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Raspberry Pi Debian Wheezy Alpha, Bodhi Linux Alpha and Pwn, A Security Test Suite

I still haven’t received my Raspberry Pi board, but there have been a couple of interesting Raspberry Pi software news this week. Raspberry Pi Debian Wheezy “Alpha” This is an update to Raspberry Pi Debian  Squeeze 6.0, based on Wheezy (Debian 7.0) and the maintainer (Alex) is looking for volunteer to help test it and iron it out, before the Raspberry Pi foundation officially announce the distribution on its blog. This distribution comes will the following: * Scratch, Python, Midori etc as before * A configuration tool for common initial setup tasks (resize root partition, change keyboard layout) * omxplayer * USB drives auto mount * Lots more This is alpha quality, so you can’t expect it something very stable, but if you want to test drive it, you can download it via BitTorrent (447 MB). Sha1sum: bdad7f1c504e22f8d754028843abb9da4330107f. You can login with the following credentials: User: pi | password:raspberry Known […]

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ARM Unveils Some Details About Mali-450 GPU

EETimes reports that ARM has shown details about its new GPU, the Mali-T450, which offers up to twice the performance of the Mali-400 and can be scaled up to 8 cores, whereas Mali-400 can only be scaled up to 4 cores. The Mali-450 (codename Tyr) targets entry-level and mid-range mobile devices, and is said to be software compatible with Mali-400. ARM new GPU has also been “tweaked” to provide better performance at the cost of occupying a slightly larger area. The company recommends the use Mali-400 for 1 to 4 cores configuration and Mali-450 for 5 to 8 cores configuration for higher end products. Contrary to Mali-T604 and Mali-T685 GPU, Mali-450 does not support general purpose computing on GPU (GPGPU). ARM is also working on a new GPU codenamed Skrymir based on Midgard architecture (Like Mali-T604 & T658) that should be available in 2014. Source: EETimes

Khadas Edge2 Arm mini PC
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Adafruit mbed and NFC/RFID Starter Pack with µNFC stack & NFC Mood Lamp Demo

If you are looking for a (relatively) low cost NFC development kit, you may interested in Adafruit mbed and NFC/RFID Starter Pack that sells for 134.99 USD. The kit contains the following items: mbed LPC1768 (Cortex M3) development board with mini-B USB cable and reference cards NFC/RFID breakout board based on PN532 NFC transceiver MiFare RFID card with 1K programmable EEPROM Full-sized breadboard 40 x 3″ (75mm) long male/male jumper wires Standard blue & white 16×2 character LCD + contrast potentiometer + header Diffused 5mm RGB LED + 3 x 560 ohm resistors Analog temperature sensor (TMP36) Piezo buzzer 2 x 10K trim potentiometer 5 x Tactile Pushbuttons On the software side, you can use AppNearMe µNFC stack written in C++ that allows you to use a user interface on NFC-enabled smartphone, removing the need for knobs, buttons, screens on your embedded device. During the initial pairing, the NFC board can […]

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Texas Instruments Launchpad MSP-EXP430G2 & Capacitive Touch Booster

This is a guest post about the low cost Launchpad MCU devkit. This kit was unveiled in 2010, but since I’d never written about this $4.30 development kit previously, I’ve accepted to publish the post below with slight modifications and amendments. You may be itching to get started with a micro-controller based project but held back because of the high cost of the development boards, and the complex nature of tools required. The good news is that Texas Instruments have come up with a development kit – including a board and the required development software tools. This tool is intended for beginners as well as experienced users. In fact, at under $5, the Texas Instruments’ LaunchPad gives you a complete environment in which you can get started with your projects. This LaunchPad Development Kit is a part of the Texas Instruments MSP430 Value Line series of micro-controllers. You can program, […]

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GeneralPlus GP3300 Cortex A8 Processor and Android Tablet Reference Design

I’ve recently come across Eken D70 Tablet which is a typical 7″ Android ICS tablet, except it’s product description shows a Cortex A8 chip called GP33003. After some research, I found that this chipset is provided by GeneralPlus (previously part of Sunplus). GP3300x application processor features a cortex A8 clocked at 1 GHz together with a PowerVR SGX531 GPU, and comes in 216pins LQFP package.  This SoC integrates LVDS and HDMI, and the company told me that the GP33XX targets “higher resolution displays, but still keep the lower PCB cost, compared to its current competitors”.  It also features an hardware video decoder and encoder (up to 1080p), and can handle a 720p full-duplex video conference. That’s about all the information I could get about the SoC itself. I’ll update this post If I find out more. The company also provides a tablet reference design (GP3300xA Tablet) with the following specifications: […]

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How To Create and Seed a Torrent in Ubuntu Using Transmission Command Line

You may have a server with limited (free) monthly bandwidth, but yet need to share some large files or files that need to be accessed by a large number of people. Instead of sharing your files via your HTTP server, you can share them via BitTorrent instead in order to hopefully save bandwidth. Here are the steps I followed on Ubuntu 11.10, but they should work with any version of Ubuntu, Debian and Mint. Install transmission client and daemon

Create a directory to share your files and .torrent files

Copy your file in that directory and create the torrent file with transmission-cli

Start transmission-daemon

That’s all your need to do. If you want to monitor transmission remotly via a web interface, you can instead run transmission-daemon as follows: transmission-daemon -c ~/p2p -a public_ip Where public_ip is the public ip of your computer. Alternatively, you could also […]

Rockchip RK3568/RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs
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Texas Instruments Wi-Fi Miracast Wireless Display on OMAP 4470

A few days ago, Texas Instruments announced a Wi-Fi CERTIFIED Miracast Video Streaming Solution based on OMAP4470 and WiLink 7.0, and they said in their press release that they would demo the platform at Computex 2012. Charbax is currently there, and shot a video showcasing different use cases possible with Miracast such as multi-tasking while streaming and mirroring. This technology looks very promising, especially since existing devices based on OMAP4470 will be able to support it with just a software update. You’ll also need to have a Miracast compliant TV, but eventually you should be able to buy a Miracast HDMI dongle for your TV (instead of buying a new TV), which is basically the board used in the demo except they use cables. This technology could be a threat to the MHL standard. The only advantage of the latter is that you don’t need power supply as it will […]

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Texas Instruments Sells the MetaWatch, A Wearable Bluetooth 2.1 Watch Devkit For $139

I think there is a TI deal about once a month, and today Texas Instruments sells (via Digi-Key) a Pebble Watch clone device similar to Pebble Watch called MetaWatch which is based on TI MSP430 MCU and CC2560 Bluetooth host controller and was released last year. There are two models: Metawatch Analog ($139) Metawatch Digital ($149) Both models regular price is $203. The discounted price also includes free shipping, but you need to follow the instructions carefully. Although the Metawatch is supposed to currently support both Android and iOS, the model sold is the original one that only supports Android. Here are the specs of the digital Model: Compatibility: Most devices with Android OS 2.3 and up. Potentially any programmable device supporting Bluetooth 2.1 and up device with Serial Port Profile (SPP) connectivity. Case / strap: 3 ATM water resistant stainless steel, black or white replaceable genuine leather strap Display: Mirror polymer network […]

Khadas VIM4 SBC