Picovoice supports custom wake word, offline voice recognition on Raspberry Pi

PicoVoice custom wake word Raspberry Pi

ReSpeaker 4-mic array is a Raspberry Pi HAT with four microphones that can work with services such as Google Assistant or Amazon Echo. It was launched in 2017. So nothing new on the hardware front. What’s new is the expansion board is now supported by Picovoice that works much like other voice assistants except it allows people to create custom wake words and offline voice recognition. Picovoice is described as an end-to-end platform for building customized voice products with processing running entirely on-device. It is cross-platform, is said to be more resilient to noise and reverberation, and thanks to running offline, it offers low-latency and complies with HIPAA and GDPR privacy regulations. The platform is comprised of two main engines: Porcupine lightweight wake word engine that supports custom wake words trained through PicoVoice console. The engine can listen to multiple wake words and is cross-platform with support for Raspberry Pi, […]

Jetson Mate Cluster box takes four Jetson Nano/Xavier NX modules

Jetson Mate Cluster Box

While we’ve seen plenty of cluster boards based on Raspberry Pi SBC or Compute Modules, I had never seen clusters of Jetson modules. Those already exist, and PicoCluster has a few, but what made me write this post today is Seeed Studio’s Jetson Mate cluster box equipped with a carrier board taking up to four NVIDIA Jetson Nano or Xavier NX modules, an enclosure covered with a largish cooling fan with RGB LED for good effect… Jetson Mate specifications: SoM compatibility – Jetson Nano or Jetson Xavier NX via four SO-DIMM sockets Video Output – HDMI 2.0 Networking Gigabit Ethernet (RJ45) port Microchip KSZ9896CTXC 6-port GigE Managed Switch for internal networking between the modules and to the outside world Camera – 2x MIPI CSI connectors USB – 4x USB 3.0 ports (one per module), 1x USB 2.0 port, 1x USB-C port for power Debugging – UART debug pins (4x pairs, […]

Arduino Sensor Kit Base is a large shield for Arduino UNO with 10 modules

Arduino Sensor Kit Base

Earlier this year, Seeed Studio introduced the Grove Beginner Kit for Arduino that included the Arduino UNO compatible Seeduino Lotus board placed at the center and ten pre-wired and detachable Grove modules to get started with sensors on Arduino with no cabling whatsoever apart from the USB cable. Arduino must have seen and liked the design, and Seeed Studio has collaborated with the Italian company to create the Arduino Sensor Kit Base with a very similar design, but with a twist as instead of an all-in-one platform with modules and an Arduino board, it’s a very large shield that seats on tops of Arduino UNO. The Arduino Sensor Kit base includes the following: Base shield with 16 Grove connectors, instead of just 12 Grove connectors on the Beginner Kit, including 7x digital connectors, 4x analog connectors, 4x I2C connectors, and one UART connector; A 3.3V/5V voltage switch is also included […]

Black Friday 2020 International Deals and Coupons

Aliexpress Black Friday Fest 2020

Singles Day 2020 is now behind us, but just like every year, international Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals and coupons are coming, and even already launched over one week before the actual events. And CNX Software will link to promotions from Chinese online websites that offer such deals with Aliexpress, Banggood, GearBest, GeekBuying, and others. Aliexpress Black Friday Fest will start on November 23, 12:00 AM PT, and last till November 27, 11:59 PM PT with up to 70% discounts. But you can also browse the website to find discounts, and add products to your cart before ordering during the event. There will also be $20 and $40 coupons for orders over $40 and $100 respectively, but conditions are unclear at this time. Banggood’s Crazy Friday event takes place during an even longer period between November 2nd and December 6th. There are special sitewide coupons for PayPal payments with […]

