Retro-style computer features 5-inch round display, Framework laptop motherboard

After completing a DIY Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W handheld PC earlier this year, Penk Chen has designed another, rather odd but cool-looking, DIY computer. The “Mainboard Terminal” is a retro-style computer with a round display powered by the mainboard found in Framework modular laptop. The computer has been tested to work with Ubuntu 22.04 out of the box with just a few configuration tweaks for the display, but other operating systems should also work considering the mainboard is based on an Intel Core  i5-1135G7, i7-1165G7, or i7-1185G7 Tiger Lake processor. There are four main off-the-shelf electronics components: Framework laptop mainboard ($399 and up) OLKB Preonic Keyboard MX Kit V3 key ($140) 5-inch round LCD with 1080×1080 resolution plus its HDMI adapter board (550 RMB = about $82) So most of the work consisted in designing the enclosure, and Penk released the STL design files on Github under an MIT […]

Khadas VIM4 Review – Part 2: Android 11 preview and benchmarks

In the first part of Khadas VIM4 review, I showed off the Amlogic A311D2 SBC and some accessories such as the DIY case and M2X expansion board to add M.2 SSD and modem and tried out OOWOW cloud services to install Ubuntu 20.04 server. I’ve now just gotten Fiber Internet at home, so it’s much more practical to test the system, and in the second part of the review, I’ve installed Android 11 on the VIM4 board, checked out settings and system info, and ran some benchmarks.  It will be more like a preview since Android 11 is not a consumer-friendly system at this time, and is more designed for people wanting to build their own applications. Installing Android 11 on Khadas VIM4 with OOWOW system Last time around, I used OOWOW system install in the SPI flash on the board to download and install Ubuntu 20.04 server to the […]

Khadas Edge2 Arm mini PC

Turing Smart Screen – A low-cost 3.5-inch USB Type-C information display

“Turing Smart Screen” is a low-cost 3.5-inch USB-C display that connects to systems with a USB port, and works with Windows, Linux (including Raspberry Pi), MacOS, and other operating systems that support Python3. But contrary to my initial assumptions, it does not exactly act as a second monitor, and instead, it is an information display, originally designed to show resource utilization, e.g. CPU and memory usage, in Windows, and controlled through commands send to the USB port. Turing Smart Screen specifications: 3.5-inch IPS display with 480×320 resolution, portrait and landscape support MCU – WCH CH552T 8-bit E8051 core MCU for USB devices Host interface – USB Type-C interface Auto start on power on Dimensions Product: 85 x 55 x 8 mm Display area: 74 x 49 mm The manufacturer says it works with Windows only using its own software, and not AIDA64. The Windows software features functions to change the […]

Khadas VIM4 Review – Part 1: Unboxing, kit assembly, and first boot with OOWOW

Khadas VIM4 is a compact Amlogic A311D2 octa-core Cortex-A73/A53 SBC with 8GB RAM, HDMI input and output, WiFI 6 connectivity, and more. You can check our earlier post for the full specifications. The good news is that it will officially launch on May 10. I’ve also just received a Khadas VIM4 review sample today together with accessories. Today, I’ll start by checking out the board, assembling the kit, and trying out OOWOW services to boot OS from the cloud, before testing available operating systems in more detail in the second part of Khadas VIM4 review a little later. Khadas VIM4 kit unboxing I received everything in a blank cardboard package with several small packages inside. Besides Khadas VIM4 SBC, we’ve got a plastic + metal enclosure with screws and screwdriver, two antennas for WiFi and Bluetooth, a USB Type-C power supply, a USB-C cable, an M.2 expansion board, a short […]

Home Assistant gives new life to Insteon Smart Home products following Smartlabs bankruptcy

Smartlabs used to sell Insteon Smart Home products, but the company is now in bankruptcy proceedings, its cloud has been turned off, and users have reported their products not working since April 14. Going to Insteon website confirms the problem: …the company engaged in a sales process in November, 2021. The goal was to find a parent for the company and continue to invest in new products and the technology. The process resulted in several interested parties and a sale was expected to be realized in the March timeframe. Unfortunately, that sale did not materialize. Consequently, the company was assigned to a financial services firm in March to optimize the assets of the company. IoT and Smart Home products going offline are nothing new, either because the company is going bankrupt or the product is not profitable anymore. It happens to me with Weloop Hey 3S smartwatch which I still […]

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS “Jammy Jellyfish” released

Canonical has just released Ubuntu 22.04 LTS “Jammy Jellyfish” right on schedule. The new version of the Linux operating system provides cloud confidential computing, a new real-time kernel for industrial applications, Arm optimization, support for Raspberry Pi SBCs, as well as support for enterprise Active Directory, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, FIPS, and FedRAMP compliance. Confidential Computing aims to improve data protection and privacy in public clouds without requiring any changes to existing application deployments, and Ubuntu 22.04 supports Azure Confidential VMs. Speaking about cloud computing, Canonical also says they optimized Ubuntu 22.04 LTS images for AWS Graviton for greater performance on Arm servers. The new real-time PREEMPT_RT kernel is currently in beta and available for both x86 and Aarch64 architectures. It is designed for telco (5G gateways) as well as other latency-sensitive applications such as industrial automation and robotics. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is also the first long-term support release with Ubuntu Desktop […]

Rockchip RK3568/RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs

SkiffOS minimal Linux for embedded containers now supports Sipeed Nezha RISC-V board

SkiffOS minimal Cross-compiled Linux for embedded containers has just added support for Sipeed Nezha RISC-V single board computer, and work on the smaller Sipeed Lichee RV board has started. Wait… What is SkiffOS? I’ve never heard about it… That’s how the abstract from the white paper describes it: Embedded Linux processors are increasingly used for real-time computing tasks such as robotics and Internet of Things (IoT). These applications require robust and reproducible behavior from the host OS, commonly achieved through immutable firmware stored in read-only memory. SkiffOS addresses these requirements with a minimal cross-compiled GNU/Linux system optimized for hosting containerized distributions and applications, and a configuration layering system for the Buildroot embedded cross-compiler tool which automatically re-targets system configurations to any platform or device. This approach cleanly separates the hardware support from the applications. The host system and containers are independently upgraded and backed-up over-the-air (OTA). In other words, that’s […]

FOMO (Faster Objects, More Objects) enables real-time object detection on low-end embedded systems

FOMO used to stand for “Fear Of Missing Out” in my corner of the Internet, but Edge Impulse’s FOMO is completely different, as the “Faster Object, More Objects” model is designed to lower the footprint and improve the performance of object detection on resource-constrained embedded systems. The company says FOMO is 30x faster than MobileNet SSD and works on systems with less than 200K of RAM available. Edge Impulse explains the FOMO model provides a variant between basic image classification (e.g. is there a face in the image?) and more complex object detection (how many faces are in the image, if any, and where and what size are they?). That’s basically a simplified version of object detection where we’ll know the position of the objects in the image, but not their sizes. So instead of seeing the usual bounding box while the model is running, the face position will be […]

Boardcon Rockchip and Allwinner SoM and SBC products