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400 Free Raspberry Pi (Development) Boards for Qt 5 Developers

Remember the 25 – 35 USD ARM11 board Raspberry Pi ? Nokia is now getting involved and plans to speed up Qt 5 development on this nice little hardware. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced that Nokia would purchase 400 boards next month and give them away to Qt 5 developers who are willing to port software, develop apps, and test and improve the Qt 5 Linux stack. Mostly likely it will be the “high-end” 35 USD version with Ethernet support and 2556 MB RAM as show below. Beside its ridiculously cheap price, the board key features include Linux support, embedded GPU and OpenGL ES libraries that makes it a usable multimedia device capable of outputting 1080p. Nokia and ICS engineers have already started to port Qt to the Raspberry Pi board using the alpha boards. You can see the Qt Quick 2 emitter demo below running on one of the […]

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Linaro 11.11 Release with Kernel 3.1.1 and Android 4.0.1 Support

Linaro has just released version 11.11 based on Linux Kernel 3.1.1 and with support for Android ICS. The Android 4.0.1 Preview build for all low cost development boards supported by Linaro are available at http://releases.linaro.org/11.11/android/images-ics-preview/. Here are the highlights of the release: Android Linaro’s baseline has now been upgraded to 2.3.7. The first Versatile Express Android build has been completed. Pandaboard and Vexpress has been upgraded to kernel 3.1.1. A preview of Ice Cream Sandwich is released and running on Snowball, Origen, iMX53 and on Pandaboard with Linaro kernels. A NEON-optimized libpng has been itegrated in all builds. Preliminary DS-5 support has been integrated. Preliminary WiFi support on Android Origen. Kernel config for each build is available on android-build page. USB Ethernet works on Origen. Camera recording function works on Pandaboard. USB camera can be hotplugged on Pandaboard. Developer Platform Firefox can now be cross-built using multiarch. Instructions are available […]

Khadas Edge2 Arm mini PC
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“Romo” Robot Controlled by Android or iOS Smartphones

Romotive startup has designed “Romo”, a tank-like Robot controlled by Android or/and iOS mobile devices. Peter Seid and Phu Nguyen – Romotive’s co-founders – have raised over 114,000 USD on KickStarter website from more than 1,100 contributors looking to buy the Romo robot. The company has reached its founding target (32,000 USD) and can now move forward on production. You can still get the Robot for 78 USD (+12 USD shipping if you live outside the US) on KickStarter. You’ll need two Android or iOS devices to play with it: one acting as a camera that sits on the “Romo” and the other to control the robot’s movements and receive the camera stream via Wi-Fi. The motors are interestingly controlled by audio signals coming from the smartphone. Romo’s Hardware is composed of the following: A motorized, acrylic base with an accessory port that can be controlled by any smartphone (or […]

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Remmina : Remote Connection via RDP, VNC, SSH, XDMCP or SFTP

If you need to connect to both Windows and Linux machines remotely,  Remmina is what you need. It is an application that can remotely connect to server using VNC, SSH, XDMCP, SFTP and RDP protocols. So that you can connect to a Windows machine using the default RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) protocol without installing a VNC server. In the screenshot below I setup a Windows RDP and a VNC connection to 192.168.0.102. There are plenty of options. Here’s a screenshot of Remote Desktop Preferences for the RDP client. To install in an Ubuntu or Debian distribution:

To install it in Fedora:

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Midgard architecture for Embedded GPUs (Mali-T604 / Mali T658)

I’ve attended a webinar entitled “Harness the power and flexibility of the Midgard architecture for Embedded GPUs” presented Steve Steele, Product Manager at ARM Media Processing Division and sponsored by EETimes. Steve starts to talk about the current GPU architecture “Utgard” used in Mali-200, Mali-300 and Mali-400MP which allows resolutions up to 1080p and are used in many smartphones today including Samsung Galaxy S2 (Mali-400MP) which provides great graphics performance. He then explains how mobile devices are used today and what performance we may except in the future: Mobile As Main compute platform: New UI and Augmented Reality Social Networks and emails Content Creation/consumption 1 Device to multiple screen (e.g LCD screen and TV via HDMI) Evolving Processing Demand: Graphics Complexity multiplied by 25 Increase in screen size (1080p resolution support). Graphics API: Khronos OpenGL ES, Microsoft DirectX 11 Compute API: OpenCL, Renderscript Compute and Direct Compute. After this overview, […]

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ChromeBooks Get Cheaper and Chrome OS Update

Google announced that the Wi-Fi only version of the Samsung Chromebooks Series 5 and Acer Chromebooks will drop by 50 USD to to 300 USD. Apparently the Chromebooks sales are not going so well. This may be improving however, as the Samsung Series 5 Wi-Fi 12.1-Inch Chromebook currently ranks 25 in Netbooks (Amazon US) and Acer AC700-1099 Chromebook (Wi-Fi) ranks quite well (maybe after the discount) at position 9 in Netbooks. Still, even after this discount, it seems difficult to justify the price compared to a “real” netbook with hard disk (the Chromebooks use the cloud for storage) and a few other extra features. I have an Acer Aspire One AOD255E that now costs 279 USD on Amazon with a 250 GB hard disk running Windows 7 starter. Unless the Chromebooks price is reduced to about 200 USD I don’t really see it selling like hot cakes even though they […]

Rockchip RK3568/RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs
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Android Variants, Hacks, Tricks and Resources – AnDevCon II

The second Android developer Conference (AnDevCon II) took place about 10 days ago. Karim Yaghmour of OperSys published the presentation slides he used during his two Android presentations. The first presentation was Embedded Android Workshop, the same presentation he did at Android Open 2011. The second presentation “Android Variants, Hacks, Tricks and Resources” slides can be found below. Those 48 slides cover the following: AOSP’s limitations: Rigid, closed development model, excludes many things… Tearing AOSP apart Forks: Cyanogenmod: After-market handset firmware with custom launcher and lots of tweaks and mods… Replicant: 100% open souce with FDroid marketplace. MIUI: Closed source with UI enhancements. Ports: RIM Playbook:  OMAP4 Tablet based on AOSP. Bluestacks: Android on Windows 7. Alien Dalvik: Android SDK + Meego SDK integration. Mods: XDA Developers. Melding with “Classic” Linux Stack: Rationale: Lots of available stacks in Linux, Android does not provide everything. Road blocks: File system, Bionic C […]

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Turn your TV into a Computer with FXI Technologies Cotton Candy USB Stick

FXI Technologies has unveiled a USB stick that turns any screen into an a computer running Android or Ubuntu, and in the future Windows 8 will also be supported. The Cotton Candy will include a Samsung Exynos 4210 dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 CPU clocked at 1.2GHz, with a Quad Core Mali 400MP  GPU, like the Samsung Galaxy S2 smartphone. It will also feature 1GB of RAM, a microSD slot capable of holding up to 64GB of flash memory, Wifi and Bluetooth connectivity and an HDMI port. This small device (it measures 8cm x 2.5cm) has decent multimedia capabilities as it can support 1080p decode of MPEG4-SP/H.263/H.264 AVC/MPEG-2/VC1, as well as MP3, AAC, AAC+, Real Audio decoding and JPG, GIF, BMP, PNG pictures. Extra third party codec can also be added. There are 2 main use cases for the Cotton Candy: Connection to a HDMI-capable TV or Display: Connect an HDMI monitor/TV […]

Khadas VIM4 SBC