CNX Software - Embedded Systems News

March 23, 2022January 7, 2023 by Ian W MORRISON (Linuxium) - 12 Comments

Higole F7G Plus Review – An affordable rugged tablet tested with Ubuntu 20.04 & Windows 11

Ruggedized industrial-use PCs are typically expensive so it is refreshing to see Higole F7G Plus, an Intel Gemini Lake Refresh tablet, being offered at an affordable price. Higole kindly sent one for review and I’ve looked at functionality and performance running on Ubuntu and also its Windows performance. Hardware Overview The Higole F7G Plus is a 10.1 inch IPS touch screen rugged industrial fanless tablet that uses Intel’s 14 nm Gemini Lake Refresh N4120 processor which is a quad-core 4-thread 1.10 GHz Celeron processor boosting to 2.60 GHz with Intel’s UHD Graphics. Designwise, meeting the MIL-STD-810G standard which is the de facto ‘ruggedized’ standard for consumer products and covers whether the device can work in a broad range of environmental conditions including surviving dropping, is evidenced by the thick protective shell around the tablet. To ensure its IP67 Certification for waterproofing each of the ports are covered by detachable rubber […]

March 22, 2022March 23, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 20 Comments

NVIDIA launches Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit, Orin NX modules, and Isaac Nova Orin AMR platform

NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin module was first introduced in November 2021, but the company has now officially launched the Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit, andunveiled the lower cost Orin NX modules still with 70 TOPS or more, and the Isaac Nova Orin AMR (autonomous mobile robot) reference platform. NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin Developer Kit Jetson Orin AGX developer kit specifications: Jetson AGX Orin module with CPU – 12-core Arm Cortex-A78AE v8.2 64-bit processor with 3MB L2 + 6MB L3 cache GPU / AI accelerators NVIDIA Ampere architecture with 2048 NVIDIA CUDA cores and 64 Tensor Cores @ 1.3 GHz DL Accelerator – 2x NVDLA v2.0 Vision Accelerator – PVA v2.0 (Programmable Vision Accelerator) AI Performance – Up to 275 TOPS (INT8) @ 60W Video Encode – 2x 4K60 | 4x 4K30 | 8x 1080p60 | 16x 1080p30 (H.265) Video Decode – 1x 8K30 | 3x 4K60 | 7x 4K30 | […]

ArmSoM RK3588 AIModule7 NVIDIA Jetson Nano-compatible SOM

March 22, 2022January 30, 2023 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Quadric devkit features q16 hybrid AI, DSP, computer vision accelerator

The Quadric devkit is an M.2 Key M module equipped with the company’s q16 edge processor offering a hybrid data-flow + Von Neumann machine for not only neural networks, but also computer vision, digital signal processing, BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms), and other workloads. This architecture allows the Quadric q16 to be more flexible than traditional AI accelerators and can deliver more effective solutions for heterogonous systems that may have multiple accelerators or require a powerful processor. The M.2 form factor enables easy integration into boards with an M.2 Key M socket such as the Gumstix Raspberry Pi 4 development board shown below with the Quadric devkit. Quadric devkit specifications: Accelerator – Quadric q16x4 Processor with 256 Vortex Cores, 8 MB on-chip memory, 4 kB per core memory, multi-precision multiply accumulate; 16 x 16mm package Memory – 4GB LPDDR4, 32-bit, dual-rank up to 3677 MHz Host Interface – 2-lane PCIe […]

March 22, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

ASRock introduces fanless iBOX 1200 Series Alder Lake-U mini PCs

ASRock Industrial has unveiled the iBox 1200 series family of fanless mini PCs powered by the latest 12th generation 15W Intel Alder Lake U-series processors, equipped with up to 64GB RAM, and supporting up to four independent displays. The fanless embedded BOX PCs also provide plenty of interfaces with 2.5GbE Gigabit Ethernet, six USB 3.2 ports, two USB 2.0 interfaces, SATA and NVMe storage, M.2 wireless expansion, and more. ASRock iBOX 1200 mini PC specifications: SoC iBOX-1215UE – Intel Core i3-1215UE hexa-core Alder Lake processor with two P-cores @ 1.2 / 4.4 GHz , four E-cores @ 0.9 / 3.3 GHz, 64 EU Intel HD graphics iBOX-1245UE – Intel Core i5-1245UE deca-core Alder Lake processor with two P-cores @ 1.5 / 4.4 GHz , eight E-cores @ 1.1 / 3.3 GHz, 80EU Intel Iris Xe Graphics iBOX-1265UE – Intel Core i7-1265UE hexa-core Alder Lake processor with two P-cores @ 1.7 […]

