SBC News

http://blog.armbian.com/content/images/2025/11/D1_v3_face_antenna-2.pngBuilding a serious automation system shouldn’t mean spending days wiring SBCs, shields, USB dongles, level shifters and external power protection. JetHub D1+ offers a clean alternative: a compact, integrated, production-ready controller built for smart buildings, industrial automation, energy management, BMS, dispatching, and reliable IoT deployments. This device is developed and manufactured by JetHome and comes ready for the field: no breadboards, no compatibility guessing, no driver hunting. Every interface is engineered, tested, and electrically protected. Software support includes Armbian Linux or…

Armbian builds for hundreds of boards. A kernel bump that is clean on one SoC can leave another unbootable and no build log will tell you. So there is a rack, and the rack boots them. Compiling is not evidence. A kernel that builds, packages that install, an image that flashes — none of it proves a board comes back after reboot. Armbian supports a very large number of boards across a dozen vendors and twenty SoC families, maintained largely by volunteers who each own one or two of them. The failure mode that hurts is not a broken build. It is a change that builds perfectly and quietly bricks the boot path on hardware nobody happened to have on their desk that week. The au…

This week's development centered on kernel and toolchain progression, expanded board support, and substantial wireless driver cleanup. Mainline tracking advanced with kernel bumps to 7.2-rc7, Rockchip edge promoted to 7.2, and sunxi edge moved to 7.1.y. Platform work included loong64 migration from debian-ports to the main Debian archive with corresponding apt repository publishing, mainline kernel and U-Boot enablement on the Avaota A1, restored CONFIG_DWMAC_SUN8I for sunxi64, and a new RK3528 bl32/DDR blob update. Rockchip64 also received backported fixes for an 8250 DMA reopen crash and for CAN TX stalls. Board coverage grew across multiple vendors, with the NanoPi NEO…

A deep dive on the current status of Chromium enablement on MediaTek Genio SoCs, including what the numbers look like when MediaTek’s hardware codecs are driven by Chromium’s V4L2 paths. View the full article

As Chromium becomes the default UI runtime on embedded Linux devices, we’re closing long-standing V4L2 gaps and enabling efficient hardware video encoding and decoding on MediaTek platforms for both downstream and upstream. View the full article

This week's work centers on Rockchip platform maturation, kernel and toolchain modernization, and board-level enablement across vendors. Rockchip received the largest share of attention, with RK3528 gaining a thermal driver, cooling-map refinements, and cleanup of legacy PCIe and pmdomain workarounds. The Radxa E24C now stores its U-Boot environment in SPI flash and reads switch port MAC addresses from EEPROM, while device trees for the Mixtile Blade 3, Core3588E, and Edge 2 were corrected. New board support was added for the Boardcon SBC3568, and the Rock 5T now ships an edge kernel. On the configuration side, hyphenated LINUXFAMILY handling was fixed in both the kernel …

This week's development centered on kernel and toolchain progression, expanded board support, and substantial wireless driver cleanup. Mainline tracking advanced with kernel bumps to 7.2-rc7, Rockchip edge promoted to 7.2, and sunxi edge moved to 7.1.y. Platform work included loong64 migration from debian-ports to the main Debian archive with corresponding apt repository publishing, mainline kernel and U-Boot enablement on the Avaota A1, restored CONFIG_DWMAC_SUN8I for sunxi64, and a new RK3528 bl32/DDR blob update. Rockchip64 also received backported fixes for an 8250 DMA reopen crash and for CAN TX stalls. Board coverage grew across multiple vendors, with the NanoPi NEO…

Running Gemma 4 E2B on a Mali GPU with LiteRT-LMThis guide should work on any armbian minimal/console (trixie) system with a working Mali-g610 GPU. DO NOT USE DESKTOP Verified on: Orange Pi 5 Max (Rockchip RK3588, Arm Mali-G610 MC4), Armbian/Debian 13 (trixie), aarch64, 8 GB RAM. Status summary: Both CPU (XNNPACK) and GPU (WebGPU/Dawn → Vulkan → panvk → panthor) work on the mainline panthor kernel — numbers below. The GPU path needed one line of local patching in Mesa's panvk driver (raise maxImageDimension3D 512 → 2048 to meet the WebGPU minimums that LiteRT's Dawn library enforces; recipe in §5, rationale in §7.1). The model is multimodal (Text + Vision + Audio): the …

This cycle centers on expanded board and SoC support, kernel maintenance across sunxi, rockchip, and sophgo families, and infrastructure refinements to installer, extensions, and CI tooling. New platform enablement covers a broad range of vendors and architectures. Notable additions include the EmbedFire LubanCat 3 v2 and Seeed reComputer RK3576 devkits, the TQ-Systems MBa62xx/MBa67xx TI K3 boards, the Tanix TX6s (Allwinner H616), and the ZTL A568 (RK3568). The Allwinner A733 line advances with a full HDMI display pipeline (DE33/RCQ), PCIe/NVMe, and U-Boot 2026.07 integration for sun55iw3, while the Sophgo SG200x family bumps edge to 7.2, gains TPU support for the Milk-V …

By resolving critical synchronization bugs in Zink’s Vulkan–OpenGL interop, Faith Ekstrand paved the way for Zink+NVK to become the default OpenGL implementation for Nouveau. View the full article

This cycle centers on Linux 7.2/7.3 kernel enablement across out-of-tree drivers, new board support and platform fixes across Rockchip, SpacemiT, and Amlogic, and a broad documentation and CI cleanup. Kernel progression dominated the driver ecosystem, with 7.3 patch sets prepared for rockchip64, meson64, and the UEFI targets, and edge bumps to 7.2.3 landing for qcs6490, qrb2210, and sc8280xp. A wave of Wi‑Fi drivers was re-enabled and bumped for 7.3 compatibility, including rtl8189es/fs, rtl8192eu, rtl8723ds, rtl8852bs, uwe5622, and bcmdhd-dkms, most addressing the strncpy removal and the cfg80211 remain_on_channel cookie signature change. The rk35xx vendor kernel also ad…

Welcome to the latest Armbian Newsletter: your source for the latest developments, community highlights, and behind-the-scenes updates from the world of open-source ARM and RISC-V computing. Armbian 26.8 brings a major shift to the ecosystem, focusing heavily on rebuilding and refining the core tools users interact with every day. Anchored by the Linux 7.1 kernel across the tree, this milestone release introduces three major overhauls: a redesigned armbian-install utility featuring expanded boot topologies and standalone bootloader flashing, the all-new Imager 2.0, and standardized UEFI ISO images for seamless deployment across desktop and minimal environments. Paired wi…

Welcome to the latest Armbian Newsletter: your source for the latest developments, community highlights, and behind-the-scenes updates from the world of open-source ARM and RISC-V computing. Armbian 26.8 brings a major shift to the ecosystem, focusing heavily on rebuilding and refining the core tools users interact with every day. Anchored by the Linux 7.1 kernel across the tree, this milestone release introduces three major overhauls: a redesigned armbian-install utility featuring expanded boot topologies and standalone bootloader flashing, the all-new Imager 2.0, and standardized UEFI ISO images for seamless deployment across desktop and minimal environments. Paired wi…

