SBC News

Yuzuki Chameleon is an open-source hardware single board computer powered by an Allwinner H616 quad-core Cortex-A53 processor that somewhat follows the shape of Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ SBC with a different port layout that should still keep mechanical and electrical compatibility with some Raspberry Pi HATs. The board supports up to 2GB RAM, up to 128GB eMMC flash, features a MicroSD card slot, one 4K-capable HDMI 2.0 port, an audio jack, four USB Type-C ports to keep the design as slim as possible, as well as a wireless module for WiFi and Bluetooth and a connector to optionally add Fast Ethernet through an external module. Yuzuki Chameleon specifications: SoC – Allwinne…

SONOFF has rolled out smart switches in the market for years, and for each iteration, they make their devices smaller and more capable. The latest ZBMINI Extreme Zigbee Smart Switch or ZBMINIL2 or ZBMINI Extreme for shorts is what we will review today. Take note that there are both Zigbee and Wifi versions that come with the same form factor, we will walk through the Zigbee version first and we will review the WiFi version – SONOFF MINI Extreme (MINIR4) – later on. The ZBMINI Extreme is designed to work without a Neutral (N) line. Those who have difficulty wiring the N line to the switch will definitely love this. In many locations, the Neutral (N) line is not wired and w…

ZeroKey’s Quantum RTLS is a 3D real-time location system (RTLS) for millimeter-level accuracy designed for the real-time monitoring of assets and people to optimize workflows in the manufacturing, supply chain, and logistics industries. The company claims that with time and location data, the solution provides the “highest level of accuracy and actionable analytics through its Spatial Intelligence Platform, giving customers 4D operational intelligence that truly delivers on the promise of Industry 4.0”, and the “hyper accuracy of Quantum RTLS empowers companies to solve problems that have never been solved before in industrial environments”. Quantum RTLS works with anchor…

ZigUNO Zigbee development board comes with an Ebyte E18-MS1 module equipped with Texas Instruments SimpleLink CC2530 8051 Zigbee microcontroller and follows Arduino UNO form for Arduino Shield compatibility. The board works with PTVO Zigbee firmware that comes with a graphical configuration tool to select the Zigbee chip used (CC2530), configure I/O behavior (input/output, pull-up, etc…), and more. The developers also suggest using DIYRuZ projects as examples to get started. ZigUNO board specifications: Zigbee module – Ebyte E18-MS1-PCB module with TI SimpleLink CC2530 8051 microcontroller with Zigbee 3.0 (and IEEE 802.15.4) connectivity, 256kB Flash and 8kB RAM, PCB ante…

ZOTAC has introduced the ZBOX CI471 nano, a fanless mini PC powered by an Intel Core 7 350 hexa-core Wildcat Lake processor with integrated Xe3 graphics and a 17 TOPS NPU. The company has also introduced two lower-end models, the ZBOX CI451 nano with a Core 5 320 processor and the ZBOX CI431 nano with a Core 3 304 processor. All three mini PCs use passive cooling and share the same 204 × 129 × 68 mm enclosure. They support up to 64GB DDR5 memory, M.2 NVMe SSD storage, and three 4K displays. Other features include dual Thunderbolt 4, 2.5GbE networking, and WiFi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 wireless connectivity. The systems are offered as barebones, meaning users must install their…

The last time we wrote about the ZOTAC ZBOX PICO PI336 mini PC it featured an Intel Celeron N4100 Gemini Lake processor, but the company appears to have launched an upgrade with an Intel Celeron N6211 Elkhart Lake processor instead. The new ZBOX PI336 PICO fanless mini PC also gets more storage up to 128GB eMMC flash, but the rest of the specifications remain pretty much the same with 4GB RAM, HDMI & DisplayPort video outputs, three USB ports, Gigabit Ethernet, WiFI, and Bluetooth, although some of the interfaces got a version bump for additional performance. ZOTAC PI336 specifications: SoC – Intel Celeron N6211 dual-core Elkhart Lake processor up to 1.2/3.0 GHz with …

