Category: Development Boards

Maker Faire Shenzhen 2015

Posted by Charbax – June 28, 2015
Category: Development Boards, Exclusive videos, Maker Faire

Maker Faire is in Shenzhen, the world capital of hardware creation, making it probably more relevant than the Maker Faires previously held in San Mateo, New York, Detroit, Kansas City, Rome, Newcastle, Tokyo and elsewhere.

MakerFaire Shenzhen 2015 is organized by Chaihuo Maker Space, a subsidiary of Seeed Studio, which is one of the leading companies in Shenzhen providing hardware components for Makers in Shenzhen and around the world.

Sponsored by the Shenzhen Government, Maker Faire Shenzhen 2015 has grown 10 times compared with 2014 with over 300 exhibitors attending, including ARM, Qualcomm, MediaTek, Freescale, Atmel, pch, intel and etc; design houses like hackaday, seeed studio, Makeblock, 40% of the makers attending come from outside of China. Products include any creative hardware, from development boards, modules, robots, prosthetic hands to an electronically enhanced pure hand-made wooden chair. For more information you can visit: http://makerfaireshenzhen.com/

Makeblock Maker Open Final Day, finished projects, Winner Announced

Posted by Charbax – June 22, 2015
Category: Robots, Development Boards, Exclusive videos, Maker Faire

This is the final day of the Shenzhen Maker Open 2015, where all the projects are presented and where the winner is announced. Maker Open is a 48-hour international robotic competition held by Makeblock, SIAT and Shenzhen Government. Makeblock is a robot construction platform, which provide anodized aluminum extrusion mechanics, easy-to-use electronics and software that are supported by each other. Makeblock’s mission is to lower the skill level requirement of making things!

There are 12 team from overseas and China joining the 2015 Shenzhen Maker Open, including students from MIT, university Utah, makers from Italy and Austria, as well as the students from Peking university, student from Shenzhen high schools and more. The Maker game theme is “music/chess/writing/drawing” in Chinese tradional archaism called“琴棋书画qinqishuhua”.

Maker Open came from Makeblock’s company trandition activity – 24 hours makerathon! Makeblock brings it to Shenzhen Maker Week.

Makeblock’s websites:
http://www.makeropen.org
http://www.makeblock.cc

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Maker-Open/127115557619938
http://facebook.com/makeblock

http://twitter.com/makeblock
https://www.youtube.com/Makeblock
http://google.com/+Makeblock

Qualcomm DragonBoard 410c 96Boards 64bit Quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 development board

Posted by Charbax – June 22, 2015
Category: Development Boards, Exclusive videos, Qualcomm, Maker Faire, Android, Ubuntu, Windows

Qualcomm DragonBoard 410c is a credit card sized 96Boards compliant development board based on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 410 processor, with I/O like USB device, 1080P HDMI, micro USB port, support WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, support Android, linux, planned to support windows 10 in the near future. The DragonBoard 410c is designed to support rapid software development, education and prototyping, including the next generation of robotics, cameras, medical devices, vending machines, smart buildings, digital signage, casino gaming consoles, and much more. At Maker Fair Shenzhen, Qualcomm is showing off how easy it is to get going with development using their new DragonBoard 410c, being released now, it will start shipping in the next weeks through Arrow Electronics.

Makeblock Maker Open Shenzhen (Day 2), 48-hour Robotic Competition

Posted by Charbax – June 21, 2015
Category: Robots, Development Boards, Sensors, Exclusive videos, Atmel, Intel, Maker Faire

Maker Open is a 48 hours international robotic competition held by Makeblock, SIAT and Shenzhen Government. Makeblock is a robot construction platform, which provide anodized aluminum extrusion mechanics, easy-to-use electronics and software that are supported by each other. Makeblock’s mission is to lower the skill level requirement of making things!

There are 12 Maker teams from overseas and China joining the 2015 Shenzhen Maker Open, including students from MIT, university Utah, makers from Italy and Austria, as well as the students from Peking university, student from Shenzhen high schools and more. The Maker game theme is “music/chess/writing/drawing” in Chinese tradional archaism called“琴棋书画qinqishuhua”.

Maker Open came from Makeblock’s company trandition activity – 24 hours makerathon! Makeblock brings it to Shenzhen Maker Week.

