Single Board Computer News - Page 79 of 99 - CNX Software

November 19, 2019November 20, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 33 Comments

Orange Pi 4/4B SBC Comes with Rockchip RK3399 SoC, Gyrfalcon 2801S NPU

Shenzhen Xunlong Software’s Orange Pi RK3399 single board computer launched in early 2018 with 2GB RAM for $109, and earlier this year, the company launched an updated version with 4GB RAM and a lower $99.96 price tag. But there are plenty Rockchip RK3399 SBC’s on the market, including FrienglyELEC NanoPi M4 going for $50 and up ($75 with 4GB RAM), and Pine64 RockPro64 board starting at $59.99 with 2GB RAM, and $79.99 with 4GB. So unless you need the extra features (HDMI Input, SATA port, mPCIe socket…) offered by Orange Pi RK3399, other boards may be more competitive. So the company has been working on lowering the cost with a smaller board. Meet Orange Pi 4. They’ve also provided some extra features with a variant of the board called Orange Pi 4B that adds a Gyrfalcon Lightspeeur 2801S AI accelerator chip/NPU. That says a lot that neither Rockchip RK3399Pro SoC […]

November 14, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Giveaway Week Winners – November 2019

We just had another of our yearly “Giveaway week” on CNX Software with 7 prizes including Arm and RISC-V development boards, NB-IoT tracker, USB-C hub, as well as development kits based on ESP32 or ESP8266 WiSoCs. People just had to comment within a 48 hours period, and we would randomly select a winner each day. We now have all confirmed winners with a strong start from Europe, Asia catching up mid-week, before with Poland and Brazil taking the week-end prizes: Balena Fin Developer Kit – Laurent H, FRANCE WisCellular NB-IoT & eMTC GPS Tracker – Jimmy, SWEDEN MINIX NEO S1 USB-C Hub with 120GB built-in SSD – Jeroen, BELGIUM Maixduino Sipeed M1 RISC-V AI Kit – Nguyen Tung, VIETNAM ANAVI Gas Detector Starter Kit – Bumsik Kim, SOUTH KOREA Particle Mesh IoT Development Kit – Wojciech Lubicz-Lapinski, POLAND NanoPi M4V2 SBC & Metal Case Kit – Thiago Tavares, BRAZIL I […]

November 13, 2019November 13, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 16 Comments

Banana Pi BPI-F2S SBC is Powered by SunPlus SP7021 Processor, Supports Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA Add-on Board

BPI Tech, a spinoff from SinoVoIP, has introduced a new single board computer with Banana Pi BPI-F2S powered by SunPlus SP7021 “Plus1” SoC with four Cortex-A7 cores, one older ARM9 real-time core, and one even older 8051 IO controller. The chip also embeds up to 512MB DDR3 memory. The board comes an 8GB flash, dual Fast Ethernet, HDMI, a 40-pin Raspberry Pi compatible GPIO header, as well as headers for an optional Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA expansion board. Banana Pi BPI-F2S SBC Specifications: SoC – Sunplus SP7021 “Plus1” with a quad-core Cortex-A7 processor @ 1.0 GHz, one Arm A926 microprocessor, an 8051 core to handle I/Os, and 128MB or 512MB DDR3 DRAM. Storage – 8GB eMMC flash, microSD card slot Video Output – HDMI 1.4 output Camera I/F – MIPI CSI connector Connectivity – 2x 10/100M Ethernet USB – 2x USB 2.0 host ports, 1x micro USB port Expansion 40-pin GPIO […]

November 11, 2019May 16, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

NVIDIA Jetson Nano Review with 52Pi ICE Tower Cooling Fan – Part 1: Unboxing

Jetson Nano Review with ICE Tower Cooling Fan

If you remember soon after Raspberry Pi 4 launch, there were talks about the SBC overheating under load, and depending on room temperature and workload a heatsink may be needed for the board to perform optimally at all times. This gave birth to “interesting” solutions such as 52Pi ICE Tower Cooling Fan, an oversized cooling solution for Raspberry Pi 4. It does the job however, and it allows me to overclock Raspberry Pi 4 to 2.0 GHz while keeping the CPU temperature under 55°C in a room at 28°C. But the latest Raspberry Pi Foundation board is not the only SBC to suffer from overheating, as at least one user noticed the board would just shutdown under load. The solution was to switch from 10W mode to 5W mode, not an ideal solution since it’s also lowering performance. But 52Pi is coming to the rescue again, as they adapted their […]