When you download an Armbian image, flash it to your SD card or SSD, and boot your board, a huge amount of automation has already happened behind the scenes. That invisible engine is what you can see at https://actions.armbian.com. Think of it as the mission control center of Armbian’s infrastructure. It doesn’t look flashy, but it represents one of the most important parts of the project: the system that builds, tests, validates, and maintains Armbian for hundreds of boards, kernels, and configurations. Armbian isn’t just an operating system. It’s an automated production platform for embedded Linux.What is actions.armbian.com?actions.armbian.com is Armbian’s public autom…

Turnip is the first Mesa driver to achieve official Vulkan conformance on Android, with stronger Android integration, shared Vulkan runtime improvements, and real-device CI testing on Qualcomm Adreno hardware. View the full article

This week’s Armbian development saw a wide range of updates focused on automation, hardware support, and workflow improvements. Key highlights include the introduction of automatic YAML target generation, expanded support for Hetzner ARM64 runners, and enhancements to the redirector update workflow with cache mirror support. Several board-specific fixes and feature additions were made, including improved power cycle handling for meson-sm1 devices and new binary files for RK35 series components. The team also advanced kernel support, notably enabling RDNA2 GPU compatibility and initial kernel 6.18 support for Ayn odin2. Continuous integration and build reliability received…

Weston 16 expands HDR and color management support, improves Perfetto debugging and DRM backend performance, and adds new protocol and renderer capabilities for more efficient and flexible Wayland compositor development. View the full article

Welcome to the latest Armbian Newsletter: your source for the latest developments, community highlights, and behind-the-scenes updates from the world of open-source ARM and RISC-V computing. JetHome boosts Armbian CIJetHome (Shenzhen JetHome Technology Co.) donated a build server for Armbian. The server compiles Armbian images, kernels and U-Boot packages. Thank you, JetHome. HW Specifications CPU 2 × Intel Xeon Gold 6148, 80 threads Memory 384 GB Storage 3.84 TB SSD, plus 20 TB of disk Network 2 × 1Sponsored Github HighlightsThis week’s work centers on Rockchip platform maturation, kernel and toolchain modernization, and board-level enablement across vendors. Rockchip r…

This week's development centered on kernel and toolchain progression, expanded board support, and substantial wireless driver cleanup. Mainline tracking advanced with kernel bumps to 7.2-rc7, Rockchip edge promoted to 7.2, and sunxi edge moved to 7.1.y. Platform work included loong64 migration from debian-ports to the main Debian archive with corresponding apt repository publishing, mainline kernel and U-Boot enablement on the Avaota A1, restored CONFIG_DWMAC_SUN8I for sunxi64, and a new RK3528 bl32/DDR blob update. Rockchip64 also received backported fixes for an 8250 DMA reopen crash and for CAN TX stalls. Board coverage grew across multiple vendors, with the NanoPi NEO…

The Milk-V Duo S is a very cheap and small board. It runs a Sophgo SG2000 with an Arm Cortex-A53 and a RISC-V C906, 512 MB of RAM, and a physical slide switch decides which one boots. Armbian now supports both architectures. PR #10326 landed the port (175 files) as two thin board targets – milkv-duos-arm and milkv-duos-riscv – over a single shared family include, so the bootloader pins can't drift apart. PR #10510 moved the edge branch to kernel 7.1. Standing on the shoulders of othersThere are at least 2 projects the port owes a lot to: queenkjuul/milkv-duo-ubuntu (Ubuntu on a mainline kernel 7.0, RISC-V) and Fishwaldo/sophgo-sg200x-debian (Debian sid, vendor kernel 5.10…

Armbian builds for hundreds of boards. A kernel bump that is clean on one SoC can leave another unbootable and no build log will tell you. So there is a rack, and the rack boots them. Compiling is not evidence. A kernel that builds, packages that install, an image that flashes — none of it proves a board comes back after reboot. Armbian supports a very large number of boards across a dozen vendors and twenty SoC families, maintained largely by volunteers who each own one or two of them. The failure mode that hurts is not a broken build. It is a change that builds perfectly and quietly bricks the boot path on hardware nobody happened to have on their desk that week. The au…

This week, we spotlight the latest progress surrounding the Armbian 25.11 release. Development continues at a steady pace, with new board enablement work, kernel refinements, and package updates rolling in from contributors across the community. From single-board computers powering homelabs to lightweight systems deployed at the edge, Armbian 25.11 aims to deliver a cleaner, faster, and more reliable experience. If you're upgrading existing installations or preparing images for new hardware, this release ensures that your boards stay efficient, secure, and ready for whatever you build next. v25.11 Improving the base, unlocking new optionsThanks to our amazing community an…

This week in Armbian: We're gearing up for the 25.11 release with a code freeze approaching November 20th, while development continues with new board support and kernel updates. We're also exploring the JetHub D1+ as a professional automation solution, understanding safe operating temperatures for SBCs, and highlighting the critical role of SPI flash in modern single board computers. Here's what's new: Armbian 25.11 release is comingArmbian 25.11 code freeze begins November 20th. Maintainers should test boards, resolve critical issues, and join the coordination meeting on November 8th.http://blog.armbian.com/content/images/icon/favicon-25.icoArmbian blogIgor Pecovnikhttp…

This week's work centers on expanded board support, Rockchip and Realtek platform maturation, and continued refinement of installation and BSP tooling. New hardware enablement spans several SoC families. Initial build support arrives for the Altera Agilex 5 SoCDK, Banana Pi R3 Mini, Firefly AIBOX-K3, and the Allwinner H5 PBS TV Stick, while a new realtek-rtd129x family brings mainline kernel and U-Boot to the Banana Pi W2. The MangoPi MQ Pro gains Debian GRUB EFI boot and a proper maintainer, and the Radxa CM5-IO transitions to mainline kernel and U-Boot. Supporting firmware updates include Tegra210 USB, GPU and VIC blobs, Amlogic VDEC firmware, Realtek rtl8261c, and Qual…

Modernizing SBC Storage: From Qualcomm EDL Flashing to SPI-to-NVMe Boots For years, single-board computer (SBC) storage followed a simple, predictable pattern: flash an image onto a microSD card or eMMC module, plug it in, and turn on the board. However, as modern embedded hardware approaches laptop-grade performance, that legacy approach is starting to break down. The latest quarter of Armbian development highlights a major shift toward modern storage pipelines. By combining Qualcomm Emergency Download (EDL) flashing in Armbian Imager 2.0 with a redesigned installation engine, Armbian is making high-performance hardware far easier to set up. Direct Qualcomm Flashing with…

