Tag Archives: embedded

Small ODROID-U3 platform coming out !

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Really interesting tweet I just saw about the Odroid-U3 platform you can find following this link. This platform with the size of a Raspberry PI board is a 4 ARM core 1.7Gb (cortex A9) with 2GB included. Video is HDMI 1080p.Storage is MicroSD slot. The price is really low : 58$

You can ran even Android & Linux on it.

Compared to a RPI, this sound good for video/media box applications, better than RPI. For hacking this is largely different, as you can see on the picture, GPIO connector are not so easy to access. But, you can also purchase an extension shield providing all what you are expected with 36 GPIO. To build your own shield it could be more complicated than RPI. This let me go to a question I have since months … Why RPI is not becoming less and less expensive or more & more powerful ? it have now about 2 year old.

Less negative point : like any new board coming after Raspberry, the ecosystem is actually really smaller and all third party components (box, shields) is really limited.

Now, that said … I have to order one !

ODROID-U3

ODROID-U3

New arduino Galileo ready for orders

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Galileo is an Intel platform compatible with arduino ; more of that it is an embedded Pentium class platform. With 400MHz and 800mA and 55€ with Ethernet but no video out, I’m not totally sure this platform provides a real new thing in the embedded world.

By the way, it have some interesting advantages :

  • Compared to usual arduino platform, you have a really more powerfull system for the price of a small arduino + ethernet shield. Making this board interesting.
  • Compared to ARM based board, for a couple of Euro more, you have a full x86 compatible platform (32b) where you can run most of the existing x86 code.

I let you have your own advice, to take a look to the detailed description here and buy it here (actually 9w delay)

 

 

MQTT on Raspeberry PI

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MQTT (MQ Telemetry Transport) is a Message Queuing system for machine to machine communications. It allows communication of mobile systems over high latency, low bandwidth and poor quality networks. It manage communications over TCP (not over Http) to optimize the size of messages and it manages different quality of services. Depending of it, messages can be dropped, received multiple times of you can have the insurance to receive the message one and only one time.

It makes this protocol really interesting for the communication between a raspberry PI and a server when this communication is event driven and the communication link looks like a Edge/3G channel.

Mosquitto is an open source implementation for MQTT.

Here are some tips on how I implemented it, for a demonstration purpose

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BeagleBone Black – General Overview

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I just got my BeagleBone black device, this is really looking like a Raspberry PI, but personally I found multiple advantage for this card compare to RPI, the first one is related to the embedded 2GB of flash memory that do not require to add external storage. Thank to that, for the first start, you just need to connect the device to your network and a screen and it run ! After about 30s you are connected to a graphical interface and able to surf the web.

The first issue I got with this device is the micro-hdmi connector located really close to the USB connector, due to the current use of an micro-hdmi 2 hdmi adaptor, i’m not able to connect correctly a USB device.I highly recommend to use a micro-hdmi cable instead of a monoblock micro-hdmi to hdmi adaptor for this reason.

By the way, the device is accessible using ssh (root/rootme) and display can be exported easily.

The next part of the article will be about different comparison between BeagleBone and other systems like Raspberry Pi.

Continue to read this article …

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