Kunbus, a German company specialized in industrial network solution, has decided to design an industrial system based on Raspberry Pi Computer module supporting variable power supply, a wide temperature range, DIN rail mounting, etc, as well as corresponding digital I/O modules and fieldbus gateways.

RevolutionPI RevPi Core specifications:

• SoC – Broadcom BCM2835 ARM11 processor @ 700 MHz
• System Memory – 512 MB
• Storage – 4GB flash
• Video Output – Micro HDMI port
• Connectivity – 10/100M Ethernet port
• USB – 2x USB 2.0 host ports, 1x micro USB port
• Misc – RTC, 3x status LEDs (2 programmable)
• Power Supply – 10.7 V to 28.8 V; polarity protection; 4 kV / 8 kV ESD protection & EMI passed (according to EN61131-2 and IEC 61000-6-2), surge and burst tests passed
• Power Consumption – Max: 10 Watts including 2 x 450 mA USB load; typ.: 4 watts.
• Dimensions – 96 x 22.5 x 110.5 mm (Polycarbonate case)
• Housing type – DIN rail housing for DIN rail version EN 50022
• Weight – 108 g
• Protection class – IP20
• Temperature Range – Operating: -40 °C to +55 °C (exceeds EN61131-2 requirements); storage: -40 °C to +85 °C (exceeds EN61131-2 requirements); N/B.: No guarantee that the system can start at less than 30 °C with a 24V power supply.
• Humidity – up to 93% (non-condensing) @ 40°C

The system runs Raspian Wheezy with RT-patch for Linux kernel 4.1.13.

Beside RevPi Core described above, the company also offers three different galvanically isolated “RevPi DIO” digital IO modules with a 28-pin I/O connector as shown in the first picture, as well as RevPi Gates gateways supporting industrial communication standards including Profinet, Profibus, EtherCat, Modbus, Sercos, CANopen, and more. RevPi DIO and Gates are connected to RevPi core through a overhead Pi Bridge connector allowing two expansions per RevPi Core.

Some RevPi Gates Gateways

You can find the full details on Kunbus RevolutionPi microsite, and purchase RevolutionPi RevPi Core (169 Euros), DIO modules and gateways on their webstore.

Thanks to Sander for the tip.

Tweet Kunbus, a German company specialized in industrial network solution, has decided to design an industrial system based on Raspberry Pi Computer module supporting variable power supply, a wide temperature…

Mecool BB2 Pro is yet another Amlogic S912 Android 6.0 TV box, but after Eweat R9 Plus, it’s my second TV box with DDR4 memory that should deliver much higher bandwidth compared to DDR3 memory used in most TV boxes. But so far, it’s clear how much performance can be extracted from the system with higher memory bandwidth in actual use,  and that’s exactly what I hope to find out in the second part of the review, but in this post I start by going through the specs, check the box and its accessories, as well as the hardware design.

Mecool BB2 Pro specifications

Apart from the DDR4 memory, BB2 Pro has pretty common specifications:

• SoC – Amlogic S912 octo-core ARM Cortex A53 processor @ up to 1.5 GHz with ARM Mali-820MP3 GPU
• System Memory – 3 GB DDR4
• Storage – 16 GB eMMC flash + micro SD slot up to 32GB
• Video Output – HDMI 2.0a with HDR and CEC support up to 4K @ 60 fps, and AV port for composite output
• Audio Output – HDMI, AV (stereo audio), and optical S/PDIF
• Connectivity – Gigabit Ethernet, dual band WiFi 802.11 b/g/n/ac + Bluetooth 4.0
• USB – 2x USB 2.0 ports
• Misc – IR receiver, power button, recovery pinhole, LEDs
• Power Supply – 5V/2A

The device runs Android 6.0 with Kodi pre-installed.

Mecool BB2 Pro Unboxing

Videostrong sent the package to me as Mecool is one of the brands together with YokaTV, and they are also found in some OEM products like Vontar.

The device ships with an IR remote control with IR learning function requiring two AAA batteries, a HDMI cable, a 5V/2A power supply, and a user’s manual.

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The device itself looks pretty similar since it’s based on the exact same case as YokaTV KB2 we’ve just reviewed, and all ports are the same including the front panel’s IR receiver and LED window and power button, two USB 2.0 ports and a micro SD slot on the side, and the rest on the rear panel: Gigabit Ethernet, optical S/PDIF, AV port, recovery pinhole, HDMI 2.0a output, and the power jack. There’s also an external Wifi antenna.

Mecool BB2 Pro Teardown

D0:76:58 MAC addresses used by Videostrong still do not look up to anything. Anyway, I had to remove the four rubber pads in the metallic bottom cover, and loosen the screws underneath in order to open the device.We’ll find two Samsung K4A8G165WB-BCRC DDR4 SDRAM chip (8Gbit each) so we’ve not been lied too, and the device indeed has DDR4 memory :), as well as the marking (3.3V, Tx, Rx, GND) for the serial console on the bottom of the board.

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We’ll need to use a small plastic tool to pull out the board from the plastic case. A heatsink – plus two thermal pads – covers Amlogic S912 processor and the remaining DDR4 chips, and a LED is connected to the bottom of the case. You’ll also notice an elliptic opening (unused) on the top right of the plastic, that’s probably reserved for a power button in other designs.

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Samsung KLMAG1JENB-B041 eMMC 5.1 flash provides 16 GB of storage, while Realtek RTL8211F and Pulse H5009NL chips enabled Gigabit Ethernet, and a KM63350711 wireless module – whose naming reminds me of Ampak AP6335 – delivers 802.11ac WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity. Finally DIO2133 audio driver completed the most noticeable components on the board.

I’d like to thank VideoStrong for sending the review sample, and interested distributors may inquire the company via the product page. Mecool BB2 Pro can also be purchased for $68 and up on Banggood, GearBest, and eBay, or just about the same as YokaTV KB2 with 3GB DDR3 instead of 3GB DDR4, and 32GB storage instead of just 16 GB, with the rest of the specifications being equal.

Tweet Mecool BB2 Pro is yet another Amlogic S912 Android 6.0 TV box, but after Eweat R9 Plus, it’s my second TV box with DDR4 memory that should deliver much…

Last year Ambiq Micro unveiled their Apollo Cortex-M4F MCU with Cortex M0+ energy efficiency thanks to operation in sub-threshold voltage (< 0.5 V), and the MCU is said found in Matrix Powerwatch, a fitness tracker powered by body heat that you never need to charge. The company has recently announced a new version of the micro-controller with Apollo 2 MCU with better maximum performance thanks to a higher maximum clock speed (48 MHz vs 24 MHz), and higher efficiency (10 μA/MHz vs 30 μA/MHz @ 3.3V).