This cycle is defined by three themes: broad new board enablement, a coordinated U-Boot v2026.10 refresh across Rockchip and Allwinner platforms, and substantial Rockchip kernel, media, and wireless work. Board support expanded on multiple SoC families, including the EasePi R1 and Pine64 Quartz64 Zero on RK3568, the ArmSoM CM7s IO board and Boardcon EM3588 on RK3588, Forlinx OK3572-C, and the Skysi X5 laptop. The Banana Pi BPI-M4 (RTD1395) and Cubieboard 4 returned with full enablement including A80 cpufreq, thermal, HDMI, and audio. Qualcomm support advanced with the Lenovo Legion Y700 Gen 4 on an SM8750 edge kernel bumped to 7.2.11, while the NVIDIA Jetson Nano joined t…

The Milk-V Duo S is a very cheap and small board. It runs a Sophgo SG2000 with an Arm Cortex-A53 and a RISC-V C906, 512 MB of RAM, and a physical slide switch decides which one boots. Armbian now supports both architectures. PR #10326 landed the port (175 files) as two thin board targets – milkv-duos-arm and milkv-duos-riscv – over a single shared family include, so the bootloader pins can't drift apart. PR #10510 moved the edge branch to kernel 7.1. Standing on the shoulders of othersThere are at least 2 projects the port owes a lot to: queenkjuul/milkv-duo-ubuntu (Ubuntu on a mainline kernel 7.0, RISC-V) and Fishwaldo/sophgo-sg200x-debian (Debian sid, vendor kernel 5.10…

Collabora is headed to Tokyo for the Linux Plumbers Conference! Join us for our talks exploring stability for Rockchip boards, the latest Tyr Rust-based GPU, and more. View the full article

When you download an Armbian image, flash it to your SD card or SSD, and boot your board, a huge amount of automation has already happened behind the scenes. That invisible engine is what you can see at https://actions.armbian.com. Think of it as the mission control center of Armbian’s infrastructure. It doesn’t look flashy, but it represents one of the most important parts of the project: the system that builds, tests, validates, and maintains Armbian for hundreds of boards, kernels, and configurations. Armbian isn’t just an operating system. It’s an automated production platform for embedded Linux.What is actions.armbian.com?actions.armbian.com is Armbian’s public autom…

Next week we'll be in Paris for Kernel Recipes! We’re pleased to sponsor this gathering of the kernel community and contribute a talk on upstream H.264 and HEVC decoding for Rockchip RK3588/RK3576. View the full article

Kraid, the new compiler for the Panfrost driver stack, now passes all 800,000 Vulkan CTS compute shader tests. This marks a major milestone, with work continuing on additional shader stages, code quality, and performance optimization. View the full article

This week's work centers on new board enablement and platform maintenance, kernel and U-Boot refresh across Rockchip and Sunxi, and CI/build infrastructure improvements. Board support expanded with the addition of Sovol Zero, SV08, and SV08 Max on the H616 platform, alongside mainline and edge enablement for the Recomputer RK3576 devkit. BeagleY-AI features were forward-ported through kernel 7.2, the Mekotronics R58S2 gained rockusb recovery-key support, and the NanoPi R3S received an ethernet alias. Vendor logos and board imagery were also refreshed on the website. On the kernel and bootloader side, the cix-p1 edge kernel moved to 7.1.5 with refreshed patches, meson64 dr…

As an active member of the freedesktop community, Collabora was busy at XDC 2025. Our graphics team delivered five talks, helped out in two more sessions, and ran a workshop for newcomers. View the full article

The Holo Core aarch64 preview provides early binaries, sources, and containers for an Arch Linux-based aarch64 port, backed by tooling and CI work for reproducible rolling-release builds. View the full article

This cycle centers on expanded board and SoC support, kernel maintenance across sunxi, rockchip, and sophgo families, and infrastructure refinements to installer, extensions, and CI tooling. New platform enablement covers a broad range of vendors and architectures. Notable additions include the EmbedFire LubanCat 3 v2 and Seeed reComputer RK3576 devkits, the TQ-Systems MBa62xx/MBa67xx TI K3 boards, the Tanix TX6s (Allwinner H616), and the ZTL A568 (RK3568). The Allwinner A733 line advances with a full HDMI display pipeline (DE33/RCQ), PCIe/NVMe, and U-Boot 2026.07 integration for sun55iw3, while the Sophgo SG200x family bumps edge to 7.2, gains TPU support for the Milk-V …

This week's development centers on expanded board support and vendor kernel work, mainline kernel progression to 7.3 with CI resilience improvements, and a substantial refresh of the Armbian Imager. New hardware enablement spans multiple SoC families, including the Boardcon SBC3568 (RK3568), ELTAY RM66 (RK3566) with vendor HDMI and power-domain workarounds, the Anbernic RG Rotate on the new Unisoc UMS512 family, and the NanoPi M6 V2. The NanoPi R6S, R6C, M6/M6V2, and NanoPC T6/T6-LTS have been unified under a single image with shared aliases, reducing duplication across the FriendlyELEC RK3588 lineup. On the vendor side, an initial rk35xx-vendor-next branch based on 6.12-…

This week's work centers on new board enablement and platform maintenance, kernel and U-Boot refresh across Rockchip and Sunxi, and CI/build infrastructure improvements. Board support expanded with the addition of Sovol Zero, SV08, and SV08 Max on the H616 platform, alongside mainline and edge enablement for the Recomputer RK3576 devkit. BeagleY-AI features were forward-ported through kernel 7.2, the Mekotronics R58S2 gained rockusb recovery-key support, and the NanoPi R3S received an ethernet alias. Vendor logos and board imagery were also refreshed on the website. On the kernel and bootloader side, the cix-p1 edge kernel moved to 7.1.5 with refreshed patches, meson64 dr…

This week's work centers on Rockchip platform maturation, kernel and toolchain modernization, and board-level enablement across vendors. Rockchip received the largest share of attention, with RK3528 gaining a thermal driver, cooling-map refinements, and cleanup of legacy PCIe and pmdomain workarounds. The Radxa E24C now stores its U-Boot environment in SPI flash and reads switch port MAC addresses from EEPROM, while device trees for the Mixtile Blade 3, Core3588E, and Edge 2 were corrected. New board support was added for the Boardcon SBC3568, and the Rock 5T now ships an edge kernel. On the configuration side, hyphenated LINUXFAMILY handling was fixed in both the kernel …

Modernizing SBC Storage: From Qualcomm EDL Flashing to SPI-to-NVMe Boots For years, single-board computer (SBC) storage followed a simple, predictable pattern: flash an image onto a microSD card or eMMC module, plug it in, and turn on the board. However, as modern embedded hardware approaches laptop-grade performance, that legacy approach is starting to break down. The latest quarter of Armbian development highlights a major shift toward modern storage pipelines. By combining Qualcomm Emergency Download (EDL) flashing in Armbian Imager 2.0 with a redesigned installation engine, Armbian is making high-performance hardware far easier to set up. Direct Qualcomm Flashing with…

This week's work centers on expanded board and SoC support, build and repository infrastructure modernization, and refinements to user-facing tooling and documentation. On the hardware side, mainline support arrived for the Radxa Rock 2A/2F and the Toradex Verdin iMX8M Mini, while the KickPi K2B V2.2 DDR3 gained a full board definition including a new Maxio MAE0621 PHY driver. The Allwinner sun60iw2 platform saw substantial advancement on the Orange Pi 4 Pro with GPU, desktop, and hardware video decode enablement, alongside kernel configuration refinements. The Amlogic C400-plus received U-Boot repacking and Mali-T820 stabilization, the Rockchip armhf edge kernel was bump…

