Posted on

Orange Pi CM5 – A Raspberry Pi CM4 alternative with up to 16GB RAM, 256GB eMMC flash

Orange Pi CM5 is a system-on-module mostly compatible with the Raspberry Pi CM4 (and upcoming Raspberry Pi CM5?) powered by a Rockchip RK3588S octa-core Cortex-A76/A55 processor that supports up to 16GB LPDDR4 and 256GB eMMC flash compared to the Pi CM4 module that is limited to 8GB RAM and 32GB flash. Since the Rockchip RK3588S has more interfaces than the Broadcom BCM2711 found in the Raspberry Pi CM4, the company added an extra 100-pin board-to-board connector with extra interfaces such as native USB 3.0, SATA III, CAN Bus, and an additional PCIe 2.0 x1 interface for a total of two. Orange Pi CM5 Orange Pi CM5 specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3588S octa-core processor with 4x CortexA76  cores @ up to 2.4GHz, 4x CortexA55 core @ 1.8GHz Arm Mali-G610 MP4 “Odin” GPU with support for OpenGL ES1.1/2.0/3.2, OpenCL 2.2 and Vulkan 1.2 Video decoder – 8Kp60 H.265, VP9, AVS2, 8Kp30 H.264 […]

Posted on

SBC software news – Armbian 24.5.1, DietPi 9.4, and Otii server for the Raspberry Pi 4/5

There’s been some notable software news for single board computers (SBCs) in the last few weeks with the release of Armbian 24.5.1 Havier with a focus on stability and UX improvement, the release of DietPi 9.4 lightweight Debian distritions for SBCs, and Otii server, the software for Qoitech Arc power supply, meter, and DAQ, has been finally released for the Raspberry Pi 4/5. Armbian 24.5.1 Havier Armbian announced 24.5.1 Havier on May 25 with bug fixes and improvements as a point release, but also some new boards. Here are some of the highlights. New boards Orange Pi 5 Pro FriendlyElec CM3588 NAS board Radxa ROCK 5 ITX Radxa Zero 3E/3W Avaota A1 SBC SK-AM68 board tqma8mpxl board CSC Hinlink H6xk boards RK3588-based Cool Pi CM5 EVB Improve Khadas support Resolve Rockchip patch maintenance nightmare Add functionality to freeze git resources Improve support for Radxa Rock S 0 and test USB […]

ArmSoM RK3588 AIModule7 NVIDIA Jetson Nano-compatible SOM
Posted on

Mekotronics R57 – A Rockchip RK3576 Edge AI fanless mini PC with HDMI input/output, dual GbE, RS232, RS485, DIO…

Mekotronics R57 is a fanless edge AI mini PC powered by a Rockchip RK3576 octa-core Cortex-A72/A53 SoC with a 6 TOPS NPU, 4GB LPDDR5, a 32GB eMMC flash, and features such as RS485 and dual gigabit Ethernet that makes it suitable for industrial automation. I initially thought it was a cost-down version of the Mekotronics R58 mini PC that I reviewed with Android 12 as my first ever Rockchip RK3588 device. But while the mechanical design is similar and some of the ports are in the same position, there are some changes with the new model equipped with only one HDMI output, one HDMI input, two GbE jacks, and a terminal block with RS232, RS485, and digital inputs and outputs. Mekotronics R57 specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3576 CPU 4x Cortex-A72 cores @ 2.2GHz, four Cortex-A53 cores @ 1.8GHz Arm Cortex-M0 MCU at 400MHz GPU – ARM Mali-G52 MC3 GPU with […]

Posted on

ECS “LIVA Mini Box QC710 Desktop” Windows 10 mini PC goes for $99.99 (Promo)

ECS LIVA Mini Box QC710 Desktop powered by a Qualcomm Arm mini PC-looking developer kit was launched in 2021 for $219, and the company is now apparently getting rid of stocks and selling the remaining Snapdragon 7c devices for $99.99 on Stack Social. The system features a Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c (SC7180) octa-core Cortex-A76/A55 SoC, 4GB RAM, 64GB eMMC flash, HDMI output, 10/100Mbps Ethernet and WiFi 5, and several USB ports. As a reminder, here are the ECS LIVA Mini Box QC710 Desktop specifications: SoC –  Qualcomm Snapdragon 7c Compute Platform (SC7180) with octa-core Qualcomm Kryo 468 (2x Cortex-A76, 6x Cortex-A55) CPU @ up to 2.4 GHz, Adreno 618 GPU System Memory – 4GB Storage – 64GB eMMC flash, MicroSD card socket Video & audio output – 1x HDMI port Networking 10/100M Ethernet WiFi 5 and Bluetooth USB 1x USB 3.2 Gen1 (5 Gbps) Type-A port 1x USB 2.0 Type-A port […]