Apollo 2 MCU key features and specifications:

• Ultra-low supply current
  • <10 μA/MHz executing from flash at 3.3 V
  • <10 μA/MHz executing from RAM at 3.3 V
• ARM Cortex-M4 Processor up to 48 MHz with FPU, MMU, wake-up interrupt controller with 32 interrupts
• Ultra-low power memory
  • Up to 1 MB of flash memory for code/data
  • Up to 256 KB of low leakage RAM for code/data
  • 16kB 1 or 2-way Associative Cache
• Ultra-low power interface for off-chip sensors
  • 14 bit, 15-channel, up to 1.2 MS/s ADC
  • Voltage comparator
  • Temperature sensor with +/-2ºC accuracy
• Serial peripherals – 6x I2C/SPI master,1x I2C/SPI slave,2x UART, PDM for mono and stereo audio microphone
• Clock sources
  • 32.768 kHz XTAL oscillator
  • Low frequency RC oscillator – 1.024 kHz
  • High frequency RC oscillator – 48 MHz
  • RTC based on Ambiq’s AM08X5/18X5 families
• Wide operating range – 1.8-3.6 V, –40 to 85°C
• Package –  2.5 x 2.5 mm 49-pin CSP with 34 GPIO; 4.5 x 4.5 mm 64-pin BGA with 50 GPIO

The MCU promises weeks, months, and years of battery life thanks to Ambiq Micro’s patented Subthreshold Power Optimized Technology (SPOT) Platform. Apollo 2 will be suitable for battery operated devices, or even batteryless devices leveraging energy harvesting such as wireless sensors, activity and fitness trackers, consumer medical devices, smart watches, and smart home/IoT devices.

Documentation and devkits are available but you’d need to contact the company to learn more. Ambiq Micro’s Apollo 2 is currently sampling to some partners, and will be sampling more broadly in the coming months. A few more details may be found on Ambiq Micro Apollo 2’s product page.

Tweet Last year Ambiq Micro unveiled their Apollo Cortex-M4F MCU with Cortex M0+ energy efficiency thanks to operation in sub-threshold voltage (< 0.5 V), and the MCU is said found…

The Khronos Group is the non-profit consortium group behind open standards and APIs for graphics, media and parallel computation such as OpenGL for 3D graphics, OpenCL for GPGPU, OpenVG for 2D vector…

Ubuntu 16.04 and – I assume – other recent operating systems are still using single-thread version of file & data compression utilities such as bzip2 or gzip by default, but…

Pycom is the company making some relatively popular IoT boards programmable with Python such as WiPy, LoPy, SiPy, and soon FiPy, supporting respectively WiFi+BLE, LoRa+WiFi+BLE, Sigfox+WiFi+BLE, and…

Parallella project’s goal is to ” democratize access to parallel computing by offering affordable open source hardware platforms and development tools”, and they’ve already done that with their very first $99 “Supercomputer” board combining a Xilinz Zynq FPGA + ARM SoC to the company’s Epiphany-III 16-core coprocessor. But the company has made progress after their 64-core Epiphany-IV, by taping out Epiphany-V processor with 1024-core last October.

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Epiphany-V main features and specifications:

• 1024 64-bit RISC processors
• 64-bit memory architecture
• 64-bit and 32-bit IEEE floating point support
• 64 MB of distributed on-chip SRAM
• 1024 programmable I/O signals
• 3x 136-bit wide 2D mesh NOCs (Network-on-Chips)
• 2052 separate power domains
• Support for up to one billion shared memory processors
• Support for up to one petabyte of shared memory (That’s 1,000,000 gigabytes)
• Binary compatibility with Epiphany III/IV chips
• Custom ISA extensions for deep learning, communication, and cryptography
• TSMC 16FF process
• 4.56 Billion transistors, 117mm² silicon area

With its 4.5 billion transistors, the chip has 36% more transistors than Apple’s A10 processor at about the same die size, and compared to other HPC processors, such as NVIDIA P100 or UC-Davis Kilocore, the chip offers up to 80x better processor density and up to 3.6x advantage in memory density.

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You’ll find more technical details, minus power consumption numbers and frequency which are not available yet, in Epiphany V technical paper.

The first chips taped out at TSMC will be sent back mid to end Q1 2017.

Tweet Parallella project’s goal is to ” democratize access to parallel computing by offering affordable open source hardware platforms and development tools”, and they’ve already done that with their very…

Last year, Marvell introduced AndroMeda Box Edge IoT board using 96Boards form factor and running Brillo (now Android Things), but the company has been working on the similarly named AndromedaBox Networking Edge (ANE) board with a tweaked version of 96Boards form factor including Gigabit Ethernet and SATA, and powered by a dual core ARMADA 3700 processor.

AndromedaBox Networking Edge specifications:

• SoC – Marvell ARMADA LP 3700 dual-core ARM Cortex 53 processor @ up to 1.2 GHz
• System Memory – 512MB LPDDR4
• Storage – 8GB eMMC flash, 1x SATA 3.0 port
• Connectivity – 1x Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 port, 1×1 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 4.2
• USB – 2x micro USB 2.0 port, 1x USB 3.0 port
• Expansion – 1x PCIe 2.0 (maybe via a slot on the back of the board), 40-pin LS (Low Speed) Expansion connector
• Power Supply – Likely 8 to 18V input as per 96Boards specs
• Dimensions – 85 x 54 mm (Same as 96Boards CE Edition)

The board would be suitable for IoT gateways, mobile NAS, home cloud server, etc… You can watch a short description of the board in the video below.
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Marvell ARMADA 3700 is the same processor as used in the company’s ESPRESSOBin community board, which means we already have a Wiki with a little more technical details (no processor datasheet though), as well as u-boot and Linux images and source code.

What’s odd is that there’s no trace of AndromedaBox Networking Edge board anywhere in the net, including in Andromedabox.org website, and the board via apparently introduced last June.

Via ARMDevices.net

Tweet Last year, Marvell introduced AndroMeda Box Edge IoT board using 96Boards form factor and running Brillo (now Android Things), but the company has been working on the similarly named…

Soniktek Electronics has designed the “e-Paper Shield Starter Kit” featuring Pervasive Displays’ E2215CS062 e-paper screen, and an adapter board to connect it to Teensy LC (Low Cost) board powered by NXP Kinetis L ARM Cortex M0+ microcontroller @ 48 MHz, or other 3.3V MCU boards supporting SPI.

Adapter board & display specifications:

• Supports Pervasive Displays 2.15″ E2215CS062 e-paper screen with 208 x 112 resolution, no backlight required, fully sunlight-readable
• Communication protocol – SPI  @ 3.3V
• Sensor – On-board thermometer with I2C interface
• Dimensions – Screen: 48 mm x 26 mm; adapter board fits into Teensy-LC module (36x18mm)

The advantages of e-Paper display are that they don’t require power to maintain an image, and they can be read in sunlight, just like actual paper. I can’t remember having seen many – if any – low cost e-Paper development kits so far, and the project is open source hardware with design files and source code available on hackster.io.

[embedded content]

The project was successfully funded on Crowdsupply last month, but you can now pre-order directly on the platform, starting at $25 for the adapter only if you already have an MCU board and the e-Paper display, $50 for the adapter board, and display, and $75 for a full kit with Teensy LC board, the adapter board, and the e-Paper Display. Shipping is free to the US, and $5 to the rest of the world.

If you are interested in e-Paper display development kits, I’ve noticed there are a dozen listed on Pervasive Display e-Ink development kits page, including e-Paper HATs boards for Raspberry Pi Zero, and other Raspberry Pi boards, and e-Paper shields for Arduino.

Via Softei.com

Tweet Soniktek Electronics has designed the “e-Paper Shield Starter Kit” featuring Pervasive Displays’ E2215CS062 e-paper screen, and an adapter board to connect it to Teensy LC (Low Cost) board powered by…

Acer Chromebook R13 is the most powered ARM Chromebook so far thanks to its Mediatek MT8173 quad core processor combining two ARM Cortex A72 cores and Cortex A53 cores, as well as a PowerVR GX6250 GPU, 4GB RAM and a 13.3″ touchscreen display. But unless you live in the US or other markets where Chromebooks are sold, it’s pretty hard to buy, and that model is relatively expensive as it sells for close to $550 on Amazon. Emdoor, a Chinese design house, has made 2-in-1 hybrid laptops based on the processor with a 11.6″ or 13.3″ touchscreen display, 1 to 2GB RAM, and 16 to 64GB storage, which – once launched – should be easier to buy, and cost less.

