sixfab “Raspberry Pi 5G Development Kit” that sold for about $400 to $600. What’s the trick? It’s designed for the Chinese market. RM500U-CN Raspberry Pi 5G HAT kit content: Waveshare Raspberry Pi M.2 TO 4G/5G HAT Quectel RM500U-CN 5G M.2 module 4x antennas plus SMA protective caps and IPEX adapter cables USB 3.0 male to male cable 1x USB 3.0 adapter and 1x USB 2.0 adapter 40-pin header 5V/3A USB Type-C power adapter Screws pack We can find more details about the RM500U-CN module […]

OASIS – ROS 2 based Smart Home operating system integrates with Kodi

OASIS Kinect 2 computer vision

OASIS is a Smart Home operating system based on ROS 2 that currently implements computer vision, input streaming, and general automation features, and can be integrated into Kodi media center. The operating system was recently released by Garrett Brown (a.k.a. garbear or eigendude), who is also known for being the RetroPlayer developer from Team Kodi/XBMC, and provides a complete implementation of the Firmata protocol for communicating with Arduino boards, plus additional support for temperature and humidity sensors, I2C, servos, sonar, SPI, stepper motors, and 4-wire CPU fans. Two main use cases are computer vision and input streaming at this time. The illustration above shows the former with the Kinect 2 driver ported to ROS 2, a background subtractor on all camera feeds using bgslibrary C++ background subtraction library, and Kodi as the visual interface. The second, input streaming, can be seen below with a Lego train (including a Falcon spaceship!) […]

Lakka 4.0 game emulator released with LibreELEC 10.0.2 and RetroArch 1.10.1

Lakka 4.0 release

Lakka 4.0 is the latest release of the game emulator based on LibreELEC 10.0.2 and RetroArch 1.10.1 frontend GUI for LibRetro game emulators cores. While Lakka was initially designed for Raspberry Pi boards in a way similar to RetroPie, it also works just fine on many other Arm platforms and PCs. Main changes to Lakka 4.0 compared to version 3.7: Build system based on LibreELEC 10.0.2 RetroArch updated to 1.10.1 Cores updated to their most recent versions superbroswar: added new libretro core sameduck: added new libretro core Mesa updated to 22.0.0 Mainline kernel updated to 5.10.103 (PC, Amlogic, Allwinner, NXP) Raspberry kernel updated to 5.10.95 Most arm devices switched to aarch64 Rockchip RK3288, RK3328 and RK3399 switched to mainline kernel 5.10.76 Added support for additional Allwinner and Amlogic devices (not tested on our side, as we do not own many of these devices) Nintendo Switch: complete rewrite of the port […]

Quadric devkit features q16 hybrid AI, DSP, computer vision accelerator

Quadric devkit Raspberry Pi CM4

The Quadric devkit is an M.2 Key M module equipped with the company’s q16 edge processor offering a hybrid data-flow + Von Neumann machine for not only neural networks, but also computer vision, digital signal processing, BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms), and other workloads. This architecture allows the Quadric q16 to be more flexible than traditional AI accelerators and can deliver more effective solutions for heterogonous systems that may have multiple accelerators or require a powerful processor. The M.2 form factor enables easy integration into boards with an M.2 Key M socket such as the Gumstix Raspberry Pi 4 development board shown below with the Quadric devkit. Quadric devkit specifications: Accelerator – Quadric q16x4 Processor with 256 Vortex Cores, 8 MB on-chip memory, 4 kB per core memory, multi-precision multiply accumulate; 16 x 16mm package Memory – 4GB LPDDR4, 32-bit, dual-rank up to 3677 MHz Host Interface – 2-lane PCIe […]

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