Weekly Roundup #53 - New Maker Products // News
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This week’s Weekly Roundup there’s a serious amount of new SBCs, as well as the usual AI boards and thankfully we’re well past all those stupid robots that we saw last year.
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Crowd Funding
KickStarter
First up on Kickstarter …
Proxmark3
The Proxmark3 is a general purpose test equipment aimed at RFID. It allows you to listen and replay any NFC and RFID traffic between 125kHz and 13.56MHz. Interface is via Bluetooth or USB and runs the Atmel SAM7S SoC. No indication of whether you can update with your own firmware or not, but if you’re in to RFID hacking then this looks pretty good.Leguino
We’ve seen a lot of STEM education kits in past Weekly Roundups. The Leguino is yet another one that is based on Lego bricks, but they’ve minimized their hardware investment by enclosing common platforms, such as the Arduino Uno, Arduino Nano and Raspberry Pi into Lego enclosures. So, you can code up using all the familiar tools, but they heavily support Visuino. They also have created a bunch of add-ons, such as; displays, servos and gears, switches, buttons, LEDs, microphones, sensors, and battery and breadboard units.Vion
Vion is a Bluetooth multimeter. It won’t be able to take on Dave Jones' multimeter for quality, but comes in cheaper. You can measure the traditional way, or install an iPhone or Android app to query the meter. It has some expected features such as auto-measuring, but some cool ones like voice assisted measurement. The specs aren’t fantastic, but for the price it is OK.pISO
OK, so it’s just another Raspberry Pi Zero with a handy USB hat, but this one allows you to setup multiple virtual flash drives. Interesting.Fipsy
My prediction of 2018 as being the year of the FPGA for Makers is heating up. Here’s another FPGA breakout board based on the Lattice LCMX02 series, but this one is interesting as their goal isn’t just to make a breakout board, but provide a full education system as well. It’s a hard sell trying to teach FPGAs to beginners. So, it’ll be interesting to see how this one goes.Raspberry Boom
The Raspberry Boom is a Pi hat that aims to detect infrasonic waves. These are sound waves that are below human hearing which is 20 Hz and below and since frequencies that low travel long distances you can pick up interesting things such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tornados, explosions, meteorites and aliens… apparently. The early bird price of US$279 is steep, but that gives you the Pi, SD card, hat, enclosure, power supply and mobile app.The Big Buddy Talker
Back in Weekly Roundup #50 we saw the Little Buddy Talker. Well now he has a bigger brother… or sister. This version increases the number of words from 254 to 1016.$6 Maker UNO
And back in Weekly Roundup #51 on Tindie we saw the Maker Uno. They now have a Kickstarter campaign up for grabs, which you can get for 17% cheaper.Binary Alarm Clock
If you like binary and clocks… then this simple Kickstarter is a binary clock… It’s one of the better built ones I’ve seen, but it does lack things like syncing to an external time source.IndieGoGo
Open Placer
Over at IndieGoGo, there’s an Open Hardware pick and place machine. If you’ve ever made more than a handful of your own PCBs, then you’ll understand the frustration working with tiny components. A P&P will automatically pick up and place components on to a PCB for you. Normally, they are pretty expensive - around US$4000, but with this campaign you can get one for under a grand that supports vision control of components down to 201s, with a 400 by 250mm work area. Nice.Crowd Supply
Circumference
Over at CrowdSupply there’s a datacentre-in-a-box in pre-launch. The Circumference provides power, cooling and gigabit network switch for up to 32 nodes based on either the Raspberry Pi or UDOO X86. The main control unit is a standard PC that provides control over cooling, power and access to node consoles.TinyPi
And yet another portable gaming thingy, this one based on the Pi Zero. Comes with 5-way joystick, two buttons, 1.4" screen and 300mAh battery.Honorable mentions
Orange Pi 4G-IOT
Back in Weekly Roundup #30 we saw the Orange Pi 2G-IoT. Well, the Orange Pi guys are back at it again with the Orange Pi 4G-IoT. This board is completely different to the 2G-IoT - They’ve dropped the Ethernet port and gone wireless mad supporting not only 4G, but WiFi, Bluetooth, FM and GPS. It runs a Mediatek MT6737 SoC with 1G RAM, 8G eMMC, HDMI and LCD out and Pi header, powered from a 5v, 2A DC jack. At US$45, it’s the cheapest way to get access to a 4G network.Visual Git for Eagle