Both EM-T8513 and EM-T8516 models share most of the same specifications, except for the display:

• SoC – Mediatek MT8173 quad core processor with 2x Cortex A72 cores @ up to 2.0 GHz, 2x Cortex A53 cores, and a PowerVR GX6250 GPU
• System Memory – 1 or 2 GB DDR3 RAM
• Storage – 16GB, 32GB, 64, or 128 GB eMMC flash + micro SD slot
• Display
  • EM-T8516 – 11.6” IPS LCD screen with 1366 x 768 resolution,  10-points capacitive touchscreen
  • EM-T8513 – 13.3” IPS LCD screen with 1920 x 1200 or 1366 x 768 resolution,  10-points capacitive touchscreen
• Video Output – mini HDMI port
• Audio – mini HDMI port, 3.5mm combo audio jack,
• Connectivity – 802.11 b/g/n/ac WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS via MT6630 chipset
• USB – 1x USB 3.0 port, 1x USB 2.0 port
• Camera – 2MP front-facing camera
• Sensor – G-sensor
• User Input – QWERTY keyboard and touchpad
• Battery – 10,000 mAh; good for a typical 6 to 7 hours on EM-T8516 model
• Power Supply – 5V/2.5A
• Dimensions & Weight
  • EM-T8516 – 297.5 x 202 x 17.5mm – 1340 grams
  • EM-T8513 – 330 x 227.7 x 18.9mm – 1480 grams

The laptops run Android 6.0 by default, but Jide’s Remix OS can also be installed instead.

[embedded content]
If you are interested in Linux, you could try to adapt the instructions to install ArchLinux ARM on Acer Chromebook R13 to Emdoor laptops. The instructions are relying on Chrome OS, but you’d have to handle it from Android instead, so there will be differences.

Pricing and availability information have not been disclosed yet. You may be able to find more details via Emdoor’s products page (N.B: It takes about 10 to 15 minutes to load a page for me).

Via ARMDevices.net

Tweet Acer Chromebook R13 is the most powered ARM Chromebook so far thanks to its Mediatek MT8173 quad core processor combining two ARM Cortex A72 cores and Cortex A53 cores,…

FriendlyARM has had a very busy year with their NanoPi boards, and they are completing the year by launching NanoPi A64 development board based on Allwinner A64 quad core Cortex A53 processor with 1GB RAM, Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI, USB ports and more.

NanoPi A64 board specifications:

• SoC – Allwinner A64 quad-core Cortex-A53 @ 648MHz to 1.152GHz with an ARM Mali400 MP2 GPU
• System Memory – 1GB DDR3 RAM
• Storage – 1x micro SD slot
• Video Output / Display IF – HDMI 1.4 port,  30-pin MIPI DSI connector
• Audio – HDMI, 3.5mm audio jack
• Connectivity – 1x Gigabit Ethernet port (RTL8211E), 802.11 b/g/n WiFi
• USB – 2x USB 2.0 ports, 1x micro USB port for power only
• Camera – 24-pin DVP camera interface
• Debugging – 4-pin debug UART header
• Expansion
  • 40-pin mostly Raspberry Pi compatible header with UART, SPI, I2C, PWM, GPIOs, etc…
  • 7-pin I2S header
• Misc – IR Receiver, 1x power button, power and system LEDs,
• Power – 5V/2A via micro USB port; AXP803 PMIC; supports software power-off
• Dimension: 64 x 60mm (6-layer PCB)

FriendlyARM will provide Ubuntu-core with Qt Embedded and Ubuntu MATE images, but community ports such as ARMbian may be released in the future. You’ll find some documentation in the Wiki (Note: the Chinese version has more info right now).

NanoPi A64 development board is now sold with a micro USB to USB cable for $25 plus shipping on FriendlyARM website

Thanks to Thomas for the tip.

Tweet FriendlyARM has had a very busy year with their NanoPi boards, and they are completing the year by launching NanoPi A64 development board based on Allwinner A64 quad core…

Eweat R9 Plus is a device powered by Realtek RTD1295 SoC combining main functions: Android 6.0 TV box, OpenWrt NAS/router, and HDMI recorder thanks to its HDMI input port. It competes directly with Zidoo X9S which has the same features, except while Zidoo X9S has no internal SATA bay and your 2.5″ hard drive just hang outside the box, Eweat R9 Plus comes with an internal 3.5″ SATA bay that makes it much neater on your furniture… We’ve already seen that in the first part for review “Eweat R9 Plus unboxing and teardown“, and I was impressed by the hardware, but the software is even more important, and that’s what I’m going to check out in the second and final part of this review.

First Boot, First Impressions and Setup.

I’ve first inserted a 1TB 3.5″ SATA drive in the device, and then I connected an extra USB 3.0 hard drive, HDMI and Ethernet cables, two USB dongles for MINIX NEO A2 Lite air mouse and Tronsmart Mars G01 gamepad, and a USB keyboard to take screenshots, as well as U4 Quad Hybrid Android TV box to the HDMI input.

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Connect the power, press the mechanical power switch on the back, and the device will boot, typically in about 40 seconds, to the main launcher. There’s no setup wizard like in Zidoo X9S, so you’d have to change configuration separately.

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The top left corner includes status icons for USB, Ethernet, Bluetooth, and WiFi, and the top right corner shows the current date and time. The first time the time and date were not correctly update, and I did not get any IP address from my router… That’s because I connected the Ethernet cable to the WAN port, but once I connected it to the LAN port, everything worked fine. It’s just WAN and LAN markings are not quite correct…. Let’s go back to the launcher with 7 large icons, the “R9 Plus” icon is linked to Chrome browser (so we have two Chrome links), apps to the list of apps, EWMC links to Kodi 16.1, and 4K to the local file browser/media player. We also have 3 shortcuts on the botton that can be customized to your needs. Sadly, there’s no status nor notifications bars which can be a pain in some use cases. The small blue “rocket” on the of EWMC icon, is actually the mouse cursor (red in reality, but the screenshot app turns that blue).

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The system comes with a bunch of apps including Netflix, HDMIRecorder, and QuickSupport, and I could install my own without any issues using Google Play and Amazon Underground.

The front panel display on the unit is a little more useful than most, as it will show the current time of the day when not playing videos or music, and instead display the current video time with 4K video player, but not Kodi, while playing media files.

If you are interested to find out more about the settings, I invite you to check the Settings section of Zidoo X9S review, as Eweat R9 Plus has basically the same settings, except only “Auto 1080p24” option is available in the Display section, Deep Color Mode (AUTO, 12-bit, 10-bit, OFF) is gone, and the Playback section is missing together with “Auto 29.97/59.94 Hz”, “Force SD audio”, “Enable low performance mode (less buffer for playback)”.

I could set the resolution (“TV System”) to 3840x2160P @ 60Hz without any issues, but I’ve noticed the video output will sometimes fall back to 720p or 1080p after a power cycle. I could not find any option to adjust overscan either, so I had some black zone on all edges of my TV. Those are issues, but the latter at least should be easy to fix via firmware upgrades.

