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XinaBox’s xChips Enable Modular Electronics for Makers & STEM Education

So today, I decided to have a look a 96Boards website to see if there was anything new from the community, and I came accross “X in a Box B901“, an “☒CHIP is designed to interface with the 96 Boards, such as the Dragonboard 410c. This provides an interface to support the ☒CHIP ecosystem, adding support for many additional sensors etc…” I had no idea what it was all about, so obviously I had to investigate. Xinabox (X in a Box) is an ecosystem of modular electronics boards used for developing, making products and learning. There are now over 70 modular xChip” with cores/CPUs, sensors, power, communication, output, and storage. They are interconnected together without wires, soldering, breadboards, and adapters are provided for Raspberry Pi, 96Boards, and other development boards. xChips can be sorted into 8 categories: Cores – MCU/CPI cores based on Microchip ATMega328P, SAMD21, ESP8266, or ESP32 with […]

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Tiny Giant Board Runs Linux, Follows Adafruit Feather Form Factor

If you want a tiny single board computer that runs Linux on Arm Cortex-A processor, some options include Raspberry Pi Zero (W), PocketBeagle, or FriendlyElec NanoPi Duo with the latter being smaller and more powerful than RPi Zero although it lacks video output. Another potential option that may become available soon is the Giant Board, which as its name clearly does not imply, is a really tiny board powered by Microchip Atmel SAMA5 Cortex-A5 processor, and leveraging Adafruit Feather form factor. Giant board preliminary specifications: SiP – ATSAMA5D27C-D1G with Microchip SAMA5D2 Arm Cortex-A5 Processor 500MHz, 128MB DDR2 RAM Storage – Micro SD slot for OS and storage Peripherals & I/Os 6x 12-Bit ADC with 3.3V Reference 4x 16-Bit PWM ADC external trigger PWM external trigger 1x I2C, 1x SPI, 1x UART Misc- Power button Power Supply 5V via micro USB port 3.7V LIPO support for portable projects The Microchip / […]

Khadas Edge2 Arm mini PC
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ANAVI Thermometer WiFi Board is Designed for Home Automation (Crowdfunding)

ANAVI Technology launched several open source hardware boards for the Raspberry Pi and ESP8266 maker communities in the past, starting with RabbitMax Flex home automation HAT for Raspberry Pi, and several others including ANAVI Light Controller ESP8266 board to control LED strips. All boards are designed with KiCad opensource EDA software, and I’ve tested several already such as ANAVI Infrared pHAT or ANAVI Light Controller, and found documentation to be very good and easy to follow. The company has now launched another ESP8266 board with ANAVI Thermometer that allows you to monitor temperature and humidity, effectively acting as a thermostat for home automation. ANAVI Thermometer specifications: SoC –  Espressif Systems ESP8266 Tensilica L106 32-bit processor Connectivity – WiFi 802.11 b/g/n Display – Mini OLED display Build-in sensor – AM2302 (DHT22) temperature and humidity sensor Expansion Terminal block for DS18B20 waterproof temperature sensor UART pins 3x slots for I2C sensors Misc – […]

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FOSDEM 2019 Open Source Developers Meeting Schedule

FOSDEM – which stands for Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting – is a free-to-participate event where developers meet on the first week-end of February to discuss open source software & hardware projects. FOSDEM 2019 will take place on February 2 & 3, and the schedule has already been published with 671 speakers scheduled to speak in 711 events themselves sorted in 62 tracks. Like every year, I’ll create a virtual schedule based on some of the sessions most relevant to this blog in tracks such as  open hardware, open media, RISC-V, and hardware enablement tracks. February 2 10:30 – 10:55 – VkRunner: a Vulkan shader test tool by Neil Roberts A presentation of VkRunner which is a tool to help test the compiler in your Vulkan driver using simple high-level scripts. Perhaps the largest part of developing a modern graphics driver revolves around getting the compiler to […]

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Linux 4.20 Release – Main Changes, Arm and MIPS Architectures

After Greg K-H handling Linux 4.19 release, Linus Torvalds is back at the helm, and released Linux 4.20 just before Christmas: Let’s face it, last week wasn’t quite as quiet as I would have hoped for, but there really doesn’t seem to be any point to delay 4.20 because everybody is already taking a break. And it’s not like there are any known issues, it’s just that the shortlog below is a bit longer than I would have wished for. Nothing screams “oh, that’s scary”, though. And as part of the “everybody is already taking a break”, I can happily report that I already have quite a few early pull requests in my inbox. I encouraged people to get it over and done with, so that people can just relax over the year-end holidays. In fact, I probably won’t start pulling for a couple of days, but otherwise let’s just […]

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$100 Laptop Shell to Support Smartphones, USB Type-C PC Sticks, and SBCs (Crowdfunding)

Launched in 2011, Motorola Lapdock turned the company’s Atrix 4G smartphone into an Android laptop, but it did not end up being a commercial success so the company stopped manufacturing the laptop shell a few years ago. It is still used by hobbyist for example to create their own DIY Raspberry Pi laptop, and in recent years, with phoned getting much more powerful and desktop support for Android improving, lookalikes have been launched such as NextDock or Mirabook. A new option will soon be available, as Charbax known for his armdevices.net website and YouTube channel has just launched an Indiegogo campaign for a $100 Lapdock. Two models will be available with Lapdock 11.6″, and Lapdock 14.1″ referring to their size, but sadly no other specifications were provided for the display. We still know they’ll work with Samsung Dex / Linux on Dex modes, Huawei PC mode, and basically any device […]

Rockchip RK3568/RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs
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$6 C-SKY Linux Board Reviewed, Benchmarked

The price of single board computers and development boards has really gone down in recent years, and it’s easy to find a low cost Arm based board for most project. But C-SKY Linux development board is quite different since it’s based on the little known C-SKY architecture, and the price in China ($6) is really competitive for a media capable board. If you live outside of China, the board is now sold for about $18 including shipping, and MickMake decided to buy one to have a closer look and review the board. As we covered during the announced the board is powered by NationalChip GX66058 C-SKY 32-bit processor clocked at up to 574 MHz and integrating  64MB DDR2 on-chip. Getting the board on-hand allowed Mick to get more details about the other chips included in the board namely: STMicro STM32F103 to handle all the JTAG control through a micro USB […]

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Balena EtcherPro Multi SD Card, USB, and Board Flasher Coming in Q2 2019

I previously wrote about Etcher Pro when posting about the fairly expensive SySTOR SD card duplicator that allows you to copy one (micro) SD card content to multiple cards on one go, for instance to speed up the process of flashing firmware for multiple single board computers. Made by the team behind the popular Etcher firmware flashing tool, EtcherPro promised to be a more cost effective solution, but there was not a lot of details at the time. Balena – previously resin.io – has now written a bit more about the project progress in a blog post. EtcherPro is a standalone hardware device, meaning no PC requires – with a user interface based on Etcher GUI, and allowing to copy a micro SD card, SD card, or USB flash driver to 16 destinations in one go thanks to USB 3.0 ports and SD card sockets. What makes the products even […]

Khadas VIM4 SBC