Makeblock’s websites:
http://www.makeropen.org
http://www.makeblock.cc

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Maker-Open/127115557619938
http://facebook.com/makeblock

http://twitter.com/makeblock
https://www.youtube.com/Makeblock
http://google.com/+Makeblock

Actions Bubblegum-96 Linaro 96Boards.org development board on quad-core ARM Cortex-A53

Posted by Charbax – May 26, 2015
Category: Development Boards, Exclusive videos, Actions, HKTDC Electronics Fair, Android, Ubuntu

Actions Semiconductor launches their first 96boards development board running Android 5 Lollipop, Ubuntu based on Linaro codebase, based on Actions S900 Quad-core 64bit ARM Cortex-A53 with PowerVR G6230 GPU, Memory 1-8GB DDR3, Storage support 4-64GB eMMC. Rich interfaces including HDMI, USB2.0 host and Micro USB2.0, LAN, WIFI.

UDOO Neo on i.MX6SoloX by Seco Labs = Raspberry Pi + Arduino + Wi-Fi + BT 4.0 + Sensors

Posted by Charbax – May 26, 2015
Category: Development Boards, Exclusive videos, Freescale, Embedded World, Android

Udoo launched their Single Board Computer Udoo Neo based on an ARM Cortex-A9 and an ARM Cortex-M4, it already got funded on Kickstarter reaching it’s $15k goal on Kickstarter in 80 minutes.

UDOO Neo merges the world of Arduino and Raspberry Pi with wireless connectivity and 9-axis motion sensors, providing a complete and easy solution to free your imagination, make your objects alive and create new smart devices and appliances from scratch.

On Monday 20 April 2015 SECO USA Inc. launched UDOO Neo on Kickstarter at 11 o’clock in EST time, raising the 15k USD dollar goal in just 80 minutes.

UDOO Neo is a credit-card size (59.3mm x 85mm – 3.35″ x 2.33″), low-cost, low-power consumption, open-source hardware board, able to run Android or Linux and Arduino-compatible. It can be used as a fully-fledged computer, as an Arduino-compatible microcontroller or as an embedded computer to build new devices, smart objects and appliances.

TI LaunchPad Evaluation Kits to get started with TI microcontrollers

Posted by Charbax – May 26, 2015
Category: Internet of Things, Development Boards, Sensors, Exclusive videos, Texas Instruments, Embedded World

Texas Instruments shows their low cost microcontroler developer platform. On the board can be a debugger, the target MCU and the specialized headers that are the same for each of the different TI Launchpad boards, some have Ethernet, other have WiFi. Using ARM Cortex-M4 and other cores, Texas Instruments also is demonstrating a complete IoT system with IBM, one of our Cloud Partnersfeaturing a variety of low power SensorTags each providing multiple sensors and using different radio technologies such as Bluetooth Low Energy, 6Lowpan, Zigbee all using the new SimpleLink ultra-low power multi-standard CC2650 wireless microcontroller as well as Wi-fi using the CC3200. These are connected via BeagleBone based gateways which communicate with the cloud server for processing using MQTT.

Altera Arria 10 FPGA with dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 on 20nm

Posted by Charbax – May 21, 2015
Category: Development Boards, FPGA, Exclusive videos, Embedded World

Altera is shipping their second generation ARM Cortex-A9 based FPGA in the Altera Arria 10 FPGA, built on 20nm, running at 1.5 GHz, the ARM processor provides a 50% increase in performance over the previous generation (Altera Arria 5) with also a 30% power reduction. Altera Arria 10 SoCs support secure boot with authentication based on Elliptical Curve Digital Signature Authentication (EC DSA), with a layered public key infrastructure for root of trust support, Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) and new anti-tamper features. Altera Arria 10 HPS now has three Ethernet MAC cores, 256 KB Scratch-RAM, supports 8- and 16-bit NAND flash devices, eMMC SD/SDIO/MMC cards, and 72-bit DDR3/4 memory. Altera Arria 10 features the industry’s only midrange 28.3 Gbps support, highest performance 2,666 Mbps DDR4 SDRAM memory interface, IEEE 754-compliant hard floating-point with 1,500 GFLOPS of DSP performance and 96 transceiver lanes deliver 3.6 Tbps of serial bandwidth.

The first ARM processor in the world with Sophie Wilson (Part 2)

Posted by Charbax – May 10, 2015
Category: Set-top-boxes, Development Boards, Exclusive videos, ARM

In 1986, Acorn shipped the ARM Development System, the world’s first ARM development board to ever be sold with an ARM Processor in it, a Tube-linked second processor for the BBC Master which allowed developers to write programs for ARM! Sophie Wilson, original ARM designer at Acorn Computers, talks about the History of ARM, with the devices that used ARM1, ARM2, ARM3, ARM610 in the Apple Newton and talking about how ARM was spun out of Acorn, how the ARM business model made ARM such a huge worldwide success.

