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Waveshare 4-inch E-ink Spectra 6 full-color e-paper display is designed for the Raspberry Pi

Waveshare recently launched the 4-inch e-Paper HAT+(E), a E-Ink Spectra 6 full-color e-paper module designed to work with the Raspberry Pi using the HAT+ standard. This 600×400 pixel display includes E-Ink Spectra 6 technology and doesn’t have a backlight. The Spectra 6 allows for high contrast and color saturation whereas no backlight means the display consumes very low power. The device communicates using SPI and is compatible with various controller boards like Raspberry Pi and Arduino. These features make this device useful for places like supermarkets, unmanned stores, shelf levels, hospital wards, and more. Waveshare has launched various e-paper displays in the past including the EINK-DISP-103 E-paper HDMI Display, the 4.2″ and 7.5″  Waveshare NFC-powered e-Paper display, and most interestingly the 7-Color e-Paper Display. Feel free to check those out if you are looking for high-quality displays. Waveshare 4-inch spectra 6 color e-paper display specification Display – E-Ink Spectra 6 […]

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Raspberry Pi RP2350 dev board features Ethernet RJ45 port with WIZNet W5500 or W5100S Ethernet controller

WIZnet has recently launched two new Raspberry Pi RP2350-based Ethernet boards – W5100S-EVB-Pico2 and W5500-EVB-Pico2 – based on different Ethernet controllers. The entry-level W5100S-EVB-Pico2 is built around the W5100S controller that features 4 independent sockets and 16 Kbytes of buffer memory. On the other hand, the W5500-EVB-Pico2 is built around the W5500, which features 8 sockets, 32 Kbytes of buffer memory, and improved security features such as OTP memory, Secure Boot, and Arm TrustZone technology. These make the W5500-EVB-Pico2 ideal for projects with robust network handling and advanced security measures. After the recent announcement of the $5 Raspberry Pi Pico 2 we have seen many development boards built around the RP2350 MCU, including the Challenger+ RP2350 WiFi6/BLE5, the Solder Party’s RP2350 Stamp, the Seeed Studio XIAO RP2350, the Cytron MOTION 2350 Pro, and more. Feel free to check those out If you are interested in RP2350-based dev boards. W5100S-EVB-Pico2 and […]

Khadas Edge2 Arm mini PC
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Cytron IRIV IO Controller – A Raspberry Pi RP2350-based industrial I/O controller

Cytron IRIV IO Controller is an “Industrial Revolution 4.0” (or Industry 4.0) controller based on the Raspberry Pi RP2350 microcontroller that comes with an Ethernet port implemented through the W5500 chipset, and several isolated interfaces such as DI and DO up to 50V, two analog inputs, and RS232 and RS485 serial interfaces accessible through terminal blocks. Last year, the company introduced the Cytron IRIV PiControl industrial controller based on the Raspberry Pi CM4 module, and the IRIV IO Controller is a much cheaper solution using a subset of the features and a design that looks similar. IRIV IO Controller specifications: Microcontroller – Raspberry Pi RP2350A  CPU Dual-core Arm Cortex-M33 @150MHz with Arm Trustzone for secure boot Dual-core 32-bit Hazard3 RISC-V @ 150MHz Up to two cores can be used at the same time Memory – 520 KB on-chip SRAM in 10 banks Storage – 2MB flash memory Networking – 10/100M […]

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Low-cost Raspberry Pi 5 HAT+ combines M.2 socket for NVMe SSD and PoE power input

With a cost of only about $25, Waveshare has recently introduced the PoE M.2 HAT+ for the Raspberry Pi 5, which is much cheaper than the similar N-Fuse PoE HAT that we’ve written about previously. As the name implies, this new Waveshare board supports Power over Ethernet (PoE) and features an M.2 slot to add NVMe SSD storage to the latest Raspberry Pi SBC. This new Waveshare HAT complies with the 802.3af/at standards and can deliver up to 25.5W of power to the Pi 5, enabling both power and network connectivity over a single Ethernet cable. Additionally, it features onboard 5V & 12V header outputs for powering additional devices like cooling fans, and there are also two LEDs for status. A fast storage device and the ability to power the device with ethernet makes this device suitable for applications such as network-attached storage, media centers, and edge computing applications. Waveshare […]

