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NiCE5340 SoM packs Nordic nRF5340 MCU, Lattice iCE40 FPGA, and 11 sensors into a tiny 29x16mm form factor

Stefano Viola’s NiCE5340 SoM is built around a Nordic Semi nRF5340 Bluetooth SoC, an iCE40 FPGA, 11 sensors, a battery charger, and various other peripherals in a 29×16 mm form factor. The nRF5340 used in the SoM is a low-power, dual-core Arm Cortex-M33 SoC with Bluetooth 5.4, Bluetooth LE (BLE), Thread, Zigbee, and other proprietary protocols. Meanwhile, the Lattice iCE40 FPGA features 3520 logic cells, 80 Kbits of embedded Block RAM, I2C, and SPI blocks, and many other features that make it suitable for applications like environmental monitoring, health tracking, and others. Previously, we have written about Unexpected Maker NANOS3, TinyS3, FeatherS3, and ProS3 boards, and ESP32-S3 4G dev board which all fall under the tiny and compact board category but this is the first time we have seen an MCU board with so many features built into a module of that size. Stefano Viola’s NiCE5340 SoM Specification ICs Nordic […]

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Canonical releases Ubuntu 24.04 Server image for Milk-V Mars RISC-V SBC

Canonical has been releasing Ubuntu RISC-V images for SBCs and QEMU at least since 2021. The latest addition is an Ubuntu 24.04 Server image for the Mars credit-card-size SBC powered by StarFive JH7110 quad-core RISC-V SoC and designed by Shenzhen Milk-V Technology. That means we now have Ubuntu Server images for the QEMU emulator, AllWinner Nezha SBC, Microchip Polarfire SoC FPGA Icicle Kit, SiFive Unmatched mini-ITX motherboard, Sipeed LicheeRV Dock, StarFive VisionFive 2 SBC, and the Mars SBC. You’ll note there aren’t any Ubuntu Desktop images for now, because the GPU (if any) in RISC-V SoCs is not yet fully supported. Mars SBC specifications: SoC – StarFive JH7110 CPU – Quad-core RISC-V processor (RV64GC) at up to 1.5GHz GPU – Imagination BXE-4-32 GPU with support for OpenCL 1.2, OpenGL ES 3.2, Vulkan 1.2 VPU H.264 & H.265 4Kp60 decoding H.265 1080p30 encoding JPEG encoder / decoder System Memory – 1GB, […]

ArmSoM CM5 - Raspberry Pi CM4 alternative with Rockchip RK3576 SoC
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Setting up a private LoRaWAN network with WisGate Connect gateway

In this guide, we’ll explain how to set up a private LoRaWAN network using the Raspberry Pi CM4-based RAKwireless’ WisGate Connect gateway and Docker or Portainer to install NodeRED, InfluxDB, Grafana, and other packages required to configure our gateway. The WisGate Connect is quite a versatile gateway with Gigabit and 2.5Gbps Ethernet plus several optional wireless connectivity options such as LoRaWAN, 4G LTE, 5G, WiFi 6, Zigbee, WiFi HaLoW, and more that can be added through Mini PCIe or M.2 sockets, expansion through WisBlock IO connectors and a 40-pin Raspberry Pi HAT connector. We’ll start by looking at the gateway features in detail, but if you already know all that, you can jump to the private LoRaWAN network configuration section. WisGate Connect unboxing, specifications, and teardown RAKwireless sent us a model with a Raspberry Pi CM4 equipped with 4 GB of RAM and 32 GB of eMMC memory, GPS and […]

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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 […]

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Year 2021 in review – Top 10 posts and statistics

As per tradition, we’ll look back at what happened during the year in the last post, and see what 2022 may have in store, plus the usual statistics from CNX Software website. The biggest story of 2021 has to be the worsening of semiconductors shortages with extremely long lead times, prices of some components going up multiple folds, constant complaints on Twitter about availability and prices. I think I even saw a website, hopefully misconfigured, showing an estimated availability of a specific STM32 MCU in 2037. This also gave rise to opportunities and board redesigns, with MotorComm Ethernet chips replacing some Realtek chips in SBCs such as NanoPi R2C and  Orange Pi R1S Plus LTS, and CH9102F showing up as a replacement for CP2104 in some IoT boards. We also got some interesting Arm processors, but sadly the high-expected Rockchip RK3588 got delayed by another year, although it’s getting really […]

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ROC-RK3566-PC single board computer supports up to 8GB RAM, M.2 NVMe SSD’s

Firefly has now launched a Rockchip RK3566 single board computer named ROC-RK3566-PC, following the launch of Station P2 RK3568 mini PC on Indiegogo last March, and the completion of the campaign a few days ago. The quad-core Cortex-A55 SBC supports up to 8GB ECC memory, up to 128GB flash, M.2 2242 MVMe SSD’s, HDMI 2.0 and MIPI DSI video interfaces, Gigabit Ethernet, and more. ROC-RK3566-PC specifications: SoC – RockChip RK3566 quad-core Cortex-A55 @ up to 1.8GHz with Arm Mali-G52 2EE GPU with support for OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0/3.2. OpenCL 2.0. Vulkan 1.1, 0.8 TOPS NPU, 4Kp60 H.265/H.264/VP9 video decoder System Memory – 2GB, 4GB, or 8GB LPDDR4 RAM with support for “all-data-link ECC” (TBC: Because the info I have so far is that ECC is supported on RK3568, not on RK3566) Storage 32GB, 64GB, or 128GB eMMC flash M.2 PCIe 2.0 socket for M.2 2242 NVMe SSD MicroSD card slot Video […]

Rockchip RK3568/RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs
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Linux 5.11 Release – Main Changes, Arm, MIPS & RISC-V Architectures

Linus Torvalds has released Linux 5.11 just in time for… “Valentine’s Day”: Nothing unexpected or particularly scary happened this week, so here we are – with 5.11 tagged and pushed out. In fact, it’s a smaller-than-average set of commits from rc7 to final, which makes me happy. And I already have several pull requests lined up for tomorrow, so we’re all set for the merge window to start. But in the meantime – and yes, I know it’s Valentine’s Day here in the US – maybe give this release a good testing before you go back and play with development kernels. All right? Because I’m sure your SO will understand. Linus Last time around, Linux 5.10 was an LTS release that added EXT-4 performance enhancements, improved post-Spectre performance, as well as the enablement of BCM2711 (Raspberry Pi 4) display pipeline, among other many changes. Some of the notable changes in […]

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Linux 4.16 Release – Main Changes, Arm and MIPS Architectures

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 4.16: So the take from final week of the 4.16 release looks a lot like rc7, in that about half of it is networking. If it wasn’t for that, it would all be very small and calm. We had a number of fixes and cleanups elsewhere, but none of it made me go “uhhuh, better let this soak for another week”. And davem didn’t think the networking was a reason to delay the release, so I’m not. End result: 4.16 is out, and the merge window for 4.17 is open and I’ll start doing pull requests tomorrow. Outside of networking, most of the last week was various arch fixlets (powerpc, arm, x86, arm64), some driver fixes (mainly scsi and rdma) and misc other noise (documentation, vm, perf). The appended shortlog gives an overview of the details (again, this is only the small stuff in […]

Boardcon Rockchip and Allwinner SoM and SBC products