Bluetera II is a motion-enabled IoT development board that supports protocol buffers (Crowdfunding)

Bluetera II

Tensor Iotera Group (TIG), an Israeli based technology company, has launched a powerful IoT development board featuring motion sensing called Bluetera II and supporting Google Protocol buffers. Bluetera II came from the idea that developing an IoT application shouldn’t be complicated. Hardware is hard, and scaling for manufacturing might also be more daunting than initially anticipated. So instead of going through those troubles, why don’t you go the route of something that works, and most importantly, is scalable, as TIG is advocating with their Bluetera IoT development platform. Bluetera II is the 2nd generation of this IoT platform. The Bluetera II board is equipped with a 9-axis motion sensor, Bluetooth 5 enabled Nordic nRF52840 SoC core, which features an Arm Cortex-M4 FPU, with 1MB of Flash, 256KB of RAM, and lastly, an SDK based on Google’s Protocol Buffer (protobuf) technology. The device can function as a BLE Central (Master) and […]

20TB HAMR Hard Drives Coming in 2020, up to 80TB Drives Expected in a Few Years

Seagate HAMR Hard Drives

We first wrote about HAMR technology in 2017. HAMR stands for “Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording” and aims at increasing data density in order for manufacturers to cram even more bytes into 2.5″ and 3.5″ drives. You can learn more about HARM technology in your previous article. At the time, Seagate had built over 40,000 HAMR drives for internal testing, and expected volume shipments of 20TB+ drives in 2019. There have been some delays, but Seagate recently announced their first formatted and fully functioning 3.5″ 16TB enterprise hard drive platform based on the technology. Bear in mind that those are only internal test units, and will not be brought to market in this configuration. Instead, the company plans to start selling its first HAMR drives with at least 20TB storage capacity later this year. The new drives behave just like existing PMR drives and are just plug-and-play in existing systems with SATA […]

Realtek RTL8720DN Dual-Band WiFi & Bluetooth 5.0 IoT Modules Sell for $4 and Up

BW16 RTL8720DN Dual-band WiFi & Bluetooth Module

There are plenty of 2.4 GHz WiFi modules for IoT project based on processors ranging from Espressif Systems ESP8266 to TI CC3200, or Realtek RTL8710. Some others add Bluetooth 4.2/5.0 such as Espressif Systems ESP32, but it’s much harder to find solutions with dual-band WiFi especially if you have a tight budget for your project or product. But Realtek RTL8720DN – part of AmebaD family –  offers just that with the Arm Cortex-M4/M0 wireless MCU supporting dual-band (2.4/5.0GHz) 802.11 b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity, and found in modules currently selling for as low as $3.90 or 24 RMB in single units. B&T BW16 RTL8720DN Module Specifications: Wireless SoC – Realtek RTL8720DN MCU with KM4 Arm Cortex-M4 core @ 200 MHz and KM0 Arm Cortex-M0 core @ 20 MHz Connectivity WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n WiFi 4 Frequency Range – 2.412-2.484GHz & 5.180-5.825GHz Data Rates 802.11a: 6,9,12,18,24,36,48,54Mbps 802.11b: 1,2,5.5,11Mbps 802.11g: 6,9,12,18,24,36,48,54Mbps 802.11n: […]

MediaTek Rich IoT SDK v20.0 Released, Pumpkin i500 SBC Announced

MediaTek i500 AI Vision Platform

MediaTek Rich IoT SDK v20.0 is Available MediaTek has announced its Rich IoT SDK v20.0  is already available for the i300 and i500 chipset series. The SDK was developed in collaboration with BayLibre, the French developer of Linux and Android embedded systems software, which is also known for helping mainlining Amlogic processors to Linux. The i300A, i300B, and i500 hardware platforms are supported and the features are focused on IoT and the emerging generation of smart devices. Supported OS’es and Test Applications The Rich IoT SDK v20.0 supports Yocto 3.0 Linux and Android 10 to let third-party customers and members of the MediaTek Ecosystem test Computer Vision algorithms, AI models and custom software on top of the base layer. Updates and Maintenance The SDK is receiving updates quarterly, with security updates and patches being delivered over-the-air (OTA) on a regular basis. The chipset series has a timeline for updates to […]

GreenWaves GAP9 IoT Application Processor Enables AI on Coin-cell Powered Devices

