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Linaro Connect SF 2017 Welcome Keynote – New Members, Achievements, the Future of Open Source, and More…

Linaro Connect San Francisco 2017 is now taking place until September 29, and it all started yesterday with the Welcome Keynote by George Grey, Linaro CEO discussing the various achievements since the last Linaro Connect in Budapest, and providing an insight to the future work to be done by the organization. The video is available on YouTube (embedded below), and since I watched it, I’ll provide a summary of what was discussed: Welcoming New Members – Kylin (China developed FreeBSD operating systems) joined LEG (Enterprise Group), NXP added LHG (Home Group) membership, and Xilinx joined LITE (IoT and Embedded). Achievements OPTEE open portable trusted environment execution more commonly integrated into products. Details at optee.org. LEG 17.08 ERP release based on Linux 4.12, Debian 8.9 with UEFI, ACPI, DPDK, Bigtop, Hadoop, etc… LITE group has been involved in Zephyr 1.9 release, notably contributing to LwM2M stack More projects to be found […]

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Flexible Silicone Case for LattePanda Board

I’ve seen many different kind of cases for development board from the simple acrylic enclosures, cheap plastic case, and more expansive wooden or metal cases. However so far I don’t think I had ever come across silicone cases, but while browsing new arrivals on DFRobot, I discovered a silicone case for LattePanda board. The case will fit closely all around the board, and have opening for ports and headers that are clearly marked including I/O pins. It takes a little less space than other type of cases, and should absorb shocks better in case of fall. At first look, it looks like it might prevent good cooling, as it does not appears suitable for the heatsinks kit sold for the board, but actually the bottom cover offers space for the fan. Other specifications listed for the case: Non-toxic and non-smell silicone material (food grade) Cold & heat fatigue resisting Static […]

Khadas Edge2 Arm mini PC
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RadioShuttle Network Protocol is an Efficient, Fast & Secure Alternative to LoRaWAN Protocol

LoRaWAN protocol is one of the most popular LPWAN standards used for the Internet of Things today, but some people found it “lacked efficiency, did not support direct node-to-node communication, and was too costly and far too complicated for many applications”, so they developed their own LoRa wireless protocol software called RadioShuttle, which they claim is “capable of efficiently sending messages in a fast and secure way between simple LoRa modules”. Some of the key features of the protocol include: Support for secure or insecure (less time/energy) message transmission, multiple messages transmission in parallel Unique 32-bit device ID (device number) per LoRa member, unique 16-bit app ID (program number for the communication) Security – Login with SHA-256 encrypt password; AES-128 message encryption Air Traffic Control – Nodes only send if no LoRa signal is active on that channel. Optimized protocol –  Message delivery within 110 ms (SF7, 125 kHz, free […]

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Google Assistant News – AIY Voice Kit For Sale, Offline Support, 3rd Party Smart Speakers Announced

There’s been a lot of development related to Google Assistant in the last few days. First, Google provided an update for AIY Projects, with their AIY Projects Voice Kit now available for pre-order on Micro Center for $35 including a Raspberry Pi 3 board, making the kit virtually free, although you may also purchase it. Note that Micro Center blocks traffic originating from some countries, so I had to use Zend2 to access the site. [Update 10/09/2017: You can also get it from Seeed Studio for worldwide shipping] Google also announced the Speech Commands Dataset with 65,000 one-second long utterances of 30 short words, which they are in the process of integrating with the next release of the Voice Kit, and will allow the devices to respond to voice commands without the need for an Internet connection. So if you lose your Internet connection, or want to isolate your Voice […]

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Those Charts Show The Benefits of Microphone Arrays for Hot Word Detection

Since I started looking more into smart speakers, including DIY ones such as the I made with Orange Pi Zero board + Google Assistant with a single microphone, I was told about the importance of microphone arrays, but so far, I had not seen any clear study or data about that. That changed today, as I came across a review of mic arrays by the makers of Snips Voice Platform. They tested five arrays connected to a Raspberry Pi 3 with the system, and also added a generic USB microphone to the mix. The results speak for themselves… In that experiment, they measured the rate at which a hot word was successfully detected by incrementally increasing the distance between 0.5 meters to 5 meters (16 ft), and for each distance, repeating the hot word 25 times at 3 second intervals using pre-recording to keep the voice level constant, and the […]

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The Stress Terminal UI (s-tui) is a Pretty CPU and Temperature Monitoring Terminal App

While it’s possible to do monitoring with tools like RPI-Monitor on headless or remote systems, top and htop are likely the commonly used tools to monitor CPU and process usage in the terminal. There’s now a new and different option with the Stress Terminal UI that display pretty charts for frequency, CPU usage, and temperature in the terminal, and as its name implies it can also stress the system. I’ve first installed it in my main computer running Ubuntu 16.04.2 as follows:

and then just started it

It took the screenshot above after enabling stress operation for a few seconds, and while frequency and CPU utilization in percent are updated properly, temperature is not, at least on my system. I had to enable “Smooth Graph” option to see any changes in the first two charts. I tried to run the app again with sudo, but still no temperature […]

Rockchip RK3568/RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs
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NComputing RX300 Thin Client Review – Part 1: Unboxing and Teardown

NComputing RX300 is a thin client based on Raspberry Pi 3 board that will allow to remotely run Windows and Linux operating systems from a much more powerful server, and Raspberry Pi 3 mostly handling the display, and connection to hardware like USB keyboard and mouse. The company has me sent a review sample for evaluation, and I’ll start by checking out what I received, and the hardware design of the device. NComputing RX300 Thin Client Unboxing I was asked whether I could test dual display, and then I had to choose between a VGA adapter or a DVI adapter. I selected the former, and I received both RX300 thin client, and a USB to VGA secondary adapter with its USB cable. We’ll find the thin client, a 5.1V/2.5A power adapter with a US plug adapter, and a multi-language quick installation guide in the package. The enclosure is really cute, and […]

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Checking out Hologram’s Developer SIM Card for Worldwide IoT Projects

Hologram is a service that offers 2G/3G/4G cellular connectivity for the Internet of Things via a SIM card that works in over 170  countries, and with pricing starting at $0.40 per month. In order to promote their services, the company offers a free developer SIM card which I ordered when I first wrote about the service last month. I was pleased and surprised they would sent it to Asia for free, and I got the card in a bubble envelop. The back of the card includes a 18 to 22 digit SIM card number and bar code, that we’ll need to use for activation, and a link that redirects to https://hologram.io/docs/. I planned to try the card with Wio GPS tracker board which requires a nano SIM card, and there are convenient cutouts to convert the SIM card to micro SIM or nano SIM card formats. Before using the card […]

Khadas VIM4 SBC