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Equiso Smart TV: 69 USD Android mini PC with Wireless Remote

Here’s yet another Android mini PC HDMI Stick. Equiso has started a KickStarter compaign to raise funds to complete development and manufacture the Equiso Smart TV, an Android mini PC based on Telechips TCC8925 Cortex A5 processor. It looks very similar to CX-01 mini PC with Android 4.0 running on a TCC8925 processor, 512 MB RAM and the lack of a microSD card slot. The only hardware differences are that it includes 8GB internal storage (vs 4GB for CX-01), and it features an HDMI 1.4 port (vs 1.3 for others). Here are the specs of the device: Telechips TCC8925 Arm Cortex A5 Processor @ 1GHz + Mali 400 3D Graphics Processor 512 MB DDR3 RAM 802.11 N wireless radio 8 GB Memory Internal (WiFi) 1.4 HDMI Plug n’ Play Interface, 3D, ESD protection, CEC USB 2.0 port microUSB 2.0 port to power the device Dimensions – 80mm x 30mm x […]

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Amahi 6.1 for Ubuntu 12.04 Released

Amahi has just announced the release of Amahi 6.1, Ubuntu Edition, an Home Digital Assistant (HDA). Amahi used to only work for Fedora and this is their very first stable release for Ubuntu 12.04. The key features of Amahi 6.1, Ubuntu Edition include: Greyhole 0.9 (storage pooling technology) Reliability fixes and updates New look Support for 32 / 64-bit Desktop and Server versions of Ubuntu Improved cloud storage with Amahi Sync Preliminary support ARM platforms such as PandaBoard and BeagleBoard One-Click App installs via Amahi’s application store If you want to get started with Amahi, you’ll have to register (and get an install code), and follow a few command line instructions. The instructions are the same to install on ARM platforms (assuming you already have Ubuntu 12.04 running), but Amahi developers recommend to install it to an hard drive instead of an SD card for performance reasons. They are also […]

ArmSoM CM5 Raspberry Pi CM4 alternative with Rockchip RK3576 SoC
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Linaro 12.06 Release with Kernel 3.5 and Android 4.0.4

Linaro has released version 12.06 based on Linux Kernel 3.5-rc3 and Android 4.0.4 (r2.1). This release brings further multimedia enablement for Android as well as some improvement to perf for Android, improved instructions & scripts for multi-arch on Ubuntu, and lots of little improvements and bugs fixes. Here are the highlights of the release: Android Multimedia enablement on AOSP, patches are in review. Most of the benchmarking applications have been automated via Monkeyrunner, working on PandaBoard and Snowball. Update panda-ics-gcc47-tilt-tracking-blob build to the TI LT 3.4 kernel. USB camera preview and still capture forward ported to tilt-tracking. 3D graphics and multimedia working on tilt-stable. IOMMU for Origen’s Multi format codec (MFC) enabled. IOMMU for Origen’s FIMC enabled. (FIMC stands for Fully Interactive Mobile Camera, and it’s used for camera input). Snowball upgraded to Android 4.0.4. Cortex strings landed in Linaro Android and submitted to AOSP (https://android-review.googlesource.com/#/c/38031/). This is part of […]

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Google Announces Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and Releases SDK

Google I/O has begun, and several major announcements have been made including the release of Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean), Google Nexus 7 tablet featuring an Nvidia Tegra 3 processor and running Android 4.1, and the Google Nexus Q media player based on TI OMAP4460 processing and running Android 4.0 ICS. I’ll write about all those announcements today in three different posts. Let’s start with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. The new version of Google’s mobile operating system includes a smoother and more responsive UI, a home screen that automatically adapts to fit your content, a better predictive keyboard, more interactive notifications, improved Android Beam (NFC) sharing, improved voice dictation (now works offline) and more. Here’s a summary of the key technical changes to Android 4.1: Faster, smoother and more responsive Vsync timing will be used for all drawing and animations to ensure a constant framerate (~62.5 fps). Triple buffering is used […]

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Baanto ShadowSense Technology Enables Virtual Graffiti Drawings on Multitouch Displays

Baanto ShadowSense is a new 2D and 3D tracking technology using sensors that allow the system to determine the relative angle and as well as other characteristics of the shadow cast by an object. The system is provided as a frame with several sensors (4 typically) that you can connect via USB to your computer. It is an USB HID device, does not need drivers and support Windows XP/7, Linux and Android. This proprietary technology has the following key features: Traceability of multiple points or objects simultaneously (up to 5 points) Up to 10,000 fps. 16 MPixel resolution of shadow position. Simple algorithm that can be implement in 8-bit MCU. Low power draw. Less than $10 US per sensor. A typical configuration uses 4 sensors and plenty of small LED emitters as shown the illustration. Up to 1mm resolution of object position. No optical lenses are required The resolution is […]

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AMD Introduces AMD G-T16R G-Series APU with 2.3 Watts Power Consumption

AMD has unveiled another APU in its Embedded G-Series processor family with the AMD Embedded G-T16R, which aims to provide a more powerful (up to 3x) and less power-hungry (7% less) replacement to AMD Geode LX processors. The AMD G-T16R is targeted at very low power, small form factor and cost-sensitive embedded designs. The company claims the processor consumes about 2.3 watts on average or 4.5 watts thermal design power (TDP). This new AMD embedded processor targets industrial control, point-of-sale, medical appliance and transportation markets.  As with the other G-Series platforms, the G-T16R can fit into small form factor boards by implementing a two-chip platform: APU + controller hub. AMD G-T16R is clocked at 615MHz, features a Radeon HD 6250 GPU and supports 1920×1200 resolution via VGA, single link DVI and DisplayPort 1.1a video outputs. It can also output 1080p via HDMI and LVDS. The APU supports Windows Embedded Compact […]

Rockchip RK3568, RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs and SoMs in 2025
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Oval Elephant Android / Linaro mini PC HDMI Stick

Since Rikomagic MK802 and Zero Device Z802 mini PCs have gone viral and started the Android mini PC craze, this type of device has been popping a bit everywhere… The latest interesting device I found is Oval Elephant Mini PC based on AllWinner A10 processor with 1 GB RAM and selling for 71.49 USD. They have appears to have a whooping 11 in stocks now to be shipped on the 3rd of July, but they are also taking pre-orders and if there is enough demand (over 1,000 pieces), the price would go down to 68 USD. The device pictured above is just a prototype, and they have decided to replace the HDMI mini male output by a proper HDMI output (probably male). As I said before I prefer this form factor, especially since you can just connect mini BlueTooth dongles (no sure that one works with Android / Linux though) to […]

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Migrating a WordPress Blog from Apache2 to Nginx

This blog is hosted on a Linode VPS with 512 MB RAM and running Ubuntu 11.10. Up until today, Apache2 was the web server, and it worked fine except sometimes, it reached connection and memory limits, and the blog would go offline for a short period of time, especially right after a new blog post. So this week-end, I decided to switch to nginx (pronounced engine-x) web server which is said to use less memory than Apache2. Let me know if something suddenly stopped working… nginx is a relatively recent web server, and the documentation on the web seems to become outdated pretty fast, so I’ve decided to document what I’ve done. The first thing I would recommend is to try it in your own local server first,  and make sure most things are working including plugins. Testing your WordPress blog with nginx in a local server I run Ubuntu […]

Boardcon EM3562 Rockchip RK3562 SBC with 8 analog camera inputs