Once I found that LAN is actually WAN, and WAN is LAN, I had no troubles at all with Ethernet and WiFi, and OpenWrt options are also exactly the same as on Zidoo X9S.

You only get 9.31GB of the 16GB in Android because some part is reserved to OpenWrt, but it still more than the 8.91GB I had on X9S. In theory it should be plenty enough, but after a day or two of use, my internal storage was completely full, despite not installing that many apps.

Eventually I found that since my 1TV hard drive had millions of files, Android’s “Media Storage” activity had created two very large databases. Disabling Media Storage fixed the issue, and after clearing the data from “Media Storage” I had close to 8GB free. Alternatively you can add an empty .nomedia files in the directory you do not want to system to scan, for example the root of the harddrive if you don’t want it to scan anything.

Going into the About device section, we can see “R9Plus” model runs Android 6.0.1 on top of Linux 4.1.17.

The firmware is rooted, and OTA firmware update is done with SystemUpdate app, and I could upgrade from R9PLUS_V1.1_20161130 version to R9PLUS_V1.02_20161217 version which I used in most of the review. I had to disconnect the USB drive, or the update will fail. You can leave the SATA drive inside the box during firmware upgrades.

The update went well, and did not mess with my settings, apps, and media files.

The included IR remote worked fine up to 10 meters, but I’d really wish higher end devices such as R9 Plus would ship with an air mouse by default. I had to jungle between the IR remote control and MINIX NEO A2 Lite air mouse quite often depending on the app I used. Realtek apps such as HDMIRecorder, 4K media player, and File Manger may work better with the infrared remote control.

Eweat R9 Plus firmware is stable and responsive, but there are a few small bugs here and there that should be fixed, like the lack of screen scale option, video output resolution set by the user is not always used after a reboot, there’s no status nor notification bars, etc… I’d also wish such higher-end systems would come with an air mouse with keyboard by default to be able to fully control the TV box with a single remote.

Power Consumption and Temperature

Power control support is basic with only on or off, no standby or reboot, but the power consumption numbers are OK, albeit a little higher than Zidoo X9S, maybe because of the 3.5″ SATA drive instead of 2.5″ SATA drive:

• Power off (SATA HDD) – 0.3 Watt
• Idle (SATA HDD) – 9.2 Watts
• Power off + SATA & USB HDD – 0.3 Watt
• Idle + SATA & USB HDD –  11.2 to 12 Watts
• SATA HDD (Copy file to SAMBA share) + Play 4K video from USB HDD + miniDLNA in the background – 18 to 19 Watts

If you has a drive with many files, miniDLNA – enabled in OpenWrt settings as DMS (Digital Media Server) – will take a lot of CPU and I/O resources, so if you don’t need it, make sure to disable it. Idle power consumption numbers are with DMS disabled.

While there’s no standby mode, we’ve seen with Zidoo X9S that standby mode is not that useful as networking and drives are all turned off. It’s just must faster to boot than from power off mode. Most cheap Android TV boxes cannot handle more than one USB hard drive, but Eweat R9 Plus had no troubles with a SATA hard drive and a USB 3.0 drive. It might be possible to add yet another USB 3.0 drive, as the power supply has a 30 Watts capacity.

It’s no surprise that with a large metal case, the device stays relatively cool at all times. The maximum temperatures measured with an IR thermometer on the top and bottom of the device were 35 and 37 °C respectively after Antutu benchmark, and 40 and 50 °C after playing Riptide GP2 for 15 minutes.

Video & Audio Playback with Kodi 16.1 and 4K App, Antutu Video Tester, and DRM Support

R9 Plus comes with Kodi 16.1 (EWMC) and 4K app to browse and play media files with the internal player. So I’ve started by testing 4K videos with both. Bear in mind that while Realtek RTD1295 supports 10-bit HEVC/H.265 up to 60 fps @ 4K, H.264 is limited to 24 Hz, which will be a problem with you shot 4K H.264 30 fps videos with a camera or your smartphone, and 4K VP9 @ 60 fps is supposed to be supported, and with DDR4 memory I had hope some progress may be made here, but unfortunately the limit is really 30 fps, which could be an issue with some (downloaded) YouTube videos. Out of Specs videos are prefixed with OoO.

For some reasons Kodi 16.1 will fail to start playing some videos the first time, but play them the second time. Just like on Zidoo X9S – but worse – Kodi 16.1 implementation is not as good as the internal player, so for best user experience you’d have to use the 4K player. Automatic refresh rate switching works with 4K app, with 23.975/24Hz, 25 Hz, 29.97 Hz and 59.94 Hz with the latest firmware. It does not work at all with Kodi.

For so the audio tests, I’ve stopped using Kodi, and only used 4K app with PCM 2.0 downmixing and audio pass-through via HDMI.

So HDMI audio pass-through is working very well, and I did not experience some of the audio cuts I had on Zidoo X9S with Onkyo TX-NR636 receiver. Those may have been fixed since Zidoo X9S review however.

Below are a few screenshots from 4K video app starting with the list of storage devices/partitions…

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… the menu available once you’ve selected a storage device…

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.. and subtitle options while playing a video.

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I’ve also quickly tested Blu-ray ISOs (Sintel and Amat videos) and both could play. Finally, I play a 2-hour 1080p video to make sure the system can play a full movie, which I does.

Antutu Video Tester score (820 points) is a little lower than on Zidoo X9S (888).

But the videos that failed are exactly the same:

DRM info crashed each time, just like on X9S, so there’s problably no DRM support at all.

HDMIRecorder App

Eweat R9 Plus HDMIRecorder, as its name implies, allows you to record video from an HDMI input source. It can record up to 1080p @ 30 fps using H.264 codec in TS or MP4 container format, with a bitrate up to 10Mbit/s.

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It will also record audio, and you can select the output with the “Path” field. It will create a new “hdmi” directory to store the recorded videos.

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Once recording has started, it will work in the background (see recording info in the top right corner below) and you can browse the web, watch other videos, and so on during recording.

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I could then connect to the device via SAMBA, and play with the recorded video with both Totem player ad VLC in my Ubuntu 16.04 computer.

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That part works fine, and looks similar to Zidoo HDMI In app, however it lacks some goodies like PiP support and UDP broadcasting found in Zidoo X9S. So if so those functions are important to you, Zidoo X9S clearly has an edge of Eweat device here.

OpenWrt and NAS functions

If you want to learn more about settings up OpenWrt on Eweat R9 Plus, I’ll redirect you to OpenWrt and NAS functions section of Zidoo X9S review as all features are identical.

You can control OpenWrt manin function in Android settings…

… and fine tune OpenWrt settings through LuCi web interface.

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I tested SAMBA, FTP, and Bittorrent. Performance on Eweat R9 Plus was very good with FTP transfer at ~105 MB/s, and 40 MB/s for SAMBA file copy to the internal SATA, very similar to Zidoo X9S with respectively about 90 MB/s and 50 MB/s.

Eweat R9 Plus FTP Transfer – Click to Enlarge

Eweat R9 Plus SAMBA Transfer

Contrary to my experience with Zidoo X9S, BitTorrent worked just fine and the transfer quickly saturated my 20 Mbps Internet connection.

Bear in mind that firmware evolves overtime and it’s quite possible Zidoo has already fixed the issue.

This time I also tested OpenWrt opkg system manager to see if it would work. After connecting to the device through ssh, I tried to update the packages and it failed miserably:

So if you want to install packages, you’d probably have to build them yourself, or copy and install opkg packages built for ARM architecture manually.