ZOTAC ZBOX PRO CM5-PICO is a compact fanless industrial mini PC built around the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 (CM5) with up to 16 GB LPDDR4x memory, optional WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0 wireless connectivity. The mini PC measures 114.8 x 76 x 31.3 mm and features two 4K HDMI outputs, Gigabit Ethernet, and M.2 expansion for NVMe storage or AI accelerators, along with an internal 40-pin GPIO header, camera interfaces, and a wide 5V to 20V DC input for industrial automation, digital signage, and IoT gateway applications. All I/O ports are placed on a single side to simplify cable management and stacking. ZOTAC ZBOX PRO CM5-PICO specifications: SoM – Raspberry Pi Compute Module…

ZPE Systems Nodegrid Mini SR is a compact cloud-orchestrated gateway designed for the secure management of Internet of Things (IoT) and Operational Technology (OT) infrastructures. Power by a dual-core Intel processor, the Linux-based device is equipped with 4GB RAM, a 16GB encrypted storage device, and whose hardware looks to be very similar to the Compulab Fitlet2 mini PC with two Gigabit Ethernet ports, four USB 3.0/2.0 ports, and optional support for WiFi 6 and 4G LTE. ZPE Nodegrid mini SR specifications: SoC – Unnamed Intel x86 64-bit dual-core processor, most likely Intel Atom x5-E3930 dual-core Apollo Lake processor (upgrades can be provided) System Memory – 4GB DD…

ZSWatch is an open-source hardware smartwatch based on an u-Blox ANNA-B402 module with Nordic Semi nRF52833 Bluetooth 5.1 SoC and running Zephyr real-time operating systems. We’ve seen several open-source hardware smartwatches over the years, as well as open-source firmware projects such as AsteroidOS or InfiniTime with the latter used in the PineTime smartwatch, and the ZSWatch adds to the list of interesting open-source wearables with all source files made public. ZSWatch specifications: Wireless module – u-blox ANNA-B402 based on Nordic Semi nRF52833 Arm Cortex-M4F microcontroller with Bluetooth LE 5.1 and direction finding support Storage – 8MB flash (MX25R6435FZNIL0)…

Ztachip is an open-source RISC-V accelerator for vision and AI edge applications running on low-end FPGA devices or custom ASIC that is said to perform 20 to 50 times faster than on non-accelerated RISC-V implementations, and is also better than RISC-V cores with vector extensions (no numbers were provided here). Ztachip, pronounced zeta-chip, is not tied to a particular architecture, but the example code features a RISC-V core based on the VexRiscv implementation and can accelerate common computer vision tasks such as edge detection, optical flow, motion detection, color conversion, as well as TensorFlow AI models without retraining. The open-source AI accelerator has be…

Avnet ZUBoard 1CG is a development board featuring the new entry-level AMD Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ ZU1CG dual-core Cortex-A53 MPSoC with 81K FPGA system logic cells, equipped with 1GB LPDDR4 RAM, as well as SYZYGY connectors and mikroBus expansion for Click boards. Priced at $159, the board may offer a good opportunity to get started with Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC, as it’s quite cheaper than boards based on ZU3 devices such as Ultra96-V2 or MYD-CZU3EG. Avnet says the board is suitable for artificial intelligence, machine learning, embedded vision, embedded processing, and robotics applications. ZUBoard 1CG specifications: SoC – AMD/Xilinx ZU+ MPSoC ZU1CG with Dual Cortex-A53…

iWave Systems iW-RainboW-G30M is a system-on-module (SoM) based on AMD Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ ZU4/ZU5/ZU7 FPGA MPSoC specially geared towards LiDAR applications for scientific and military applications. The module comes with up to 12GB of RAM, 4GB for the programmable logic (PL) and 8GB for the Arm Cortex-A53/R5-based Processing System (PS), two 240-pin high-density, high-speed connectors with 142 user I/Os, 16x GTH transceivers up to 16.3Gbps, and four GTR transceivers up to 6Gbps. iW-RainboW-G30M specifications: FPGA MPSoC – AMD Xilinx Zynq Ultrascale+ ZU4, ZU5, or ZU7 MPSoC with Processing System (PS) featuring 2x or 4x Arm Cortex-A53 core @ 1.5 GHz, two Cortex-R5 co…

