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Getting Started with ANAVI Light pHat Starter Kit with RGB LED Strip, Light Sensor

ANAVI Light pHAT is an expansion board best suited for Raspberry Pi Zero (W/WH) boards, but also working with any other Raspberry Pi boards with a 40-pin header, that can control a 12V RGB LED strip and sensors. The project’s crowdfunding has just been successfully completed on CrowdSupply with 82 pledges, but you can still pre-order the board or kits for $25 and up. The developer – Leon ANAVI – had sent me a starter kit a little while ago, and this week-end I had time to test the basic functionalities of the board. The package includes the pHAT board itself, a one meter RGB LED strip, an I2C sensor, and some stickers. The sensor is based on BH1750 ambient light intensity sensor. The light pHAT boards include a 4-pin 12V/RGB blue terminal, EEPROM, three I2C connecter, a 3.3V UART connector to access the serial console for debugging / running […]

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Anavi Light pHAT Adds RGB Light Strip Support to Raspberry Pi Boards (Crowdfunding)

He works as a software engineer for his main job, but Leon ANAVI is apparently enjoying his hobby of designing open source hardware, as after RabbitMax Flex home automation HAT, and ANAVI Infrared pHAT with IR transmitter and receiver, he has come up with as third project: Anavi Light pHat, an add-on board for Raspberry Pi 3/Zero (W) that adds support for RGB light strips. Light pHAT specifications: Compatible with 40-pin Raspberry Pi header EEPROM with board manufacturer information and a device tree fragment Terminal block for a 12V RGB LED strip 3x 4-pin I2C headers for sensor modules 1x 3-pin header for PIR motion sensor 1x 4-pin UART header for debugging Dimensions – pHAT form factor You first need to connect the pHAT to your board, and then LED strip, and you can then control the lights using Home Assistant open source home automation platform, with the strip integrated […]

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How to Control Your Air Conditioner with Raspberry Pi Board and ANAVI Infrared pHAT

Leon ANAVI may be a full-time software engineer, but in his spare time he has started to develop open source hardware project with the help of others and by himself. Last year, I got hold of his RabbitMax Flex HAT for Raspberry Pi, and tested it with the provided LCD display, one temperature sensor, and a Raspberry Pi 2 board. The board also featured IR receiver & transmitter, and I tried to use it with my aircon remote control, but at the time I did not find a way to do it easily, and control my TV with LIRC instead. Leon has now made a simpler, smaller, and cheaper add-on board for Raspberry Pi Zero, and other Raspberry Pi boards with a 40-pin header, with 3x I2C headers, two IR transmitters, and one IR receiver. He sent me a sample of “ANAVI Infrared pHAT”, and after quickly describing the board, […]

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DALI2 expansion module for ESP32-C6-Pico and ESP32-S3-Pico boards facilitates Smart Lighting integration

Waveshare has recently launched the Pico-DALI2 expansion module for ESP32-Pico series boards designed to enable DALI communication for customized control of multiple lighting groups. It is compatible with development boards such as the ESP32-C6-Pico and ESP32-S3-Pico and includes a DALI communication screw terminal for connecting external DALI devices. DALI (Digital Addressable Lighting Interface) is a standardized protocol used for lighting control in building automation systems. The latest version of the DALI2 protocol is better than the old one in that it offers enhanced interoperability, additional features like multi-master configurations, and better energy management capabilities. DALI2 devices can communicate bidirectionally, meaning controllers can send commands and also receive status feedback from lighting devices, allowing for more complex automation and diagnostics. We can get more information about DALI from Wikipedia. We have previously seen the uses of DALI in Texas Instruments MSPM0 Arm Cortex-M0+ microcontrollers as an interface and in Acme CM3-Home […]

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RAUC open-source OTA update solution for embedded Linux ported to Rock Pi 4 SBC

RAUC open-source OTA update solution enabling A/B updates for embedded Linux images has recently been ported to the Radxa Rock Pi 4 Model B SBC powered by a Rockchip OP1 SoC by the project’s maintainer, Leon Anavi working for Konsulto Group. If you run a Linux distribution like Ubuntu, Debian, or Fedora, packages and OS images are taken care of automatically or by running a few commands. However, software engineers who build custom embedded Linux images with the Yocto Project or Buildroot must handle this themselves. Luckily, there are already open-source OTA firmware update solutions such as Mender, Balena, Torizon, OSTree, Snap, or RAUC, and we’ll look at the latter today. RAUC (Robust Auto-Update Controller) was started by Pengutronix in 2015 and eventually adopted by the community. It’s a lightweight update client that runs on an Embedded Linux device and controls the A/B update procedure when a new firmware revision […]

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FOSDEM 2024 schedule – Open-source embedded, mobile, IoT, robotics, RISC-V, etc..

FOSDEM – which stands for Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting – is a free-to-participate event where thousands of developers meet in Brussels on the first week-end of February to discuss open-source software & hardware projects. FOSDEM 2024 will take place on February 3-4 with 880 speakers, 818 events, and 66 tracks. Although I won’t attend, I’ve created a virtual schedule like every year with sessions most relevant to the topics covered on CNX Software from the “Embedded, Mobile and Automotive” and “Open Hardware and CAD/CAM” devrooms, but also other devrooms including “FOSS Mobile Devices”, “ Energy: Reimagining this Ecosystem through Open Source”, “RISC-V”, and others. FOSDEM Day 1 – Saturday, February 3, 2024 10:30 – 10:55 – Screen Sharing on Raspberry Pi 5 Using VNC in Weston and Wayland with the Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded by Leon Anavi In 2023, embedded Linux developers received eagerly awaited news: […]

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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T-Keyboard-S3 4-key USB mechanical keyboard features keycaps with 0.85-inch color display

LILYGO T-Keyboard-S3 is an ESP32-S3 powered USB mechanical keyboard with four keys each equipped with a keycap featuring a 0.85-inch 128×128 color display to show different icons or characters. We have already covered several programmable small mechanical keyboards/keypads or macropads, so the first time I saw the T-Keyboard-S3 I did not think much of it until I read the $65 price tag on Aliexpress which I found excessive for this type of device. That’s only until I realized that each resin keycap has its own color display that the price made sense, and it makes quite a versatile macropad as you could easily program multiple layouts depending on the use case. T-Keyboard-S3 specifications: Wireless module ESP32-S3-WROOM-1 MCU – ESP32-S3R8 dual-core LX7 microprocessor @ up to 240 MHz with Vector extension for machine learning Memory – 8MB PSRAM Storage – 16MB SPI flash Connectivity – WiFi 4 and Bluetooth 5 with LE/Mesh […]

Boardcon Rockchip and Allwinner SoM and SBC products