Difference between revisions of "News"

It's been a while since our last updates, actually it's 3 years ago! A lot of things happened at Radxa and today we are really happy to introduce our latest Single Board Computer, ROCK Pi 4. ROCK Pi 4 series are Rockchip RK3399 based boards in Raspberry Pi/Tinker board form factor. It offers "class-leading performance while leveraging outstanding mechanical compatibility". We know that there are some SBCs based on RK3399 on the market already, but why another one? In this post, we will explain why we made ROCK Pi, the ideas behind ROCK Pi and what we are thinking of Single Board Computers .

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.

Hi, all

I am glad to announce that the pyRock - python gpio module for rock/pro/lite platform is released. This python module uses /dev/mem to access the low level register and configure them, same way as pyPi(https://pypi.python.org/pypi/RPi.GPIO). The advantage of implementing it this way is speed and full control, the dis-advantage is security problem.

The radxa rock/pro is shipped with an acrylic case along with the main board. The full transparent acrylic case looks very beautiful but it also has some disadvantages such as easy to break and hard to put together the first time. There are some other cases for the rock family i want to introduce to the community today.

Metallic case by Cenique Cenique provides digital signage solutions, one of their model is based RR so they designed the metallic case for RR. The case fits RR well and export all the interfaces except the extension headers. Eight screws keep the case and RR tight inside the case. There is also VESA mounting holes for mounting the case somewhere else.

Node.js® is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Our forum Radxa Talk is an example of application based on node.js. Developer @jdarling has made the library for interfacing with the Radxa Rock's GPIO.

@jdarling told me that "I can control LED's, Motors, Relays, and get inputs from Buttons, Digital Sensors, etc really well now. I tried controlling a Servo but the IO response times with the sloppy nature of JavaScripts timing and eventing system pretty much make that a no go.

I've also successfully used the Serial UART with no problems. Still need to get my hands on some type of SPI device before I can say that SPI/I2C works, I know there is code needed to fix that one but without anything to test with not going far with that :). "

@jdarling also provides a sdcard image with node.js ready to use. Click read more to join the discussion of node.js on radxa rock.

As you have noticed that we now have a new simple but beautiful skin for our wiki. The new skin is called bootstrapskin and it's brought us by the bootstrapskin team from uk. Lee and his team is really doing great work for the mediawiki skins. I found their skin by google "best mediawiki skin" and then someone recommends it on Quora. When i see the bootstrapskin website(of course it's mediawiki). It's exactly what i was looking for.

I am happy to announce the preview release of the Android KitKat 4.4.2 image for Radxa Rock.

Notes for this release:

This release is for Radxa Rock full version only, the lite version will have wifi problem It’s basically a full working release version, including: HDMI, Audio, Ethernet, Wifi/Bluetooth, USB host, uSD card Green led is on, blue led is off when system booting up The 13 key simple IR remote from radxa works out of the box Google play and other google service is not included in this release The default Android Launcher doesn’t look good in big monitor or TV, we are considering pre-install some cool launcher Pre-installed some apps developed by Rockchip Download:

Maker Faire is The Greatest Show and Tell on Earth. It’s the third Maker Faire in Shenzhen. Radxa, as one of the few open hardware start up in Shenzhen wouldn’t miss it. We will be at the booth C-21. We will show the kiosk based on radxa rock which can show triggered AD based on the audiences. And we will unveil some products from radxa upcoming…