With less than 12 days to go before Christmas, here are 12 reasons, from 12 different people who became Collaborans this year, on why you should consider joining our team! View the full article

It's been a long road for Wayland's recently landed color management extension. We take a brief look back at how this latest feature was formed. View the full article

Our multimedia engineering team delivered major improvements to GStreamer 1.28: hardware acceleration and zero-copy pipelines, HDR and color support for Wayland, AI inference integration, plus critical codec and RTP/WebRTC interoperability fixes. View the full article

Enhancing the graphic software stack for the Raspberry Pi. View the full article

A testament to its long standing community interest and devote volunteers, FOSDEM will be celebrating its 25th anniversary this year. Join us as we take the stage to discuss BlueZ, GStreamer, Open Source AI models, & more! View the full article

Times are changing: LLVM has become more than a spare to GCC, such that glibc - the last big GCC bastion, is now working towards supporting LLVM as a first-class citizen. View the full article

Mere weeks after the debut of Open Source Summit Latin America, Dublin continues the collaborative momentum with the 2022 hybrid editions of Linux Plumbers Conference and Open Source Summit Europe! View the full article

Differences between pkg-config variables, the use of AX_PKG_CHECK_MODULES, and what to include in custom variables. automake and autoconf snippets are provided View the full article

Released a few months ago, the Google Pixel 3 is the first Android phone running with the mainline graphics stack. A feat that was deemed impossible 10 years ago is now a reality thanks to a lot of hard work from the entire community. View the full article

The past few months have been busy ones on the open-source graphics front, bringing with them Wayland 1.13, Weston 2.0 and Mesa 17.0. Here's a look at some of these developments, including Collabora's behind-the-scenes work on performance improvement. View the full article

Engineers have widely adopted GStreamer to build video analytics pipelines, and while many companies have indeed built their machine learning analysis framework around GStreamer, no one had made the effort to contribute upstream, until now. View the full article

With over 350 patches authored and nearly 200 reviewed and tested in multiple subsystems, 2021 was a great year for Linux kernel development at Collabora. Here is a look at some of our achievements during the year. View the full article

Collabora continues to relentlessly shift the needle to make high-quality open-source software not just an aspiration, but an expectation. We're pleased to announce an extension of our collaboration with Arm, providing more surety and capability for Panfrost. View the full article

We're reflecting on the steps taken as we continually seek to improve Linux kernel integration. This will include more detail about the tests used to enhance the quality of testing processes and coverage. View the full article

Simplifying AGL's existing Wayland-based graphical stack and avoiding the use of modules that aren't maintained upstream has lead to the creation of a new compositor based on libweston, bringing more reliable and fine-grained system control. View the full article

Last month I gave a short talk about the Chamelium board from the ChromeOS team, a board that is getting more and more usage outside of Google as it can help you automate the testing of your display (and not only!) code and hardware. View the full article

Venus is a virtual Vulkan driver based on the Virtio-GPU protocol, which defines the serialization of Vulkan commands between guest and host. Here's a closer look at Venus, its components, and their relations in the context of extensions. View the full article

The latest enhancements to the DRM subsystem have made mainline Linux much more attractive, making drivers easier to write, applications portable, and a much more friendly and collaborative community than we've ever had. View the full article

Following on from part 1 in the series, part 2 covers more developments in low-level graphics, including support for buffer modifiers in the kernel, Mesa, Wayland, Weston, Mutter and GNOME Shell, and X.Org. View the full article

The KernelCI project, which powers kernelci.org with automated testing for the upstream Linux kernel, has found a new home after sailing through uncharted waters for over five years. View the full article

As we continue improving the kernel integration landscape on multiple fronts, this also means making better tests available for all. Working closely with the community, we have now landed a new, ready-to-use, kselftest upstream in mainline Linux. View the full article

Panfrost, a project that delivers an open source implementation of a driver for the newest versions of the Mali family of GPUs, now includes support for running Wayland compositors and zero-copy GPU-accelerated clients. View the full article