Quantum Mini devkit combines Allwinner H3 M.2 SoM with baseboard

Quark-N Allwinner H3 M.2 SoM

Quantum Mini may be yet another Allwinner H3 Arm Linux development board, but what makes it special is the company used the standard M.2 Key-A 22mm form factor to create Quark-N Allwinner H3 system-on-module with storage and memory. The kit is completed by Atom-N baseboard that takes the M.2 module and offers two USB 2.0 ports, one USB Type-C port, as well as 2.4 GHz WiFi 4 and Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity, and a MicroSD port for additional storage. Quantum Mini development kit specifications: Quark-N SoM SoC – Allwinner H3 quad-core Cortex-A7 @  1GHz with Mali-400MP2 GPU System Memory – 512MB LPDDR3 Storage – 16GB eMMC flash Interfaces exposed via M.2 connector – Ethernet, SPI, I2C, UART, GPIO, MIC, LINEOUT Dimensions – 31 x 22mm (6-layer PCB) Temperature Range – 0-80°C Atom-N baseboard M.2 socket for Quark-N system-on-module Storage – MicroSD card slot Display – TFT display Connectivity – 2.4 GHz […]

ODYSSEY-X86J4105 SBC Review with Ubuntu 20.04 – Raspberry Pi & Arduino Headers Tested

ODYSSEY-X86J4105 Ubuntu 20.04 Review Arduino & Raspberry Pi Headers

We’ve already reviewed ODYSSEY-X86J4105 SBC with Windows 10. When combined with Re_Computer enclosure it’s a typical Intel Gemini Lake mini PC but with a twist: Arduino and Raspberry Pi header. The latter works fine in Windows, but at the time, the Raspberry Pi header does not. So Linux is our only option. I’ve now had time to install and test Ubuntu 20.04 on ODYSSEY-X86J4105 single board computer. I did not install Ubuntu on the internal eMMC flash where Windows 10 resides, but instead on a 128GB M.2 SATA SSD. I’ll first run some usual command to check system information, then run benchmarks, and check whether all features are working before focusing the review on the Arduino and Raspberry Pi headers. ODYSSEY-X86J4105 Ubuntu 20.04 System Info We can check some of the information from the system in the terminal:

An Intel Celeron J4105 processor with 8GB RAM and the rootfs […]

Odyssey Blue J4105 Windows & Linux Mini PC Comes with a 128GB SSD, an Arduino Compatible MCU

Odyssey Blue J4105

We recently reviewed ODYSSEY-X86J4105 SBC by Seeed Studio with Windows 10, and installed it to the Re_Computer case to convert it into a mini PC. Besides being a standard Intel Gemini Lake SBC, the board also comes with an Arduino MCU and header, as well as a 40-pin I/O header so it can be an all-in-one Arduino development platform, or be used for advanced robotics projects. Both the board and case had to be purchased separately, and Windows 10 was pre-installed on the internal eMMC flash. But now, Seeed Studio has started to offer Odyssey Blue J4105 mini PC with ODYSSEY-X86J4105 SBC pre-installed into Re_Computer case and fitted with a 128GB SSD for increased storage capacity and better performance. Odyssey Blue J4105 mini PC specifications: SoC – Intel Celeron J4105 quad-core processor @ 1.5/2.5 GHz (Turbo) with 12EU Intel UHD Graphics 600 @ 250-750 MHz; 10W TDP System Memory – […]

Edge Impulse Enables Machine Learning on Cortex-M Embedded Devices

Edge Impulse

Artificial intelligence used to happen almost exclusively in the cloud, but this introduces delays (latency) for the users and higher costs for the provider, so it’s now very common to have on-device AI on mobile phones or other systems powered by application processors. But recently there’s been a push to bring machine learning capabilities to even lower-end embedded systems powered by microcontrollers, as we’ve seen with GAP8 RISC-V IoT processor or Arm Cortex-M55 core and the Ethos-U55 micro NPU for Cortex-M microcontrollers, as well as Tensorflow Lite. Edge Impulse is another solution that aims to ease deployment of machine learning applications on Cortex-M embedded devices (aka Embedded ML or TinyML) by collecting real-world sensor data, training ML models on this data in the cloud, and then deploying the model back to the embedded device. The company collaborated with Arduino and announced support for the Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense and […]

Youyeetoo X1 x86 SBC