March 21, 2022March 22, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Linux 5.17 release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 5.17: So we had an extra week of at the end of this release cycle, and I’m happy to report that it was very calm indeed. We could probably have skipped it with not a lot of downside, but we did get a few last-minute reverts and fixes in and avoid some brown-paper bugs that would otherwise have been stable fodder, so it’s all good. And that calm last week can very much be seen from the appended shortlog – there really aren’t a lot of commits in here, and it’s all pretty small. Most of it is in drivers (net, usb, drm), with some core networking, and some tooling updates too. It really is small enough that you can just scroll through the details below, and the one-liner summaries will give a good flavor of what happened last week. Of course, this means […]

March 21, 2022March 21, 2022 by Sponsored Post - 3 Comments

Ai-Thinker Ra-08 LoRaWAN module features ASR6601 chip (Sponsored)

Ai-Thinker Ra-08/08H are new LoRaWAN modules based on ASR Microelectronics ASR6601 module featuring a 48MHz ARM Cortex M4 microcontroller and Semtech SX1262 transceiver allowing long-range, low power communication for the Internet of Things. Both LoRaWAN modules share most of the same specifications, but the Ra-08 module operates in the 410-525MHz frequency band, while the Ra-08H module works in the widely used 803MHz to 930MHz band. Ai-Thinker also provides a development kit for each module. Ai-Thinker Ra-08/Rs-08H key features and specifications: Programmable embedded Arm Cortex-M4 MCU with 128 KB of Flash and 16 KB of SRAM LoRa radio Sensitivity – -138 dBm @ SF12/125KHz Tx power – Up to +22dBm Frequencies Ra-08 – 410 MHz to 525 MHz Ra-07H – 803 MHz to 930 MHz Spread spectrum factor – SF5, SF6, SF7, SF8, SF9, SF10, SF11, SF12 LoRa, (G)FSK, BPSK, and (G)MSK modulation Bit rate up to 62.5 Kbps in LoRa […]

Rockchip RK3568, RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs and SoMs in 2025

March 20, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Avnet survey shows chip shortage impacts most designs, increases engineers workload

Avnet has just released a survey of global engineers asking them how they were coping with the global chip shortage, longer lead times, and the impact on product design. Note that most of the 530 respondents are from EMEA (56%), and the US (31%), while only 10% are in Asia, and 2% are in Japan (I understand Asia means ex-Japan here), so it may not perfectly reflect the global situation, but the results are interesting nonetheless. If times have been challenging for your company/project, know that you are not alone, and 98% percent of respondents have had troubles accessing parts, 93% has experienced longer lead times, 73% of the survey respondents say the chip shortage presents a significant challenge, and 64% are now selecting parts based on availability rather than preference. Microcontrollers are the most challenging part to get hold of (think STM32), which has led to an increase in […]

March 19, 2022March 21, 2022 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 13 Comments

Gas pumps happen to be about as insecure as your typical router

Around 400 gallons of gas were stolen from a gas station a few days ago by using a special remote to put it in “dispense mode” and get the gasoline for free. It is not an isolated incident and over the years gas pumps have been hacked using different methods, with some running embedded Linux and connected to the Internet just like a router. We previously noted devices connected o the internet like IP cameras and routers were often not secure since most were configured with default credentials (username/password). I went backpacking a few years ago, and each time I stayed somewhere I tried to log in to the router web interface using the infamous admin/admin, and it worked about 80% of the time. In 2016, I also noticed that changing the default credentials may not help, as the telnet port of my modem router was opened to the outside […]