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$39 Variscite VAR-SOM-AM33 SoM Powered by TI Sitara AM335x

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 […]

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84 MB Minimal Raspbian ARMHF Image for Raspberry Pi

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 […]

ArmSoM RK3588 AIModule7 NVIDIA Jetson Nano-compatible SOM
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Fedora To Give Away Raspberry Pis, OLPC 1.75 Laptops and Arduinos to Developers

Fedora will give away over 200 open hardware devices as part of its Summer of Hardware initiative to Fedora contributors. 150 Raspberry Pi boards, 50 OLPC 1.75 laptops and 20 Arduino boards and shields will be freely distributed to randomly selected candidates. In order to qualify, you must have a Fedora Project account, have signed the Fedora Project Contributor Agreement, be a member of at least one non-CLA / FPCA Fedora Group and be resident in one of the following country/region: Australia (excluding the states of New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory), Belgium, Canada (excluding Quebec), Germany, India, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom, or the United States (excluding New York and Florida). To apply, you need to fill an application form by the 15th of August where you select your preferred device and enter your full name, Fedora account information and […]

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Vizio Co-Start (VAP430) Google TV Stream Player

First announced at CES 2012, the Vizio VAP430 stream player featuring Google TV 2.0 has become available for pre-order for $99 last week. Here are the specs provided on Vizio website: Video Resolution Supported – 720p, 1080i, 1080p 3D Support – Yes Video Playback – H.264, MP4, MKV Audio Music Playback – MP3, AAC, WMA Audio Features – Up to 5.1 surround sound pass-through Connectivity WiFi – 802.11 n/g/b Bluetooth Ethernet – 10/100 Mbps Connections HDMI In – Connection to Cable or Satellite Box HDMI Out –  Connection to TV One USB 2.0 Host port Remote control – Built-In IR Blaster, Bluetooth, Touchpad and Keyboard Dimension – 10.67 x 4.06 x 10.67 cm Weight – 300 grams They did not provide information about the processor, RAM and flash used, but I would guess it’s based on Marvell Google TV Reference Platform which is powered by ARMADA 1500 HD Secure Media […]

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Smallart U-Host mini PC Unboxing and Review

I’ve just received a Smallart Uhost mini PC based on AllWinner A10 from the “The Cubies hacker shop” on Aliexpress. The device features 1GB RAM, 4B flash, includes 802.11 b/g/n built-in, USB ports, HDMI output and a microSD card. It costs $70 including shipping. I received the device in the simple package below. There is a whole bunch of stuffs inside the package. A USB to mini USB cable for power and to connect the device to PC to act as a USB drive, the Smallart U-host mini PC itself, a user manual in English, the power supply 5V/2A with a USB port, an HDMI female to male cable. The USB to mini USB cable has actually 2 large USB connector in order to provide up to 5W power (2  x 500mA x 5V). The mini PC has several connectors including an HDMI male connector, a USB Host port (for […]

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Linaro 12.07 Release with Kernel 3.5 and Android 4.0.4

Linaro has released version 12.07 based on Linux Kernel 3.5-rc3 and Android 4.0.4. Some work has been done on Jelly Bean (but the port is for next month), several benchmark tools have been added to LAVA as Linaro wants to provide standard benchmarks for Android, Linaro ALIP image now uses LXDE by default with a smaller image and improved performance, and Open Embedded images are now available (minimal and LAMP stack). Here are the highlights of the release: Android Jellybean baselines for Galaxy and Panda with Linaro extra’s available Android Benchmarking apps were deployed for pandaboard, snowball and origen in LAVA including: vellamo, quadrant, nbench, linpack, glbenchmark, geekbench, caffeinemark, antutu, andebench Improved native Benchmarks variance on Android to 1%, working on Java variance ICS “tests” builds now produced by default and test lists generated Open overlay tarballs working pm-qa’s cpuidle cpufreq cpuhotplug sched_mc suspend integrated into the Android builds Linaro […]

Rockchip RK3568, RK3588 and Intel x86 SBCs and SoMs in 2025
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LinuxCon North America 2012 Schedule

LinuxCon (North America) 2012 will take place on August 29 – 31, 2012 at Sheraton Hotel & Marina, in San Diego, California. The event will be co-located with the Linux Kernel Summit, the Linux Plumbers Conference, and CloudOpen 2012. LinuxCon consists of 3 days of keynotes, business and developers related sessions as well as tutorials. There will be over 80 sessions and keynotes during those 3 days. I’ll highlight a few sessions that I find particularly interesting and related to embedded Linux, software development and ARM. August 29 10:45 – 11:30 – Life After BerkeleyDB: OpenLDAP’s Memory-Mapped Database by Howard Chu, Symas Abstract: OpenLDAP’s new MDB library is a highly optimized B+tree implementation that is orders of magnitude faster and more efficient than everything else in the software world. Reads scale perfectly linearly across arbitrarily many CPUs with no bottlenecks, and data is returned with zero memcpy’s. Writes are on […]

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Discounted and Free Development Kits by Future Electronics and Texas Instruments

If you have a project in mind, Future Electronics and Texas Instruments are currently offering free development boards and 50% discounts on selected development kits respectively. Future Electronics Boards4Free Initiative In August, Future Electronics will be giving away 5 boards every Wednesday (20 boards in total). Here’s how it works: Every Wednesday at 12 pm EST from August 1 to August 22 Future Electronics will post a board on their  Twitter, Facebook and Google+ feeds. Reply to them on Twitter, comment on their post on Facebook or comment on their post on Google+ with your project idea to enter into the contest. Each action counts as on entry, so you can get up to 3 entries Each weekly drawing period begins at 12 pm EST and ends at 12:30 pm EST. (So you’ve just got 30 minutes to enter, unless I missed something) Future Electronics will draw 5 winners and […]

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