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PGCPSU is a Tiny LiPo PSU Module (Crowdfunding)

Last year we wrote about a two dollars USB 18650 battery shield that allows you to easily power your board over USB using a 18650 LiPo battery. But if you need some more flexibility, and extra features such as reverse polarity protection, PGCPSU, which stands for “Pretty Good Cheap Power Supply Unit”, may be worth looking into. PGCPSU key features & specifications: Power Input – micro USB input or pin header for charging (4.7V to 6V max.) Power Output 5V rail providing at least 350mA, and up to 650mA 3.3V rail providing at least 400mA, and up to 800mA Safety Integrated battery protection including reverse polarity protection Over-discharge, short circuit/over-current protection Power Efficiency High efficiency even at low load, important for long battery life Low quiescent current (49uA for the 5V rail + 57uA for the 3.3V rail) Enable/disable pin for the 3.3V rail with selectable default state solder jumper […]

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NexDock 2 Laptop Shell Gets a Full HD Display, a USB type-C Port (Crowdfunding)

NexDock 14″ laptop shell was first introduced in 2016 to help people convert their smartphones or single board computers into a laptop with a display, a keyboard and battery. The crowdfunding campaign was successful with over $360,000 raised for the projects, and the first NexDock has been shipped to 2,600+ backers. The following year, the company – now called Nex Computer – announced plan to develop NexDock 2 with support for Intel Compute Cards. This did not quite work out as expected since Intel decided to stop further development of Compute Cards, but not all is lost as Nex Computer has now launched NexDock 2 with an aluminum body, a slightly smaller but higher resolution Full HD display, an edge to edge keyboard, and a USB type-C input port. NexDock 2 specifications: Display – 13.3” IPS LCD display with 1920×1080 resolution, 16:9 aspect ratio Video Input – Full-size HDMI input […]

Khadas Edge2 Arm mini PC
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NVIDIA Introduces $99 Jetson Nano Developer Kit

NVIDIA Tegra X1 octa-core Arm processor with a 256-core Maxwell GPU was introduced in 2015. The processor powers the popular NVIDIA Shield Android TV box, and is found in Jetson TX1 development board which still costs $500 and is approaching end-of-life. The company has now introduced a much cheaper board with Jetson Nano Developer Kit offered for just $99. It’s not exactly powered by Tegra X1 however, but instead what appears to be a cost-down version of the processor with four Arm Cortex-A57 cores clocked at 1.43 GHz and a 128-core Maxwell GPU. Jetson Nano developer kit specifications: Jetson Nano CPU Module 128-core Maxwell GPU Quad-core Arm A57 processor @ 1.43 GHz System Memory  – 4GB 64-bit LPDDR4 @ 25.6 GB/s Storage  – microSD card slot (devkit) or 16GB eMMC flash (production) Video Encode – 4K @ 30 | 4x 1080p @ 30 | 9x 720p @ 30 (H.264/H.265) Video […]

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Getting Started with Temperature & Humidity Sensors on ESP8266 using ANAVI Thermometer

ANAVI Thermometer was launched on CrowdSupply in January.  It is an ESP8266 WiFi board with a built-in DHT22 temperature and humidity sensor, support for external DS18B20 waterproof temperature sensor, as well as other sensors thanks to three I2C sensors. I received the ANAVI Thermometer starter kit last month, and I’ve only found time to play with it in the last few days. I’ll start with a unboxing, assembly guide, before showing it action, and I’ll try to make it interface with Home Assistant over MQTT. ANAVI Thermometer Starter Kit Unboxing The kit comes with ANAVI Thermometer board, a plastic stand, a USB to TTL debug board, an I2C OLED display, a few nuts and bolts, and a couple of KiCad and ANAVI stickers. Leon ANAVI also added a traffic light board and LEDs, but it’s not normally part of the kit 🙂 ANAVI Thermometer board include an ESP8266 module, AM2302 […]

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Samsung ARTIK Product Line Discontinued

Everyday I read hundreds of articles trying to find something interesting to write on CNX Software blog, and one way I keep track of news is to subscribe to RSS feeds using Thunderbird. From time to time, feeds get broken due to updates making them fail RSS validation, and today I noticed Samsung ARTIK feed had stopped working, so I went to the website, and… Wait… What closure of ARTIK business? It turns out Samsung Electronics decided to shutdown their ARTIK product line in December 2018 as reported by Business Korea: Samsung Electronics will pull the plug on its ARTIK project in four years after starting to develop the internet of things (IoT) platform. … IT industry experts say that Samsung decided to halt the ARTIK project because of its poor results. Samsung wanted to build an IoT ecosystem and lead the IoT market through the ARTIK project but it […]

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FOSSASIA 2019 Schedule – March 14-17

As its name implies, FOSSASIA is a Free and Open Source Software  event taking place every year in Asia, more specifically in Singapore. I first discovered it last year, and published a virtual FOSSASIA 2018 schedule last year to give an idea about the subjects discussed at the event. It turns out FOSSASIA 2019 is coming really soon, as in tomorrow, so I’m a bit late, but I’ll still had a look at the schedule and made my own for the 4-day event.  Thursday – March 14, 2019 10:05 – 10:25 – For Your Eyes Only: Betrusted & the Case for Trusted I/O by Bunnie Huang, CTO Chibitronics Security vulnerabilities are almost a fact of life. This is why system vendors are increasingly relying on physically separate chips to handle sensitive data. Unfortunately, private keys are not the same as your private matters. Exploits on your local device still have […]

Rockchip RK3568/RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs
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Phicomm N1 Android 7.1 TV Box Supports Multiple Linux Distributions

I like to look at new hardware platforms supported by Linux mainline, and recently covered MapleBoard MP130 SBC which I found in Linux 5.0 changelog.  Today, I had a look at another device. Phicomm N1 is an Amlogic S905D powered TV box running Android 7.1 with a user interface geared towards to the Chinese market. Nothing that interesting so far, but a topic on Armbian forums made it more interesting as the box comes with a larger heatsink than most other cheap TV boxes, a 12V/2A power supply which should allow you to connect several USB hard drives, and potentially more importantly, it became popular among Chinese users, with the community releasing several Linux based distributions for the device including  CoreELEC, LibreELEC, Alpine Linux, CentOS, Debian, Deepin, ArchLinux Arm, and more. Phicomm N1 hardware specifications: SoC – Amlogic S905D quad core Arm Cortex-A53 processor @ 1.5 GHz with Arm Mali-450 […]

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K3s Lightweight Kubernetes Distribution Targets Low Resources x86 and Arm Platforms

Kubernetes (K8s) is described as a “portable, extensible open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services, that facilitates both declarative configuration and automation. It has a large, rapidly growing ecosystem. Kubernetes services, support, and tools are widely available. Google open-sourced the Kubernetes project in 2014”. However, as Rancher Labs’ CEO Sheng Liang explains “existing Kubernetes distributions are often memory intensive and overly complex for edge computing environments”, so the company developed and launched K3s, a lightweight Kubernetes distribution designed for developers and operators looking for a way to run Kubernetes in resource-constrained x86, Armv7-A and 64-bit Armv8-A hardware platforms often found in edge computing environments, as opposed to the cloud. Rancher Labs managed to reduce the footprint of Kubernetes, and better adapt it to entry-level hardware by taking four main steps: Removing old and non-essential code – Alpha functionalities, all non-default admission controllers, in-tree cloud providers, and storage drivers are […]

Khadas VIM4 SBC