If you’ve ever designed your own PCBs, then sometimes you want to be able to compare changes you’ve made between revisions. Especially if you’re working in a team. cadlab.io solves this issue by providing visual comparisons between boards and schematics along with annotations and comments. Nice.Festivals and conferences
Since the last Weekly Roundup there’s been a bunch of festivals and conferences. The big one was of course Embedded World 2018, but there was also the reprap festival, which highlights just how far 3D printing has come. Then there was the Trenton Computer Festival and you may have missed World Create Day and of course HackADay announced their Hacker Academy Awards. With $200,000 in cash prizes up for grabs. It’ll be interesting to see what hacks come up.ATMEGA4809
Over at Microchip they have shown us that the old AVR series chipset isn’t dead yet by releasing a new variant called the ATmega4809. From the datasheet it seems to read like a typical AVR; 8bit RISC CPU, 16 channel ADC, SPI, I2C, but wait… what’s this? Configurable Custom Logic? Nice. Admittedly, it only has 4 lookup tables so not as advanced as an FPGA, but still is a nice feature and hopefully a sign of things to come.Project Fin
Over at resin.io they are dipping their toes into the SBC market with Project Fin. This is a ruggedized carrier board for the Pi CM3 Lite with up to 64GB eMMC, dual-band WiFi, Bluetooth, RTC, mini PCIe and an Artik020 MCU which can shutdown the Pi completely for low power modes. It can also handle a wide DC input supply of 6 to 30v.Ultra96
The 96boards format is finally getting some traction and we’re seeing a number of boards hitting the market using this format. Four new SBCs have just recently been released. For example: Avnet have launched a 96boards format SBC based on the Zynq UltraScale+ SoC with on-board FPGA, 2G DDR4 RAM, micro SD, WiFi, Bluetooth, 3 USB3.0 ports, mini DP, along with the standard 96boards GPIO expansion. Powered from a wide 8 to 18v, 3A DC supply.HiKey 970
Then there’s the HiKey970, which is another powerhouse, running the octo-core Kirin 970 with 6GB, 4 channel DDR4 RAM, 64G UFS flash, micro SD, GbE, dual-band WiFi, GPS, GLONASS, 2 USB3.0, 2 USB Type C, mPCIe running from a wide 8 to 18v DC supply. It seems all the SBCs are starting to be a whole lot more grunty. These boards would be perfect for Machine Learning.DragonBoard 820c
Over at Arrow they have finally come out with the DragonBoard 820c in the 96boards format. This runs the new Snapdragon 820E SoC, which is a quad-core Kyro processor running at up to 2.35GHz. A bit of a beast. The board also has 3G DDR4 RAM, 32G UFS flash, micro SD slot, GbE, dual-band WiFi, Bluetooth, USB3.0, mini PCIe, HDMI capable of 4K @ 60Hz and unusually GPS and motion sensors. You get all this for US$200.Developer Board 8
Not to be outdone, Geniatech have also released the Developer Board 8, which, as far as I can see, is identical to Arrow’s board minus a couple of bits. So, not sure what’s going on there.Raspberry Pi 3B+
Of course last week we saw the Raspberry Pi 3B+ being released. No need to go into that here. Check out what I thought of it in my quick review.Gumstix Chatterbox
Gumstix have announced two boards that work with Amazon Voice Services called the Chatterbox. The first board takes a Colibri i.MX7 System-on-Module and provides WiFi, Bluetooth, GbE, RTC, SD slot and audio in and out. The second board is designed to take the Raspberry Pi CM3 module with pretty much the same specs, except there’s no Ethernet.SolidRun SBCs
SolidRun have released a couple of SBCs, both of which take their i.MX8 System-on-Module, which comes in three flavours, from dual-core Cortex-A53 with 3G DDR4 RAM to quad-core Cortex-A53 with 4G DDR4 RAM. All three boards also have GbE, WiFi, Bluetooth, PCIe SSD, eMMC, SD, USB3.0, HDMI capable of 4K @ 60Hz and a bucket load of GPIOs. This board can be chucked in to the HummingBoard Pulse, which breaks out pretty much everything on the SoM, but also provides a MikroBUS click interface and can be powered from 7 to 36v or PoE. Then there’s the Cubox Pulse mini PC, which breaks out less of the SoM features and is designed more as a desktop.Maker Shops
Tindie
There’s a bunch of cool things over at Tindie.