My work on Wayland and Weston color management and HDR support has been full of learning new concepts and terms. Many of them are crucial for understanding how color works, and what the values in a pixel actually mean. View the full article

Getting into kernel development can be daunting. There are layers upon layers of knowledge to master, but no clear roadmap, especially when it comes to debugging drivers or navigating userspace-kernel issues. View the full article

How is an uncompressed raster image laid out in computer memory? How is a pixel represented? What are stride and pitch and what do you need them for? How do you address a pixel in memory? How do you describe an image in memory? Pekka discusses the essential digital imaging concepts for programmers. View the full article

Powered by Rust, the video codec stack on ARCVM is now bringing faster and more reliable video decoding on ChromeOS. Here's how Collabora has been helping shape video virtualization for Chromebooks, and what it means for end users. View the full article

This second installment explores the Rust libraries Collabora developed to decode video and how these libraries are used within the ARCVM codec stack to eventually replace CrosVM's dependency on the Chrome codec stack through libvda. View the full article

The final installment of a series explaining how Collabora is helping shape the video virtualization story for Chromebooks with a focus on the future plans for cros-libva and cros-codecs. View the full article

After rigorous debugging, a new unit testing framework was added to the backend compiler for NVK. This is a walkthrough of the steps taken to achieve this. View the full article

This week marks two years since the OpenGL implementation on Vulkan was initially announced. Since then, and especially over the past few months, much has progressed with many new features being added and performance now close to native (95%!). View the full article

Our ongoing work on improving WebKitGTK+ performance brought us to take a closer look as to why GTK+ was experiencing significant speed issues when used with Wayland and HiDPI screens, revealing the root cause to be within the lower level toolkit. View the full article

Three demos. One stand. From end-to-end HDR and a brand-new SoC running PanVK, to NVK and WebGPU out of the box — discover how Collabora pushed open source graphics forward at Embedded World 2025. View the full article

With the LLVM toolchain seeing increasing development and adoption alongside the older, more established GNU toolchain, projects needing to support both, in particular the GNU C library (glibc), are facing challenges and questions. View the full article

Adding a variety of expertise from across the globe, the departments of Core, Multimedia, Kernel, XR, People Operations, and DevOps now have more hands on deck. Discover a snapshot of our newest teammates! View the full article

Earlier this month, Collabora took part in the very first KernelCI hackfest, initiated as a joint effort with the Google Chrome OS team. Here's a look at what led to our participation and what was accomplished. View the full article

After several months of work, we are excited to announce a first proposal for a Wayland driver for Wine. The proposal is in the form of an RFC, in order to explore how to best move forward with the upstreaming and further development of the driver. View the full article

Collabora has been working with the Raspberry Pi Foundation on various projects including a web browser optimised for the Raspberry Pi. Since the first beta release we have made huge improvements; now the browser is more responsive, it’s faster, and videos work much better (the first beta could play 640×360 videos at 0.5fps, now we can play 25fps 1280×720 videos smoothly). View the full article

With Black Valley in Norway, and Akademy in Greece, this weekend's plans are all set or computer enthusiasts! Collabora is proud to sponsor both of these events as a chance for communities to come together and strengthen their bonds. View the full article

Collabora will be at NeurIPs this week to dive into the latest academic findings in machine learning and research advancements that are changing the industry. View the full article

Collabora is headed to Stuttgart for XR Expo 2026! Visit us in Hall 2, booth 2C22, to experience the latest around Monado and ElectricMaple, and catch our 2 talks! View the full article

Visit us at the STMicroelectronics booth, where Collabora will highlight how the STM32MP2 chip empowers edge AI solutions for industrial applications. View the full article

The beauty of Open Source is that we can reuse code written by many other people, keep their authorship, and credit them for their work, without needing to reinvent anything! View the full article

Part steadfast approach - part welcoming spirirt; Collabora continues to successfully expand with new talent amply on deck. Well ahead of the remote work curve, our new joiners have settled into their roles from their respective corners of the planet. View the full article

Our recent efforts on the Hantro kernel driver have resulted in the addition of H.264 decoding support and multiple performance improvements. We are now introducing High Efficiency Video Coding, also known as H.265, decoding support on NXP's i.MX8 M. View the full article

