tool News - Page 4 of 13 - CNX Software

December 10, 2020December 10, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Ollie USB board exposes isolated UART, CAN, USB, RS485 & RS232 interfaces (crowdfunding)

Just like months, we wrote about Tigard open-source USB FT2232H board for hardware hacking with easy access to OpenOCD, JTAG, Cortex, flashrom interfaces used to debug/flash boards, extra I/Os with UART, SPI, and I2C, as well as a header to connect a logic analyzer and observe signals. If the board does not exactly match your requirements, Ollie USB board might, also it may not serve exactly the same purpose(s). The board acts as a USB bridge to isolated UART (x2), CAN, USB, RS485, and RS232 interfaces. Ollie specifications: MCU – STMicro STM32F042 Arm Cortex-M0 microcontroller with CAN interface Host interface – Micro USB port Isolated interfaces (all with ESD protection) 2x UART ports up to 12 Mbps with 1.8/3.3/5 V voltage levels (set by slide switch) CAN bus based on CANable/CANtact open hardware, flashed with dual firmware CANtact and Candlelight (switch selectable) and equipped with termination resistor switch Downstream USB […]

December 10, 2020December 10, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

RISC-V hardware & software ecosystem highlights in 2020

The RISC-V Summit 2020 is currently taking place virtually, and RISC-V International, a non-profit corporation aiming to drive the adoption and implementation of the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA), took the occasion to remind us of the growth of the ISA both in terms of commercial adaption, education, and other projects. Calista Redmond, CEO of RISC-V International, detailed the growth in memberships: This year, our technical community has grown 66 percent to more than 2,300 individuals in our more than 50 technical and special interest groups. We’re seeing increased market momentum of RISC-V cores, SoCs, developer boards, software and tools across computing from embedded to enterprise … We’re proud of our growing global membership, which has more than doubled in the last year to 1,000 total members, including 222 organizations.” RISC-V also launched the RISC-V Exchange now listing over 124 RISC-V cores, SoCs, and developer boards, as well as 129 […]

December 9, 2020December 9, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 19 Comments

$20 mini spot welder machine welds thin steel strips on battery packs

When I think about welding machines, I imagine fairly large units, protective gloves and masks, plus sparks coming out of the welding process when two metal parts are melted together. So when I saw a small “portable DIY mini spot welder machine” going for $25 on Banggood[update: or just under $20 shipped on Aliexpress], I thought to myself: “what is THAT”? It turns out it’s made for welding jobs with thin nickel-plated steel strips such as the ones that can be found attached to 18650 batteries, or full battery packs. Mini spot welder specifications: Controlled with by unnamed MCU Display – LCD with welding parameters: WELD ENERGY – 01-99 adjustable by up and down keys INPUT – Display input power voltage WELD WAY – Manual / Auto (adjustable with “square label” button) Based on 5x 300A MOSFETs 30cm 10AWG cables for welding pens 25V 10000uF high-frequency low-resistance capacitor to increase […]

December 2, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Power Profiler Kit II measures power consumption in Nordic Semi based embedded systems

If you’re developing battery-powered products it’s important to optimize your application to consume as little power as possible to extend battery life. As we’ve seen with Qoitech Otii Developer Tool, getting the right tool for development can help developers work more efficiently, and save countless man hours. If you’re specifically working on products based on Nordic Semi nRF51, nRF52, nRF53 or nRF91 wireless chips, the company has just announced the Power Profiler Kit II (PPK2) that enables easy and affordable power measurement of average and dynamic power consumption in embedded solutions based on the aforementioned wireless SoC’s/SiP’s. Power Profiler Kit II key features: 200nA to 1A measurement range Resolution varies between 100nA and 1mA depending on the measurement range Instantaneous and average current measurement for all Nordic DKs, in addition to custom HW Ampere meter and source modes Built-in programmable regulator with a 0.8V to 5V output range and up […]

November 24, 2020November 24, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 17 Comments

Pine64’s PINECIL RISC-V soldering iron launched for $25

We’ve previously mentioned PINECIL RISC-V soldering iron during Pine64’s release of PineCube open-source IP camera development kit, and the good news is the soldering iron is now available for $24.99 on Pine64 store together with optional sets of gross or fine soldering tips compatible with the one used with TS100 model The soldering iron is powered by GigaDevice GD32VF103TB 32-bit RISC-V general-purpose microcontroller and features a small display and two buttons for user interaction, as well as changeable tips. It can be powered by a USB-C power adapter or a 12 to 24V power brick such as the ones you’d found with laptops. PINECIL soldering iron key features and specifications: MCU – GigaDevice GD32VF103TB 32-bit RV32IMAC RISC-V “Bumblebee Core” @ 108 MHz with 128KB flash, 32KB SRAM Display – 0.69-inch OLED monochrome display with 96×16 resolution Tip – 106mm long, Type B2 Temperature range – 100°C to 400°C; reaches operating […]

November 3, 2020November 5, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 97 Comments

Giveaway Week – Miniware DT71 Smart Tweezers

Day 2 of Giveaway Week 2020 on CNX Software. What do we have here? Miniware DT71 smart tweezers that serve as LCR meter, basic signal generator, and of course actual tweezers. I found DT71 to be a useful tool for electronics enthusiasts and engineers for checking out SMT (and DIP) components, debugging boards, and even generating signals for testing. When connected to a PC, it will show as a USB storage device that you can use to adjust settings or upgrade the firmware. To enter the draw simply leave a comment with your country and whatever else you’d like to say. If the country is missing, I’ll consider the entry void. Other rules are as follows: Only one entry per contest. I will filter out entries with the same IP and/or email address. Contests are open for 48 hours starting at 11 am (Bangkok time) every day. Comments will be […]

September 8, 2020September 8, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 27 Comments

USBImager – A Lightweight Alternative to balenaEtcher

The common way to flash OS images to SD cards used to be “dd”. But you could potentially damage your system with a wrong command, it will not do verification after writing the firmware image, and it was not available in Windows, so people had to use Win32DiskImager, and last time I check it did not do verification either. So Etcher, now called balenaEtcher, became a popular cross-operating systems tool to flash images for Raspberry Pi and other SBCs. It’s easy to use and does verification after flashing. However, the binary is rather large at around 130 MB, and the company started to show sponsors to fund the development of the program, and this was not to the liking of everyone. During my review of CrowPi2 Raspberry Pi 4 laptop, I encountered an issue with balenaEtcher, which was quickly fixed once I updated the program to the latest version. But […]

August 23, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

Perfetto Profiler Now Supports Mali GPU Hardware Counters via Panfrost

Perfetto is an open-source system profiler, app tracer, and trace analyzer for Linux, Android & Chrome platforms, and user-space apps. The program can already visualize CPU and memory usage, as well as power consumption. GPU support is more limited with the program only capable of sampling the GPU frequency when the driver outputs that information via ftrace. When Perfetto is also extendable thanks to a Tracing C++ SDK that “allows userspace applications to emit trace events and add more app-specific context to a Perfetto trace”. Collabora made use of the tracing SDK to add support for Mali Midgard GPU performance profiling in gfx-pps project using the Mali GPU hardware counters exposed via Panfrost open-source Mali GPU driver. After following the installation instructions, you’ll be able to run the following executables for tracing and profiling: tracedtracing service. traced_probes OS probes service. perfetto command-line tool for recording traces. producer-gpuproviding the Panfrost data […]