You can also watch Part 1 of my interview with Sophie Wilson here (and check back for Part 3!) this is being filmed at the Center for Computing History in Cambridge

Allwinner H64 Set-top-box development board

Posted by Charbax – April 30, 2015
Category: Set-top-boxes, 4K UHD, Development Boards, Exclusive videos, Allwinner, China Sourcing Fair, Android

Allwinner H64 OTT box development board is a 64bit Quad core ARM Cortex-A53 with H.265 4K decoding, 4K HDMI output, smart color display with Android 5 Lollipop support.

ARM mbed IoT Starter Kit on IBM’s Bluemix cloud platform

Posted by Charbax – April 6, 2015
Category: Internet of Things, Development Boards, Sensors, Exclusive videos, Freescale, IBM, Embedded World, ARM

ARM launches the ARM mbed IoT Starter Kit Ethernet Edition, an extremely easy to use development kit for Internet of Things, to channel data from Internet-connected devices directly into IBM’s Bluemix cloud platform. The combination of a secure sensor environment by ARM with cloud-based analytics, mobile and application resources from IBM allows fast prototyping of new smart products and unique value-added services for the IoT market. It is particularly suitable for developers with no specific experience in embedded or web development, as it provides a platform for learning new concepts and creating working prototypes. After the initial out of box experience, the infinite possibilities of cloud applications can be explored through IBM’s production grade BlueMix platform, in which deployment and device management is as simple for one device as it is for a million of them. The starter kit hardware can be modified and extended to explore the device design space, and a finalised design can be taken to production using the mbed SDK and HDK.

ARM mbed IoT Starter Kit can be ordered here: https://developer.mbed.org/platforms/IBMEthernetKit/

$10 Cypress PSoC ARM Cortex-M3 Programmable System-on-Chip

Posted by Charbax – March 26, 2015
Category: Wearables, Robots, Internet of Things, Development Boards, Sensors, Cars, Health, Exclusive videos, Cypress, Embedded World

Cypress makes programmable system-on-chip solutions used in a wide range of applications, from consumer and automotive to industrial and military products. They are launching the $10 CY8KIT-059 development board to program their ARM Cortex-M3 PSoC 5LP at http://www.cypress.com/?rid=108038 The Cypress PSoC platform includes several families of devices that feature an ARM Cortex processor surrounded by a host of programmable analog and digital resources that can easily be customized with a simple drag-and-drop design tool called PSoC Creator. Cypress’s newest PSoC innovation includes the PSoC 4 M-Series, which, with its 32-bit ARM Cortex M0- core, 128KB of flash, programmable analog and digital components, dual CAN interfaces and 55 GPIOs, make it an ideal replacement for standard 8-bit and 16-bit applications. Another recent Cypress innovation is the Cypress PSoC 4 BLE, which adds Bluetooth Low Energy connectivity to any device, and is ideal for a variety of wireless applications from fitness and health-monitoring wearables to sensor-based systems in homes.

Radxa Rock2 RK3288 development board

Posted by Charbax – March 26, 2015
Category: Development Boards, Exclusive videos, Rockchip, Linaro Connect, Android, Ubuntu

This is the Radxa Rock2 on Rockchip RK3288 quad-core ARM Cortex-A17, still being optimized for release at http://radxa.com/Rock2 it’s configured as a SoM (System on Module) board with a choice of two base boards with more or less connectors and with that SoM module swappable. Tyler Baker of the Linaro LAVA team talks about the connectors and how Linaro is integrating this into http://kernelci.org which you can hear about at http://138.2.152.197/2015/02/28/kernelci-org-upstream-kernel-validation-project/

Atmel | SMART SAM S70 and E70 ARM Cortex-M7 (World’s fastest ARM Cortex-M)

Posted by Charbax – March 17, 2015
Category: Internet of Things, Development Boards, Networking, Sensors, Cars, Exclusive videos, Atmel, Embedded World

