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AirGradient ONE Kit Review – An open-source indoor air quality monitor

The product we are reviewing today is the “AirGradient ONE” air quality monitor kit which is an updated version of the earlier AirGradient air quality monitor. The device is equipped with sensors from Sensirion and Plantower, allowing it to measure many air quality parameters such as CO2, PM2.5, TVOCs, NOx, temperature, and humidity. It is an indoor air quality monitor that is both open-source software and open hardware. This means that the Arduino source code, schematic diagrams, PCB, and 3D models of the enclosure are available to developers. AirGradient ONE DIY Kit Unboxing The device was packaged within a cardboard box, with a greeting card from the manufacturer. The card features a QR code linking to a webpage with the installation guide. Since I requested the Kit version (there’s also a fully assembled model), some sensors were not pre-assembled and they were well-packaged in separate seals. The main PCB was […]

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UP 7000 Intel Processor N100 fanless SBC review – Part 1: Unboxing and first boot

AAEON has sent us an UP 7000 single board computer equipped with an Intel Processor N100 Alder Lake-N CPU, 8GB RAM, and 64GB eMMC flash for review. The business card-sized SBC is an update to the UP 4000 SBC that we reviewed last year with an Intel Atom x7-E3950 Apollo Lake processor, 4GB RAM, 64GB eMMC flash, and should also provide an x86 alternative to the Raspberry Pi 5 for industrial application. We’ve already written about the UP 7000 specifications with N100, N97, or N50 processor in an earlier article, so in the first part of the review, we’ll check out the hardware, compare its design to other small form factor, yet relatively powerful, single board computers, and install Ubuntu 22.04,  before testing the Linux OS on the board in more details in the second part of the review. UP 7000 Unboxing We received a package with two boxes, one […]

ArmSoM CM5 Raspberry Pi CM4 alternative with Rockchip RK3576 SoC
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International Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2023 deals and coupon codes

We’ve been writing about international Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals and coupon codes since 2014, as US-centric promotions such as Amazon’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals are not always available to the international audience of CNX Software. So once again, we’ve searched at Black Friday and Cyber Monday 2023 international promotions and discount codes from specific manufacturers as well as popular online stores such as Aliexpress, Banggood, and others. Aliexpress Black Friday and Cyber Monday event Aliexpress will have a Black Friday (and Cyber Monday) event in 2023, but we have limited details at this time since it will only start on November 23, contrary to some of the other deals we’ll feature below which are already up and running. But the event will have two periods: Nov 20-22 PT – Warm Up event where users can find and add items to the cart before purchasing during the […]

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Makeblock mBot Neo robot review with Smart World Add-on Pack

MakeBlock mBot Neo, also known as mBot2, is an educational robot that builds upon the previous generation mBot1 robot, and the company has sent us a review sample, following our earlier review of the Ultimate 2.0 10-in-1 educational robot kit, along with the Smart World Add-on Pack. The mBot Neo features a new ESP32-based CyberPi control board with WiFi connectivity for IoT and AI support. The robot is also equipped with a 2nd generation Ultrasonic sensor with improved object detection accuracy and status indicator, a built-in 4-ch RGB line sensor that can detect colors, as well as a new drive motor that comes with an encoder for more precise motion control. The mBot Neo robot kit is expandable with metal parts from other Makeblock models, mBuild modules and various electronic modules can be added making it also possible to build custom robots with third-party structural parts. The mBot Neo robot […]

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ADATA SE920 USB4 external SSD offers up to 2TB capacity, supports up to 3,800 MB/s data transfers

ADATA SE920 is a small USB4 external SSD with 1TB or 2TB storage capacity that leverages the 40 Gbps connection enabled by USB4 and delivers up to 3,800 MB/s sequential read speed. The storage device supports Thunderbolt 3 & 4 and is backward compatible with USB 3.2 and USB 2.0 standards. The USB-C port makes it suitable for mini PCs, laptops, SBCs, and even smartphones, but one potential downside of the small form factor is that it integrates a fan to cool the SSD although the user can enable/disable it by extending/retracting the telescopic case. ADATA SE920 specifications: Capacity – 1TB / 2TB Host interface – USB4 up to 40Gbps, backward compatible with USB 3.2/2.0 Performance Sequential Read – Up to 3,800 MB/s, or in other a 10GB file can be transferred in about 3 seconds Sequential Write – Up to 3,700 MB/s (USB4) or up to 3,200 MB/s (Thunderbolt […]

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Raspberry Pi 5 Kit Review – Part 1: Unboxing, Assembly and First Boot

I’m quite late on that one, but after an extended holiday, I’m now ready to review the Raspberry Pi 5 the company sent me last month. I’ll do so with the latest Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm based on Debian 12 and CNX Software’s “tropical reviews” are usually more demanding than most others due to the higher ambient temperature (usually around 28°C in my room) in Thailand. But since Raspberry Pi did not just send the Raspberry Pi 5, but a full kit with keyboard, mouse, enclosure, and more, I’ll start with a post mostly looking at the hardware with an unboxing, assembly, plus a quick try at Debian 12 on the new SBC. Raspberry Pi 5 Kit Unboxing Besides the Raspberry Pi 5 itself, the package included the active cooler (heatsink + fan), a microSD card preloaded with a pre-release Raspberry Pi OS Bookworm image, a USB-PD power supply, a […]

Rockchip RK3568, RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs and SoMs in 2025
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Linux 6.6 LTS release – Highlights, Arm, RISC-V and MIPS architectures

The Linux 6.6 release has just been announced by Linus Torvalds on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML): So this last week has been pretty calm, and I have absolutely no excuses to delay the v6.6 release any more, so here it is. There’s a random smattering of fixes all over, and apart from some bigger fixes to the r8152 driver, it’s all fairly small. Below is the shortlog for last week for anybody who really wants to get a flavor of the details. It’s short enough to scroll through. This obviously means that the merge window for 6.7 opens tomorrow, and I appreciate how many early pull requests I have lined up, with 40+ ready to go. That will make it a bit easier for me to deal with it, since I’ll be on the road for the first week of the merge window. Linus About two months ago, […]

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Sophgo SG2380 – A 2.5 GHz 16-core SiFive P670 RISC-V processor with a 20 TOPS AI accelerator

Sophgo SG2380 is an upcoming 2.5 GHz 16-core RISC-V processor based on SiFive Performance P670 cores and also equipped with a 20 TOPS AI accelerator using SiFive Intelligence X280 and Sophgo TPU that will find its way into a $120 desktop-class mini-ITX motherboard in H2 2024. The RISC-V processor also supports up to 64GB RAM, as well as UFS 3.2 and SATA 3.0 storage, comes with an Imagination GPU for 3D graphics and a VPU capable of 4Kp60 H.265, H.264, AV1, and VP9 video decoding, plenty of interfaces, and the system can manage locally deployed larger-scale LLMs like LLaMA-65B without the need for external NVIDIA or AMD accelerator cards. Sophgo SG2380 RISC-V SoC Sophgo SG2380 specifications: CPU 16-core SiFive P670 (RV64GCVH) 64-bit RISC-V processor @ up to 2.5GHz with RISC-V Vector v1.0, Vector Crypto Cluster configuration – 12x 2.5 GHz performance cores, 4x 1.6 GHz efficiency cores Full RISC-V RVA22 […]

Boardcon EM3562 Rockchip RK3562 SBC with 8 analog camera inputs