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FOSDEM 2021 Online February 6-7 – Hardware, Embedded & IoT talks

FOSDEM is an open-source developer event that takes place on the first week-end of February every year in Brussels, Belgium. Every year except this year, as due to COVID-19 restrictions, FOSDEM 2021 will take place online like most events these days. The schedule has been up for some time, and today I’ll look at some of the interesting talks mostly from the Embedded, Mobile and Automotive “virtual devroom” but also other tracks. Saturday, February 6, 2021 13:00 – 14:00 – From Reset Vector to Kernel – Navigating the ARM Matryoshka Long gone are the times of executing the OS in-place from memory-mapped flash upon reset. A modern SoC now comes with complex mask ROM firmware, with driver, filesystem, protocol and crypto support for loading… yet another bootloader. In his talk, Ahmad follows this chain of bootloaders until the kernel is started, stopping along the way for RAM setup, peripherial initialization, […]

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Managing Edge IoT Linux Devices Closely, Remotely, Securely

CNXSoft: This is a guest post by Roy Dalal, Embedded Systems Engineer who looked for IoT device management solutions, and ended up using Upswift. With the recent shift from Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOS) to Linux-based embedded systems, there has been a boom in the IoT industry in creativity and expandability and opened doors to a whole new level of automation. Unlike the previous generation of IoT devices which followed the “program once, use forever” concept, with the new developments in the IoT industry, mainly the devices based on Linux operating systems that demand more and more flexibility, accessibility, and control. It has been challenging to address all these points at once when it comes to remote monitoring and control of these devices; especially if one produces thousands of those smart devices to be sold worldwide. The ability to manage these connected devices (Raspberry Pi, Jetson Nano, or any SOM/SBC that […]

Khadas Edge2 Arm mini PC
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Inkplate 10 ESP32 e-Paper display offers faster refresh rates (Crowdfunding)

Inkplate 6 is an ESP32 powered wireless e-Paper Display based on a recycled  Kindle E-reader display, and that e-Radionica launched in December 2019 via a crowdfunding campaign. The company says backers were “happy about the versatility and simplicity of the display” but wished for a larger display, a faster refresh rate, and extra features. This gave birth to an upgraded version: Inkplate 10. The new ESP32 wireless display comes with a recycled 9.7-inch display with 1200 x 825 resolution, up to 38% faster refresh rates, as well as extra GPIO pins, an RTC clock, a USB Type-C port, and lower power consumption. Inkplate 10 specifications: Wireless module – ESP32 WROVER module with dual-core ESP32 processor with Wi-Fi & Bluetooth 4.0 (BLE) connectivity, 8MB PSRAM, 4MB flash External storage – MicroSD card socket Display  – 9.7-inch, 1200 x 825 e-paper display with support for grayscale, partial updates, and quick refresh cycles: […]

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Year 2020 in review – Top ten posts and stats

It’s this time of the year when we look back at what happened, and what may be next. 2020 did not pan out as planned in more ways than one, but there were still some interesting developments. Based on 2019 announcements, 2020 was promising to be an exciting year for Amlogic and Rockchip with the expected launch of RK3588 and S908X high-end processors for 8K capable devices,  but we’ll have to wait for 2021 for this to happen. Instead, the most interesting processor of the year from the Allwinner, Amlogic, and Rockchip offerings was probably Amlogic S905X4 processing adding AV1 hardware decoding. As pointed out in our “RISC-V 2020 highlights” post, it was a fairly eventful year for RISC-V architecture, although there’s still a long road ahead, especially for application processors. We had seen some general-purpose and Bluetooth RISC-V MCUs in 2019, but 2020 saw the launch of the first […]

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Notecard LTE Cat-M / NB-IoT M.2 modem sells for $49+ with 10 years of connectivity

If the IoT is ever going to take off, it needs low-cost hardware and connectivity. LoRaWAN is free, apart from the hardware costs, but for projects that need wider coverage and/or higher bitrate cellular connectivity is the way to go and we’ve seen in the past that Hologram offers a free developer SIM card for global IoT projects plus some low-cost cellular IoT plans, as well as 1CNE plans to offer a 10-year plan for 10 Euros. Blues Wireless has taken a different approach as they combine hardware and cellular connectivity with their Notecard LTE-IoT modems (LTE Cat 1/Cat M or NB-IoT) shipping for 10 years of connectivity for up to 500MB data. Notecard has four variants with the following key features and specifications: MCU – Arm Cortex-M4 MCU with 2MB flash Cellular connectivity NOTE-NBGL-500 – Narrowband Cat-M/NB-IoT/GPRS (Global) via  Quectel BG95-M3 modem NOTE-NBNA-500 – Narrowband Cat-M/NB-IoT (North America) via […]

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ODROID-N2+ based “Home Assistant Blue” announced as official hardware for Home Assistant

Home Assistant has announced “Home Assistant Blue” hardware with an enclosure designed by Hahn Werke housing Hardkernel ODROID-N2+ SBC, and software supported by BayLibre who helped upstreaming the code. The goal is to make Home Assistant Blue a fully open-source platform with long-life support. The device was officially announced during the Home Assistant Conference 2020 held a couple of days ago. Home Assistant Blue home automation gateway uses the 4GB DDR4 version of the Amlogic S922X SBC, ships with a 128GB eMMC flash module, and offers Gigabit Ethernet and four USB 3.0 ports. As I understand it, the gateway will run the latest Home Assistant Core 2020.12 that was announced at the conference with a new feature called Blueprints defined as “pre-created automation with user-settable options”, as well as new neural voices for Nabu Casa Cloud TTS (Text-to-Speech), the ability to temporarily disable devices, and more. The release was initially […]

Rockchip RK3568/RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs
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Linux 5.10 LTS release – Main changes, Arm, MIPS and RISC-V architectures

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 5.10: Ok, here it is – 5.10 is tagged and pushed out. I pretty much always wish that the last week was even calmer than it was, and that’s true here too. There’s a fair amount of fixes in here, including a few last-minute reverts for things that didn’t get fixed, but nothing makes me go “we need another week”. Things look fairly normal. It’s mostly drivers – as it should be – with a smattering of fixes all over: networking, architectures, filesystems, tooling.. The shortlog is appended, and scanning it gives a good idea of what kind of things are there. Nothing that looks scary: most of the patches are very small, and the biggest one is fixing pin mapping definitions for a pincontrol driver. This also obviously means that the merge window for 5.11 will start tomorrow. I already have a couple […]

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Jetson Mate Cluster box takes four Jetson Nano/Xavier NX modules

While we’ve seen plenty of cluster boards based on Raspberry Pi SBC or Compute Modules, I had never seen clusters of Jetson modules. Those already exist, and PicoCluster has a few, but what made me write this post today is Seeed Studio’s Jetson Mate cluster box equipped with a carrier board taking up to four NVIDIA Jetson Nano or Xavier NX modules, an enclosure covered with a largish cooling fan with RGB LED for good effect… Jetson Mate specifications: SoM compatibility – Jetson Nano or Jetson Xavier NX via four SO-DIMM sockets Video Output – HDMI 2.0 Networking Gigabit Ethernet (RJ45) port Microchip KSZ9896CTXC 6-port GigE Managed Switch for internal networking between the modules and to the outside world Camera – 2x MIPI CSI connectors USB – 4x USB 3.0 ports (one per module), 1x USB 2.0 port, 1x USB-C port for power Debugging – UART debug pins (4x pairs, […]

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