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Banana Pi BPI-CM5 Pro – A Rockchip RK3576-powered Raspberry Pi CM4 alternative with up to 16GB RAM, 128GB flash, a 6 TOPS NPU

Banana Pi BPI-CM5 Pro, also called ArmSoM-CM5, is a Rockchip RK3576 system-on-module electrically and mechanically compatible with the Raspberry Pi CM4 while offering up to 16GB LPDDR5 memory, 128GB eMMC flash, and a 6 TOPS AI accelerator embedded into the RK3576 SoC. It comes with a WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.3 wireless module, a PMIC for power management, and two 100-pin connectors mostly compatible with the pinout of the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4. ArmSoM also provides a CM5-IO carrier board to make use of the extra USB 3.0 and PCIe interfaces, and the company told CNX Software they tested the module successfully with the official Raspberry Pi CM4 IO board. Banana Pi BPI-CM5 Pro specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3576 CPU – 4x Cortex-A72 cores at 2.2GHz, 4x Cortex-A53 cores at 1.8GHz GPU – Arm Mali-G52 MC3 GPU with support for OpenGL ES 1.1, 2.0, and 3.2, OpenCL up to 2.0, […]

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Arduino CLI 1.0 released – Let’s try it with the Raspberry Pi Pico 2

Arduino has just announced the release of the Arduino CLI version 1.0.0, the first stable release for which users and developers can be confident the software API won’t change over time, or at least with minimal changes that will not impact the workflow of applications based on it. We first looked at the Arduino CLI when it was still at the alpha stage way back in 2018. Arduino CLI version 1.0.0 was actually quietly released about two months ago, but Arduino only announced it now and the utility is now at version 1.0.4 with several bug fixes. Arduino CLI 1.0 release The goal of the API is to easily program the boards from the command line without having to use the Arduino IDE, and the CLI can be integrated into your own script to automatize various processes. Arduino explains there are three ways to integrate and utilize the capabilities of […]

Rockchip RK3568/RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs
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How to recover a “bricked” Raspberry Pi Pico 2 or other RP2350 board

In theory, it’s close to impossible to brick your Raspberry Pi Pico 2 or other RP2350 boards because the bootrom code (source code) is stored in the 32KB ROM of the microcontroller and is by definition “read-only memory”.  But I managed to “brick” my Raspberry Pi Pico 2 the other day, and even a blinky sample would not run on the board. So I’ll explain a simple method to recover/perform a factory reset of sorts. First, let me explain what happened. My board became unusable after I ran the following command while building RISC-V Linux for RP2035 and my Pico 2 was connected to the build machine:

At some point, it will copy a UF2 firmware binary designed for boards with PSRAM which the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 lacks:

After that, I could still see the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 board as an “RP2350” drive on my computer, […]

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Using RISC-V cores on the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 board and RP2350 MCU – From blinking an LED to building Linux

Raspberry Pi Pico 2 was released last month with a Raspberry Pi RP2350 microcontroller equipped with two Arm Cortex-M33 cores and two 32-bit RISC-V “Hazard3” cores with up to two cores usable at any time. So in this guide, we’ll show how to use the RISC-V cores on the RP2350 MCU, compare their performance against the Arm Cortex-M33 cores, and even build Linux for RISC-V for RP2350 boards that have PSRAM. Apart from the extra memory and more powerful cores, plus new features related to security and the HSTX interface, the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and Pico will be very similar to the end user and the instructions in our article “Getting Started with Raspberry Pi Pico using MicroPython and C” remain valid. I don’t think there’s a MicroPython RISC-V image yet, so we’ll focus on running C programs on the RISC-V cores. A quick check with the Arm cores […]

Khadas VIM4 SBC