This week's work centers on expanded board and SoC support, build and repository infrastructure modernization, and refinements to user-facing tooling and documentation. On the hardware side, mainline support arrived for the Radxa Rock 2A/2F and the Toradex Verdin iMX8M Mini, while the KickPi K2B V2.2 DDR3 gained a full board definition including a new Maxio MAE0621 PHY driver. The Allwinner sun60iw2 platform saw substantial advancement on the Orange Pi 4 Pro with GPU, desktop, and hardware video decode enablement, alongside kernel configuration refinements. The Amlogic C400-plus received U-Boot repacking and Mali-T820 stabilization, the Rockchip armhf edge kernel was bump…

Tyr has reached a major milestone by booting the Arm Mali-G610 GPU’s MCU using upstream Rust DRM memory-management abstractions, while helping shape the kernel infrastructure future Rust GPU drivers will rely on. View the full article

Next week we'll be in Prague for a packed Open Source week! We’ll speak at the Linux Plumbers Conference and GStreamer Conference, and present two demos at the ELC Technical Showcase. View the full article

JetHome (Shenzhen JetHome Technology Co.) donated a build server for Armbian. The server compiles Armbian images, kernels and U-Boot packages. Thank you, JetHome. HW Specifications CPU 2 × Intel Xeon Gold 6148, 80 threads Memory 384 GB Storage 3.84 TB SSD, plus 20 TB of disk Network 2 × 1 Gbit/s, bonded Build runners 40 That is about a tenth of the fleet's capacity, running up to 3 kernel or 40 full image builds at once. The server also remembers work it has already done: Compiled code is reused. A rebuild takes under a minute instead of three.Software packages are downloaded once and shared by all 40 b…

Welcome to the latest Armbian newsletter! This development cycle brings a massive wave of progress across the entire ecosystem, packed with broad new board enablement, major platform maturation, and essential tooling upgrades. Highlights include: Extensive Board Enablement: Expanding support across multiple SoC families—including the EasePi R1, Pine64 Quartz64 Zero, ArmSoM CM7s IO board, Boardcon EM3588, Skysi X5 laptop, Banana Pi BPI-M4, Qualcomm Lenovo Legion Y700 Gen 4, NVIDIA Jetson Nano, Altera Agilex 5 SoCDK, Banana Pi R3 Mini, Firefly AIBOX-K3, Radxa Rock 2A/2F, and Anbernic handhelds like the RG Rotate. Bootloader & Kernel Modernization: A sweeping refresh m…

JetHome (Shenzhen JetHome Technology Co.) donated a build server for Armbian. The server compiles Armbian images, kernels and U-Boot packages. Thank you, JetHome. HW Specifications CPU 2 × Intel Xeon Gold 6148, 80 threads Memory 384 GB Storage 3.84 TB SSD, plus 20 TB of disk Network 2 × 1 Gbit/s, bonded Build runners 40 That is about a tenth of the fleet's capacity, running up to 3 kernel or 40 full image builds at once. The server also remembers work it has already done: Compiled code is reused. A rebuild takes under a minute instead of three.Software packages are downloaded once and shared by all 40 b…

Collabora is heading to Amsterdam! Join us at Booth A63 in Hall 14 to see GStreamer Analytics with machine learning, standalone XR remote rendering, and our MediaTek Genio-powered Magic Mirror for virtual clothing swaps. View the full article

Tyr’s latest Rust GPU kernel driver work puts GPU memory management in place, from VM binding and GPUVM to GEM-backed buffers and firmware boot, moving key pieces upstream before tackling synchronization next. View the full article

We moved our Home Assistant to a bigger board, and nothing needed re-pairingOur house runs on Armbian, and it has for years. Its Home Assistant setup started on an Allwinner H5 NanoPi K1 Plus. In 2025, it moved to the Rockchip NanoPi R3S LTS as soon as that board came out. This month it moved again, to the NanoPi M6. It was a live install: a Z-Wave mesh, a Zigbee network, a pile of automations and years of history. We expected at least one evening of re-pairing sensors. It took about half an hour, and every device came back on its own. Before: NanoPi R3S LTS After: NanoPi M6 V2 SoC Rockchip RK3566 Rockchip RK…

Olimex UEXT-CH390 is a small open-source hardware module that adds 10/100 Mbps wired Ethernet connectivity to microcontroller boards through an SPI interface. It is designed for Raspberry Pi Pico and Pico 2 boards, as well as ESP32-S3, C3, C5, C6, and other microcontrollers without built-in Ethernet connectivity. The module is based on the WCH CH390 Ethernet controller and features an RJ45 connector, a standard UEXT connector, and a smaller 1.0mm-pitch pUEXT connector. It measures 50 x 21 mm and is supported in the Arduino IDE and ESPHome firmware, making it suitable for wired IoT sensors, Home Assistant devices, and other applications where WiFi is unreliable or unwanted…

Linux kernel 7.2 adds broad core, Rust, and hardware-support updates, with Collabora contributing 102 patches across graphics, media, virtualization, networking, power management, and SoC enablement. View the full article

Altera has introduced the Agilex 27 FPGA and SoC family designed for AI infrastructure, high-speed networking, 6G and satellite communications, and aerospace and defense applications. The family includes 14 device models, each available as either an FPGA-only device or an FPGA SoC with integrated Arm processors The new devices rely on Altera’s third-generation HyperFlex architecture, which the company claims delivers 1.8 times the performance per Watt compared to the previous-generation Agilex 7 FPGAs. Other features include up to 17.6 million logic elements, second-generation AI Tensor DSP blocks, an Arm Cortex-A720/A520 processor subsystem in the SoC FPGA variants, 256 …

Working closely with Google, we built the first RDK-based Chrobalt reference platform for third-party devices, enabling Chromium-based YouTube support, certification, and automation on embedded TVs and set-top boxes. View the full article

The easiest way to get Armbian onto your board just got easier. In Armbian Imager 2.5, you set up a board by answering a few simple questions, and Imager double-checks your storage right before it writes. Settings now has a page of its own, and the app speaks Greek and Serbian too. Armbian Imager 2.5 in four minutes: the real app, from start to finish. Set up your board with a few answersA first-boot profile writes your network, user account, SSH keys, language and time zone onto the card, so the board is ready to use the moment it boots. In 2.5, New profile walks you through setup one question at a time: how the board connects, who logs in, which language and time zone t…

Waveshare ESP32-S31-Zero is a small ESP32-S31 development board that follows the form factor of the earlier Waveshare “Zero” boards, such as the ESP32-C6-Zero-B, RA4M1-Zero, and ESP32-S3-Zero, among others. The new tiny board still features a USB-C port for power and programming, as well as eighteen through and castellated holes for GPIO and power signals, but it boasts a more powerful ESP32-S31 dual-core RISC-V MCU clocked at up to 320 MHz, featuring 2.4 GHz WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.3, and 802.15.4 connectivity, as well as up to 32MB on-chip PSRAM and a 16MB or 32MB SPI flash chip. Since the ESP32-S31 has quite a few extra I/Os, Waveshare also added a 40-pin high-density con…