The Atmel | SMART SAM S70 and E70 microcontrollers are based on the high-performance 32-bit ARM Cortex-M7 RISC processors with double precision floating point unit. They operate at a maximum speed of 300MHz and feature up to 2048KB of Flash, dual 16KB of cache memory and up to 384KB of SRAM. They can achieve 1500 CoreMarks or up to 645 DMIPS. On the memory side, they have a flexible SRAM which can be configured as Tightly Coupled Memory (TCM) up to 256KB. Allowing execution of deterministic code or fast processing data. Code executed from TCM is executed at full speed so at 300MHz. The SRAM is multi-port which is reducing the latency over the bus matrix. When they have a lot of burst the latency can be reduced by 16 thanks to the 4 ports. To accelerate the execution of the code from on-chip Flash or nonvolatile memory connected to QuadSPI or over the External Bus Interface, they have integrated a huge L1 cache of 16kByte for the instruction and 16kByte for the data. Both with ECC. The 384KByte of SRAM can be extended through the SDRAM interface. Looking at the features now, they have plenty of serial communications such as SPI, SDIO or USART. Atmel has one High-speed USB Host and Device, with integrated PHY which obviously save some cost and PCB space. There is one CMOS Camera interface for image acquisition. All the series offer two Advanced Analog Frontend (AFE) with Dual Sample and hold capability and Up to 16-bit resolution with hardware oversampling. They also have programmable Gain for small signal input. All series offer real-time event management through direct connection between PWM, Timer and ADC for motor control application. Both series are based on the same feature set, the only difference is coming from the Ethernet, CAN support (SAME70 integrates Ethernet and CAN). Atmel offers all series in BGA and QFP from 64 to 144 pins. Small 64-pin pincount option offers an entry level form factor high performance MCU. All series support the extended Industrial temperature range from -40 to 105°C.

Qualcomm at Linaro Connect, Open Source Freedreno GPU Drivers for Qualcomm Adreno GPUs running on Inforce Computing’s Single-board-computers

Posted by Charbax – March 17, 2015
Category: Development Boards, Exclusive videos, Qualcomm, Linaro Connect, Android, Ubuntu

Hacking on Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 and Snapdragon 805 based Inforce Computing single-board-computers, Inforce 6410 and Inforce 6540, in this video, the Qualcomm Linaro Landing Team and Qualcomm Linaro engineers talk about the status of Ubuntu Linux release on Snapdragon 600 processor based development boards. Rob Clark, Freedreno project owner, talks about the status of open source graphics drivers for Qualcomm Adreno processor. The Linaro Linux release uses Freedreno graphics driver for HW acceleration. Other landing team engineers talk about various other plugins and drivers such Gstreamer plugin developed for the Linux release to enable to support for HW accelerated HTML5 video. There has been a lot of progress made on up streaming drivers for Snapdragon processors. For latest Linaro Linux release, visit: http://releases.linaro.org/latest/ubuntu/snapdragon For information on development boards based on Snapdragon processor, visit http://mydragonboard.org/. For Inforce Computing’s single-board-computers based on Snapdragon processors, visit http://inforcecomputing.com/products/inforce_products.html

Infineon shows €16 ARM Cortex-M0 XMC1100 Starter Kit Development Board with free DAVE “Digital Application Virtual Engineer”

Posted by Charbax – March 3, 2015
Category: Internet of Things, Development Boards, Exclusive videos, Embedded World

Matthias Ackermann, Industrial Microcontrollers at Infineon Technologies presents the latest technologies around its XMC 32-bit industrial microcontroller families powered by ARM Cortex-M and a new version of DAVE in action – 600W LLC titanium class power conversion reference design using XMC4000 series, XMC MCU buck kit evaluation platform for XMC MCUs, 1kW BLDC power tool reference design using XMC1300 series, 2-axis FOC motor control using XMC4400 series, MATLAB Simulink coder library integration in DAVE, secure field update/upgrade for XMC4000 series, 24GHz radar for presence and distance detection, flicker-free LED lighting control with RGB LED lighting shield for Arduino.

The Infineon demos show typical use cases and implementations utilizing XMC MCUs that feature deterministic behavior (programmable hardware interconnect matrix), performance (with DSP and FPU or MATH co-processor enabling 32-bit DIV and 24-bit trigonometric calculations), accuracy (peripherals clock up to 120MHz, HRPWM with 150ps), full control (timer concatenate up to 64-bit, POSIF), integration (ΔΣ Demodulator, LED Brightness Color Control Unit), and flexible programmable communication interfaces for M2M and IoT.

The demos use DAVE. DAVE stands for “Digital Application Virtual Engineer”. It is the free of charge software development platform for XMC MCUs offering a configurable and reusable code repository called XMC Lib (low level driver) and DAVE APPs.

kernelci.org upstream kernel validation project

Posted by Charbax – February 28, 2015
Category: Development Boards, Software, Exclusive videos, Linaro Connect, Android, Chrome OS, Ubuntu

Tyler Baker discusses and demos http://kernelci.org, where development boards all over the world are being booted with the bleeding edge upstream kernel to provide validation results to the kernel community.

