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Mythic Beasts, miniNodes Offer Raspberry Pi 4 Hosting Services

Mythic Beats is the company offering hosting services for the Raspberry Pi website, and following Eben Upton proposal they decided to host the website on eighteen Raspberry Pi 4 boards, fourteen of which used as LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) servers, as well as two used as static servers with Apache, and the final two used as memory store using memcache. Two days before Raspberry Pi 4 8GB RAM launch, they tested the implementation with “normal” traffic (e.g. around one million visitors a day), and the day of the launch, tens of millions visitors came to the website, and it failed, but not because of a failure of the Raspberry Pi cluster, but instead due to a Cloudflare glitch. This is all explained in Raspberry Pi blog. This is all for internal use, but you could also get your own hosted Raspberry Pi 4 board, as Mythic Beast recently added […]

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Advantech UNO-220 is an Industrial RS232/RS485 Gateway Kit for Raspberry Pi 4

While Raspberry Pi SBCs are mostly designed for the education market, they find their way in various devices, even in the industrial market with products such as ModBerry M500 industrial computer, Compulab IOT-GATE-RPi industrial IoT computer, BB-400 Neuron Edge industrial controller, and many others. All those offer RS-232 and RS-485 ports besides other interfaces typically found in industrial applications like isolated inputs, CAN buses, and more. There’s now yet another option with Advantech UNO-200 industrial gateway kit for Raspberry Pi 4 board with RS232/RS485 header and RTC battery. Advantech UNO-220 specifications: Compatible SBC – Raspberry Pi 4 Model B with dual micro HDMI outputs, audio jack, as well as USB and Ethernet ports accessible through the enclosure I/O Interfaces GPIO – Input (GPI) 0-3: VIH: 2~5V VIL: 0 ~ 0.8V; Output (GPO) 0-3: 0 ~ 5V Serial Ports – 5-pin terminal block for RS232/485, automatic direction control, 300 ~ 115.2kbps […]

Khadas Edge2 Arm mini PC
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Raspberry Pi SBC Now Supports OpenVX 1.3 Computer Vision API

OpenVX is an open, royalty-free API standard for cross-platform acceleration of computer vision applications developed by The Khronos Group that also manages the popular OpenGL ES, Vulkan, and OpenCL standards. After OpenGL ES 3.1 conformance for Raspberry Pi 4, and good progress on the Vulkan implementation, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has now announced that both Raspberry Pi 3 and 4 Model B SBC’s had achieved OpenVX 1.3 conformance (somehow dated 2020-07-23). Raspberry Pi OpenVX open-source sample implementation passes the Vision, Enhanced Vision, & Neural Net conformance profiles specified in OpenVX 1.3 standard. However, it is NOT intended to be a reference implementation, as it is not optimized, production-ready, nor actively maintained by Khronos publically. The sample can be built on multiple operating systems (Windows, Linux, Android) using either CMake or Concerto. Detailed instructions are provided for Ubuntu 18.04 64-bit x86 and Raspberry Pi SBC. Here’s the list of commands to […]

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CutiePi Raspberry Pi CM3+ Lite based Tablet Launched on Kickstarter

Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+ Lite based CutiePi open-source tablet has been in the making for well over a year, and the company has made enough progress to launch a Kickstarter campaign with the Raspberry Pi tablet offered for $169 and up. CutiePi specifications: SoM – Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+ Lite with Broadcom BCM2837 quad-core Cortex-A53 processor and 1GB RAM Storage – MicroSD card slot Display – 8-inch 5-point multi-touch display with 1280×800 resolution Video Output – Micro HDMI Audio – 2W 8Ohm speaker Camera – 5MP front-facing camera Connectivity – WLAN 802.11 b/g/n WiFi 4 and Bluetooth 4.0 (RTL8723BS) USB – 1x USB type-A port Expansion – 6x GPIO pins Sensor – Gyroscope Misc – Handle that doubles as a stand Battery – 5,000 mAh Li-Po battery Power Supply – 5V via USB Type-C port; STM32 MCU handles power management and battery level monitoring Dimensions – 213 x […]

