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November 22, 2021November 22, 2021 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 12 Comments

Renesas introduces sub 50 cents FPGA family with free Yosys-based development tools

Renesas has just unveiled the ForgeFPGA family of low-cost low-power FPGA’s to go for under 50 cents in (large) volumes following their acquisition of Dialog Semiconductors last August, who previously designed the GreenPAK programmable mixed-signal matrix. The company says its FPGAs consume half the power of competing FPGAs with a standby current of under 20uA, the price point will enable the use of FPGA in new markets and IoT products, and the tools will be free, at least as in beer, without any license to acquire or install. The full specifications are not available yet, but the ForgeFPGA Family will come with a maximum of 5,000 gates of logic, and the first devices ship with 1K and 2K Look Up Tables (LUTs), and as just mentioned, will operate at ultra-low power as low as 20 microamps in standby. ForgeFPGA is expected to target the same market as GreenPAK notably embedded […]

October 19, 2021May 27, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 8 Comments

Cortex-M55 based Arm Virtual Hardware is now available in AWS Cloud

The Arm DevSummit 2021 is taking place on October 19-21, and the first announcements from Arm are related to IoT with “Arm Total Solutions for IoT delivering a full-stack solution to significantly accelerate IoT product development and improve product ROI”, “Project Centauri” aiming to achieve for an extensive Arm Cortex-M software ecosystem in the way that Project Cassini does for the Cortex-A ecosystem, starting with support for PSA Certified and Open-CMSIS-CDI cloud-to-device specification, and Arm Virtual Hardware based on Corstone-300 IoT platform with a Cortex-M55 MCU core and an Ethos-U55 microNPU accessible from Amazon Web Services. The first two are quite abstract right now, and more information may become available in the future, but the Arm Virtual Hardware is available now from AWS as a public beta, with 100 hours of free AWS EC2 CPU credits for the first 1,000 qualified users. The virtual hardware does not emulate only the […]

October 4, 2020October 4, 2020 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

DT71 smart tweezers review – 3-in-1 tweezers, multimeter, and signal generator

Earlier this year, I discovered a new (to me) category of devices that look useful for electronics projects with smart tweezers Colibri ST-5S that integrate an LCR meter and can help quickly identify SMD components. I also noted some cheaper, but bulky models selling on Aliexpress for $15 and up. I’ve now received another compact model, yet affordable, as Seeed Studio sent me Miniware DT71 smart tweezers for review. As we’ll see in this getting started guide, DT71 can be used both as a multimeter and a signal generator and sells for around $59 plus shipping. Miniware DT71 Smart Tweezers Unboxing Let’s first see what I received. the tweezers are stored in a plastic box that contains three parts. First, the arms fitted with replaceable tips clearly marked as positive (red) and negative (blue). There’s a 3.5mm audio jack that allows us to connect the microcontroller unit with a display, […]

August 15, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Embedded Linux Conference (ELC) Europe 2019 Schedule – October 28-30

Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2019 Schedule

I may have just written about Linaro Connect San Diego 2019 schedule, but there’s another interesting event that will also take place this fall: the Embedded Linux Conference Europe on October 28 -30, 2019 in Lyon, France. The full schedule was also published by the Linux Foundation a few days ago, so I’ll create a virtual schedule to see what interesting topics will be addressed during the 3-day event. Monday, October 28 11:30 – 12:05 – Debian and Yocto Project-Based Long-Term Maintenance Approaches for Embedded Products by Kazuhiro Hayashi, Toshiba & Jan Kiszka, Siemens AG In industrial products, 10+ years maintenance is required, including security fixes, reproducible builds, and continuous system updates. Selecting appropriate base systems and tools is necessary for efficient product development. Debian has been applied to industrial products because of its stability, long-term supports, and powerful tools for packages development. The CIP Project, which provides scalable and […]

August 7, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 10 Comments

STMicro Launches $10 STLINK-V3mini Mini Probe for STM32 MCUs

Last year, we reported STMicroelectronics launched STLink-V3 debugger & programmer for STM8 & STM32 microcontrollers that added I2C, SPI, and CAN interfaces compared the previous STLink-V2 model. It’s not particularly expensive either at $35, but if you ever wanted something more compact and cheaper, the company has now introduced STLink-V3mini debugger going for under $10. STLINK-V3Mini key features and specifications: JTAG / serial wire debugging (SWD) specific features: 3 V to 3.6 V application voltage support and 5 V tolerant inputs JTAG communication support SWD and serial wire viewer (SWV) communication support Virtual COM port (VCP) specific features: 3 V to 3.6 V application voltage support on the UART interface and 5 V tolerant inputs VCP frequency up to 15 MHz USB – Micro USB 2.0 connector for power and connection to host computer Misc – 2x color LEDs: communication, power; STDC14 signals protection Dimensions – 30 x 15 mm […]

July 26, 2019July 29, 2019 by Sponsored Post - Comments Off

AFRd Auto Frame Rate Daemon Works with 64-bit Amlogic Processors

Automatic frame rate switching in TV box ensures video output matches the video frame rate in order to avoid skipped frames (judder) from time to time, and makes the videos much smoother to watch, especially to trained eyes. The problem is that the feature is not always implemented, and/or does not work for all apps. AFRd auto frame rate daemon aims to solve this issue by automatically switching video output to match the video framerate – e.g. 23.976 fps or 59.94 fps – on Android TV boxes powered by one of Amlogic 64-bit processors, be it S905, S905X, S905X2, S912, S905W and other more recent Armv8 processors from the company. Developed by Andrey Zabolotny (anpaza), AFRd is Linux daemon can be linked to either bionic for Android, or glibc for Linux operating systems, and the source code can be found on Github. It relies on two techniques to detect the […]

July 16, 2019July 16, 2019 by Stephen Vicinanza - No Comments

PicoLog 6 Beta supports Raspberry Pi 4, 3B and 3B+

One of the most popular computer platforms, Raspberry Pi has not been supported for Pico’s advanced datalogging software, up until now. The PicoLog 6 datalogging software is now compatible with Raspbian Stretch or later OS. The software has been designed for quick access to simple or complex acquisitions, and enabled to record, analyze or view data of almost any type. TC-08 Thermocouple Datalogger with Raspberry Pi 3 board Real Power It is essentially the same software that runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux, with a few differences to take advantage of the capability of the lower-powered Arm processors. Producing a powerful datalogger for the Raspberry Pi SBC platform. The PicoLog 6 is optimized for Raspbian Stretch and runs the Raspberry Pi 4, 3B and 3B+ SBC’s. The core of the utility is an easy to use visual interface that allows for an almost out-of-box use to the program. Features Making […]