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Atmel Unveils AVR XMEGA C, tinyAVR ATtiny1634 and AVR UC3 L3/D4 MCUs

Atmel announced 14 new Atmel AVR microcontrollers divided into 4 families: AVR XMEGA C, tinyAVR ATtiny1634, AVR UC3 L3 and AVR UC3 D4. Atmel AVR XMEGA C MCUs Atmel AVR XMEGA C MCUs are 8-/16-bit general-purpose MCUs with Full-Speed USB, 12-bit ADC, up to 384 KB flash and 32 KB SRAM. They can support Atmel QTouch Library for implementation of capacitive buttons, sliders and wheels functionality. The AVR XMEGA C MCUs consume 700nA in sleep mode with RTC. There 8 new XMEGA C MCUs which target consumer, industrial and home automation applications such as thermostats with display, building and climate control, utility meters with RF and ZigBee connectivity. The smallest XMEGA C MCU (ATxmega16C4), which comes in 44-pin package and has 16KB device, is the cheapest AVR XMEGA device with USB provided by Atmel. You can find further information on Atmel AVR XMEGA C page. Atmel tinyAVR ATtiny1634 MCU Atmel […]

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Intel Roadmap to 2015 and Beyond: 5nm Technology, Merrifield Mobile Processor, Microservers and More

Intel had their annual Investor meeting day on the 10th of May 2012 in Santa Clara where we would learn a few things about what’s ahead for Intel and the semiconductor industry. Paul Otellini, Intel President and Chief Executive Officer, started the meeting by  giving some numbers about Intel results and showing opportunities existing for cloud and data center, personal computing, mobile devices and intelligent systems (for automotive, retail and communications markets). One interesting point was the tremendous growth in data Intel expects from 2,500 Exabytes per year (7 EB/day) today to 8,000 Exabytes by 2015 which the majority of the growth lead by Big data. He also boasted about Intel technology advantage. For example, Intel introduced High-K Metal Gate technology in 2007 and competitor only got it in products last year (btw Samsung Exynos 5 uses HKMG). They recently introduced Tri-gate technology and they only expect competitors to catch […]

ArmSoM CM5 Raspberry Pi CM4 alternative with Rockchip RK3576 SoC
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Schematics Capture and PCB Layout in Linux with Kicad

Most schematics capture and PCB layout software run on Windows and are closed source. But if your favorite OS is Linux, there are a few open source software including Kicad and gEDA. There is also Cadsoft Eagle which can be installed in Linux with a free license for hobbyists and educational purposes, but is not open source. Today, I’ll focus on Kicad. I don’t really capture schematics, let alone layout PCBs, but I sometimes need to use this type of software to locate pins/components on the schematics and PCB and check some parts of the schematics that can affect  software. So I will mainly give an overview of Kicad and write my experience trying to import another project (Beagleboard XM) to Kicad. If you want to learn how to get started with your own project with Kicad, you might want to have a look at Teho Labs Kicad Tutorial. In […]

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Xibo Digital Signage Running on Mele A1000 AllWinner A10 Set-Top Box

Those following my blog know that I recently bought a Mele A1000 to play around. For those who are not familiar with this device, the Mele A1000 is a $70 Android set-top box featuring an AllWinner A10 cortex A8 processor and lots of peripherals, and it can easily be hacked to run a Linux distributions. This hardware would also be a great digital signage player thanks to its video playback capabilities: up to 2160p video decoding and 1080p video output. Last year, I ported Xibo, an open source digital signage player, to ARM and ran it in the Beagleboard emulator (qemu), but I hadn’t had the opportunity to try it out in a real hardware. I’ve tried this rootfs based on Linaro ARM Linux Internet Platform (ALIP) image for BeagleBoard in the Mele A1000, by following an adaptation of the method I provided earlier. For this demo, I created a […]

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Embedded Artists NXP LPCXpresso Motor Control Kit Promotion

