BPI-R4 Pro Router Board Delivers MT7988A SoC with Tri-Band Wi-Fi 7 Capability

The Banana Pi BPI-R4 Pro router board is now available following its earlier preview. Built around the MediaTek MT7988A (Filogic 880) quad-core Arm Cortex-A73 processor at 1.8GHz, it targets Wi-Fi 7 access points and multi-gigabit gateway applications. The BPI-R4 Pro was first introduced in May 2025 and is offered in two variants. The “8X” model […]

Low-Cost BeaglePlay SBC Gains Fully Upstream PowerVR Graphics with Vulkan 1.2

The $99 BeaglePlay single board computer has reached a notable milestone: its integrated PowerVR Rogue GPU is now supported by a fully upstream open-source graphics stack in the mainline Linux kernel and Mesa. BeaglePlay, introduced in 2023, is built around the Texas Instruments AM625, a quad-core Cortex-A53 SoC that integrates a PowerVR Rogue AXE-1-16M GPU. […]

Creality Falcon A1 Pro Review – An easy-to-use, fully enclosed 20W laser engraver with a built-in HD camera

Creality has sent a review sample of the Falcon A1 Pro fully enclosed laser engraver and cutting machine. It’s designed to be easy to use out of the box since it’s mostly pre-assembled. It is equipped with a 20W blue laser and can engrave and cut a wide variety of materials such as cardboard, wood, bamboo, rubber, leather, fabric, acrylic, plastic, and more. It notably supports cutting 10 mm thick basswood and 8 mm thick black acrylic. The machine can engrave materials at a speed of up to 600 mm/s, and offers smart features such as auto focus, real-time flame...

Ezurio Carbon AM62 Targets Industrial Linux with TI Sitara AM62x

Ezurio has introduced the Carbon AM62, a 45 x 30mm OSM-MF v1.2 system-on-module based on TI’s Sitara AM623 and AM625 processors. The solder-down module integrates a TPS65219 PMIC, LPDDR4 memory, eMMC storage, and optional Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth LE via Ezurio’s Sona wireless modules. Carbon AM62 integrates up to a quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor clocked […]

Bit-Brick K1 Pro Adds 6 TOPS NPU and Dual NVMe to Compact SBC

Bit-Brick’s K1 Pro is a single-board computer based on the Rockchip RK3576 application processor, targeting low-power embedded deployments that still require substantial CPU, GPU, and on-device acceleration. The board integrates LPDDR4X memory, onboard eMMC storage, and high-speed I/O including PCIe expansion for NVMe SSDs. On the compute side, RK3576 combines quad Cortex-A72 cores clocked up […]

xSDR packs 2×2 MIMO, Artix-7 FPGA, and 3.8 GHz tuning into M.2 2230 form factor

Crowd Supply has featured the xSDR, a compact M.2 2230 A+E-key software-defined radio module that combines a Lime Microsystems LMS7002M RF transceiver with an AMD Artix-7 FPGA. Designed for direct integration into laptops, tablets, embedded PCs, and edge systems, it delivers 2×2 MIMO RX/TX operation across a 30 MHz to 3.8 GHz tuning range. The […]

Instruction decoding in the Intel 8087 floating-point chip

In the 1980s, if you wanted your IBM PC to run faster, you could buy the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor chip. With this chip, CAD software, spreadsheets, flight simulators, and other programs were much speedier. The 8087 chip could add, subtract, multiply, and divide, of course, but it could also compute transcendental functions such as tangent and logarithms, as well as provide constants such as π. In total, the 8087 added 62 new instructions to the computer.

But how does a PC decide if an instruction was a floating-point instruction for the 8087 or a regular instruction for the 8086 or 8088 CPU? And how does the 8087 chip interpret instructions...

Android 17 Beta 1 released with H.266/VVC support, camera improvements, and more

Google has just announced the release of Android 17 Beta 1 with performance improvements, H.266/VVC video codec support, smoother camera mode transitions, privacy and security enhancements, and more. The company is not releasing Developer Previews anymore, and instead follows the “continuous Canary channel” announced with the first Android 16 Developer Preview. So, with Android 17, the very first release is the “Beta 1” release. Some of the key changes in Android 17 so far: Developers can’t opt out of orientation and resizability restrictions on large screen devices (sw > 600 dp), so they’ll have to make sure their apps work...

Testing Reachy Mini - Hugging Face's Pi powered robot

When I saw Jensen Huang introduce the Reachy Mini at CES, I thought it was a gimmick. His keynote showed this little robot responding to human input, turning its head to look at a TODO list on the wall, sending emails, and turning drawings into architectural renderings with motion.

HuggingFace and Pollen robotics sent me a Reachy Mini to test, and, well, at least if you're looking to replicate that setup in the keynote, it's not, as Jensen put it, "utterly trivial now."

SMT components are getting smaller — but your precision doesn’t have to

We now offer a professional range of magnifying tools designed specifically for PCB inspection and electronics work MAG-GLASSES magnifying Glasses – High magnification. Hands-free operation. Perfect for precise PCB assembly and repair. MAG-GLASS-10, MAG-GLASS-20, MAG-GLASS-30 Mini Magnifiers (×10 / ×20 / ×30). Compact, powerful, and ideal for spotting even the smallest solder joints and micro […]