WiFi Performance

We’ve already seen Gigabit Ethernet works perfectly above with transfers at 105 MB/s through FTP basically saturing the Gigabit Ethernet bandwidth, so I’ll only focus on WiFi in the network performance section. Eweat R9 Plus has excellent WiFi performance with both 802.11n @ 2.4 GHz, and 802.11ac (433 Mbps), roughly matching Zidoo X9S equally good performance.

Throughput in MB/s – Click to Enlarge

All you need to know is that Eweat R9 Plus is one of the top devices for WiFi  for all devices I’ve tested over the year.

Miscellaneous Tests

Bluetooth

I could pair Vernee Apollo Lite Android smartphone with “Realtek Bluetooth”, however once I started transferring files from my phone to the device, I either got the message “Unfortunately Bluetooth has stopped”, and when lucky, the transfer was initiated with Eweat R9 Plus showing an overlay message reading “”Incoming file from another device, please confirm…”. That’s all good but since there’s no notification bar, and no pop-up window, I had no idea where to confirm the transfer, and it eventually time out. I could not test Bluetooth Low Energy, because all my device are either broken or lost.

Bluetooth is not completely useless however, as I could get Sixaxis to work with my PS3 BT gamepad clone, and I paired X1T Bluetooth earbuds successfully, and listen to a YouTube video.

Storage

Eweat R9 Plus could mount NTFS, EXT-4, and NTFS partitions on a 1 TB USB 3.0 Seagate expansion harddrive with only BTRFS failing to be recognized. A FAT32 micro SD could also be mounted in read/write mode, as well as my SATA drive formatted with NTFS.

A1SD bench app shows excellent sequential read and write for the SATA interface, a decent performance for all supported file systems through USB 3.0:

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• USB 3.0 + NTFS – Read: 37.93 MB/s – Write: 39.28 MB/s
• USB 3.0 + EXT-4 – Read: 37.67 MB/s – Write: 39.43 MB/s
• USB 3.0 + exFAT – Read: 37.04 MB/s – Write: 39.28 MB/s
• SATA + NTFS – Read: 140.78 MB/s – Write: 86.30 MB/s

Eweat R9 Plus looks faster than Zidoo X9S using SATA + NTFS, but bear in mind that the hard drive used was different, so it may explain the difference. However, Zidoo was quite better for USB 3.0 using EXT-4 and NTFS, but quite poor for exFAT, which R9 Plus appears to support well.

Read and Write Speed in MB/s – Click to Enlarge

I also measured internal storage performance, but unfortunately A1SD bench reported “Cached Read”, so the read speed is not valid. The write speed of about 55 MB/s is however, and this is quite good. The actual read speed in the chart below should be lower than 140+ MB/s, but usually read speed is faster than write speed, so performance should still be good.

Read and Write Speeds in MB/s – Click to Enlarge

Gaming

I played Candy Crush Saga with the air mouse, and Beach Buggy Racing (with max quality) using a gamepad, and both games played perfectly well. Then I switched to Riptide GP2, again with maximum resolution settings. It’s started begin playable – but not quite 60fps – just like on Amlogic S905/S912 TV boxes, and Zidoo X9S, but then I noticed the image would freeze from time to time, and after a race was completed,  it may have a 10 seconds black screen before going to the main menu. So I checked the CPU usage in OpenWrt (SSH terminal), and notice miniDLNA with a high CPU usage. So I disabled DMS in Android’s OpenWrt settings, miniDLNA stopped running, and I could play the game for 15 minutes more without issues, nor performance degradation over time.

Eweat R9 Plus Benchmarks

Let’s start with CPU-Z.. R9PLUS (rtk_kylin32) model with a quad core Cortex A53 processor @ 1.4 GHz and a Mali-T820 GPU, so no surprise here.

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The device reached 36,076 points in Antutu 6.2 against 34,976 points for Zidoo X9S Antutu score.

There are a few potential explanations for the small difference: 1. R9 Plus firmware is more recent, 2. it’s winter here (~ 22 °C), and 3. R9 Plus has DDR4 ram instead of DDR3 RAM. However the strange thing is that R9 Plus RAM score is 3,046 points, but Zidoo X9S got 3,960 points which does not make any sense.

Vellamo 3.x scores are pretty similar with R9 Plus getting 1,430, 881 and 2,539 points for respectively multicore, metal, and Chrome Browser benchmarks, against 1,457, 831 and 2,638 points for Zidoo X9S. So it looks like DDR4 memory does not help for any benchmarks, including 3Dmark’s Ice Storm Extreme.

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4,359 points for Eweat R9 Plus against 4,574 for X9S.

Conclusion

Eweat R9 Plus is a solid device, and I really like the internal 3.5″ SATA bay, internal and external storage, as well as networking performance is really outstanding too. However I would have wished the firmware to have fewer bugs, and just like for Zidoo X9S, Realtek RTD1295 SoC has some limited 4K capabilities when it comes with H.264 and VP9. Getting the optimal performance may require some tweaks like disabling some server services.

PROS

• Responsive and stable Android 6.0 firmware
• 4K app plays 4K H.265 videos very well with automatic frame rate switching, and HDMI audio pass-through for Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD audio
• Excellent Ethernet and WiFi performance
• Excellent internal and SATA storage performance, and good USB 3.0 performance
• NTFS, EXT-4, exFAT, and FAT32 file systems are well supported
• HDMI Input (up to 4K60 input) with video recording up to 1080p30 (4K input is also supported but record at 1080p30 max)
• OpenWrt NAS functions such as SAMBA, FTP, and BitTorrent running at the same time as Android, as well as router functions thanks to its two Gigabit Ethernet ports
• Proper power handling with power off, standby, and reboot, and low power consumption in off/standby modes. The provided 36W power supply also allows the connection of multiple hard drives.
• Dolby & DTS audio licenses are included, so audio will work in any apps
• OTA Firmware update
• Good hardware design with internal 3.5″ SATA bay

CONS (and bugs):

• Realtek RTD1295 VPU limitations:
  • 4K H.264 up to 24 fps which will be an issue for 4K videos recorded with some actions cameras (GoPro/Xiaomi Yi) and smartphones
  • 4K VP9 up to 30 fps, as 60 fps is not well supported. This will be an issue for some 4K videos downloaded from YouTube
• Kodi 16.1 (EWMC) is not really working that well with many 4K videos not playing smoothly (even those within specs) and automatic frame rate not working. So 4K app is recommended
• No DRM support (DRM info app will crash)
• HDMI input works, but does not include features like picture-in-picture and UDP broadcasting found in Zidoo X9S
• You’ll probably have to use both the include IR remote control AND a air mouse or other input device to fully use the device. A air mouse specifically designed for the box would be a plus.
• Scale screen option missing in firmware, so I had black edges on my TV the whole time (should be easy to fix with firmware update)
• No option for status and notifications bars
• Bluetooth file transfer is unreliable (crash) and there’s no way to confirm file transfer (related to notification bar above)
• Tweaks may be needed (e.g. disable Media Storage and DMS) for optimal performance if you have a hard drive with many files.
• The system will not always remember the video output set by the user (e.g. 4K 60 Hz set, but falls back to 1080p or 720p).

Eweat also lacks a community forum like Zidoo, but as long as they keep firmware updates rolling, it may or may not matter to you. Overall, Eweat R9 Plus is also a good device combining 4K TV box, OpenWrt NAS, and HDMI recording functions. Whether that’s right for you depends on your requirements and budget.