Wireless Tag WT99P461-S1 is an ESP32-P4X and ESP32-C61 board based on the same WT01P461-S1 module as found on the ESP32P4C61-TINY board introduced last June. The main differences are that the WT99P461-S1 is a full-featured development board, adding features such as Fast Ethernet, RS-485, CAN bus, an on-board microphone, and a speaker connector. It still comes with a microSD card slot, MIPI DSI/CSI connectors, and other features, making it suitable for industrial HMIs, gateways, and control applications. WT99P461-S1 specifications: Wireless Module – Wireless-Tag WT01P461-S1 (25 x 25mm) Microcontroller – ESP32-P4X (ESP32-P4 v3.2) MCU Dual-core RISC-V microcontroller @ 360/4…

Back in May, we wrote about the Procolored X One 3-in-1 laser engraver with UV and UV-DTF color printing, and the company contacted us a few months later for a review. But instead of having us review the laser engraver, they proposed that we test their K13 Lite DTF printer “developed for small businesses and creators producing customized apparel and merchandise”. Basically, a T-shirt printer using DTF (Direct-to-Film) technology. I wasn’t so sure at first, since T-shirt and garment printing isn’t exactly one of the primary topics we cover here at CNX Software! But I eventually decided to go ahead, since it might be interesting to understand the setup process, workflow, so…

NXP MCX W70 and KW43 wireless MCU families support Bluetooth 6.x Channel Sounding for secure distance measurement in industrial IoT and automotive applications. The MCX W70 supports Bluetooth LE, Zigbee, Thread, and Matter for Smart Home and industrial devices, while the KW43 is designed for automotive applications such as digital keys and secure vehicle access. Both families feature a 96 MHz Arm Cortex-M33 application core, a separate Cortex-M33 core for wireless connectivity, up to 1.5MB flash, 256KB SRAM, a dedicated Localization Compute Engine (LCE), and NXP’s EdgeLock security features. Bluetooth Channel Sounding support combines phase-based ranging (PBR) and round-t…

We’ve been sent a GEEKOM A5 2027 Edition mini PC powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 7730U 8-core/16-thread CPU for review. The mini PC supports up to 64GB dual-channel DDR5-5600MHz memory, can drive up to four independent displays via HDMI 2.0 and USB-C ports, includes three USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-A ports, two USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C ports, one USB 2.0 port, a full-size SD card reader, a 2.5GbE port, and Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.4 wireless connectivity. The model sent for review ships with 16GB DDR4 SO-DIMM RAM and a 512GB M.2 SSD pre-loaded with an activated Windows 11 Pro operating system. In the first part of the review, we’ll list the specifications, perform an unboxing and teardown t…

The easiest way to get Armbian onto your board just got easier. In Armbian Imager 2.5, you set up a board by answering a few simple questions, and Imager double-checks your storage right before it writes. Settings now has a page of its own, and the app speaks Greek and Serbian too. Armbian Imager 2.5 in four minutes: the real app, from start to finish. Set up your board with a few answersA first-boot profile writes your network, user account, SSH keys, language and time zone onto the card, so the board is ready to use the moment it boots. In 2.5, New profile walks you through setup one question at a time: how the board connects, who logs in, which language and time zone t…

After checking out the ACEMAGIC Kron Mini K5’s hardware with an unboxing and a teardown in the first part of the review, we tested the entry-level Intel Core 3 304 mini PC on Windows 11, and we’ve now taken the time to test Linux on the low-cost mini PC with Ubuntu 26.04. In this article, we’ll report our experience installing Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS, checking system information, running benchmarks, evaluating storage and networking (2.5GbE and WiFi 6) performance, running a stress test to monitor thermal throttling, and measuring fan noise and power consumption of the mini PC. Installing Ubuntu 26.04.1 For this test, we installed Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS alongside Windows 11. We st…

Banana Pi BPI-M8 is a credit card-sized SBC powered by an Allwinner A733 octa-core Cortex-A76/A55 SoC that aims to offer an alternative to the Raspberry Pi 5. The BPI-M8 comes with 4GB LPDDR5, HDMI and MIPI DSI display interfaces, two MIPI CSI camera interfaces, Gigabit Ethernet, on-board WiFi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0, four USB ports, a 16-pin FFC PCIe connector, and the usual 40-pin GPIO header. Two variants are offered: the BPI-M8A with 64GB eMMC flash, and the BPI-M8B with 16MB SPI NOR flash. Banana Pi BPI-M8 specifications: SoC – Allwinner A733 CPU Dual-core Arm Cortex-A76 @ up to 2.00 GHz Hexa-core Arm Cortex-A55 @ up to 1.80 GHz Single-core RISC-V E902 real-time core GPU…

STMicroelectronics has introduced the STM32H7P4 and STM32H7P5, two 520 MHz Arm Cortex-M7 MCUs part of STM32H7P family designed for digital power, motor control, industrial sensing, and edge AI applications. Both feature a Hardware Signal Processor (HSP) for accelerating mathematical and signal-processing operations, while the STM32H7P5 also includes an 85 GOPS Neural-ART NPU for Edge AI inference/TinyML. The MCUs feature up to 2MB dual-bank flash, 736KB SRAM, two high-resolution timers with up to 24 PWM outputs, three advanced motor-control timers, and four 12-bit ADCs. Other features include CORDIC and FMAC mathematical accelerators, three CAN FD interfaces, USB OTG Full…

AAEON claims the PICO-PTH4 is the world’s first 2.5-inch Pico-ITX board powered by an Intel Panther Lake processor, such as the Core Ultra 5 325, Core Ultra 7 355, and Core Ultra X7 358H, delivering up to 180 TOPS of AI performance in a 100mm x 72mm form factor. The single board computer ships with up to 32GB of LPDDR5X, supports M.2 M-Key/E-Key and PCIe x4 FPC expansion, and offers dual 2.5GbE, HDMI 2.1 video output, two USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports, and internal connectors for USB 2.0, front panel, RS-232/422/485, GPIO, and SMBus/I2C. AAEON PICO-PTH4 specifications: Panther Lake SoC (one or the other) Intel Core Ultra 5 325 CPU – Octa-core (4P+4LPE) CPU up to 4.5 GHz with 12MB S…

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…

AAElectronics’ LocalDot is an open-source replacement mainboard that converts a 3rd-generation Amazon Echo Dot into a local voice assistant compatible with Home Assistant. The board replaces one of the two original PCBs while reusing the existing microphones, speaker, buttons, LEDs, and enclosure, so the device works without relying on Amazon’s cloud services. The board combines an ESP32-S3 for WiFi connectivity and device control with an ESP32-P4 for audio processing. It supports the original four-microphone array with beamforming, on-device wake-word detection, and local voice commands through Home Assistant. Installation requires no soldering or enclosure modifications…