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Raspberry Pi VideoCore IV Boards Get an Unofficial Vulkan Driver Good Enough to Play Quake 3

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is collaborating with Igalia to work on everything related to graphics support for VideoCore VI GPU found in Raspberry Pi 4’s Broadcom BCM2711 SoC. This lead to OpenGL ES 3.1 conformance at the beginning of the year, and good progress with Raspberry Pi 4 Vulkan support. There’s no plan to work on an official Vulkan driver for earlier Raspberry Pi  boards with VideoCore IV GPU, but since the Raspberry Pi Foundation released open-source VideoCore IV driver and documentation several years ago, it’s, in theory, possible for skilled developers to improve on it. That’s exactly what Martin Thomas, an NVIDIA engineer, has done in his spare time, and after two years of work, a Vulkan driver for Raspberry Pi VideoCore IV board – RPi-VK-Driver – has been released on Github. Pi-VK-Driver implements a subset of the Vulkan, and since it is not fully conformant to the standard […]

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Checking Out Raspberry Pi OS 64-Bit on Raspberry Pi 4 8GB RAM

The Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB RAM launched a couple of weeks ago together with the beta version of Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit. Note that you should currently use the 32-bit version of Raspberry Pi OS (previously known as Raspbian) as the 64-bit still has bugs and missing features, but I want to find out the current progress, so I installed raspios_arm64-2020-05-28/2020-05-27-raspios-buster-arm64.zip and had no problem to boot the board. Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit System Information After going through the setup wizard in the desktop environment to configure the language, time, networking, etc…, and make sure the OS is updated, I checkout some information:

I do have a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B Rev 1.4 with 8GB Memory (revision: d03114), the image comes with a 64-bit Linux kernel:

and we do get a 64-bit rootfs.

All good. Known issues Before starting the review, let’s make ourselves aware […]

Rockchip RK3568/RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs
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CrowPi2 Raspberry Pi 4 Laptop Doubles as Electronics Learning Kit (Crowdfunding)

CrowPi portable learning kit for Raspberry Pi 3 B+ and Pi Zero boards was launched in 2018. It comes with a 7″ display, several sensors, buttons, a breadboard, and more all packed in a small suitcase. Elecrow has now started a new crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter to fund the second generation portable electronics learning kit: CrowPi2 which looks much more like a laptop than a suitcase found in the first model thanks to a large display, and a detachable keyboard placed on top of the electronic prototyping/learning area. It’s also more powerful thanks to the latest Raspberry Pi 4 SBC. CrowPi2 specifications: Compatible Raspberry Pi boards – Raspberry Pi 3B/B+, Raspberry Pi 4 Display – 11.6-inch 1920×1080 IPS screen Camera – 2MP camera Audio – Built-in microphone and stereo speaker; 3.5mm audio jack Keyboard – 2.4GHz detachable wireless keyboard (QWERTY only) with touchpad Sensors and Modules under the keyboard: Displays […]

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GNU Health Embedded Open Source Health Platform Works on Raspberry Pi 3/4, and soon Olimex SBC’s

GNU Health (GH) is a free and open-source Health and Hospital Information System (HIS) that can manage the internal processes of a health institution, such as financial management, electronic medical records (EMR), stock & pharmacies or laboratories (LIMS). It is already used in various hospitals, health centers, and medical research facilities in various countries, most developing countries, across the world. The program would normally be installed on x86 servers running Linux or FreeBSD, but there’s also a version for Raspberry Pi 3 and 4 based on openSUSE called GNU Health Embedded, and work is being done to port the solution to Olimex OlinuXino SBC’s. Contrary to what the photo above implies, GNU Solidario does not sell the hardware pre-loaded with GNU Health Embedded, but you can download it for free from their servers, and if you want to support the project you could always make a donation. As I understand […]

Khadas VIM4 SBC