The manufacturer sent me the review sample directly. Distributors can inquire the company to purchase in quantities, but if you just need one or a few you can purchase it on Aliexpress for $175.99 plus shipping (about $200) on Aliexpress.

Merry Christmas to all!

Tweet Eweat R9 Plus is a device powered by Realtek RTD1295 SoC combining main functions: Android 6.0 TV box, OpenWrt NAS/router, and HDMI recorder thanks to its HDMI input port….

Allwinner A13 – repackaged as Allwinner R8 – single core Cortex A8 processor is used in $9 C.H.I.P board with 512MB, 4GB storage, WiFi and Bluetooth, and I/Os. Now a Chinese company has created a new Allwinner A13 board called Lichee Pi that appears especially suited to drive LCD displays thanks to its 40-pin LCD RGB connector, but it also comes with WiFi & Bluetooth, a micro SD slot, and some I/Os.

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Lichee Pi One board (preliminary/tentative) specifications:

• SoC – Allwinner A13 ARM Cortex A8 processor @ 1.0 GHz with Mali-400 GPU
• System Memory – 512MB DDR3 RAM
• Storage – 2x micro SD slot
• Display Interface – 40-pin RGB LCD connector, with 8080 interface, VGA and LVDS supported via add-on board
• Camera – 24-pin CSI interface
• Audio – 3.5mm audio jack
• Connectivity – Optional 802.11 b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth via RTL8723BU module (Multiplexed with USB 2.0 host port)
• USB – 1x USB 2.0 host port, 1x micro USB OTG port, 1x micro USB port for power only
• Expansion – Two 20-pin headers with 9x GPIO, 3x I2C, 3x UART, 3x SPI, etc…
• Misc – RGB LED
• Power Supply – 5V via micro USB port or 2-pin header, LiPo battery via miniJST connector
• Dimensions – Est. 75 x 55 mm

The board can run Android or Linux distributions like Debian or Ubuntu, and you’ll find some information such as schematics and some documentation on Github.

You’ll find soon info in English on Linux-Sunxi website, as well as elecfans.com with more info, but in Chinese only. The price of the board appears to be 39 CNY ($5.6), and a complete kit with a 4.3″ display (800×480) a 3MP camera goes for 168 CNY (~$24). Shipping costs are not included. The company has also registered ilichee.cc, but the site is not accessible for now as it’s waiting for an ICP license.

Tweet Allwinner A13 – repackaged as Allwinner R8 – single core Cortex A8 processor is used in $9 C.H.I.P board with 512MB, 4GB storage, WiFi and Bluetooth, and I/Os. Now…

Smart Homy is a TV box running Android TV that includes an ATSC, DVB-T2/C or DVB-S2 tuner, is said to be powerful enough to be used as a 3D gaming platform, and serves as a security system and home automation gateway using Z-Wave, Bluetooth, WiFi and IR blaster to control your things.

Smart Homy player specifications:

• SoC – Amlogic S905-H Rev C Processor with penta-core Mali-450MP GPU
• System Memory – 2GB DDR3
• Storage – 32GB internal storage
• Video Output – HDMI 2.0 up to 4K @ 60Hz with HDCP 2.2
• Audio Output – HDMI and optical S/PDIF
• Video / Audio Capabilities – 10-bit 4K H.265 @ 60 fps, HD audio pass-through, Dolby Digital & DTS licenses
• DRM – Widevine Level 1, Microsoft PlayReader, Netflix license
• Digital TV Tuner – DVB-S2 (satellite), DVB-C/T/T2 (Cable/Terrestrial), ATSC
• Connectivity – Gigabit Ethernet, dual band 802.11 b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, Z-Wave (Plus 500 series)
• USB – 2x USB 2.0 ports

The device ships with Homy Remote, a backlit Bluetooth 4.0 LE remote control that includes gyroscope, and allows to control the player with voice commands. Smart Homy appears to mostly targets the US markets as seen in the comparison table with some home automation solution, media players. and game console.

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It would have been a little more fair to include the non-pro version of NVIDIA Shield Android TV since the price without hard drive is also $199, and it still lacks home automation support and the tuners. While you can play games with Amlogic S905-H SoC, the performance will be much lower than the NVIDIA box.

In order to maximize Z-Wave interoperability, Homy Player supports more than 50 command classes for Z-Wave devices, and the player/gateway also supports more than 70 Security Devices, including common security cameras. Configuration of home automation is allegedly simplified thanks to a “patent pending” Scene Recording System where you can easily record trigger and action using your physical devices.

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Smart Homy Player project has been launched on Indiegogo (flexible funding), where the company targets to raise $59,000 or more. A $199 pledge should get you Homy Player with the remote and an extra 64GB storage. Shipping adds $30, and delivery is scheduled for July 2017. You may also get more details on Smart Homy website.

Tweet Smart Homy is a TV box running Android TV that includes an ATSC, DVB-T2/C or DVB-S2 tuner, is said to be powerful enough to be used as a 3D…

ADL Embedded Solutions, a US company specializing in… embedded solutions, has unveiled ADLE3800SEC embedded single board computer (SBC) optimized for size, weight and power (SWAP), based on an Intel Atom E3800 Bay Trail-I processor with HDMI, SATA dual Gigabit Ethernet, etc… The board is the first one part of the company’s Edge-Connect architecture defined a 75x75mm form factor with an edge connector exposing additional I/Os for breakout boards.

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ADLE3800SEC board specifications:

• SoC
  • Intel Atom E3827 dual core Bay Trail-I processor @ up to 1.75GHz with 1MB cache, Intel Gen7 graphics (8W TDP) OR
  • Intel Atom E3845 quad core Bay Trail-I processor@ up to 1.91GHz with 2MB cache, Intel Gen 7 Graphics (10W TDP)
• System Memory – Up to 4GB DDR3-1333MHz (soldered on-board)
• Storage – 1x M.2 socket(Key B, 2242); 1x SATA 2.0 (6GB/s) via edge connector
• Video Output
  • 1x HDMI up to 1920 x 1200 or 1x DisplayPort up to 2560×1600
  • 1x DisplayPort via edge connector
• Connectivity – 2x Gigabit Ethernet ports (RJ45)
• USB – 1x USB 3.0 ports, 1x USB 2.0 port, 2x USB 2.0 interfaces via edge connector
• Other Expansion via edge connector – 2x PCIe, SM-Bus
• Misc – Optional low profile heat spreader; optional conformal coating of CPU board & underfill of BGA components
• Power Supply – 20 to 30V DC
• Dimensions – 75 x 75 mm
• Temperature Range — Optional for extended temperature screen -40 to 85°C

The board can run Linux or Windows 7/8/10. Typical applications would include UAV and UUV unmanned systems, industrial control systems, government and defense, video surveillance, small scale robotics, remote data-logging, man-wearable computing, etc…

The company did not disclose pricing info,  but you should be able to find more info and if needed, inquire ADL Embedded Solutions via ADLE3800SEC SBC product page.

Via HackerBoards

Tweet ADL Embedded Solutions, a US company specializing in… embedded solutions, has unveiled ADLE3800SEC embedded single board computer (SBC) optimized for size, weight and power (SWAP), based on an Intel…

JeVois Neuromorphic Embedded Vision Toolkit – developed at iLab at the University of Southern California – is an open source software framework to capture and process images through a machine vision algorithm, primarily designed to run on embedded camera hardware, but also supporting Linux board such as the Raspberry Pi. A compact Allwinner A33 has now been design to run the software and use on robotics and other projects requiring a lightweight and/or battery powered camera with computer vision capabilities.

