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May 30, 2019May 30, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 6 Comments

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B and Rock64 1GB SBCs Promotions

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Free microSD Card

Ameridroid has some promotions for two of the most popular single board computers on the market. The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B (not B+) is now offered for $33.95, or $32.95 with CNXSUPPORTER1 coupon, with a free 16GB class 10 micro SD card pre-loaded with NOOBS. The company also discounted Rock64 board (1GB RAM model), with the same form factor as Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, but a faster Rockchip RK3328 processor, and high-speed interfaces like USB 3.0 and Gigabit Ethernet, making it one of the best alternatives to Raspberry Pi 3 board. You can now get it for $24.95, a discount of $5 compared to the normal price on Ameridroid. $24.95 also happens to be the price the board is sold on Pine64, but you may save on shipping depending on where you live. You’ll also be able to save a bit more by using one of the following […]

May 20, 2019May 31, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 30 Comments

Top 5 Raspberry Pi Alternatives in 2019

The Raspberry Pi boards are great little Arm Linux SBC’s with a low price and great community support. But the Broadcom processors used in the boards are also fairly old so they may not be suitable for some projects. If your application needs or would benefit from modern features such as memory over 1GB RAM, an actual Gigabit Ethernet port, USB 3.0 port(s), 4K video output, or H.265 hardware video decoding you’ll have to find Raspberry Pi alternatives. I’ll point out 5 alternative single board computers in this post from the point of view of existing Raspberry Pi users, who will want good software support and a board with the same or similar form factor as Raspberry Pi 3 Model B/B+ in order to reuse their add-on boards and/or enclosures. Price has to be competitive as well, so nothing above $80 will be mentioned. The boards are not listed in […]

May 9, 2019 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments

Roshambo Retro Gaming Console Kit Features Rock64 or RockPro64 Board

Recalbox, Lakka TV, Retro Arena, and Batocera are some of the retro gaming distributions optimized to run on development boards. You can install those by yourself, and enclose the board is any case, but if you want something more fancy, Cloud Media is now selling Roshambo retro gaming kit based on Rock64 (RK3328) or RockPro64 (RK3399) SBC’s. Roshambo and RoshamboPro retro gaming kits are compatible with respectively Rock64 and RockPro64 boards, come with a shell with carrier board, power supply, cooling fan (Pro model only) and support cables. The kits support 256GB or 512GB SSD cartridges provided by the company, and optional game controllers with analog triggers and buttons are also available for purchase. Pine64 Rock64 / RockPro64 boards are compatible with Recalbox, Lakka TV, Retro Arena, and Batocera distributions, but bear in mind ROMs are not provided, so you’d have to install your own, or play free games only. […]

June 12, 2018June 12, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 13 Comments

Add a 3.5″ Hard Drive to Your Raspberry Pi with Suptronics X830 Add-on Board

If you ever plan to make your own NAS with an Arm Linux board, the Raspberry Pi board should not be your first choice, as regular readers will already know they are already cheaper and/or better solutions such as NanoPi NEO2 NAS Kit, ODROID HC2, or Popcorn Transformer to name a few. But if you already own one of the Raspberry Pi boards and a 3.5″ hard drive, you considering going with Suptronics X830 add-on boards – also sold under Geekworm brand – instead of a DC powered USB enclosure since it avoids extra cabling and the use of two power supplies. SupTronics X830 board features: SATA connector for 3.5″ SATA drive up to 10TB implemented via USB 3.1 Gen1 to SATA 6Gb/s bridge controller USB 3.0 port to connect to Raspberry Pi board Power Supply Input – 14 to 40V DC input via 5.5/2.5mm power barrel jack (Powers the […]

May 28, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 1 Comment

IOTA Tangle is a Blockless Distributed Ledger for the Internet of Things – Running a IOTA Full Node on Rock64 Board

A lot of efforts is going into distributed ledger technologies like the blockchain, and while I keep hearing blockchain is the future, there’s a lot of hype, and so far I have not seen that many practical use cases. But recently I saw Open Source Foundries – a new company announced at Linaro Connect US 2017 – participated in the IOTA blockchain BoF at the OpenIoT Summit 2018 showing a demo publishing sensor data to the IOTA Tangle. So maybe we have a practical application here… Sadly, there’s no video recording of the IOTA blockchain BoF, so instead let’s go to the IOTA website to find out more. What is IOTA? That’s the short description of the solution: An Open-Source Distributed Ledger The first open-source distributed ledger that is being built to power the future of the Internet of Things with feeless microtransactions and data integrity for machines. The key technology […]

April 2, 2018April 3, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Linux 4.16 Release – Main Changes, Arm and MIPS Architectures

Linus Torvalds has just released Linux 4.16: So the take from final week of the 4.16 release looks a lot like rc7, in that about half of it is networking. If it wasn’t for that, it would all be very small and calm. We had a number of fixes and cleanups elsewhere, but none of it made me go “uhhuh, better let this soak for another week”. And davem didn’t think the networking was a reason to delay the release, so I’m not. End result: 4.16 is out, and the merge window for 4.17 is open and I’ll start doing pull requests tomorrow. Outside of networking, most of the last week was various arch fixlets (powerpc, arm, x86, arm64), some driver fixes (mainly scsi and rdma) and misc other noise (documentation, vm, perf). The appended shortlog gives an overview of the details (again, this is only the small stuff in […]

November 13, 2017November 29, 2017 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 7 Comments

Linux 4.14 Release – Main Changes, ARM & MIPS Architecture

Linus Torvalds has announced the release of Linux 4.14: No surprises this week, although it is probably worth pointing out how the 0day robot has been getting even better (it was very useful before, but Fengguang has been working on making it even better, and reporting the problems it has found). Sure, some of the new reports turned out to be just 0day doing things that just don’t work (ie KASAN with old gcc versions, but also doing things like loading old ISA drivers in situations that just don’t make sense – remember when you couldn’t even ask if the hardware existed or not, and just had to know), but even then it’s been all good. The appended shortlog is obviously only for the (small) haul since rc8, and it really is tiny. Not very many commits, and they are small. The biggest thing that stands out in the diffstat […]

August 7, 2017May 26, 2018 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 25 Comments

ROCK64 Board Review – Part 2: Quick Start Guide with Ubuntu 16.04.3 MATE, Multimedia Features, Some Benchmarks

Pine64 ROCK64 is the first maker board based on Rockchip RK3328 processor, and is potentially interesting for various applications including network storage thanks to USB 3.0 and Gigabit Ethernet, multimedia applications with 4K HDR video support, as well as other applications requiring I/Os. I’ve already tested Rock64 board with Android 7.1 operating system, so today I’ll report by finding and experience with Ubuntu 16.04.3 with MATE desktop. Selecting and Flashing a Linux Image You’ll find several operating systems in the Wiki, but you’ll also find more cutting edge images in ayufan’s github. But first let me explain some vocabulary used for Pine64 firmware files: Engineering version – Becomes with release build based on the stock build develop by Pine64 and the SoC vendor. It’s supposed to be more stable, but get less updates Community versions (currently managed via ayufan) are more frequently updates, and comes with more recent features. You’ll find […]