November 11, 2019November 11, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 21 Comments

NanoPi R1S Dual Gigabit Ethernet Router Comes with 32-bit or 64-bit Arm Processor

FriendlyELEC launched NanoPi R1 SBC & Gateway earlier this year with Allwinner H3 processor, two Ethernet ports, as well as WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity. The design makes use of both Ethernet on the processor, but that also means on Gigabit Ethernet port had to be combined with a Fast Ethernet processor. The company has now added a USB to Gigabit Ethernet bridge to their latest NanoPi R1S board meaning it’s now a dual Gigabit Ethernet SBC, but with the caveat that the port behind the USB bridge is limited to USB 2.0 speed (480 Mbps), and with overhead the USB Ethernet bandwidth is around 330 Mbps. There are two versions of the board, namely NanoPi R1S-H3 and R1S-H5 with respectively Allwinner H3 32-bit processor, and Allwinner H5 64-bit processor. Apart from the different processors, both boards share the same PCBA and specifications: SoC NanoPi R1S-H3 – Allwinner H3 quad-core Arm […]

November 10, 2019November 12, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 283 Comments

Giveaway Week – NanoPi M4V2 SBC & Metal Case Kit

Let’s finish giveaway week 2019 on a high with FriendlyELEC NanoPi M4V2 single board computer, and its metal case kit. The board features a Rockchip RK3399 processor with 4GB LPDDR4 RAM, and the metal case kit allows the addition of an NVMe M.2 SSD as well. I tested the mini PC with FriendlyCore Desktop based on Ubuntu 18.04, since at the time, Armbian was still not working with the updated board equipped with LPDDR4 memory, and Android requires an eMMC flash module which was not part of the kits I received. NanoPi M4V2 performed fairly well in the case, but the fan is quite noisy, and somehow the RAM bandwidth was almost half of the one in the earlier NanoPi M4 board with DDR3 memory, which is the opposite one would expect. Probably related to some software tweaks as explained in the comments section of the review. I received two […]

November 4, 2019February 16, 2020 by Stephen Vicinanza - 1 Comment

Digilent Offers 2 Zynq-Based Linux Development Boards Supporting SYZYGY Expansion

Digilent Announces SYZYGY high-speed SBCs Digilent has announced two new SBCs that are ultra-high-speed and built to be more modular than its other boards. The company, which has a great deal of experience in Pmod lower speed FPGA standards has now entered the open-source, SYZYGY high-speed standards with its Eclypse Z7 and the Genesys ZU development SBCs. Background on the Digilent Zybo FPGA SoC SBC We reported on the Zybo development board FPGA SoC from Digilent and that seems to have lead to the latest format for the Eclypse Z7. Zmod There is also a release planned for the new Zmod modules, built to work with both the Eclypse Z7 and the Genesys ZU as SYZYGY compliant expansion modules. Opal Kelly and Zmod expansion The Zmods are Opal Kelly module standard, called SYZYGY, first seen in the Opal Kelly SYZYGY Brain-1 SBC. The standard was developed to jump the gap […]

October 23, 2019November 24, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Khadas VIM3L SBC Review with Android 9 Firmware

Khadas VIM3L is the first and so far only Amlogic S905D3 SBC on the market, so I first ran some benchmarks and checked system info. But it is also designed to be an HTPC, I’ll continue the review with some 4K video and audio playback testing, some gaming, and I/O benchmarks. Khadas VIM3L Unboxing As you may remember (or not), VIM3L ships either as a bare board pre-loaded with Android 9 or as an HTPC kit with the board running CoreELEC. I’ve received the bare board which also comes with two WiFi antennas. It can do much more than a simple TV box however, since it also comes with an M.2 NVMe socket (extra adapter board required), and sockets with MIPI DSI + touchscreen, and MIPI CSI camera. It’s one of the few boards with a low profile Ethernet connector, so if you ever wanted to build a farm of […]