JeVois-A33 camera:

• SoC – Allwinner A33  quad core ARM Cortex A7 processor @ 1.35GHz with  VFPv4 and NEON, and a dual core Mali-400 GPU supporting OpenGL-ES 2.0.
• System Memory – 256MB DDR3 SDRAM
• Storage – micro SD slot for firmware and data
• 1.3MP camera capable of video capture at
  • SXGA (1280 x 1024) up to 15 fps (frames/second)
  • VGA (640 x 480) up to 30 fps
  • CIF (352 x 288) up to 60 fps
  • QVGA (320 x 240) up to 60 fps
  • QCIF (176 x 144)  up to 120 fps
  • QQVGA (160 x 120) up to 60 fps
  • QQCIF (88 x 72) up to 120 fps
• USB – 1x mini USB port for power and act as a UVC webcam
• Serial – 5V or 3.3V (selected through VCC-IO pin) micro serial port connector to communicate with Arduino or other MCU boards.
• Power – 5V (3.5 Watts) via USB port requires USB 3.0 port or Y-cable to two USB 2.0 ports
• Misc
  • Integrated cooling fan
  • 1x two-color LED: Green: power is good. Orange: power is good and camera is streaming video frames.
• Dimensions –  28 cc or 1.7 cubic inches (plastic case included with 4 holes for secure mounting)

The camera runs Linux with the drivers for the camera, JeVois C++17 video capture, processing & streaming framework, OpenCV 3.1, and toolchains. You can either connect it to a host computer’s USB port to check out the camera output (actual image + processed image), or to an MCU board such as Arduino via the serial interface to use machine vision to control robots, drones, or others. Currently three modes of operation are available:

• Demo/development mode – the camera outputs a demo display over USB that shows the results of its analysis, potentially along with simple data over serial port.
• Text-only mode – the camera provides no USB output, but only text strings, for example, commands for a pan/tilt controller.
• Pre-processing mode – The smart camera outputs video that is intended for machine consumption, and potentially processed by a more powerful system.

The smart camera can detect motion, track faces and eyes, detect & decode ArUco makers & QR codes, detect & follow lines for autonomous cars, and more. Since the framework is open source, you’ll also be able to add your own algorithms and modify the firmware. Some documentation has already been posted on the project’s website. The best is to watch the demo video below to see the capacities of the camera and software.

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The project launched in Kickstarter a few days ago with the goal of raising $50,000 for the project. A $45 “early backer” pledge should get you a JeVois camera with a micro serial connector with 15cm pigtail leads, while a $55 pledge will add an 8GB micro SD card pre-load with JeVois software, and a 24/28 AWG mini USB Y cable. Shipping is free to the US, but adds $10 to Canada, and $15 to the rest of the work. Delivery is planned for February and March 2017.

Tweet JeVois Neuromorphic Embedded Vision Toolkit – developed at iLab at the University of Southern California – is an open source software framework to capture and process images through a…

I’ve already checked out vThings CO2 Monitor hardware and we’ve seen it’s based on ESPrino ESP8266 board, and my model includes CM1106 CO2 sensor and BMP180 temperature and pressure sensor. I’ve now installed it in my kitchen, about 3 to 4 meters from the gas stove, and getting data to ThingSpeak.

The door and window of my kitchen are open all day, and the wall have ventilation holes. That’s important for CM1106 sensor since it auto calibrates every 3 days in clear air. If you plan to use such sensor in a closed environment, you should buy Vthings with CM1102 CO2 sensor that costs more, but does not require calibration.

Since all WiFi systems I’ve just so far starting AP mode for configuration, I first looked for an access point, but… nothing… Then I decided to read the documentation (might be useful at times), and the monitor is actually configured via a Chrome (desktop only) add-on through USB. There are three types of devices made by vair-monitor, and I first used  vThings Configuration Utility add-on, but eventually found out I had to use vThings – Dual Beam Configuration Utility.

vThings Configuration vs Things – Dual Beam Configuration Utility

I used Ubuntu (Linux), but if you are using a Windows or Mac computer, you’ll need to install drivers first. Once you’ve connected the monitor through USB and started “vThings- Device Configuration Tool” the following windows should be shown.

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The fist thing to do is to connect the monitor to your WiFi router by entering its SSID and password, and click on Set WiFi.

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It should connect to your router, and the first time updated the firmware automatically. Wait a couple of minutes for it to complete, and you can go to the next step to configure one or more of the following Public, Private or Generic services:

I decided to go with ThingSpeak since I got familiar with it while writing Sonoff POW tutorial.

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Select the data provided by the sensors inside your vthings Co2 monitor, in my case CO2 levels, temperature, and pressure, and nothing else, or connection will fail, as I found out when I used 4 default fields including humidity, and ThingSpeak was not updated at all. You’ll also need ThingSpeak API write key, that you can get my create a channel on ThingSpeak.com as shown below.

Once the channels is create on ThingSpeak website, and you’ve added the API write key in vThings Device Configuration Tool, you could go to Generic Services->HTTP and notice an HTTP request has been created, so if you have installed ThingSpeak locally, you could change api.thingspeak.com to your own IP address.

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By default the data will be updated every 120 seconds, but you can change that in Settings->Update Interval. Once configuration is done, you can unplug it from your PC, and connected to the location you want to monitor. vThings Device Configuration Tool requires a USB connection to find the device, it can not find it over WiFi, so if you want to change configuration, you’ll need to connect it back to your computer. There’s a function to (auto)start a webserver in vESPrino, but it did not seem to work for me.

After a few hours or minutes depending on your update internal you should get some nice charts on ThingSpeak with CO2 levels, temperature and pressure, or other data based on the sensors you’ve selected while purchasing the hardware.

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The channel is public if you are interested/curious in seeing the data. ThingSpeak will show 60 samples (2 hours in my case) by default, but let’s see what happened over the last 12 hours with CO2 levels.

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The CO2 levels started at about 500 to 600 ppm while I did the configuration in my office (windows closed), and dropped to around 404 ppm once I installed in the kitchen. That value correspond roughly to the current CO2 ppm value in the atmosphere (in Hawaii). Three times around 18h00 people warmed food and CO2 jumped to around 500 ppm. During the night, CO2 levels slowly increased to 480 ppm, likely because of the plants cycle (producing oxygen during the day, and carbon dioxide during the night). This morning CO2 levels spiked at around 900 ppm when cooking right after 6am and 8am.

That’s all fun, but is there a real benefit to measuring CO2 levels in your house? In the kitchen I could probably trigger an alert over 1,500 ppm in which case it may mean something is burning, but smoke detectors are much cheaper and better suited to the task. Vladimir Savchenko, vThings developer, found a study claiming that high CO2 levels may decrease creative thinking and lead to bad sleep, so he used vThings CO2 monitor in his bedroom and discovered CO2 levels reached close to 4,000 ppm, and that just open the door or window would greatly reduce the concentration of the gas.

vThings CO2 monitor does not only monitor CO2 levels as we’ve seen above, as temperature, humidity, and/or pressure sensor can be included in the case, as well as a PM2.5 & PM10 laser dust sensor.

vThings CO2 Monitor v3 is sold for 60 Euros with CM1106 CO2 sensor, and more if you use a better CO2 sensor, or add extra environmental sensors. 135 Euros would get you a top of line monitor with a laser dust sensor, CDM7160 CO2 sensor, temperature and humidity sensor, and RF connectivity.