Seeed Studio has launched two Nordic nRF52840-based Bluetooth LE e-paper kits preloaded with the OpenDisplay open-source firmware for e-paper displays and supporting Home Assistant integration. The OpenDisplay 4.26″ Mono features a 4.26-inch monochrome/grayscale display with 800×480 resolution and partial refresh support, while the OpenDisplay 7.3″ Color Kit is equipped with a 7.3-inch Spectra 6 color e-paper with the same resolution. Both are powered by a 2,000 mAh battery and feature a few buttons for control and reset. Seeed Studio OpenDisplay kits specifications: MCU – Nordic Semi nRF52840 CPU – Arm Cortex-M4F microcontroller @ up to 64 MHz Memory – 256 KB SRAM Storag…

Today, I’m going to review the LattePanda Mu Ultra, a compact x86 compute module designed for on-device AI applications. It comes in two versions, powered by either an Intel Core Ultra 5 226V or a Core Ultra 7 256V processor. Both models feature 16 GB of high-speed LPDDR5X memory running at 8533 MT/s, with the higher-end model delivering up to 115 TOPS of combined AI computing power. In this review, I installed Ubuntu 26.04 and benchmarked the LattePanda Mu Ultra using various tools, including sbc-bench, Geekbench 7, and Geekbench AI. I also tested its CPU, GPU, and NPU performance with llama.cpp and YOLO26 to evaluate its capabilities for AI applications. Finally, I crea…

WeAct Studio Logic Analyzer V2 is a low-cost, small WCH CH32H417 board designed to be used as a 16-channel USB 3.0 logic analyzer with up to 200 MHz bandwidth. The company says the board runs three different “apps”: logic analyzer, USB-serial + DAP, or custom firmware developed by the user, all located at different addresses on the flash and selected by simply pressing the button on the board. WeAct Logic Analyzer V2 board specifications: MCU – WCH CH32H417 CPU cores QingKe RISC-V5F up to 400 MHz QingKe RISC-V3F up to 144 MHz GPU – Graphics Processing Hardware Accelerator GPHA Memory – 896KB SRAM Storage – 960KB flash; 304 KB slot for “user app”/custom firmware (slot 2 @ …

Nordic Semi has just announced the nRF71 Series of ultra-low-power SoCs with ultra-low-power Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth Low Energy (LE), and Thread connectivity, as well as an Axon NPU for edge AI workloads. The company claims the new chips, starting with the dual-band nRF7120 and tri-band nRF7120E, deliver up to 20 times lower standby power usage than current-generation nRF70 Series Wi-Fi products. This should allow nRF71 devices to run for years on battery, whether they use BLE, Thread, or Wi-Fi, for Smart Home, wearables, and industrial IoT applications. Nordic Semi nRF7120/nRF7120E specifications: MCU cores Arm Cortex-M33 @ up to 256 MHz RISC-V coprocessor @ up to 256 MHz wit…

M5Stack’s Core Matrix is an ESP32-C61-based IoT controller with a 16×16 white LED matrix for displaying icons, animations, device status, and notifications. It supports 2.4 GHz WiFi 6 connectivity and is designed for IoT applications, sensor data monitoring, and interactive displays. It also includes a 6-axis BMI270 IMU, a microSD card slot, a passive buzzer, three user buttons, a power button, and a USB-C port. The board supports external modules and sensors through M5-Bus and Grove interfaces, with battery-power management circuitry that lets it run on either USB power or an external battery. M5Stack Core Matrix specifications: SoC – Espressif Systems ESP32-C61HR8 CPU –…

The Armbian 26.11 release cycle is in its final stretch. November is for stabilizing: fixing regressions, building release images, and testing on as much supported hardware as we can. Since Armbian 26.08, hundreds of contributions have improved the build framework, kernel support, installation tools, hardware compatibility and release automation. Now it’s time to bring it all together and get Armbian 26.11 ready to ship. What’s coming in this releaseDebian Trixie is now the build base. It’s the official build host and the default Docker image. Ubuntu Noble has been removed from release targets, and every image format is now signed. U-Boot 2026.10 is in place on most platf…

Seeed Studio XIAO STM32C5 is the company’s first XIAO development board based on an STMicroelectronics MCU, namely a 144 MHz STM32C5A3CG Arm Cortex-M33 microcontroller. It features two CAN FD controllers and a 6-axis IMU with programmable heating for robotics, industrial control, and motion-sensing applications. The board also includes 16MB of external flash, a 48 MHz external crystal, a USB-C port, and battery charging circuitry. One CAN FD channel is connected to an onboard transceiver, while the second requires an external transceiver. The integrated IMU heater allows firmware to control sensor temperature and reduce measurement drift from temperature changes. XIAO STM…

A few weeks ago, we noted that the Brainchip AKD1500 M.2 module could work with the Raspberry Pi 5 using a compatible M.2 HAT+ expansion card to evaluate the solution or develop applications using the company’s low-power, low-latency neuromorphic AI technology. To make things even easier, they’ve now introduced the AKD1500 Raspberry Pi 5 Dev Kit that packs a Raspberry Pi 5 8GB, an official M.2 HAT+, and an Akida AKD1500 M.2 B+M-Key card into a metal case. Most ports from the Raspberry Pi 5 are exposed, namely the Gigabit Ethernet port, the four USB connectors, the two HDMI video outputs, and the USB-C port for power. The Raspberry Pi 5 power button and an LED on the M.2 …

SparkFun introduced two new development boards called IoT RedBoard, both based on the ESP32-P4 v3.x (ESP32-P4X) and compatible with the Arduino UNO R3 form factor. The main difference is that one features an ESP32-C5 for Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5 LE, Zigbee, and Thread connectivity, while the PoE version includes 10/100 Mbps Ethernet and Power over Ethernet (PoE) support. They also include MIPI CSI/DSI camera and display connectors, two USB-C ports, a microSD card slot, Qwiic expansion, Arduino R3-compatible headers, and LiPo battery charging and monitoring. These features make it suitable for HMI, edge computing, and IoT applications. SparkFun IoT RedBoard ESP32-P4 specificat…

TOOCAA NOVA is a desktop laser cutter and engraver that combines creative functions in a compact body. It comes with a translucent orange cover and an A4 work area of 297 × 210 mm, suitable for making signs, decorations, personalized gifts, and DIY projects. The reviewed model uses a 20W diode laser module for cutting and engraving, and supports materials such as wood, paper, leather, and coated aluminum. The machine’s highlight is its 5MP AI camera, which displays an image of the material inside the machine in the software, making it easier to align designs with the desired position. It also has an autofocus system that automatically adjusts focus distance and a material…

Andrii Shylenko’s LabWired is an MIT-licensed MCU firmware simulation core that runs compiled firmware against modeled CPUs and peripherals, captures UART and bus output, register state, and supports repeatable checks in CI. The simulator works on Arm Cortex-M0+, Cortex-M3, Cortex-M4, Cortex-M7, Cortex-M33 cores, RISC-V architecutre, and Xtensa LX6 and LX7 (some ESP32 parts). The main benefit of the project is speeding up firmware testing since doing some on real boards is slow. The hardware must be ready, then the firmware must be flashed to the board each time you want to test it, and if something breaks, developers get a dark LED and no trace. If a firmware project nee…

