It’s already Friday, and the fifty prize of CNX Software’s Giveaway Week 2024 will be the RT-Thread Vision board equipped with a Renesas RA8D1 Arm Cortex-M85 microcontroller, a camera, an optional LCD display, and a 40-pin GPIO header. The board is used as an evaluation platform for the Renesas RA8D1 MCU and RT-Thread real-time operating system. As its name implies, it’s mainly designed for computer vision applications leveraging the Helium MVE (M-Profile Vector Extension) for digital signal processing (DSP) and machine learning (ML) applications. I haven’t reviewed it myself and instead, received two samples from RT-Thread who sent them to me by mistake, so I’ll give them away here and on the Thai website. But it was reviewed by Supachai who tested the RT-Thread Vision board with OpenMV and ran a few benchmarks last June. The Helium MVE did not seem to be utilized in OpenMV at that time (June [...]

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Seeed Studio has added two members to its XIAO family of tiny MCU boards with the XIAO MG24 and XIAO MG24 Sense boards based on Silicon Labs EFR32MG24 multi-protocol wireless SoC and designed for battery-powered Matter over Thread and Bluetooth LE 5.3 applications. Both 21×17.8 mm USB-C boards feature a 78MHz Silabs MG24 Cortex-M33 microcontroller with 256kB SRAM and 1536KB flash, an additional 4MB SPI flash on-board, and 22 pins and pads for GPIO pins, analog inputs, and power signals, plus a reset button and two LEDs. The “Sense” model adds an analog microphone and a 6-axis IMU sensor. XIAO MG24/MG24 Sense specifications: SoC – Silicon Labs EFR32MG24 (EFR32MG24B220F1536IM48-B) MCU cores Arm Cortex-M33 @ 78.0 MHz with DSP instruction and floating-point unit for user application Arm Cortex-M0+ core for wireless Memory – 256 KB RAM Storage – 1536 KB flash Wireless protocols – Matter, OpenThread, Zigbee, Bluetooth Low Energy 5.3, [...]

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Japanese company KAGA FEI has recently unveiled the incredibly small ES5L15BA1 Bluetooth LE 6.0 and 802.15.4 module based on Nordic Semi nRF54L15 ultra-low-power Cortex-M33 wireless MCU. We had previously covered the u-Blox NORA-B2 which I already found pretty small at 14.3 x 10.4 x 1.9mm, but the ES5L15BA1 module goes a step further measuring just 8.55 x 3.25 x 1.00 mm with an integrated antenna which could make it the world’s smallest Bluetooth LE module. KAGA FEI ES4L15BA1 specifications: SoC – Nordic Semiconductor nRF54L15 MCU cores Arm Cortex-M33 with Arm TrustZone @ 128MHz RISC-V coprocessor for software-defined peripheral Memory – 256KB SRAM Storage – 1.5MB non-volatile memory Wireless Bluetooth 6.0 Data rates – 2Mbps, 1Mbps, 500kbps, 125kbps Features AoA / AoD Channel Sounding 802.15.4 radio for Thread / Zigbee / Matter Nordic Proprietary 2.4 GHz protocol up to 4 Mbps Frequency – 2402 to 2480 MHz +8dBm output power Antenna [...]

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Synaptic has unveiled the SYN4383 and SYN43756(E) high-performance “Veros” SoCs with tri-band Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3/5.4, and an optional 802.15.4 radio. The SYN4383 is an upgrade to SYN4382 SoC that supports 1,200 Mbps 2×2 MIMO Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.4, and 802.15.4 for Zigbee and Thread support. It supports real simultaneous dual-band (RSDB) operation and offers “greater system integration”. The SYN43756(E) is similar but lacks an 802.15.4 radio and RSDB support. SYN4383 “Triple Combo 3” Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.4, 802.15.4 SoC Synaptics Veros SYN4383 key features: Tri-band 2×2 MIMO Wi-Fi 6E (802.11ax) up to 1200 Mbps throughput, RSDB with 2.4 GHz radio and either 5 or 6 GHz radio, and support for legacy 802.11a/b/g/n/ac WiFi Bluetooth 5.4 (Bluetooth 6.0 compatible) with LE Audio, Channel Sounding for accurate positioning 802.15.4 radio for Thread and Zigbee Application-layer support for Matter-compliant security and interoperability Smart Co-Ex for WiFi/Bluetooth coexistence in the 2.4 GHz band [...]

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The NXP RW612 is an Arm Cortex-M33 SoC with three radios, namely WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.4, and 802.15.4 for Thread and Matter connectivity. It also has a small sibling called the RW610 without the 802.15.4 radio. I first came across RW61x chips, when Debashis wrote about the Trimension SR250 UWB chip mentioning it can work with “host processors like NXP’s i.MX, RW61x, and MCX families”. I initially thought it was a typo for the iW612 tri-radio solution introduced in 2022, and the RW612 is indeed similar, but it’s a complete wireless microcontroller/SoC with an Arm Cortex-M33 application core so it can be used independently as a host instead of a companion chip. NXP RW612 and RW610 specifications: MCU sub-system Core – 260 MHz Arm Cortex-M33 with TrustZone-M Memory On-chip 1.2 MB SRAM PSRAM interface for memory expansion Storage – Quad FlexSPI Flash XIP with on-the-fly decryption Peripheral interfaces Up to [...]

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