Embedded Artist and NXP have jointly designed the LPCXpresso Motor Control Kit to easily get started with motor control prototyping. This platform is based on NXP LPCXpresso MCUs and can control BLDC (Brushless DC), BLAC (Brushless AC), stepper and dual brushed DC motors. This is not a new design (2010), but Embedded Artist and NXP are discounting their development kit by 50% for a limited period, which brings the price of the kit to 149 Euros, instead of 299 Euros. The kit includes: LPCXpresso Motor Control Board LPCXpresso LPC1114 Board (The “stick” on the left in the picture above) LPCXpresso Eclipse-based IDE and GNU compiler BLDC Motor with hall sensors 24V Power supply (60W) Here are the specifications of the Motor Control Board: Controller MCU • Socket for LPCXpresso LPC1114 and LPC1343 • Socket for LPCXpresso LPC176x • Socket for LPC1xxx in PLCC44 • Expansion connector for control by LPC1800/LPC4000/LPC2900 […]

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Yocto Project Release 1.2 Announced

The Yocto Project Release 1.2 has just been announced. This release codenamed “Denzil” and based on Poky 7.0 is the third release of the project. The project was announced in October 2010 to provide developers with greater consistency in the software and tools they’re using across multiple architectures for embedded Linux development. Yocto Project 1.2 Features: HOB redesigned with new user interface and work flow. HOB is a GUI based tool for users to customize and build an embedded Linux image in a more intuitive and easier way. Build appliance, which is a set of changes and enhancements to enable users to build a virtual machine image running Linux built with the Yocto Project. Within the Linux running on the virtual machine, users can customize and build their own customized embedded Linux images. Error message handling improvement, making error message more efficient, useful and accurate to users. New kernel update […]

Rockchip RK3568, RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs and SoMs in 2025
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Linaro 12.04 Release with Kernel 3.4 and Android 4.0.4

Linaro has just released version 12.04 based on Linux Kernel 3.4-rc3 and Android 4.0.4_r1.1. This release already provides Ubuntu 12.04 LTS images for Pandaboard, Snowball, Origen and Versatile Express, and all community builds (nano, ALIP…) are based on Ubuntu Precise Pangolin as well. This should provide significant performance boosted compared to Ubuntu 11.10 thanks to hard-float support and other optimization (See Phoronix Benchmarks). A lot of work since to have gone into big.LITTLE implementation, HTML5 is now supported in Firefox, and it seems Linaro is still working on ARMv6 as they provided VP8 optimizations and improved the toolchain for this architecture. Here are the highlights of the release: Android Finished Snowball Multimedia enablement. Updated all builds to AOSP ICS 4.0.4_r1.1. Switched all builds to 4.7. Updated base toolchain components MPFR and GMP. Ported htop to Android. Ported stressapptest to Android for big.LITTLE Testing. Implemented and ran weekly big.LITTLE tests. Integrated […]

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Energy Micro Unveils 2 New Gecko Cortex M3 Starter Kits: EFM32LG-STK3600 and EFM32GG-STK3700

Energy Micro introduced two starter kits (STK) for complex battery-powered products such as portable health and fitness devices and smart accessories: EFM32LG-STK3600 – Based on the EFM32LG990F256 MCU (Cortex M3 ) with 256KB on-chip flash and 32KB RAM. EFM32GG-STK3700 – Based on the EFM32GG990F1024 MCU (Cortex M3 ) with 1MB on-chip Flash and 128KB RAM Both the Leopard Gecko and Giant Gecko MCU can directly control a TFT display and feature a USB driver that supports the Host, Device and On-the-Go (OTG) protocols. The new STKs are also equipped with light, metal and touch sensors which allow designers to work with the LESENSE Low Energy Sensor interface allowing passive sensing of 16 sensors without host CPU intervention. The hardware feature set is completed by a USB plug, 32MB on-board NAND Flash, LCD and a variety of LEDs and push-buttons. The two EFM32 starter kits includes debugging support with a  full […]

Boardcon EM3562 Rockchip RK3562 SBC with 8 analog camera inputs