ARM Cortex-M7 in STM32 F7 STMicroelectronics, IS2T brings MicroEJ Java apps store for embedded market

Posted by Charbax – February 27, 2015
Category: Internet of Things, Development Boards, Exclusive videos, STMicroelectronics, Embedded World

STMicroelectronics launches STM32 F7 series of very high performance Microcontroller Units based on the ARM Cortex-M7 core. The STM32 F7 devices are the world’s first ARM Cortex-M7 based 32-bit microcontrollers, improving on the benchmark performance. Taking advantage of ST’s ART Accelerator as well as an L1 cache, the STM32 F7 devices deliver the maximum theoretical performance of the Cortex-M7 no matter whether code is executed from embedded Flash or external Memory: 1000 CoreMark/428 DMIPS at 200 MHz fCPU.

Demonstrated running on the STM32 F7, IS2T MicroEJ SDK enables embedded Java development for any MCU and MPU, from the smallest ARM Cortex-M0+ to the newest Cortex-M7 and beyond. The embedded Java platform includes IS2T Java Virtual Machine (footprint: 28KB of RAM, 1.5KB of RAM) and IS2T libraries for IoT, GUI and communication applications. Boot time to first line of Java main is 2ms on a Cortex-M4@120MHz.

IoT solutions includes TPC/IP, Wifi, MQTT, Websockets, HTTP, JSON, XML, COAP… protocols. GUI solutions includes a full set of widgets, drawing, motions, anti-aliased… libraries – typical animations at 60FPS with less than 10% CPU load. Full Java applications run on MCU starting from 256KB of flash.

The MicroEJ demo running on STM32F7 device shows the Waddapps store connection, an online store of embedded applications that can be downloaded to the STM32F7 through any link (e.g. ethernet, Wifi, Bluetooth). Apps are downloaded, installed, started, stopped, uninstalled without reset – same as smartphone users would typically do with an Apps Store.

More information about STM32 F7: http://www.st.com/web/en/catalog/mmc/FM141/SC1169/SS1858?sc=stm32f7
Free MicroEJ SDK evaluation: http://www.is2t.com
Wadapps Store: http://www.wadapps.com

Freescale i.MX 6SoloX ARM Cortex-A9 with ARM Cortex-M4 and the Mentor Embedded Multicore Framework

Posted by Charbax – February 27, 2015
Category: Development Boards, Exclusive videos, Freescale, Embedded World, Android

Freescale launches i.MX6SX for Heterogeneous Processing at Embedded World 2015, it has one ARM Cortex-A9 core running at 1Ghz and one ARM Cortex-M4 core running at 200Mhz. Enabling the Heterogeneous Processing on the new Freescale i.MX 6SoloX , Mentor Graphics shows their Mentor Embedded Multicore Framework that enables two capabilities necessary for taking advantage of mixed core architectures: 1) remote processor lifecycle management and 2) inter-processor communication. Remote processor lifecycle management is based on the open source standard remoteproc, and allows the master core to power and boot a remote core. The inter-processor communication mechanism is based on the open source standard rpmsg, and allows the establishment of a communication channel across different types of cores and operating systems.

The demo shown at the Freescale booth at Embedded World boots Mentor Embedded Linux on the A9 core. The Linux system runs a Qt based patient monitoring application. When the start button is pressed on the Qt application, remoteproc interfaces are used to power up the M4 core and launch the Nucleus RTOS firmware responsible for capturing patient data, then rpmsg interfaces are used to establish a VirtIO based communication mechanism between the applications across the mixed core and operating system architecture. Pressing the stop button on the Qt application the reverse happens, ending in a powered off M4 core.

The entire runtime software architecture is instrumented and the trace data is visualized in Sourcery Analyzer for simultaneous timeline performance analysis and debug of both operating systems and applications.

You can read more about the Freescale iMX6 SoloX here: http://www.freescale.com/webapp/sps/site/prod_summary.jsp?code=i.MX6SX

48-core 64bit Cavium ThunderX ARM Server demonstrating Virtualization

Posted by Charbax – February 24, 2015
Category: Servers, Development Boards, Networking, Exclusive videos, Cavium, Linaro Connect, Ubuntu

Cavium is showing the most powerful ARM Processor in the world, with a 48-core ARMv8 64bit processor, demonstrating the high-performance visualization running the Xen Hypervisor running on an internal evaluation board and the KVM Hypervisor running on a rack-mounted 1U platform.