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VoltaStream AMP1 Linux Audio Board Includes a Stereo Audio Amplifier, Adds WiFi and Bluetooth

Last summer I wrote about VoltaStream ZERO an audio board powered by NXP i.MX6ULL processor, with up to 1GB RAM, a Texas Instruments DAC, and leveraging Raspberry Pi Zero form factor. The board runs a custom Linux distribution called PolyOS built with the Yocto Project, and including shairport-sync, librespot, SqueezeLite, a DLNA renderer, and more. Polyvection, the company behind the project is now back with VoltaStream AMP1 audio development board, with half the board very similar to VoltStream ZERO, and the other half featuring an audio amplifier, and a wireless module for WiFi and Bluetooth. VoltaStream AMP1 board specifications: SoC – NXP i.MX6ULL ARM Cortex-A7 processor @ 996 MHz System Memory – 512 MB DDR3 Storage – micro SD card slot Audio 1x I2S for integrated DAC and AMP, 1x I2S for GPIO access, 1x TOSLINK-IN jack Analog DAC – Texas Instruments PCM1862 (SNR 103 dB) Amplifier – ISSI IS31AP2121 […]

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International Black Friday & Cyber Monday Deals in 2017

Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2017 deals have started to show up on some Chinese e-retailers website, so as every year, I’ll go through a non-exhaustive list with the most popular websites. GearBest’s 2017 Black Friday event offers discount from 8% up to 15% for mobile phone, tablets & computers, and appliances. One example if Alfawise S95 TV Box with S905W/2GB RAM/16GB flash going for $29.99 shipped. They also offer coupons up to 20% or a just amount in dollars. You can purchase lucky bags with a surprise product, some flash sales will be organized, as well as a lucky draw to win Xiaomi Mi 6 smartphone. Aliexpress is ready for both Black Friday and Cyber Monday with some games to win coupons, and deals per category. I have not found any specific yet, but while the games are on, the actual Black Friday sale will only take place between […]

Khadas Edge2 Arm mini PC
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Rockchip RK3399 Sapphire Board is Sold for $75 (Promo)

Black Friday is coming soon, so we’ll start to see more an more interesting deals in the day ahead. Last summer, I wrote about what should be the cheapest RK3399 development board: Sapphire, Rockchip’s own evaluation board that sold for $75… on Taobao with limited availability. So not exactly the easiest board to get. But today, I’ve learned that Varms, the company behind ROCK960 board, was selling Sapphire board for the same $75, plus shipping ($20 when I tried) with “many boards in stock”. Just a quick reminder about the specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3399 hexa-core big.LITTLE processor with two ARM Cortex A72 cores, four Cortex A53 cores, and an ARM Mali-T860 MP4 GPU System Memory – 4 GB LPDDR3, dual channel Storage – 8 GB eMMC flash, micro SD card Video Output / Display Interfaces – 1x HDMI 2.0 up to 4K @ 60 Hz; MIPI DSI, eDP, LVDS via MXM […]

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Google Releases Tensorflow Lite Developer Preview for Android & iOS

Google mentioned TensorFlow Lite at Google I/O 2017 last may, an implementation of TensorFlow open source machine learning library specifically optimized for embedded use cases. The company said support was coming to Android Oreo, but it was not possible to evaluate the solution at the time. The company has now released a developer preview of TensorFlow Lite for mobile and embedded devices with a lightweight cross-platform runtine that runs on Android and iOS for now. TensorFlow Lite supports the Android Neural Networks API to take advantage of Machine Learning accelerators when available, but falls back to  CPU execution otherwise. The architecture diagram above shows three components for TensorFlow Lite: TensorFlow Model – A trained TensorFlow model saved on disk. TensorFlow Lite Converter – A program that converts the model to the TensorFlow Lite file format. TensorFlow Lite Model File – A model file format based on FlatBuffers, that has been […]

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Linux 4.14 Release – Main Changes, ARM & MIPS Architecture

Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux 4.14: No surprises this week, although it is probably worth pointing out how the 0day robot has been getting even better (it was very useful before, but Fengguang has been working on making it even better, and reporting the problems it has found). Sure, some of the new reports turned out to be just 0day doing things that just don’t work (ie KASAN with old gcc versions, but also doing things like loading old ISA drivers in situations that just don’t make sense – remember when you couldn’t even ask if the hardware existed or not, and just had to know), but even then it’s been all good. The appended shortlog is obviously only for the (small) haul since rc8, and it really is tiny. Not very many commits, and they are small. The biggest thing that stands out in the diffstat […]

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Lab in a Box Concept Embeds x86 Server and 6 ARM Boards into a PC Case for Automated Software Testing

The Linux kernel now has about 20 millions line of code, Arm has hundreds of licensees making thousands of processors and micro-controllers, which end up in maybe hundreds of thousands of different designs, many of which are not using Linux, but for those that do, Linux must be tested to make sure it works. The same stands true for any large software used on multiple hardware platforms. Manual testing is one way to do it, but it’s time consuming and expensive, so there are software and hardware continuous integration solutions to automate testing such as Linaro LAVA (Linaro Automated Validation Architecture), KernelCI automated Linux kernel testing, and Automotive Grade Linux CIAT that automatically test incoming patch series. Both CIAT and KernelCI focus on Linux, and rely on LAVA, with KernelCI leveraging hardware contributed by the community, and proven to be effective as since it’s been implemented, failed build configs dropped […]

Rockchip RK3568/RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs
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H.265 / HEVC License Pricing Updated for Low Cost Devices

Most video codecs such as H.264, H265/HEVC, MPEG-2, MPEG-4… requires the manufacturer to pay a license fee. The fees are then added to the final product, but the actual codec fees are usually unknown to the end user. One of the exceptions are VC-1 and MPEG-2 license fees for Raspberry pi boards which are sold separately for respectively £1.20 ($1.58 US) and £2.40 ($3.16 US). So I assumed that licenses pricing was mostly private and negotiated based on volume. But a recent article stated that HEVC Advance, independent licensing administrator, revised the royalties for lower-price devices (<$40) with the price table below providing a good insight into pricing for different device types, unit prices and regions. The new discounted royalty rate category applied to consumer and commercial products selling for less than $40 including set-top boxes, surveillance cameras, game console and others. A simplified Patent License Agreement (PPL) was also announced in order […]

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Linux Benchmarks – Intel J3455 Apollo Lake vs Z3735F Bay Trail vs RK3399 and Other ARM Platforms

Since I’ve just installed Ubuntu 17.10 on MeLE PCG35 Apo, I decided I should also run some benchmarks comparing with other ARM and x86 Linux platforms I’ve tested in the past.I was particularly interested to compare the performance of Intel Apollo Lake processors (Celeron J3455 in this case) against higher end ARM processors like Rockchip RK3399 (2x A72, 4x A53) since systems have a similar price (~$150+), as well as against the older Bay Trail processor to see the progress achieved over the last 2 to 3 years. To do so, I used Phoronix Benchmark Suite against Videostrong VS-RK3399 results (RK3399 development board):

The benchmark first issued a warning about “powersave” governor, but I still went ahead, and once completed I change it to “performance” governor:

…and ran the tests again. All results are available on OpenBenchmarking. Let’s address the governor results first. cpufreq-info reports that powersave governor […]

Khadas VIM4 SBC