Rockchip SoCs, notably the RK3399, are popular in devices such as Chromebooks and single-board computers. Indeed, they bring some interesting features, one of them being the Arm Frame Buffer Compression (AFBC). View the full article

Getting PanVk, an open source driver for Arm Mali Midgard and Bifrost GPUs, closer to conformancy by implementing one of the core Vulkan features: support for secondary command buffers. View the full article

Prior to joining Collabora, I took part in Round 17 of the Outreachy internships, to work on the virtual drivers in the media subsystem of the Linux kernel, or more specifically, on the vicodec driver. View the full article

Earlier this year, from January to April 2021, I worked on adding support for stateless decoders for GStreamer as part of a multimedia internship at Collabora. Here's a recap of this completed work. View the full article

Collabora is proud to sponsor this year's annual GStreamer conference, taking place in London, UK. Join us as we showcase the latest with machine learning analytics, WirePlumber, and more. View the full article

The testing ecosystem in the Linux kernel has been steadily growing, but are efforts sufficiently coordinated? How can we help developers and maintainers integrate code more efficiently? How can we mitigate maintainer burnout? View the full article

A student intership experience at Collabora View the full article

Collabora is proud to sponsor this year's annual Debian conference, taking place in Brest, France. Join us as we showcase the latest with Apertis, discuss Debian running on mobile devices, and more. View the full article

Next week, Collaborans including Julian Bouzas and Enric Balletbò i Serra will be in Paris to participate in the 3rd edition of Embedded Recipes and 8th edition of Kernel Recipes View the full article

Now included in our Debian images & available via our GitLab, you can build a complete, working BL31 (Boot Loader stage 3.1), and replace the closed binary blob with an open-source binary that anyone can compile. View the full article

With only a few months passing since our last new joiner update, it should come as no surprise that the Collabora crowd has expanded yet again. Our flexible disposition affords us an exceptional bunch to onboard when opportunity knocks, but also leaves room to hear new voices as we shape our path forward. View the full article

Google Open Source has announced their 2020 first quarter Google Open Source Peer Bonus winners, and Alyssa Rosenzweig, Software Engineer at Collabora, is among the recipients! View the full article

Join us on June 18 for our low-latency ML video analytics demo on the Ryzen AI Max 300 Series at the AMD Embedded Computing Summit! View the full article

We’ll be in Frankfurt this Thursday for the AMD Embedded Computing Summit! See a live demo of our AI Magic Mirror for a touchless, real-time experience. View the full article

Did you know you could run a permissively-licensed MTP implementation with minimal dependencies on an embedded device? Here's a step-by-step guide on how to easily run cmtp-responder on a Rock Pi 4 or any other board equipped with a UDC. View the full article

Interested in learning more about low-level specifics of the eBPF stack? Read on as we take a deep dive, from its VM mechanisms and tools, to running traces on remote, resource-constrained embedded devices. View the full article

The second part of this series takes a more in-depth look at the eBPF VM and program studied in the first part. Having this low level knowledge is not mandatory but can be a very useful foundation for the rest of the series. View the full article

In part 1 and 2 of this series, we took a condensed in-depth look at the eBPF VM. In part 3, we define the high-level components of an eBPF program, including the backend, loader, frontend and data structures. View the full article

Now that we've studied the mainstream way of developing and using eBPF programs on top of the low-level VM mechanisms, we'll look at projects taking different approaches, attempting solutions to some of the unique problems faced by embedded Linux. View the full article

Up until now, talking in-depth about userspace tracing was deliberately avoided because it merits special treatment, hence this part devoted to it. We'll now look at the why of it, and we'll examine eBPF user tracing in two categories: static and dynamic. View the full article

Initcalls, which serve to call functions during boot, were implemented early on in the development of the Linux Kernel. Read on as we take a closer look, including their purpose, their usage, ways to debug them (using initcall_debug or FTrace), and more. View the full article

During the past few months significant progress has been made on the Open Source Arm Mali GPU driver front, culminating in the Panfrost driver targeting Mali T and G-series of GPUs being available now. View the full article

