Radxa ROCK 5A SBC – A Raspberry Pi 4 lookalike with up to 16GB RAM, Rockchip RK3588S SoC

Radxa ROCK 5A SBC

Radxa has just unveiled the ROCK 5A single board computer (SBC) following Raspberry Pi 4 form factor and powered by a Rockchip RK3588S octa-core Cortex-A76/A55 processor coupled with up to 16GB of RAM as a way to celebrate Chinese New Year 2023. The Radxa ROCK 5A (aka ROCK5 Model A) closely follows the Raspberry Pi 4 layout, including two micro HDMI ports, a 3.5mm AV port, a microSD card, a 40-pin GPIO header, four USB ports, and a Gigabit Ethernet port. The MIPI DSI connector is there too, and so is the MIPI CSI camera connector, but in a different location. Radxa also added some features such as an M.2 socket for a wireless module (since there’s none on board) and eMMC flash module connectors, among other smaller changes (e.g. Power button!). ROCK 5A specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3588S CPU – Octa-core processor with 4x Cortex-A76 cores @ up to […]

FindBoard is another single board computer database

FindBoard parametric search

Hackerboards.com single board computer database has been around for several years starting as Board-DB, but I noticed another one called FindBoard while browsing on Aliexpress with some more exotic boards. Hackerboards’ database currently features 467 SBCs and MCU boards, while FindBoard has 453 boards. There are some overlaps, but also boards that are not found in the first database. Many of the boards on FindBoard are Linux-capable, but they are also some microcontroller boards as we can see from the screenshot above. If Chinese is selected, the “Buy now” will redirect you to Taobao, and if it is English they will be a link to an Aliexpress page. There’s a parametric search function for FinderBoard single board computer database but it’s really only useful when selecting one single parameter because the system use “OR” instead of “AND”. So if select 01Studio and Linux as above, it will show results for […]

Khadas VIM1S (Amlogic S905Y4) SBC review with Android 11

Khadas VIM1S Android 11 review

We’ve previously tested Ubuntu 22.04 on Khadas VIM1S Amlogic S905Y4 SBC, so we’ll switch to Android 11 in the second part to check out the user experience and benchmark the system under Android. Installing Android 11 on Khadas VIM1S board with OOWOW We’ll basically follow the same procedure as with Ubuntu to flash the Android OS. Press and hold the Function button, press the Reset button, and release the Function button. to enter the OOWOW Wizard, and if an Ethernet cable is not connected, select Network to configure Wi-Fi as the installation process requires downloading an image from Khadas servers. This time, we’ll select the latest Android 11 image namely vim1s-android-11-v221020.raw.img.xz At just 525 MB in size (when compressed), the Android 11 image for Khadas VIM1S board is fairly compact. Installing Android with OOWOW is really easy with the interface downloading and flashing the image to the eMMC flash without […]

Forlinx FET-MX9352-C – An NXP i.MX 9352 system-on-module for industrial AIoT applications

Forlinx FET-MX9352-C System-on-Module

Forlinx FET-MX9352-C is a system-on-module based on NXP i.MX 9352 dual Cortex-A55 processor with Cortex-M33 real-time core and a 0.5 TOPS AI accelerator that can be used for industrial control, IoT gateways, medical equipment, and various applications requiring machine learning acceleration. The FET-MX9352-C follows last week’s announcement of the iWave Systems iW-RainboW-G50M OSM module and SBC with a choice of NXP i.MX 93 processors. The Forlinx module comes with two board-to-board connectors instead of solderable pads and can be found in the OK-MX9352-C single board computer with dual GbE, various display and camera interfaces, RS485 and CAN Bus, etc… FET-MX9352-C i.MX 9352 system-on-module Specifications: SoC – NXP i.MX 9352 with 2x Arm Cortex-A55 cores @ up to 1.7GHz (commercial) or 1.5 GHz (industrial), Cortex-M33 real-time core @ 250 MHz, 0.5 TOPS Arm Ethos U65 microNPU System Memory – 1GB/2GB LPDDR4 RAM Storage – 8GB eMMC flash 2x high-density 100-pin board-to-board […]