The STM32G5 series is a family of 280 MHz Arm Cortex-M33 mixed-signal MCUs designed for industrial power supplies, photovoltaic inverters, EV chargers, robotics, and motor control systems. It doubles the performance of the older STM32G4 series unveiled in 2021. The new MCU family features up to 512KB flash, 112KB SRAM with ECC, a 111 ps high-resolution timer (HRTIM) with up to 12 PWM outputs on some variants, and 12-bit ADCs supporting up to 5 MSPS. Other features include position encoder interfaces, a 16-element programmable logic array, CORDIC and FMAC mathematical accelerators, and security features such as Arm TrustZone, secure boot, and post-quantum cryptography supp…

Renesas RZ/T2N industrial MPU supports up to four-axis motor control and includes PWM timers, encoder interfaces, and trigonometric accelerators. It’s designed for industrial robots, programmable logic controllers (PLCs), motion controllers, and multi-axis servo drives. The MPU features up to two 1.2 GHz Arm Cortex-A55 cores for application processing and two 800 MHz Cortex-R52 cores for real-time control. It also integrates a three-port Gigabit Ethernet switch with TSN support and industrial Ethernet protocols such as EtherCAT, PROFINET RT/IRT, and EtherNet/IP. This feature set allows real-time motor control, industrial networking, and Linux applications to run on a sing…

Raspberry Pi has announced yet another price increase, this time for most models with 16GB of RAM. The Raspberry Pi 5 16GB now sells for $385, an $80 increase compared to the last price hike in April, and the Raspberry Pi CM5 system-on-module gets a $40 increase, starting at $375 for the Lite model without wireless. The “good news” is that the Raspberry Pi 500+ mechanical keyboard PC stays at the same price, starting at $410. I suppose they can afford it on that model, because it’s already richly priced and the demand must be lower than for single board computers and compute modules. Here’s the updated price list for the Compute Module 5 16GB variants. Interestingly, the …

This week's work centers on a large-scale kernel CVE backporting program for the 6.1 and 6.12 LTS series, a CPU tuning and frequency framework overhaul, and sustained board, SoC, and vendor-kernel maintenance across the Rockchip, MediaTek, and Allwinner ecosystems. The CVE effort dominates activity, with more than one hundred reviewed backport sets landing across 6.1 and 6.12 covering networking (mac80211, cfg80211, Bluetooth, netfilter, mlx5, stmmac), filesystems (btrfs, f2fs, ext4, smb client, ksmbd), virtualization (KVM SVM/SEV, vhost, virtio), graphics (amdgpu, i915, vc4, msm), and core subsystems (bpf, mm, io_uring). Supporting this is a new fasttrack CI pipeline wit…

Lumissil Microsystems IS31CS9202 and IS32CS9202 are 50 MHz Cortex-M0+ microcontrollers for industrial, consumer, and automotive applications with a serial video bus (SVB), a LumiBus LED controller, and a capacitive touch-key controller. Both chips come with 16KB RAM, 256KB flash, a CAN FD controller, SPI master/slave, I2C master/slave, two enhanced UART interfaces, a quadrature encoder, a 14-bit sigma-delta ADC, a 12-bit SAR ADC, an 8-bit DAC, up to 42 GPIO pins, and more. The only differences are that the IS32CS9202 is designed for automotive applications and benefits from a wider -40°C to 125°C temperature range and AEC-Q100 and ASIL-B qualifications. Lumissil IS31CS920…

Arduino Nano XL Link is an evolution of the popular Arduino Nano board, with the same dimensions, but featuring a more powerful Microchip PIC32CK Arm Cortex-M33 running at 120 MHz with 2 MB of flash and 512 kB of RAM. It also adds CAN FD, RS485, and 10/100 Mbps Ethernet field bus transceivers for industrial, home, and building automation applications such as industrial networks, motor drives, building automation buses, smart sensors, and touch panels. The company also unveiled the Nano XL Link Connector Carrier to go along with the new board. Arduino Nano XL Link Arduino Nano XL Link (ABX00182) specifications: MCU – Microchip PIC32CK2051SG01144 CPU – Arm Cortex-M33 @ 120…

Gil Tal has developed the P4 Launcher, an open-source application platform designed to bring a PC-like experience to ESP32-P4 boards with an attached touchscreen display. The launcher boots directly into its interface, while applications (.papp files) are stored on a microSD card and loaded into PSRAM when launched. You can add, remove, and run applications without reflashing the firmware or rebooting the device by simply copying files to the microSD card.Gil says 21 PAPP (PSRAM APP) applications are available now, mostly emulators and games, including Neo Geo and Atari 2600 emulators, Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem 3D and OpenTyrian, plus Clock and Files. Like ESPBrookesia, the…

MikroTik KNOT Gateway HL9 is an IP66-rated outdoor IoT gateway that combines 915 MHz Wi-Fi HaLow (802.11ah), Bluetooth 5.1, Wi-Fi 6, LTE Cat 1 bis, Gigabit Ethernet, and GNSS. The gateway supports asset tracking, remote sensor monitoring, industrial IoT, and agricultural applications. Built around a dual-core Qualcomm IPQ-5010 ARM64 processor, it features 256MB RAM and 128MB NAND flash. It relies on a Morse Micro MM6108 Wi-Fi HaLow SoC for sub-GHz connectivity, with Gigabit Ethernet, 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi 6, and LTE Cat 1 bis cellular for backhaul. MikroTik KNOT Gateway HL9 specifications: SoC – Qualcomm IPQ-5010 dual-core 64-bit Arm processor @ 800 MHz Memory – 256MB RAM Storage…

Working closely with Google, we built the first RDK-based Chrobalt reference platform for third-party devices, enabling Chromium-based YouTube support, certification, and automation on embedded TVs and set-top boxes. View the full article

You might assume that a Google-certified Android TV box will both work better and guarantee no malware. However, you’d be wrong, at least for the latter. Google has just published a new Threat Intelligence report entitled “Shutting the Door on the XCPE Botnet”, where they found that 1.3 million TV boxes were infected by the XCPE backdoor, enrolling them into a botnet used for financial gains. Google assesses with high confidence that the malware was intentionally developed, deployed, and operated by Videostrong Technology, a TV box manufacturer, which we frequently covered in the past when Android TV boxes were still somewhat a novelty and at times usable as an alternativ…

Next week we'll be at electronica in Munich! In partnership with Renesas, Collabora will showcase real-time, low-latency ML video analytics on Renesas RZ/G2L and RZ/V2H platforms, using GStreamer for integrated video processing and on-device AI inference. View the full article

