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Phyx LANA-TNY – A WCH CH32V203 RISC-V development board for embedded applications

The LANA-TNY is a compact development board created by Phyx and built around the CH32V203 RISC-V microcontroller. It offers a low-cost solution for embedded development and features a built-in USB bootloader, eliminating the need for an external programmer to flash the firmware. With a USB-C connector and a minimalist design, the board provides essential components to start development quickly. At its core, the Phyx LANA-TNY is powered by the CH32V203G6U6, a 32-bit RISC-V microcontroller from WCH Electronics, capable of running up to 144MHz with 1-cycle multiply/divide operations. It includes 10KB of SRAM, 32KB of single-cycle Flash, and 224KB of additional external flash for program or data storage, though the external memory operates at a slower speed. The CH32V203 microcontroller supports a range of peripherals, including ADC, timers, USB devices, UART, I2C, and SPI, making it suitable for a wide variety of embedded applications. Designed in the style of Adafruit’s QT […]

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The Epi C3 is a tiny ESP32-C3 development board with USB-C and an onboard antenna

The Epi C3 is a small development board based on the Espressif ESP32-C3 microcontroller with a USB-C connector for power and programming and an onboard ceramic antenna for wireless applications. We have previously covered several tiny ESP32-C3 development boards such as the Microflex series, ESP32-C3-0.42LCD, the XIAO ESP32C3, and LOLIN’s C3 Mini and C3 Pico. The Epi C3 claims the title of the “smallest ESP32 dev board with USB-C and an onboard antenna.”  It uses a Johanson ceramic antenna with a “surprising range for its size” and the USB-C port is sunk into the board to reduce footprint. The ESP32-C3 microcontroller on the Epi C3 board is much more powerful than the 8-bit AVR chip on its predecessor, the Epi 32U4. The Epi C3, however, retains many of the older board’s protective features, including TVS diodes on the USB data lines and power input, a 500mA on the USB power […]

ArmSoM CM5 - Raspberry Pi CM4 alternative with Rockchip RK3576 SoC
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Waveshare ESP32-S3-Zero is a tiny WiFi and BLE IoT module with a USB-C port, up to 32 GPIOs

Waveshare ESP32-S3-Zero is a tiny (23.5×18 mm) module based on Espressif ESP32-S3 WiFi 4 and BLE microcontroller with two rows of nine through holes plus 16 pads for GPIOs, a USB-C port for power and programming, Boot and Reset buttons, and a ceramic antenna. It reminds me of the Seeed Studio’s XIAO ESP32S3 module with an even smaller 21 x 17.5mm design, but the ESP32-S3-Zero offers more GPIOs, an RGB LED, and a built-in ceramic antenna instead of a u.FL connector for an external antenna. Waveshare ESP32-S3-Zero specifications: Wireless MCU – Espressif Systems ESP32-FH4R2 CPU – dual-core Tensilica LX7 microcontroller @ 240 MHz Memory – 512KB SRAM,  2MB PSRAM Storage – 4MB flash Wireless – Wi-Fi 4 & Bluetooth 5.0 dual-mode (classic + BLE) connectivity Antenna – 2.4 GHz ceramic antenna USB – USB Type-C port for power and programming Expansion I/Os 2x 9-pin 2.54mm pitch headers and castellated holes […]

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ReSpeaker Lite Voice Assistant Kit combines XMOS XU-316 and ESP32-S3 for advanced voice processing, Home Assistant integration

Seeed Studio’s ReSpeaker Lite Series includes the ReSpeaker Lite 2-Mic Array and Voice Assistant Kit, featuring the XMOS XU-316 AI sound chip for advanced voice processing and integration with Home Assistant via ESPHome. It’s perfect for smart home control with far-field voice capture and noise cancellation. The kit combines the ReSpeaker Lite dual-microphone array with the XIAO ESP32S3 module for voice recognition, noise reduction, and processing. It supports WiFi, BLE 5.0, and has a 2.4GHz rod antenna. It also offers I2S and USB connectivity for use with microcontrollers and SBCs, making it ideal for smart voice assistants and home automation. We’ve previously covered the NXP i.MX RT106F & RT106A/L, where NXP i.MX RT106A  can run voice assistant software with features like acoustic echo cancellation, ambient noise reduction, beamforming, barge-in, and playback processing. We’ve also written about other ReSpeaker boards, such as the ReSpeaker 4-Mic Array board, ReSpeaker Core board, and […]