Tweet I’ve already checked out vThings CO2 Monitor hardware and we’ve seen it’s based on ESPrino ESP8266 board, and my model includes CM1106 CO2 sensor and BMP180 temperature and pressure…

RetrOrangePi is a Linux distribution based on armbian transforming Allwinner H3 boards – mostly Orange Pi boards, but also Banana Pi M2+ and NanoPi boards – into entertainment centers to play retro games, and watch/listen media files (videos/music) using Kodi. If you don’t have a development board, or would prefer a complete solution with casing and power supply, Beelink X2 TV box is also supported. The developers had been recently working on rectifying some GPL issues, and they have released RetrOrangePi 3.0 images right before Christmas.

RetrOrangePi 3.0 changelog and key features:

• Full Armbian 5.23 Jessie Desktop version with kernel 3.4.113 (backdoors fixed)
• Slim version 1st release (less than 2 GB) coming soon
• OpenELEC (Kodi Jarvis 16.1) with CEC support by Jernej Krabec
• RetroPie-Setup version 4.1
• New Kodi Krypton beta6 version
• New emulationstation-ROPI branch forked from jacobfk20 with gridview, on screen keyboard with easy wifi config and storage check with additional features added by ROPi team: display settings, OpenELEC / Desktop launcher and background music switcher integrated into main menu.
• New Plug n’ Play feature – USB roms autoload (reads from /media/usb0) (buggy)
• New dummy roms feature (most common platform shown)
• New splash video on 1st boot by Rafael Spirax
• New default splashscreen (from Libretro)
• New custom ES splashscreen by Francois Lebel @MagicFranky
• OpenELEC ROPI addon already installed
• Retroarch with XMB menu driver (Lakka)
• Better looking video with bilinear filtering (smoothness) or scanlines by default
• Most retroarch cores updated (FBA, PCSX etc)
• New and improved content:
  • AdvanceMAME (newer romset, more compatibility, better performance in some games: Elevator Action Returns, Street Fighter the Movie, Star Wars Arcade, Judge Dredd, Sega Sonic The Hedgehog etc)
  • Amiga (FS-UAE emulator, fullscreen now, diskette sound, launcher)
  • Atari 5200
  • Atari 8bit (models 400 800 XL XE)
  • Coco / Tandy
  • Colecovision (ColEm emu Custom Coleco BlueMSX core)
  • Creativision
  • Daphne (Philips Cdi emulator)
  • Dosbox (GLES version)
  • Dreamcast (fixed reicast-joyconfig)
  • Duke Nukem port (fixed tint color)
  • Game and Watch (fixed shortcuts)
  • Intellivision
  • OpenMSX (with .dsk support) PPSSPP (new version 1.3 from odroid repo)
  • TI99/4A (Texas Instruments)
  • Wolfenstein3D port

There are two ways to download the images:

• BitTorrent – 16.0 GB download with images for all boards
• Main server (http) – 1.6 GB compressed firmware image for your board.

If you download from the main server, you’ll get a warning saying you can’t sell hardware pre-installed with the image:

RetrOrange Pi is a non profit project.
It consists of a basic Retropie setup with most Libretro cores on top of an Armbian Jessie Desktop version pre-installed.
It includes an OpenELEC fork as well.
Much of the software included in the image have non-commercial licences. Because of this,
selling a pre-installed RetrOrange image is not legal, neither is including it with your commercial product.
As it relies on other people’s work with our own features, we won’t be offering any help in customizations to avoid rebranding or reselling.

It will be interesting to see what happens with RetroEngine Sigma project on Indiegogo that is very likely based on RetrOrangePi image for Orange Pi Lite board.

Anyway, since BitTorrent download was very slow, I downloaded RetrOrangePi-3.0.Orangepione.img.tar.gz from the main server for my $3.69 Orange Pi One board (there was a promo in September), extracted it, and flashed it to a 32GB card (8GB is enough) in Linux:

Replace sdX by your own SD card device in the 3rd command above. You can also do this in Windows with Win32DiskImager. Once it is done, insert the micro SD card in your board or TV box, prepare a gamepad, and connect all relevant cables.

If you have connected the serial console (completely optional), or want to access the system through ssh, you can login with pi/pi or root/orangepi credentials:

Most people will just follow the instructions on the TV. We’ll get through a bunch of animation and logos during the boot.Note: Please ignore the vertical lines on the photos, as there’s just an issue with my TV.

The first time the system will resize the SD card to make use of the full SD card capacity, and generate SSH keys.
One more “Loading…” logo…

If you have connected a gamepad (highly recommended), you’ll be ask to configure the keys. Tronsmart Mars G01 gamepad was automatically detected, and I could easily set all keys up.

Once all is well and done, you’ll get to the main menu to select emulator or Kodi.

Most emulators do not come with ROMs due to license issues, so you’d have to find the ROMs yourself, and install them via a USB drive, or copy them directly into the board over the network, for example with scp. If you want to try to play some games straightaway, you can do so by going to the PORTS sections with 13 games available including Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein 3D, CannonBall, Duke Nukem 3D, Super Mario War, etc…

I tested shortly tested Wolfenstein 3D and Quake, as well as launched Kodi 17 (Beta 6) in the demo video below.

[embedded content]

Tweet RetrOrangePi is a Linux distribution based on armbian transforming Allwinner H3 boards – mostly Orange Pi boards, but also Banana Pi M2+ and NanoPi boards – into entertainment centers…

Market forecasts for the Internet of Things promise billions of connected device in the years to come, but this won’t happen when LPWAN  connector sensors cost $50 or more, so prices will have to come down. I’ve been told that one company is working on a WiFi + LoRa module that’s going to sell for $5 to $6 sometimes in 2017, but in the meantime, it’s possible to get some LoRa modules for less than $10, albeit limited to 433 MHz frequency not the more common 868 MHz (EU) and 915 MHz (US), thanks to products such as AI-Thinker Ra-02 module.

Ra-02 specifications:

• Chipset – Semtech SX1278 low power long range transceiver
• Radio
  • 433MHz frequency (420 to 450 MHz range)
  • +20dBm – 10mW constant RF output vs. V supply; up to 300 kbps bitrate
  • Supports FSK, GFSK, MSK, GMSK, LoRa and OOK Modulation Mode
  • 127dB RSSI wave range.
• I/Os – 16x half through holes with half-duplex SPI communication, GPIO and power signals; 2.0 mm pitch
• Supply Voltage – 1.8 – 3.7V, default 3.3V
• Power Consumption – Receive < 10.8mA (LnaBoost closed, Band 1); transmist: < 120mA(+20dBm), sleep: 0.2 uA
• Dimensions – Estimated 16×16 mm
• Certifications – FCC/CE
• Temperature Range – -40 to +85 °C

I could only find the module on a company called Smart Prototyping selling the module for $9 plus shipping ($6.84), which amounts to roughly $15. But you could also get your hands on a pair of two SX1278 modules and spring antennas for $14.85 including shipping on Aliexpress, or about $7 per module.

The specifications of this cheaper module are basically the same as the AI-Thinker module. The seller is also promising to send the schematics and program by e-mail. If you look for DRF1278F on the web, you’ll find other websites selling it, for example it can be found on eBay for as low as $5.60 with one antenna and including shipping.

[Update: for 868MHz search for DRF1272F ($8.28), and 868/915 MHz for DRF1276G ($8.68)]

Thanks to Elia for the tip.

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