Posted on

Pironman 5 is a fancy tower PC case for the Raspberry Pi 5 with NVMe M.2 SSD, oversized fans, RGB LEDs

SunFounder Pironman 5 is an enclosure for the Raspberry Pi 5 SBC that looks like a small Tower PC equipped with two RGB LED fans and a tower cooler with a PWM fan for cooling, and support for an NVMe SSD drive through the company’s Pironman 5 NVMe PiP HAT+ expansion board. The case also includes a small OLED information display, a power button for safe shutdown, two full-size HDMI ports, a spring-loaded microSD card socket for easy insertion and removal, an IR receiver for media center applications, and externally accessible 40-pin GPIO header so users can still play with GPIO while the Raspberry Pi 5 is inside the case. Pironman 5 key features and specifications: Designed for the Raspberry Pi 5 SBC (a board like Radxa Rock 5C could be installed instead, but software for OLED display, RGB LEDs, fan control, etc… might be an issue) Storage Pironman 5 […]

Posted on

Rockchip RK2118G/RK2118M dual-core Star-SE Armv8-M microcontrollers target smart audio applications

Rockchip RK2118G and RK2118M smart audio microcontrollers based on a dual-core Star-SE Armv8-M processor, an NPU for smart AI audio processor, three DSPs, 1024KB SRAM, optional DDR memory in package, and a range of peripherals. I first noticed the RK2118M in slides from the Rockchip Developer Conference 2024 last March, but I did not have enough information for an article at the time. Things have now changed since I’ve just received a bunch of datasheets including the one for the RK2118G and RK2118G microcontrollers, which look identical except for the DDR interface and optional built-in 64MB RAM for the RK2118G. The datasheets have only one reference to Arm with the string “Arm-V8M” and nothing else, and Cortex is not mentioned at all. But the slide above reveals the STAR-SE core looks to be an Arm Cortex-M33 core. We also learn the top frequencies for the “STAR-M33″/”STAR-SE” core  (300MHz) and the […]

Rockchip RK3568, RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs and SoMs in 2025
Posted on

Linux 6.9 release – Main changes, Arm, RISC-V, and MIPS architectures

Linus Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 6.9 on LKML: So Thorsten is still reporting a few regression fixes that haven’t made it to me yet, but none of them look big or worrisome enough to delay the release for another week. We’ll have to backport them when they get resolved and hit upstream. So 6.9 is now out, and last week has looked quite stable (and the whole release has felt pretty normal). Below is the shortlog for the last week, with the changes mostly being dominated by some driver updates (gpu and networking being the big ones, but “big” is still pretty small, and there’s various other driver noise in there too). Outside of drivers, it’s some filesystem fixes (bcachefs still stands out, but ksmbd shows up too), some late selftest fixes, and some core networking fixes. And I now have a more powerful arm64 machine […]

Posted on

Geekworm X1011 board adds up to four NVMe SSDs to the Raspberry Pi 5

Geekworm X1011 is a new expansion board for the Raspberry Pi 5 with four M.2 sockets enabling the insertion of up to four M.2 NVMe SSDs with data pushed through the PCIe Gen2 interface of the popular SBC. We were already wondering why most people would want to connect two NVMe SSDs to the Raspberry Pi 5 when the Geekworm X1004 HAT+ was launched considering the 5GT/s limitation from the board and the PCIe switch, but the company decided to double the number of drives with the X1011 meaning each drive can achieve up to around 100 MB/s (or 400MB/s) when used simultaneously. It does look nice and fairly compact though. Geekworm X1011 specifications: Supported SBC – Raspberry Pi 5 and other SBCs with a compatible 16-pin PCIe FPC connector and mounting holes Chipset – ASMedia ASM1184e PCI express packet switch with 1x PCIe Gen2 x1 upstream port and 4x […]

Boardcon CM3588 Rockchip RK3588 System-on-Module designed for AI and IoT applications