GAPuino Board

GreenWaves Technologies GAP8 multi-core RISC-V microcontroller was introduced last year for artificial intelligence (AI) at the edge at ultra-low power consumption. GAP8 AIoT SoC was shown to perform inference at 3.7mA against 60mA for the same workload on STM32F7 Arm Cortex-M7 MCU. The company has now expanded its GAP IoT application processor family with GAP9 that delivers five times lower power consumption compared to GAP8 microcontroller while enabling inference on neural networks 10 times larger. Greenwaves GAP9 will bring machine learning and signal processing capabilities to (coin cell) battery operated or energy harvesting devices such as IoT sensors in consumer and industrial markets, wearables, smart building, smart farming and so on. GAP9 is said to combine architectural enhancements with Global Foundries 22nm FDX process to achieve a peak cluster memory bandwidth of 41.6 GB/sec and up to 50 GOPS compute power while consuming only 50mW. The increased memory bandwidth (20x […]

SiFive Learn Inventor is a Wireless RISC-V Development Kit Inspired by BBC Micro:bit

SiFive Learn Inventor is a RISC-V educational board partially inspired by BBC Micro:bit board with the same crocodile clip-friendly edge connector, and an LED matrix. The board is also fully qualified to work with the Amazon FreeRTOS real-time operating system. Shaped in the form of a hand, the board features SiFive FE310 RISC-V processor found in the SiFive HiFive1 board, as well as ESP-WROOM-32 WiFi + Bluetooth module. SiFive Learn Inventor specifications: SoC – SiFive FE310-G003 32-bit RISC-V (RV32IMAFC) processor @ 150 MHz with 64KB of internal SRAM Storage – 512 KB flash “Display” – 6×8 “widescreen” array of RGB LEDs with 262,000 colors each; LEDs can expand off-board onto external arrays via the edge connector Wireless Connectivity – 802.11b/g/n WiFi 4 (2.4GHz) and Bluetooth 4.2 LE via an ESP32 module (ESP-WROOM-32) USB – 1x Micro USB port for power and programming/debugging Expansion A/D Converters (four) accessed via on-board coprocessor […]

Khadas VIM3 NPU ToolKit Release & Video Demo

Khadas VIM3 NPU Toolkit

Khadas VIM3 board based on Amlogic A311D processor with a 5TOPS Neural-network Processing Unit (NPU) launched last June. We’ve reviewed VIM3 with Android 9 shortly after launch, but until recently it was not possible to leverage the NPU since the software was not quite ready yet. The goods news is that Khadas has now released the NPU toolkit for both VIM3, and the cheaper VIM3L boards. The NPU toolkit contains the following directory: docs – Model conversion documentation acuity-toolkit – Model conversion tools linux_sdk – Linux SDK android_sdk – Android SDK The toolkit works in host PCs running Ubuntu 16.04 or 18.04 with Tensorflow framework, and inference can run on both Linux and Android OS in Khadas VIM3/3L board. It includes an Inception v3 sample with 299×299 sample photos, among other demos. You’ll find documentation to get started with model conversion and inference in Linux on Khadas Wiki. You can […]

STEEReoCAM is a 3D Stereo Camera for NVIDIA Jetson Nano, TX2, & AGX Xavier Dev Kits

STEEReoCam 2MP 3D Stereo Camera The latest e-con systems camera added to the lineup is the STEEReoCam. A 2MP 3D MIPI compliant stereo camera that works with the NVIDIA Jetson Nano, AGX Xavier, and Jetson TX2 development kits.   Improved Overall Function The camera has greater accuracy and depth range, with an OmniVision 1/2.9″ OV2311 global shutter CMOS sensor.  And the STEEReoCam comes bundled with CUDA the proprietary accelerated stereo SDK, that uses the GPU in the NVIDIA Tegra processors. AI and IoT Applications The camera is targeted towards depth sensing, AVG, robotics, face and gesture recognition, drones, medical procedure robots, and embedded visions. Software Development Kit e-Con Systems provides a Software Development Kit (SDK) package for the camera designed to work with NVIDIA Jetson development boards. The SDK is built on OpenCV 3.4.2 and CUDA Compute Capability 5.3/7.2/6.2. Sample Linux applications, some of which are shown in the video […]

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