That’s the beginning of the new giveaway week that will take place between on March 9 – 15, with one device given away every day. I’ll start with a bang with Nagrace HPH-NTV6, an Android TV box powered by Rockchip RK3288 SoC with 4GB RAM and 32GB Flash. In my initial HPH NT-V6 review, I found the device to have very good performance, but at the time XBMC support was rather weak on RK3288, and the device had serious Ethernet issues. Since then XBMC / Kodi / SPMC has greatly improves, and the company recently released a new firmware that fixes the critical Ethernet performance bug, so in 2015 it has become a much better device. There’s also a Ubuntu / Android dual boot image. You can check out HPH NT-V6 unboxing post for more pictures. To enter the draw simply leave a comment below. Other rules are as follows: […]
Sigrok and Pulseview in Ubuntu 14.04 with UNI-T UT61E Digital Multimeter
A couple of months ago, I received a new digital multimeter UNI-T UT61E that can send data to a computer via a serial cable, and allows you draw some nice charts. I’ve already done that in Windows 7 with the provided tools, and reported on the power consumption of some Chinese Android TV boxes. However, since I use Ubuntu 14.04 as my main operating system, Linux based tools would be more convenient, and open source sigrok-cli command line client and its graphical interface pulseview are supposed to support UT61E DMM, so I had to give it a try. A Quick Look at UNI-T UT61 Digital Multimeter Before going into Sigrok, I’ll quickly show what the multimeter received from DealExtreme . It took longer than expected to ship because of of included 9V battery, and at the first shipping attempt it was returned to DX, but after 8 weeks or so, […]
Compulab Utilite2 Android / Ubuntu mini PC is Now Up for Sale for $192 and Up
Compulab Utilite2 is a new family of mini PCs powered vt Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 quad core Krait 300 processor, with 2GB RAM, 4GB eMMC and optional mSATA storage that runs Android 4.4 or Ubuntu Linaro, with CM-QS600 SoM found in the device being officially supported by Linaro. Utilite2 Standard 4G and Standard 4G + 32SSD (or just SSD for short) are now listed on UK based TinyGreenPC for respectively £158.00 ($241) and £181.00 ($276), but the two models can also be bought direct on Compulab website for $192 and $229 with a 4 weeks lead time. Utilite2 specifications: SoC – Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 APQ8064 quad-core Krait 300 @ 1.7GHz with Adreno 320 GPU compliant with OpenGL ES 1.1 / 2.0 / 3.0 and OpenCL System Memory – 2GB DDR3-1066 Storage – 4GB eMMC, mSATA socket (mini-PCie form-factor, populated with 32 GB SSD on SSD model), and micro-SD slot up to […]
DonglePi is a USB Dongle with a Raspberry Pi Header for your PC
While the newer Raspberry Pi A+, B+ and B2 boards feature the new 40-pin connector, the Raspberry Pi boards Model A and B have a 26-pin expansion header, but both are use to access GPIOs, UART, SPI, I2C and interface with external hardware, and many add-ons boards have been developed for the Raspberry Pi. But what if you’d like to use R-Pi add-ons board on your PC, or instead you are developing your own add-on board, but would like to do so directly on your PC for convenience? DonglePi is the answer. It’s a small USB dongle with Atmel SAMD21 MCU and a 26-pin Raspberry Pi compatible header, that you could use connect to your Android/Linux/Windows PC to play with GPIO, I2C, SPI, Serial, PWM just like on a Raspberry Pi, and using RPi/GPIO or smbus Python libraries for programming. The project is still in development, and so far most […]
iConsole Micro Intel Atom TV Stick To Run Android 5.0 based Console OS
Console Inc., previously Mobile Media Ventures, Inc., is the company developing Console OS operating system based on Android 4.4 / 5.0 for Intel platforms that includes customizations for a better desktop experience, and you can already try the preview version of Console OS Standard for free on some Intel hardware, with another paid version to become available at the time of the stable release. The company has now announced iConsole Micro a Console OS HDMI TV Stick based on a quad core Intel Atom processor that looks very much like MeegoPad T01, but it’s said to be based on Intel Compute Stick technology. iConsole Micro specifications have not been fully released, but here’s what we know so far: SoC – Unnamed Intel Atom 64-bit quad core processor System Memory – 2 GB RAM Storage – 32 GB eMMC + micro SD slot up to 128GB (160GB in total) Video & […]
ARM Cortex M0+ Based Arduino Zero Pro Board Gets Listed on Arduino.org
A new “Arduino Zero Pro” board has been listed on Arduino.org, which looks very similar to the Arduino Zero board announced last year, with Atmel ATSAMD21G18 ARM Cortex M0+ MCU, and that is still listed as “Coming Soon” on Arduino.cc website. So it feels a little odd Arduino would release a board with basically the same features. Arduino Zero Pro key specifications are indeed exactly the same: Microcontroller – Atmel ATSAMD21G18 32-bit ARM Cortex M0+ MCU @ 48 MHz with 32 KB SRAM, 256 KB flash, up to 16KB EEPROM (By emulation). 48-pin LQFP package. Digital I/O Pins – 14, with 12 PWM and UART Analog Input Pins – 6, including 5 12bits ADC channels and one 10 bits DAC DC Current per I/O Pin – 7 mA USB – 2x micro USB ports Debugging – USB via Atmel’s Embedded Debugger (EDBG) on-board debugger, and JTAG Misc – reset button, […]
Xilinx Introduces Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC with Cortex A53 & R5 Cores, Ultrascale FPGA
Xilinx Zynq-7000 dual core Cortex A9 + FPGA SoC family was announced in 2012, and provides a wide range of SoC with features and price range, and led to low cost ARM + FPGA such as ZedBoard, and more recently Parallela and MYiR Z-Turn boards. The company unveiled its successor with Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC providing five times more performance per watt, with four ARM Cortex A53 cores, two ARM Cortex R5 real-time MCU cores, a Mali-400MP GPU, an UltraScale FPGA fabric manufactured with 16nm FinFET+ process. There are two main sub-families in Zynq Ultrascale+ MPSoC for “smarter control & vision”, and “smarter network”. Both share the same processing systems (CPU, GPU, MCU, Peripherals, Security), but the networking family has beefier FPGAs, and lacks the H.264/H.265 video processing unit found in the control & vision version: Processing Systems Processor – Quad ARM Cortex A53 MPCore up to 1.3GHz Real-time Processor – […]
Mixtile LOFT-Q Allwinner A31 Board with SATA Can Now be Purchased for $90
Mixtile LOFT-Q and LOFT Kit were unveiled nearly a year ago, the first being a development board based on Allwinner A31 processor with 2GB RAM, 16GB RAM, SATA connector, Gigabit Ethernet, etc.., while the second is a kit with an enclosure and power supply. The kit does not appear to be available yet, but the board has recently been listed on SeeedStudio for $90. Mixtile LOFT-Q specifications: SoC – Allwinner A31 quad core ARM Cortex-A7 processor with PowerVR SGX544 MP2 GPU System Memory – 2GB DDR3 Storage – 8GB eMMC, SATA III connector for 2.5″ drives, and SD card Slot Video Output – HDMI 1.4 up to 1080p60 Video Decoding – H.264 4Kx2K video decoding, multi-format FHD video decoding, including Mpeg1/2, Mpeg4 SP/ASP GMC, H.263, H.264,etc Audio I/O – HDMI, 1 S/PDIF, high definition microphone Camera I/F Integrated Parallel & MIPI I/F sensor Integrated powerful ISP, supporting Raw Data CMOS […]