When I review media player or development boards, I’m often asked about power consumption figures. One way to measure power consumption is to use a Kill-a-Watt, but for low power devices it’s not always accurate enough, and it also includes the heat dissipation from the power adapter, which may or may not be useful depending on what you want to measure. For USB powered devices or boards, an easy way to measure power consumption is to use CHARGER Doctor, a small $5 USB dongle that displays both voltage and current alternatively. Unfortunately, most products I’ve received lately use barrel type connectors, so this little tool has not been as useful as I hoped. The only solution is then to measure voltage and current with a multimeter. Voltage is measured in parallel, so you just need to point the multimeter’s leads where you want to perform the measurements. However, the current […]
We’re now starting to get quite a few players with ARM Cortex A15 cores on the market, as well as some with ARM Cortex A17. So a comparison table of different quad and octa SoCs might be a useful thing to do. I’ve put aside SoCs such as HiSilicon K3V3, and OMAP5, and focused on the four latest processors: Nvidia Tegra K1 (32-bit), Samsung Exynos 5422, Rockchip RK3288 and AllWinner A80. I haven’t included Mediatek MT6595 and Qualcomm SnapDragon 805, because the two companies mainly focus on smartphones and tablets (although it appears to be slowly changing for Qualcomm), documentation is usually difficult or impossible to find, and in the case of Qualcomm they use their own ARMv7 Krait cores. I’ve highlighted some features in green, in case a particular SoC appears to have an edge. Rockchip RK3288 AllWinner A80 Nvidia Tegra K1 Samsung Exynos 5422 CPU 4x ARM Cortex-A17 […]
Throughout all articles in this blog, I use a lot of technical terms and acronyms that you may not be familiar with. This glossary will include technical terms used in Android and Linux devices, development boards, and embedded platforms. If one or more relevant terms or acronyms is/are missing, please let me know in the comment section or via the contact form. 0-9 – A – B – C – D – E – F – G – H – I – J – K – L – M – N – O – P – Q – R – S – T – U – V – W – X – Y – Z 0-9 1-Wire – A single-wire (plus ground) communications protocol used for memory products, interface solutions, and by SW tools. 10GbE – 10-Gigabit Ethernet 10Base2 – So-called Thin Ethernet, using RG-58 coax cables and BNC connectors […]
Until now, if we talked about mini PCs in stick form factor that always meant some ARM or MIPS processor were powering the devices. Intel is not yet into this type of form factor, but with ICE xPC (Indiegogo), you can now find an x86 computer module with the CPU, RAM, and SSD as well as connectivity modules and sensors into a box as small and thin as a smartphone. ICE xPC will also support other low power processors including Core i5 processor and/or ARM SoCs if the concept is gaining traction. ICE xPC modular computer specifications: SoC – Intel Bay Trail 4-cores Atom processor with Intel HD graphics System Memory – 4GB RAM Storage – 64 GB SSD Connectivity – 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi module + Bluetooth module Camera – 720p Sensors – Accelerometer, Gyro sensor Power Supply – 20 Watts. Energy used claimed: between 3 and 11 Watts. Dimensions […]
I’ve just found out via my twitter feed that Nordic Semiconductor had announced the availability of the Bluetooth LE-based S120 8-link central protocol stack and nRF51 Wireless Charging SDK for wireless charging applications based on a new wireless charging standard called Rezence. The Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP) gave their wireless power technology the name Rezence a couple of weeks ago. Rezence uses magnetic resonance, instead of inductance used in first generation products, and bring several key improvements: Greater charging range – Your device does not need to be placed on a charging pad, but it can be placed anywhere within range (I could not find data yet). Multiple device charging – Ability to charge multiple devices with different power requirements at the same time, such as smartphones, tablets, laptops and Bluetooth headsets. Up to 8 devices with Nordic Semi solutions mentioned in the introduction. Ready for the real world […]
I’ve shown some unboxing pictures and video of Jynxbox Android M6 earlier this week, and today I’ll write a review of this AMLogic AML8726-M6 dual core Android media player. I’ll start with my first impressions, go through the different settings, test video playback, wi-fi performance, and reports about different miscalleous tests: Bluetooth, USB mass storage, USB webcam, etc… First Boot, Settings and First Impressions First, you’ll need to insert the provided AAA batteries in to the remote control. Opening the remote is a bit tricker than I would like as the cover does not come off that easily. Before powering up the device, I’ve connected the provided HDMI cable between the device and my HDTV, and an Ethernet cable to my hub. The first Ethernet cable would not click with in the device RJ45 connector, although it works with my laptop and other devices, but using another one worked just fine. Connecting […]
Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux Kernel 3.12: I was vacillating whether to do an rc8 or just cut the final 3.12, but since the biggest reason to *not* do a final release was not so much the state of the code, as simply the fact that I’ll be traveling with very bad internet connection next week, I didn’t really want to delay the release. Sure, we had a number of driver reverts, and there was an annoying auto-NUMA memory corruption fix series, but none of it was really worth delaying 3.12 for. But the fact that I’m going to be (effectively) off-line next week means that I’m *not* opening the merge window for 3.13 yet – since I won’t have the bandwidth to really do merges anyway. That doesn’t mean that you can’t send me pull request for the merge window early, of course – maintainers can […]
Although not really designed for this purpose, Android has been used in devices such as set-top boxes, netbooks and mini PCs for a while, mainly in Chinese products, but recently Hewlett-Packard has announced an All-in-One PC running Android 4.2. The company is persevering its Android push on “legacy” computing devices with a 10.1″ Laptop / Tablet hybrid powered by Nvidia Tegra 4, and running Android 4.2, called SlateBook x2 (Full name: SlateBook x2 10-h010nr). Here are the specifications of this laptop: SoC – Nvidia Tegra 4 (T40S) Quad Core processor @ 1.8 GHz System Memory – 2GB 1600MHz DDR3 SDRAM Storage – 16 GB eMMC + Multi-Format Digital Media Card Reader Display – 10.1″ diagonal WUXGA LED-backlit touchscreen display (1920×1200) Connectivity – 1×1 802.11b/g/n WLAN and Bluetooth External Ports: 1x USB 2.0 on base 1x HDMI on base 1x Headphone-out/microphone-in combo jack Keyboard – Full-size island-style QWERTY keyboard Battery: 2-cell […]