This summer, Christoph Haag and I had the pleasure of taking part in Google Summer of Code as mentors for xrdesktop, the Open Source project bringing the Linux desktop to VR on Valve's SteamVR & Monado. Here's what was accomplished. View the full article

As we begin winding down 2019, it's time to take a moment to celebrate the new Collaborans who joined our various engineering and administrative teams in Q2 & Q3 this year! View the full article

Android uses the HWC API to communicate with graphics hardware. This API is not supported on the mainline Linux graphics stack, but by using drm_hwcomposer as a shim it now is. View the full article

Getting Android up and running on the iMX6 platform using an open source graphics stack has been impossible up until recently, but now you can. Here's a guide through the steps. View the full article

GPUs like Intel and Vivante support storing contents of graphical buffers in different formats. Support for describing these formats using modifiers has now been added to Android and Mesa, enabling tiling artifact free running of Android on the iMX6 platform. View the full article

More progress is being made in the area of i.MX6, etnaviv and Android. Since the last post a lot work has gone into upstreaming and stabilizing the etnaviv on Android ecosystem. This has involved Android, kernel and Mesa changes, many of which are available upstream now. View the full article

The weekend saw some of the NetSurf developers gather once again to do battle against the Red Queen...no, wait. I mean plan and write code. View the full article

Now based on Debian Bookworm, Apertis is a collaborative OS platform that includes an operating system, but also tools and cloud services to optimize development and increase reliability. View the full article

Apertis v2025 has landed with all the updates from Debian 12.9. This release has a variety of updates including new supported boards, improved release processes, and more! View the full article

Based on Debian 13 (Trixie), Apertis v2026 delivers updated system libraries, development tools, compilers, and core services, alongside a new default Wayland compositor, a reworked SDK, and smarter packaging pipelines. View the full article

Spring is in bloom in the northern hemisphere, and with it comes three tech events we'll be attending - PyCon US, Shell & Display Next Hackfest, and Linaro Connect! View the full article

In the embedded world, many modern SoCs such as the ST Microelectronics STM32MP1 now include coprocessor cores which can be used for a wide range of tasks and can offload some of the work from the main processor. View the full article

In continuation with our series about Kernel Integration we'll go into more detail about how regression detection, processing, and tracking can be improved to provide a better service to developers and maintainers. View the full article

This week, two Collaborans will be in Dresden, Germany to take part in the AGL All Member Meeting. George Kiagiadakis and Daniel Stone will be in attendance, with the former also giving a presentation on the latest happenings in upstream multimedia. View the full article

Collaborans are in Tokyo this week to take part in the AGL All Member Meeting. They'll be discussing the future of IVI Window Management, and also look at the latest upstream work around the PipeWire framework and how it can benefit the automotive industry. View the full article

In our previous post, we presented a project backed by INVEST-AI which introduces a multi-stage neural network-based solution. Now let's dive into the machine learning details of our innovative, open source hand-tracking pipeline. View the full article

MLBench enables developers and maintainers to effortlessly gauge how their frameworks perform compared to other implementations, prior code versions, or across different boards, with respect to both runtime performance and other metrics. View the full article

With only free software, a Mali G31 chip can now run Wayland compositors with zero-copy graphics, including GNOME 3. We can run every scene in glmark2-es2, 3D games like Neverball can be played, and video players mpv and Kodi are now supported. View the full article

Adhering to the fundamentals of open source, the Atari VCS OS is based on Debian using the Apertis infrastructure, and the graphics rely on Weston as its Wayland compositor. View the full article

Blink font-size-adjust via CSS properties View the full article

Collabora brought Bluetooth Auracast broadcasting to MediaTek Genio 700 for Embedded World 2026. Here's the complete, fully Open Source setup featuring Debian, BlueZ, PipeWire, with all the code and configs from our live booth demo. View the full article

I have been working on getting U-boot upstream up to speed for the Radxa Rock-5B Rockchip RK3588 board. One of the cool features that I recently published upstream is the ability to boot the board without any kind of non-volatile media (NVM) used. View the full article