The first STM32 MCU based on Arm Cortex-M33 core was the ultra-low-power STM32L5 microcontroller, and the company is now following with the STM32U5 series also designed for smart applications including wearables, personal medical devices, home automation, and industrial sensors. The...

Microcontrollers used to be those cute little chips clocked at 8 MHz, but it’s now common to have MCUs clocked at one or two hundred Megahertz, and with Cortex-M7 cores, several hundred Megahertz is now possible, and NXP even pushed...

Most laptops are not made to be serviced by the end-users or expanded. In the part of the world where I live, I still have a “warranty void” sticker if I open my laptop to add an M.2 SSD. There...

Since the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 launch last fall, we’ve seen several interesting carrier boards for the system-on-module including Wiretrustee to build a NAS with up to four SATA drives, the compact, Arduino-sized Piunora board that also include an...

Sony Semiconductor Israel, previously known as Altair Semiconductor, has announced the launch of the Altair ALT1255 NB-IoT (NB2) chipset. The 5G-ready chip comes with an integrated SIM, a user MCU, and a GSM/GPRS fallback modem. Sony Altair ALT1255 NB-IoT chipset...

Qualcomm introduced the Snapdragon XR2 5G VR Reference Design last year based on their latest Snapdragon XR2 virtual/extended reality processor. But the company never designed a reference design for the earlier Snapdragon XR1 that was found in Google Glass Enterprise...

Arduino Oplà IoT Kit was launched last fall as the first open programmable IoT platform from the company. The kit included everything you need to create your own IoT devices with MKR IoT carrier with a 1.3-inch OLED color display, ...

StereoPi stereoscopic camera based on Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 was introduced in late 2019 on Crowd Supply.  The camera can record 3D video, create 3D depth maps with OpenCV, and benefits from the Raspberry Pi software ecosystem. The developers...

Elecrow develops and manufactures electronics products for the maker market, and in recent years entered the STEM education market with products such as CrowPi2 Raspberry Pi 4 education laptop that I reviewed last year. The laptop integrates plenty of electronics...

While it’s possible to use Raspberry Pi Pico with a breadboard or Veroboard, we’ve seen the benefits of inserting the board into a baseboard such as Maker Pi Pico providing LEDs, a MicroSD card, audio output, and the ability to...

RISC-V open architecture allows designers to implement their own instructions, and some of those may become an official RISC-V extension. But the process to approve a new extension may have been suboptimal, so RISC-V International has just unveiled the Fast...

We’ve seen a fair amount of Intel Elkhart Lake platforms including modules, 3.5-inch SBCs, Pico-ITX boards, and embedded mini PCs, but so far, I had not noticed any Elkhart Lake mini-ITX motherboard. Advantech AIMB-218 motherboard offers a choice of low-power...

One of the new features of Android 12 is support for the AVIF file format that provides much smaller files at the same level of quality. Jake Archibald has done a great job comparing AVIF format to JPEG, WebP, and...

The Raspberry Pi Pico is not compatible with Linux, but now supports another Unix-like operating system known as Fuzix. Alan Cox’s Fuzix is a Unix-like operating system for older devices with less performance capacity. David Given’s two recent posts have...

DH electronics DHCOM STM32MP1 is an STMicro STM32MP1 Cortex-A7/M4  system-on-module (SoM) following the company’s SO-DIMM-based DHCOM standard, and capable of running Linux with Etnaviv GPU drivers. The SoM is compatible with two DHCOM carrier boards from the company, namely DH...

Orange Pi PC is an Allwinner H3 SBC that was launched in 2015 for as little as $15 plus shipping (now $17.42 with 1 GB RAM), and made by a company called Shenzhen Xunlong Software. The next year, the company...

In my early list of third-party Raspberry Pi RP2040 boards, I shortly mentioned Cytron Maker Pi Pico baseboard for Raspberry Pi Pico that exposes all pins via female headers, includes LEDs for all GPIOs pin, six Grove connectors, three user...

Last summer, Espressif and Amazon jointly announced the ESP32-PICO-V3-ZERO Alexa Connect Kit module providing out-of-box connectivity to ACK (Alexa Connect Kit) cloud services, support for features such as Alexa control, “Frustration-Free Setup” and Amazon Dash replenishment for connected devices. At...

Kodi is an open-source media center that was initially designed for the XBOX game console, but was quickly ported to other platforms such as Windows and Linux, and eventually to low-cost Android TV boxes and single board computers such as...

AAEON has introduced several BOXER AI edge computers over the years either powered by an NVIDIA Jetson module, a HiSilicon HI3559A Arm SoC, or an Intel processor combined with Movidius Myriad AI accelerator. The latest model, BOXER-8521AI, combines an NXP...

Last year, Olimex introduced ESP32-S2-DevKit-LiPo and ESP32-S2-WROVER-Devkit-LiPo boards optimized for battery-powered applications with as little as 30uA deep sleep power consumption. ESP32-S2 processor comes with a USB OTG interface, but at the time, Espressif Systems ESF-IDF SDK did not support...

Google releases a new version of Android every year, and the company is now usually releasing a developer preview in February to allow feedback and testing from app developers. So here we are with the Android 12 developer preview having...

Dustin Watts developed FreeTouchDeck software to interface with Windows, macOS, Linux computers and boards over Bluetooth LE using an ESP32 board connected to a touchscreen display. So far, he used off-the-shelf parts, but he has now decided to create his...

Getting open-source multimedia drivers on Arm Linux is one of the most difficult tasks, that’s why there’s no much talk about open-source GPU drivers for 2D & 3D graphics acceleration, but work on video hardware decoding and encoding is also...

Over the years, we’ve seen many LoRa modules combining STM32 microcontroller with Semtech SX12xx wireless transceivers, so that’s probably why STMicro decided to create the first LoRa SoC with STM32WL that was launched last year. I’ve just been informed a...