BIOSTAR EdgeComp MS-U320 is a fanless industrial mini PC powered by an Intel Core 3 304 or Core 5 320 Wildcat Lake SoC with four COM ports, dual 2.5GbE, and 4G/5G cellular connectivity expansion. The mini PC supports up to 64GB DDR5, M.2 NVMe SSD storage, features 4K-capable HDMI 2.1 and DisplayPort 1.4 connectors, earphone and microphone jacks, and six USB ports. It supports a wide 9-24V DC input and can operate in the -20°C to +50°C temperature range for industrial automation, smart manufacturing, industrial IoT, smart retail, and smart infrastructure. BIOSTAR EdgeComp MS-U320 specifications: Wildcat Lake SoC Intel Core 3 304 5-core CPU – 1x P-cores @ 1.5/4.3 GHz (Turbo…

HIYD is a compact and thin (2.7mm) health and fitness tracker that attaches to the back of a regular wristwatch and looks very similar to the Azume One, which we wrote about last month. Developed by San Jose-based HIYD, the device adds heart rate, sleep, recovery, and activity tracking to traditional watches using a removable microsuction mechanism. It features optical sensors for heart rate, heart rate variability (HRV), and blood oxygen (SpO2) monitoring, along with an accelerometer and skin temperature sensor. The device connects to Android and iOS smartphones over Bluetooth and supports sleep tracking, daily readiness scores, and camera-based nutrition logging. Batte…

VZMORE sent us a review sample of the iX9 Max mini PC powered by an Intel Core Ultra 9 185H 16-core/22-thread Meteor Lake processor clocked at up to 5.1 GHz, paired with 24 GB of LPDDR5-5600 memory and a 1 TB NVMe SSD. It supports up to four simultaneous displays via HDMI 2.0 and USB4 ports, offers six USB Type-A ports, two 40 Gbps USB4 ports, and two 2.5 GbE ports, as well as Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 wireless connectivity. In this article, we will list the specifications, go through an unboxing and a teardown to check out the hardware, and boot the system to the pre-installed Windows 11 Pro operating system. A more detailed review with feature testing and benchmarks on …

This cycle is defined by the launch of the armbian/external packaging pipeline, broad kernel and U-Boot version bumps across platforms, and substantial desktop and repository infrastructure work. The new armbian/external repository establishes a dedicated build and mirror pipeline for third-party software, with tooling for dependency checks, parallel sync, incremental uploads, and a package site published at external.armbian.com. Initial payloads include charsiu for the RK3576 NPU, developer tools such as claude-code, codex, grok-cli, Zed, and a GitHub CLI build for riscv64, alongside a full Armbian Hyprland shell derived from the Omarchy port with companion packages for …

It’s now possible to run KiCad 10 directly in a web browser or as an Android app thanks to two separate open-source projects, unaffiliated with the official KiCad project. Let’s have a look at both. Ziro Designer/ZiroEDA – KiCad 10 in your web browser Akshay Rukade (ZiroEDA), an engineering student in India, ported KiCad 10.0.6 to the browser through the Ziro Designer/ZiroEDA Designer project. It’s a TypeScript translation of KiCad’s C++, kept file-for-file against the KiCad implementation, so the real schematic editor, PCB editor, interactive router, and ERC/DRC run in a browser tab and read and write normal KiCad projects. That means you can open local KiCad projects or…

An AI-assisted side project turned a missing KDE tablet feature into a working handwriting mode, combining open source recognition, stylus input, and human-led debugging across an unfamiliar software stack. View the full article

Collabora authored 111 patches for Linux 7.3, spanning DRM core, Rust, MediaTek, Rockchip, and more. Highlights include a new color format property, per-connector hotplug events, sparse mappings in Panthor, and continued progress on Tyr. View the full article

Waveshare UNO-Q-DSI-TOUCH-10.1A is a 10.1-inch touchscreen display designed for the Arduino UNO Q single board computer. The Arduino UNO Q exposes its MIPI DSI interface through the 60-pin JMEDIA and JMISC headers, and for all practical purposes, you normally need a board like the Arduino UNO Media Carrier to make use of it. The UNO-Q-DSI-TOUCH-10.1A display solves that by integrating the headers so users can simply insert the Arduino UNO Q into it without an additional adapter board or special wiring. Waveshare UNO-Q-DSI-TOUCH-10.1A specifications: Screen Size – 10.1-inch Panel type – IPS panel Native Resolution – 1280 x 800 Refresh Rate – 60 Hz Colors – 16.7 millions Vi…

Tektronix is better known for its high-end and pricey oscilloscopes, but has now introduced the 1 Series DPO, a line of low-cost digital phosphor oscilloscopes starting at just $450, with optional AI-assisted control through the new Tek Intelligence connector. These oscilloscopes are designed for electronics testing, embedded development, education, and everyday circuit debugging. The 1 Series DPOs feature up to four analog channels, 50 MHz to 200 MHz bandwidth, 12-bit vertical resolution, and up to 1.25 GS/s sampling rate. They also integrate a 7-inch touchscreen and 10 Mpoints of memory per channel, support I2C, SPI, and UART protocol decoding, and implement built-in wa…

Designed by CoolMaker Lab in China, the ESP32 4-channel PWM fan controller is an open-source, Home Assistant-compatible board for managing cooling in server racks, NAS systems, network cabinets, and other DIY enclosures. It can independently control up to four 4-pin PWM fans, supporting PWM-based speed adjustment, tachometer-based RPM monitoring, and individual fan power switching. The controller supports up to four external DS18B20 temperature sensors for automatic fan speed adjustment, along with a web interface, an HTTP REST API, and Bluetooth proxy functionality. The latest v2.0 hardware and firmware also support optional LD2402G 24GHz mmWave radar for presence-based …

Just last week we wrote about the GL.iNet Mango 2 (GL-MG1300), a low-cost mini travel router built around a MediaTek MT7621A dual-core MIPS SoC. Now, Banana Pi has introduced another MIPS router: the BPI-RT2 router board built around a Realtek RTL8198D dual-core MIPS SoC. The BPI-RT2 ships with 256MB DDR3 RAM, 128MB SPI-NAND flash, four Gigabit Ethernet ports (one WAN and three LAN), and a USB 3.0 port. It also supports dual-band WiFi 6 with 2×2 MIMO on both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands. The board measures 97 × 65mm and is designed for home networking, wireless access points, and small business routers. Banana Pi BPI-RT2 specifications: SoC – Realtek RTL8198D Dual-core MIP…

Vantron has introduced the VT-SBC-SMARC-IMX952, an 82 × 50 mm SMARC 2.1 system-on-module (SoM) built around NXP’s i.MX 952 processor with two or four Arm Cortex-A55 cores, a Mali-G310 GPU, and a 2 TOPS eIQ Neutron NPU. The module is designed for industrial HMIs, edge AI vision, factory automation, in-cabin sensing, and other embedded applications. The module comes with 8GB LPDDR4x memory, 64GB eMMC storage, two Ethernet interfaces (GbE + 2.5 GbE) with TSN support, and an optional Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0 wireless module. It exposes all I/Os through a standard 314-pin MXM 3.0 connector VT-SBC-SMARC-IMX952 specifications: SoC – NXP i.MX 952 CPU Dual- or quad-core Arm Corte…