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Linux 6.10 Release – Notable changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linux Torvalds has announced the release of Linux 6.10 on LKML: So the final week was perhaps not quote as quiet as the preceding ones, which I don’t love – but it also wasn’t noisy enough to warrant an extra rc. And much of the noise this last week was bcachefs again (with netfs a close second), so it was all pretty compartmentalized. In fact, about a third of the patch for the last week was filesystem-related (there were also some btrfs latency fixes and other noise), which is unusual, but none of it looks particularly scary. Another third was drivers, and the rest is “random”. Anyway, this obviously means that the merge window for 6.11 opens up tomorrow. Let’s see how that goes, with much of Europe probably making ready for summer vacation. And the shortlog below is – as always – just the last week, not some kind […]

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Watch ESP32’s GPIO status in real-time in a web browser

GPIOViewer is an open-source Arduino library allowing users to monitor the GPIO pins status of their ESP32 board in real-time in a web browser for troubleshooting or fun. It’s different than the Wokwi ESP32 simulator that works entirely in a web browser since the GPIOViewer library sends GPIO status data of the actual hardware over WiFi to display the pin status as they change in a page rendered in a web browser from a choice of popular ESP32 development boards. The GPIOViewer library relies on the ESPAsyncWebServer Async web server for ESP8266 and ESP32 and the AsyncTCP asynchronous TCP library for ESP32 microcontrollers. The first two must be manually downloaded and installed, and the latter can be installed directly from the Arduino IDE’s Library Manager by searching for it. GPIOViewer has a 50 KB footprint, works with digital, analog, and PWM, and supports various ESP32-VROOM-32 development boards, Olimex ESP32-EVB and […]

Rockchip RK3568/RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs
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Mixtile Core 3588E SoM review – Part 2: Ubuntu 22.04, hardware features, RK3588 AI samples, NVIDIA Jetson compatibility

We’ve already had a look at the Mixtile Core 3588E NVIDIA Jetson Nano/TX2 NX/Xavier NX/Orin Nano compatible Rockchip RK3588 SO-DIMM system-on-module in the first part of the review with an unboxing and first boot with an Ubuntu 22.04 OEM installation. I’ve now had more time to play with the devkit comprised of a Core 3588 module in 16GB/128GB configuration and a Leetop A206 carrier board with low-level features testing, some benchmarks, multimedia testing with 3D graphics acceleration and video playback, some AI tests using the built-in 6 TOPS NPU and the RKNPU2 toolkit, and finally I also tried out the system-on-module with the carrier board from an NVIDIA Jetson Nano developer kit. Ubuntu 22.04 System info We had already checked some of the system information in the first part of the Mixtile Core 3588E review, but here’s a reminder:

I also ran inxi to check a few more details. […]

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ButtonBoard is a 3cm round WiFi IoT board with BME280 and IMU sensors (Crowdfunding)

ButtonBoard is a tiny round-shaped board based on the ESP-01F WiFi IoT module (ESP8285), equipped with a BME280 air pressure, humidity, and temperature sensor, an IMU sensor, and designed for wearables electronics projects. ButtonBoard specifications: Wireless module – ESP-01F module with ESP8285 Tensilica L106 microcontroller @ 80/160 MHz with 2.4GHz WiFi connectivity, PCB antenna; package: 11 x 10 mm USB – Micro USB port Sensors Bosch Sensortec BME280 pressure, temperature, and humidity sensor, and altimeter. IMU sensor Expansion – Through holes for up to 10x GPIOs, I2C, SPI, USART Misc – Reset button Power Supply – 5V via micro USB port; onboard power management Dimensions – About 3cm diameter The ButtonBoard can be programmed with the Arduino IDE via USB or WiFi, MicroPython, Lua, and Scratch, and they also mention support for ChatGPT through the current API, but I could not find any code samples at this time. They do […]

Boardcon Rockchip and Allwinner SoM and SBC products