Year 2022 in review – Top 10 posts and statistics

CNX Software Happy New Year 2023

It’s the last day of the year and the time to look at some of the highlights of 2022, some traffic statistics from CNX Software website, and speculate on what 2023 may bring us. The semiconductors shortage continued in 2022, but things are looking brighter in 2023 with the full reopening of the world mixed with forecasts of difficult economic times that should keep the demand/supply equation in check. On the Arm processor front the biggest news of the year, at least in this corner of the Internet, was the launch of the Rockchip RK3588 octa-core Cortex-A76/A55 processor together with interesting single board computers that we’ll discuss below. Announced last year, the Amlogic A311D2 octa-core Cortex-A73/A53 was finally made available in a few SBC’s, and we finally got some news about the Amlogic S928X Cortex-A76/A55 SoC showcased in 8K TV boxes, but we have yet to see it in action. […]

Khadas VIM1S review – Ubuntu 22.04 tested on an Amlogic S905Y4 SBC

Khadas VIM1S review

In this review of Khadas VIM1S SBC, we’ll install Ubuntu 22.04, and report our experience testing the performance such as memory speed and eMMC flash performance, and 3D graphics capabilities. Installing Ubuntu 22.04 on Khadas VIM1S Just like Khadas VIM4 and Edge2, the Khadas VIM1S SBC ships with the OOWOW firmware that allows easy installation of operating systems by downloading the images, and flashing them directly to the eMMC flash.  You need just to connect a monitor and a USB keyboard and have an Internet connection through either LAN or Wi-Fi. Let’s start by installing Ubuntu 22.04 on Khadas VIM1S together. If no OS is installed, OOWOW will boot automatically, but if there’s already another OS installed, you can press and hold the Function button, press the Reset button, and release the Function button. After a few seconds, the OOWOW Wizard as shown in the picture below should show up. […]

Pico-ITX SBC features NXP i.MX 93 LGA system-on-module

NXP i.MX 93 SBC

iWave Sytems iW-RainboW-G50M is an NXP i.MX 93 OSM-L compliant LGA module with up to 2GB RAM, WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 5.2 module that is found in the company’s iW-RainboW-G50S Pico-ITX SBC designed for industrial applications. The NXP i.MX 93 single and dual-core Cortex-A55 processor with an Ethos U65 microNPU was announced in November 2021, but we had yet to see any hardware based on the new NXP i.MX 9 processor family. The iW-RainboW-G50M and iW-RainboW-G50S change that with a system-on-module and single board computer. iW-RainboW-G50M NXP i.MX 93 system-on-module Specifications: SoC (one or the other) NXP i.MX 9352 dual-core Cortex-A55 processor @ up to 1.7 GHz with Arm Cortex-M33 @ 250 MHz,  0.5 TOPS NPU NXP i.MX 9351 single-core Cortex-A55 processor @ up to 1.7 GHz with Arm Cortex-M33 @ 250 MHz, 0.5 TOPS NPU NXP i.MX 9332 dual-core Cortex-A55 processor @ up to 1.7 GHz Arm Cortex-M33 @ […]

Geniatech DS-3566 digital signage board is powered by a Rockchip RK3566 SoC

Geniatech DS-3566

Geniatech DS-3566 is a board based on Rockchip RK3566 designed for digital signage applications with a low-profile, multiple video interfaces such as HDMI, LVDS, eDP, and MIPI DSI, and plenty of headers and connectors for expansion. The single board computer ships with up to 8GB RAM, 128GB eMMC flash, and supports Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi 5, Bluetooth 4.1, as well as cellular connectivity as an option. Some of the interfaces available through connectors include RS232, RS485, CAN Bus, I2C, SPI, etc… Geniatech DS-3566 specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3566 quad-core Arm Cortex-A55 processor @ 1.8 GHz with Arm Mali-G52 EE GPU, 0.8 TOPS NPU System Memory – 2GB to 8GB LPDDR4 Storage – 16GB to 128GB eMMC flash, MicroSD card slot Video Interfaces 1x HDMI 2.1 up to 4Kp60 1x LVDS header and backlight header 1x eDP header and backlight header 1x 4-lane MIPI DSI connector Camera – 1x 4-lane MIPI CSI […]

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