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Top 10 Posts of 2012 on CNXSoft Blog

This is the last day of the year, so it’s probably a good time to look back and see what interested people on this blog. This has been a banner year for low cost ARM devices and boards starting with the Raspberry Pi, then MK802 and the new mini PCs / HDMI TV dongles / PCs-on-a-stick (whatever you want to call them) that came after, always cheaper and faster. Those low cost devices have in turn made people really interested in ARM Linux, and lots of development on those little devices and boards started. The top 10 posts of 2012, according to page views, reflect just those trends: 74 USD AllWinner A10 Android 4.0 Mini PC (May 2012) – MK802 started the whole “low cost mini PCs” craze, and drove the most traffic to this blog this year. People got excited about the price, form factor, and the possibility to […]

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XBMCHUB to Give Away Jynxbox Android HD Media Players

XBMCHUB has announced the launch of a giveaway to promote XBMCHUB.com and expand this community that provides third party add-ons for XBMC, and the most active members of the community will get one of the 4 Jynxbox Android HD media players available. But before going into details about XBMCHUB “competition”, let’s have a look at the hardware. Specifications: SoC – Amlogic AML8726-M3 Cortex A9 CPU @ 1.2GHz with Mali 400 GPU System Memory – 1GB RAM DDR3 Storage – 4GB Nand Flash + MicroSD slot (Up to 32GB) USB – 3x USB 2.0 Host ports Connectivity Wifi – 802.11b/g/n 10/100 Ethernet Video Output – HDMI 1.3 Misc – IR Sensor for remote Video container formats – AVI, MKV, TS, TP, TRP, M2TS, MPG, MP4, MOV, M4V, VOB, IFO, DAT, WMV, ASF, RM, RMVB, FLV, XVID, DIVX 3/4/5 up to 1080p resolution Audio formats – MP3/ OGG/ WMA/ WAV/ AAC/ FLAC […]

ArmSoM CM5 Raspberry Pi CM4 alternative with Rockchip RK3576 SoC
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MK802 II Mini PC Now Costs as Much as Raspberry Pi Model B. Let’s Compare Them!

MK802 mini PC quickly went viral as it launched in May 2012 for $74 US, and since then many Chinese manufacturers have jumped into the market bringing both new faster devices, and the price down. AllWinner A10s, a low cost version of AllWinner A10 used in MK802, was also launched specifically for this market to bring costs even lower. Today, I’ve been informed an HDMI TV dongle based on AllWinner A10s that sells for $36.55 on Tinydeal.com which is a very good price, but decided to check on Aliexpress to look for comparable deals, and found one shop selling MK802 II for $34.91 including shipping via China Post, which makes it cheaper than the Raspberry Pi model B selling for $35 excluding shipping. Both products target 2 different markets, as MK802 is oriented to the consumer market, and Raspberry Pi targets the educational market, but in practice, it appears people […]

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Linaro 12.12 Release with Linux Kernel 3.7 and Android 4.2.1

Linaro release 12.12 has just been announced, and includes Linux Kernel 3.7 and Android 4.2.1. The tracking version (stable release) uses Kernel 3.4.22. This release upgrades Android to version 4.2.1, Ubuntu images are now based on Ubuntu 12.10 (Quantal Quetzal) and Linaro U-Boot 2012.12 has been released with support for Origen 4 Quad and Arndale boards. Further improvements have been done for OpenEmbedded ARMv8, where they replaced the php Apache module by php-fpm among other things. On the kernel side, USB drivers have been refactored, and a kernel size analysis have been performed on several platforms. The power management team has mainly worked on big.LITTLE IKS and MP implementations, and it’s the first time LEG (Linaro Enterprise Group) is included in the release, and they worked on UEFI for ARM, GRUB for U-Boot, and provided a Ubuntu server image for Arndale board which can boot via UEFI or UBoot. Here […]

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Rhombus Tech EOMA-68 CPU Card Prototype

Do you remember Rhombus Tech AllWinner A10 EOMA-PCMCIA CPU card that targets a BOM cost of $15 US, that was announced at the end of last year? Well, after much wait, the first prototype is now available. This CPU module is based on AllWinner A10 Cortex A8 processor, with 1GB RAM, a NAND Flash, one USB OTG port, microSD slot, HDMI, PMIC, an Ethernet PHY (at the back), an expansion header, and the EOMA-68 connector giving access to peripherals signals (SATA, Ethernet, RGB/TTL, I2C etc…). It can act as a Linux/Android stand-alone computer or be connected to a baseboard. One of the first project will be a laptop for the Chinese market. AllWinner A10 SoC may be a little underpowered to be used in laptop compared to the latest ARM processors, but since EOMA-PCMCIA is a standard, pin-to-pin compatible modules will eventually be designed and manufactured with different/faster (ARM) processors. […]

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libavg on Raspberry Pi

libavg development team has recently announced a beta port of their multimedia library to the Raspberry Pi. libavg is a high-level development platform for media-centric applications using Python as scripting language and written in C++. I came to know this platform as I tried Xibo Digital Signage, and I tested it on ARM platforms. Up to know this would only work using software rendering/decoding, and everything was painfully slow on ARM, but libavg developers are now making use of OpenGL ES to boost graphics speed. More work is needed, and they intend to eventually support features such as hardware video decoding (OpenMAX possibly via gstreamer) and compressed textures. Installing libavg on Raspberry Pi. Pre-built packages are available for Raspberry, so installation is pretty straight forward:

Running Samples Apps 32 samples are located in /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/libavg/samples/ directory, and they rely on X11, so first start LXDE:

Open a serial console (LXTerminal) […]

Rockchip RK3568, RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs and SoMs in 2025
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Build Your Own Freescale i.MX6 Quad Laptop

Andrew Huang (“Bunnie”) and others have been working on an open source laptop based on Freescale i.MX6 Quad processor since June, and they’ve recently got the motherboard. Beside featuring a powerful quad core ARM processor, the design files are also provided, so if you have the right skills and resources you can build it yourself. The open source laptop mainboard (Codename: Novena) has the following specifications: SoC – Freescale iMX6 Quad @ 1.2GHz with Vivante GC2000 GPU System Memory – 64-bit DDR3-1066 SO-DIMM, upgradable to 4GB Storage – microSD boot flash, SATA-II connector for hard drive / SSD, SD card reader and serial EEPROM (for storing crash logs and other bits of handy data). FPGA – Spartan-6 CSG324. It has several interfaces to the CPU, including a 2Gbit/s RAM-like bus. Internal ports & sensors: mini PCI-express slot UIM slot for mPCIx mobile data cards Dual-channel LVDS LCD connector (up to […]

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Getting Started with Infineon XMC4500 Relax Lite Kit and DAVE 3 IDE

Infineon Relax Lite Kit is a 10 Euros development kit based on Infineon XMC4500 Cortex M4 MCU with 160 KB SRAM and 1 MB flash, and featuring 2 USB OTG ports for debugging and powering up the board, 3 buttons (including reset), 2 LEDs, and 2 headers (through holes) giving access to the signals from the MCU such SPI, I2C, I2S, UART, CAN, ADC, DAC and PMW. The kit if available online via Hitec, but unless you live in Germany, this is not an interesting option, as international shipping costs over 100 Euros. So you’d better check local distributors in your country. The package only comes with the board, and you’ll need a USB to microUSB to power the board. To get started, simply connect the board via the USB cable to one of the USB OTG connectors, and to a Windows PC. The power LED (green) should lit up, […]

Boardcon EM3562 Rockchip RK3562 SBC with 8 analog camera inputs