The Raspberry Pi is supposed to be great for hardware prototyping, but you may not know where to start and/or depending where you live it might be difficult to buy the small components needed at a decent price. That’s where Adafruit Raspberry Pi starter pack comes into play. It includes a case, some cables and power supplies, as well as a breadboard and a whole bunch of components. The package includes: Adafruit clear acrylic Pi Box USB Micro-B Cable to connect the Raspberry Pi to a power source 5V 1A power adapter USB TTL console cable to be used to access the serial console. Useful to debug the kernel or if you run your device without display and/or network. 4GB SD Card Adafruit Pi Cobbler kit with GPIO cable for connection to the GPIO/I2C/SPI/Power pins. USB microSD card reader for loading the image onto the SD card. Large full-size clear […]
For those interested, here’s the list of hardware platforms I own [Updated in May 2017): Linux Development Boards Raspberry Pi – Development board powered by Broadcom BCM2835 (ARM11) that supports several Linux distributions Raspberry Pi 2 – Development board powered by Broadcom BCM2836 (4x ARM Cortex A7) that supports several Linux distributions Raspberry Pi Zero – Minimal version of Raspberry Pi board. ODroid-X – Development board based on Samsung Exynos 4412 Quad core cortex A9 processor for Linux and Android development – See unboxing and Android review. Cubieboard – Development board featuring AllWinner A10 processor. Read Unboxing and quick start post for details. Olimex A13-OLinuXino-MICRO – Open source hardware AllWinner A13 development board. Read my board review for details. Wandboard Dual – Development board powered by Freescale i>MX6 Duallite processor. See unboxing and quick start guide. My short Ubuntu review may also be interesting. OPENBRIX Zero – Development board based on […]
This is a list of gadgets that are remarkable either by their hackability, their popularity and/or their price. As with the boards lists, I plan to keep the list short and add/remove gadgets as things evolve. I don’t plan to include smartphones and/or tablets, but if you have one you can probably just go to XDA developers forums and start to hack away. Mele A1000 set-top box The Mele A1000 is an Android set-top box based on AllWinner A10, with 512GB RAM and 4GB flash, and a whole lots of features: HDMI, VGA and Composite video outputs RCA audio and optical audio outputs 3 USB Host ports SATA interface IR sensor 10/100M Ethernet Wi-fi 802.11 b/g/n, SD card slot. There’s an internal serial port that makes it very easy to debug u-boot and the kernel via a serial debug board. Beside Android, this device currently supports most ARM Linux distributions, […]
This micro-controller development boards list does not intend to be exhaustive. On the contrary, I only plan to list the boards that I find remarkable either by the level of community support, price or features, and I plan to keep the list shorter than 10 boards. Arduino Boards The Arduino boards are little development boards usually based on AVR MCUs, but a new version will also support ARM based ATMEL SAM3U micro-controller. What’s great about the Arduino is the low price (Starting at around 10 Euros), the huge community behind, the tutorials and the “shields“, some extension boards to add features to the basic boards. There are too many boards and versions to list here, so check out the list on Arduino website. The most commonly used boards appear to be Arduino Uno and Arduino Mega. Blog Posts: 16 Euros Arduino Leonardo Board is Now Available First ARM-Based Arduino Board […]
“What board can I use for xxx development?” is one of the most common questions I can see on forums or groups. So I’ve decided to list what I consider the best embedded Linux / Android development boards, micro-controllers development kits and hackable gadgets. I also provide a list of hardware I own to satisfy the curiosity of some, and possibly for others who are interested in collaborating in some ways.
I’ve been wondering how the Raspberry Pi would handle WordPress. I’ve found some instructions using Apache 2, but this may not be the best server to use for this type of low-end hardware. nginx server requires less resources, and as it is what I already setup for this blog, I decided to give it a try on the Pi. I’ll provide all the detailed steps I followed below, but you can also download the compressed SD card image (113 MB), uncompress it and copy it to an SD card the usual way. After the system boots, find your Raspberry Pi’s IP address, type it in your PC’s browser, and you should see the page pictured below. If you want to login to the dashboard, the username is “admin” and the password “raspberry”. Instructions to Install WordPress on Raspberry Pi You can use your default Debian Linux distribution (e.g. Raspbian) if […]
Variscite has announced a new system-on-module based on Texas Instruments Sitara Cortex A8 AM335x processors (AM3352 or AM3354) named VAR-SOM-AM33, which sells for as little as $39 US (in large quantities I assume). This SoM is available in commercial and industrial grades, and the company expects the module to be used in applications such as automotive, control systems, lighting, refining and processing. Here are the specs of this module: CPU – Texas Instruments AM335x Processor @ up to 720 MHz withPowerVR SGX530 GPU (AM3354 only) System Memory – 256MB 606MHz DDR3 Storage – 128 to 512MB SLC NAND Flash Display interface – LCD interface – Parallel RGB Supporting 1400×1050 24bit and4/5/8-Wire touch panel interface Audio – Line-in, line-out, stereo headphone out, digital microphone, analog microphone and S/PDIF Out Connectivity: 10/100Mbps Ethernet PHY 10/100/1000Mbps RGMII Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n (via TI WiLink 6.0) Bluetooth V4.0 + EDR (via TI WiLink 6.0) Interfaces: 2 […]
Many embedded systems applications do not require a desktop environment or graphical interface on the screen (e.g. server), and you may want to only install the files you really need on the SD card either to reserve as much space as possible for data and/or your program or to reduce costs. After searching for a minimal image based on Raspbian ARMHF distribution for the Raspberry, I could only find Linux Systems minimal image based on the Alpha version of the Raspbian Wheezy. Their compressed image is 109 MB in size, has a custom kernel, sshd and ntpd are enabled, but the wireless tools were deleted, and at the time the swap was located in another partition instead of a file inside the rootfs. The uncompress rootfs is about 414 MB (as reported by df -h when mounted as a loop device). I decided to prepare a minimal image myself based […]
