Dear Community, we just get the update from our friend, Marc, who is working on HW decoding for Linux on RK3288 platform. Marc brings us the first release for the Kodi on Rock2 Square. The release works under Rabian on Rock2 Square. We have test it in the first place. I have to say the status is very completed and hardware decoding do works. Kodi runs at 1080p smoothly and still smooth when decoding 1080p video. It can even decode some HEVC video since the decoding library is from android.

We have been asked the questions by many individual users as well as some commercial users that "i have setup my own server on rock pro and running well, now i want to backup in case i lose data in the future" or "we have developed our own application and setup the environment now we want to install the same environment to 100 rock pro, how to do that". So we write this. This how-to tells you how to backup and restore the same firmware to your boards step by step. This how-to works for rock/rock pro/rock2 square. This how-to works under Linux. What you should know before read this:

The word "maker"(Chuangke in Chinese) is more popular than any time else in China. Our Premier Li Keqiang has visited Shenzhen Maker Space Chaihuo, which excited every maker in China. Premier Li Keqiang pledged to establish a new platform for innovation and cultivate a "maker culture" in the country. Shenzhen government defines Shenzhen as the "Maker City". It's the good time for the Chinese Makers than ever. At this environment, this year Maker Faire Shenzhen will be better than ever.

WiringX is a modular approach to several GPIO interfaces. Till now, it supports five platforms: Raspberry Pi, Hummingboard, BananaPi, Radxa Rock and MIPS CI20 Creator. For Radxa Rock(pro/lite), wiringX provides interfaces for GPIO, I2C, SPI and ISR. You can easily use these function on Rock through wiringX.

By default, rock pro/lite support standard HDMI resolution, that is 1080p(1920*1080), 720p(1280*720), but some times, we need to display on non-common resolution such 1024*1024, or 1366*768. On PC platform, the HDMI resolution can be passed to the CPU and configured via EDID, but for ARM platform, we need to change the code to adjust to the timing of the HDMI display. Click read more for the detail instructions.

The rock2 series is finally coming now. We have started rock2 series last year. The rock2 series is made of the SoM and the base board. The reason why we make it SoM plus baseboard is answered in the rock2 som compatibility thread at radxa talk.

Rock2 SoM(left) and the Rock2 Square baseboard(right).

Matchstick is the world's first chromecast like, open software and hardware HDMI streaming stick based on Firefox OS(Another member of OSHW family). Matchstick team has ported FirefoxOS to rk3066. So the matchstick can be a FxOS develepment board. Based on this, they have developed a flint protocol, which is used by the smart phone to discover and control matchstick. They choose FxOS because it will make the sender/receiver development can be done in html5.

Since rk3066 and rk3188 of rock pro share the same android SDK, it's easy to have firefox os support rock pro as well. Naobsd has done some initial work based on the matchstick FxOS repo tree and then Byron from matchstick has got rock pro officially supported in their tree. Thanks to the matchstick team and naobsd, now we have FxOS on rock pro.

Eleparts is founded in 1999 and opened its first online shop in 2000, and it's Korea’s first electronic components on-line shop. That was 14 years ago! Eleparts is agency in Korea of more than 120 companies and their customers include Samsung, LGE, iriver and so on. Now they proudly to distributor radxa too. Customers in Korea can buy radxa from the following link:

http://www.eleparts.co.kr/front/productblist.php?brandcode=9346

CHIPSTER - it's a domestic Russian electronic parts shop. CHIPSTER sales electronic components, various modules and arduino based kits, microcomputers, tools e.t.c. They ship often to four countries (Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Belarus). They also able to ship to europe countries and too. Customers may use various payments methods like visa, MC, WebMoney e.t.c at CHIPSTER.

Buy radxa from CHIPSTER:

http://chipster.ru/catalog/microcomputers/radxa-rock/

Dear community

I am proudly to announce that we have open sourced the hardware design of rock pro/lite, completely. This is really a brave step for us especially here in Shenzhen, China, considering that someone is just copying and pasting our wiki to theirs, some fly board is just be made like our style. The owner of Olimex, an OSHW company once said, there is no real open source hardware from China. Now, i want to say, hey, we make open source hardware and we are from China.

Kali Linux is a Debian-derived Linux distribution designed for digital forensics and penetration testing. Kali Linux is preinstalled with numerous penetration-testing programs, including nmap (a port scanner), Wireshark (a packet analyzer), John the Ripper (a password cracker), and Aircrack-ng (a software suite for penetration-testing wireless LANs). Kali Linux recently supports ARM devices. manu7irl has made a script of building kali Linux for radxa rock and freq has improved it and made the image for rock pro.