Bluetooth NLC (Networked Lighting Control) fully standardizes Bluetooth light bulbs

Bluetooth NLC

Bluetooth NLC (Networked Lighting Control) is a full-stack standard for wireless lighting control from the Bluetooth SIG that will enable multi-vendor interoperability, improve ease of deployment, and offer greater scalability. Bluetooth light bulbs have been around for many years, at first using Bluetooth LE (Radio Layer) and then adding Bluetooth Mesh (Network Layer) to the mix, but there were always some proprietary bits to the software stack, and Bluetooth NLC removes all those with a complete standard for lighting control that further adds Device Profiles specific to his use case. Bluetooth NLC still relies on Bluetooth Low Energy and Bluetooth Mesh, but adds the following NLC Device Profiles at the Device Layer defining the requirements for a range of devices/features: Ambient Light Sensor Basic Lightness Controller Basic Scene Selector Dimming Control Energy Monitor Occupancy Sensor You’ll find the specifications for each profile on the Bluetooth website. While the announcement was […]

GEEKNUC’s Intel NUC 12 and NUC 13 promotion for back to school season (Sponsored)

GEEKNUC Back to School

GEEKNUC, a reseller of genuine Intel NUC mini PCs, has now launched a “back to school” promotion for two Intel NUC mini PCs, namely the Intel NUC 13 Pro Arena Canyon with an Intel Core i7-1360p processor, 32 GB RAM, and a 2TB NVMe SSD and the Intel NUC 12 Enthusiast Serpent Canyon powered by an Intel i7-12700H CPU with 64GB DDR4 and a 2TB NVMe SSD. Both models are eligible for a $120 discount with the coupon code “cnxsoftwarenuc120“, which means the Intel NUC 13 Pro 32GB/2TB sells for $925, and the NUC 12 Enthusiast goes for $1,075 after the discount code is applied. Summary of the Intel NUC 13 Pro Arena Canyon specifications: SoC – Intel Core i7-1360P 12-core/16-thread (4P+8E) Raptor Lake processor clocked at up to  3.7 GHz (E cores) / 5.0 GHz (P cores) with 18 MB cache, 96EU Intel Iris Xe graphics; 28W PBP System […]

ArmSoM CM5 - Raspberry Pi CM4 alternative with Rockchip RK3576 SoC

EDATEC ED-IPC2100 industrial computer offers 4x RS485/RS232 ports

EDATEC ED-IPC2100 industrial computer with RS485 and RS232 ports

EDATEC has launched four more Raspberry Pi CM4-powered industrial computers with the ED-IPC2100 Series that mostly differ from the earlier ED-IPC2010 model with an extra M.2 Key-B socket for an SSD, an extra Gigabit Ethernet port, and four COM ports with RS232 or RS485 interfaces depending on the exact model. The new ED-IPC2100 series industrial computer family ships with a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 with up to 8GB RAM, 32GB flash, optional WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0, and offer a full-size HDMI video output, two Gigabit Ethernet port, and a few USB ports. The ED-IPC2120 model looks to offer some extra features such as an HDMI Touch FPC connector, MIPI CSI camera and DSI display connectors, and audio interfaces. ED-IPC2100-series specifications: SoM – Raspberry Pi CM4 SoC – Broadcom BCM2711 quad-core Cortex-A72 processor @ 1.5GHz with VideoCore VI GPU System Memory – 1GB, 2GB, 4GB, or 8GB LPDRR4-3200 RAM […]

Qualcomm 10G Fiber Gateway Platform supports Wi-Fi 7 and “Service Defined Wi-Fi technology”

Qualcomm 10G Fiber Gateway Platform

Qualcomm 10G Fiber Gateway Platform combines 10G Passive Optical Network (PON) technology with Wi-Fi 7 connectivity to deliver 10 Gbps Internet speed to the home. The platform also supports “Service Defined Wi-Fi technology” to enable cloud-to-device quality of service. It seems it was only a few years ago that we talked about 1 Gbps broadband Internet speed, but some companies like Sonic already offer 10 Gbps fiber optic internet to residential customers in the US. That means we’ll need powerful CPEs to deliver 10 Gbps speed to the home and distribute them through the home through multi-gigabit Ethernet and/or WiFi 7, and Qualcomm 10G Fiber Gateway Platform aims to address this market. Qualcomm 10G Fiber Gateway Platform specifications: CPU – Unnamed quad-core processor Passive Optical Network Deployment types: XGS-PON Residential Gateway (HGS/ONT), XGS-PON SFU ONU, XGS-PON SFU+ ONU Peak Downstream Rate: 10 Gbps Peak Upstream Rate: 10 Gbps Wi-Fi Peak […]

Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K Max (2023) features a 2 GHz MediaTek MT8696T CPU, support WiFi 6E

Amazon Fire TV 4K Max 2023

Amazon has recently introduced its second-generation Fire TV Stick 4K and Fire TV Stick 4K Max 2023 powered by MediaTek MT8696D and MT8696T Arm Cortex-A55 processors respectively and going for $49.99 and $59.99 on Amazon. The new Fire TV Stick 4K Max model is an incremental update compared to the Fire TV Stick 4K Max (2021) with basically the same processor but clocked slightly higher, twice the storage capacity, and WiFi 6E support instead of just WiFi 6. The Fire TV Stick 4K (2023) is a more notable update compared to the very first Fire TV Stick 4K launched in 2018. Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K / 4K Max (codenames: AFTKM and AFTKRT) specifications: SoC Fire TV Stick 4K (2023) – MediaTek MT8696D with quad-core Arm Cortex-A55 processor @ 1.7 GHz, Imagination GE9215 GPU @ 650MHz Fire TV Stick 4K Max (2023) – MediaTek MT8696T with quad-core Arm Cortex-A55 processor […]

AMD Kria K24 Zynq Ultrascale+ system-on-module targets motor control and DSP applications

AMD Kria 24

The AMD Kria K24 System-on-Module (SOM) with a custom-built Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC and the KD240 Drives Starter Kit are designed for the development of cost-sensitive industrial and commercial edge applications. The new Kria K24 is about half the size of a credit card and uses half the power of the larger, but connector-compatible, Kria K26 SOM that was introduced in 2021 for computer vision applications when the company was still known as Xilinx. That means existing K26 carrier boards can be reused with the Kria K24 SOM without modifying the PCB, but note there’s only one 240-pin connector on the new module, plus an extra 40-pin connector. AMD Kria K24 specifications: MPSoC – Custom-built Zynq Ultrascale+ XCK24 Quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor  up to 1.3 GHz Dual-core Arm Cortex-R5F real-time processor up to 533 MHz Mali-400 MP2 GPU up to 600 MHz FPGA fabric with 154K logic cells AMD Deep Learning […]

Rockchip RK3568/RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs

Review of Youyeetoo Rockchip RK3568 SBC with Lubuntu 20.04 and the RKNPU2 AI SDK

YY3568 SBC Lubuntu 20.04 review

We’ve already reviewed the Rockchip RK3568-power Youyeetoo YY3568 SBC with Android 11 – and listed the specifications and checked out the hardware kit –  in the first part of the review. We now had time to switch to Lubuntu 20.04, perform some basic tests, and also have a closer look at the RKNPU2 AI SDK for the built-in 0.8 TOPS AI accelerator found in the Rockchip RK3568 SoC. Installing Ubuntu or Debian on YY3568 SBC The company provides both Debian and Ubuntu images for the YY3568 SBC with different images depending on the boot device (SD card or eMMC flash) and video interface used (DSI, eDP, HDMI). Our YY3568 “Bundle 5” kit comes with an 11.6-inch eDP display so we’ll select the “Ubuntu 20” image with edp in the file name. The RKDevTool program is used to flash Linux images and it’s the same procedure as we used with Android […]

AI in a box offline LLM solution leverages Rockchip RK3588S’ NPU (Crowdfunding)

offline open source LLM Radxa Rock 5A

Useful Sensors “AI in a box” LLM (large language model) solution works offline with complete privacy and leverages the NPU in Rockchip RK3588S processor for conversational AI similar to ChatGPT but without an internet connection or registration required. The AI box prototype currently relies on off-the-shelf hardware, specifically the Radxa ROCK 5A SBC with 8GB RAM, housed in a plastic enclosure, and the code relies on open-source models like Whisper speech-to-text model and Llama2 language models.   Besides conversational AI where you can interact with the box as if you were talking to a person, the AI in a Box can also be useful for other use cases: Live Captions – The box can display subtitles/closed captions for a live event or help in situations where people have trouble hearing a conversation using the audio input. Live Translation – It can also translate various languages close to real-time. Simply select […]

Boardcon Rockchip and Allwinner SoM and SBC products