DDR4 supply/demand stress leads to Raspberry Pi CM4/CM5 price increases

The price of DDR4 memory has increased dramatically in recent months due to limited supply and increased demand for AI workloads. The Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 and 5 (CM4/CM5) are based on LPDDR4 memory, and Raspberry Pi reports that memory costs are roughly 120% higher than they were just a year ago. So they have no choice but to increase the price by $5 to $10 for the CM4 and CM5, as well as the Raspberry Pi 500 keyboard PC. I assume the $200 price tag for the Raspberry Pi 500+ mechanical keyboard PC released last week already includes...

Free Stuff - May 2025

The belated May 2025 recipient for the Great Scott Gadgets Free Stuff Program is Nagamani C Gunjal, a university student who has requested a HackRF One for an academic project that involves research and demonstration of real-world vulnerabilities in consumer and commercial drones by analyzing and manipulating radio communication protocols. Her focus is on ethical hacking and the security testing of drones that operate using RF signals, specifically targeting control signals transmitted between the radio transmitter and onboard radio receiver module of the drone. This project is part of a broader study on UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) security with an...

AAEON GENE-ARH6 – A 3.5-inch subcompact industrial SBC with Intel Core Ultra 200H/U SoC

AAEON’s GENE-ARH6 is a 3.5-inch subcompact industrial SBC built around the Intel Core Ultra 200H/U “Arrow Lake” processors, which delivers up to 96 TOPS AI power when equipped with an Intel Core Ultra 7 255H SoC. The board supports up to 96GB DDR5 memory, and multiple display outputs through HDMI 2.1, DP 2.0, LVDS, and eDP interfaces. Connectivity includes three Ethernet ports, four COM headers, GPIO, SMBus or I2C, and multiple USB ports. Expansion options include M.2 slots for 5G, Wi-Fi 6E CNVi, PCIe Gen4 storage with RAID 0 or 1, and an FPC2 connector for additional PCIe lanes. Other...

ARIES MSRZG3E OSM-compliant SiP with Renesas RZ/G3E MPU targets industrial HMI and Edge AI

ARIES Embedded MSRZG3E is an OSM-compliant system-in-package (SiP) built around the Renesas RZ/G3E MPU, designed for HMI, industrial, medical, and edge AI applications. The Renesas RZ/G3E SoC integrates a quad-core Arm Cortex-A55 CPU, a Cortex-M33 real-time core, and an Ethos-U55 NPU delivering up to 512 GOPS for AI power. Other features include PCIe Gen3, USB 3.2, dual Gigabit LAN, plus CAN FD, UART, I2C, SPI, and ADC. Multimedia support includes dual displays, MIPI-CSI camera input, and H.264/H.265 video codec. The SiP ships with 512 MB to 8 GB LPDDR4 RAM and 4 GB to 64 GB eMMC flash, with commercial...

Name that Ware September 2025

The Ware for September 2025 is shown below.

Thanks to Michael Dwyer for submitting this ware! I originally contemplated only showing the digital board to make the ware more challenging, but the analog part is so chaotically gorgeous I had to share it out of the aesthetic appreciation.

Despite the size and complexity of the system, there is no CPU. There was a day and age where it was fairly common to design systems without one. In many cases, a ROM-based FSM was more economical, offering better performance and consistent timing. This gave them an edge over MCUs when the flexibility afforded...

Winner, Name that Ware August 2025

The Ware for August 2025 is the Superboard II from an Ohio Scientific Challenger 1P. Congrats to Tibor Bartos for naming it. Email me for your prize!

Fogwise AIRbox Q900 – $599 Qualcomm IQ-9075 AI Box delivers up to 200 TOPS of AI performance

Fogwise AIRBox Q900 AI box is an upgrade to the Fogwise Airbox powered by a Qualcomm IQ-9075 SoC with up to 200 TOPS (sparse) of AI performance, 36GB RAM, and 128GB UFS storage. Radxa says its new AI micro-server competes directly against the NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX 16GB, offering cheaper overall system cost, similar performance, and higher efficiency.  Other benefits include Cortex-R52 real-time cores, 2.5GbE networking, and separate GPU, NPU, and DSP. Fogwise AIRBox Q900 specifications: SoC – Qualcomm DragonWing IQ-9075 CPU Octa-core Kryo Gen 6 (Cortex-A78C-based) application cores @ up to 2.36 GHz Quad-ore Cortex-R52 real-time cores @ up...

How to Install LM Studio – Step-by-Step Guide (2025)

LM Studio is a free, open-source desktop application that lets you download, run, and experiment with large language models (LLMs) entirely offline on your Linux machine. Unlike cloud-based AI services, LM Studio gives you complete control over your data—nothing leaves your computer. It supports hundreds of models from Hugging Face and other repositories, including Llama, […]

How to Install Logseq – Step-by-Step Guide (2025)

Logseq is a free, open-source knowledge management and note-taking tool that uses bullet journaling principles and bi-directional linking to help you build a networked thought system. Unlike traditional note-taking apps, Logseq connects ideas across notes, making it ideal for researchers, writers, and developers who need to organize complex information. It stores notes locally in markdown […]

How to Install Frog – Step-by-Step Guide (2025)

Frog is a free, open-source OCR tool that extracts text from screenshots, images, and QR codes. It runs offline on your Linux desktop, making it essential for capturing text from PDFs, videos, or any visual content you can’t copy-paste. Why Should You Install Frog? Frog solves the frustrating problem of text locked in images: Extract […]