Cool stuff for Raspberry Pi, Arduino and all electronics hobby projects

Archive for August, 2024

August 30, 2024

Cooler Panel for Vivid Unit

Vivid Unit uses RK3399 SoC, which is a pretty good processor, but is also somewhat known for its high heat generation. RK3399 tends to thermal throttle when performing task that uses CPU/GPU heavily, which limits its ability to reach its full potential.

We just launched “Cooler Panel“, which is an active+passive cooling solution for Vivid Unit. The Aluminum PCB not only acts as a circuit board for driving the mini blower fan, but also works as a huge heatsink for Vivid Unit.

This is how Vivid Unit looks like after mounting this cooler panel on the back:

The diagram below shows how this cooling solution works:

The dedicated software “vcool” will run in the background and keeps monitoring the CPU and GPU temperature, and control the on-board mini blower fan accordingly. You can install the software by simply running:

sudo apt update

sudo apt install vcool

sudo reboot

You may even define your own strategy to drive the fan according to the CPU/GPU temperature, by modifying the /etc/vcool/vcool.stg file.

Retail Price

The retail price for this cooler panel kit is €15.

How to Buy

You can order this cooler panel kit in our e-shop.

Soon you may also be able to order this kit via our resellers/distributors.

More Information

More information about this cooler panel, including how to install the software and assemble the kit, can be found on its product page.

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August 29, 2024

Unlock GPU’s Potential on Vivid Unit

Vivid Unit comes with Debian Linux system installed, and its GPU acceleration was only partially supported by closed-source “libMali” binary blob. Only very limited applications (such as Chrome web browser) can use the hardware acceleration and the glmark2-es2 score was very poor (about 55).

Now we have an upgrade ready, which will upgrade the kernel to 5.15 and install Mesa 21.2.6 into the system. This upgrade will fully unlock the potential of Mali T860 GPU on Vivid Unit, and all applications can benefit from hardware acceleration. After the upgrade, your Vivid Unit will score about 300 in glmark2-es2. It can score even more (about 500) if you test it with external display that has higher refreshing rate.

Vivid Unit glmark2-es2 score

How to upgrade?

Just run this command in your Vivid Unit’s terminal:

curl -sL https://github.com/uugear/vu_install/raw/main/enable_gpu.sh | bash

Alternatively you may use this shorter version:

curl -sL https://bit.ly/ENGPU | bash

After the script finishs, you can reboot your device.

You may run “glxinfo -B” to verify the upgrade, and you should see something like this:

vivid@vivid-unit:~$ glxinfo -B
name of display: :0.0
display: :0 screen: 0
direct rendering: Yes
Extended renderer info (GLX_MESA_query_renderer):
Vendor: Panfrost (0xffffffff)
Device: Mali T860 (Panfrost) (0xffffffff)
Version: 21.2.6
Accelerated: yes
Video memory: 3831MB
Unified memory: yes
Preferred profile: core (0x1)
Max core profile version: 3.1
Max compat profile version: 3.1
Max GLES1 profile version: 1.1
Max GLES[23] profile version: 3.1
OpenGL vendor string: Panfrost
OpenGL renderer string: Mali T860 (Panfrost)
OpenGL core profile version string: 3.1 Mesa 21.2.6 (git-bc7160c025)
OpenGL core profile shading language version string: 1.40
OpenGL core profile context flags: (none)

OpenGL version string: 3.1 Mesa 21.2.6 (git-bc7160c025)
OpenGL shading language version string: 1.40
OpenGL context flags: (none)

OpenGL ES profile version string: OpenGL ES 3.1 Mesa 21.2.6 (git-bc7160c025)
OpenGL ES profile shading language version string: OpenGL ES GLSL ES 3.10

Seeing “Mali T860 (Panfrost)” appear in the result, you know the upgrade was successful.

Benchmark

You may run “glmark2-es2” or “glmark2-es2 –off-screen” to get benchmark.

The actual score may vary depends on the enviroment temperature, cooling situation, capability of power supply etc. However you can expect a score about 300 after such upgrade.

Remarks: please make sure the power supply is good enough to deliver the required current, otherwise the device may reboot during the test.

Remarks: the device will get rather hot during the test, and you may (or may not) need to take extra cooling measures to ensure the device won’t reboot due to overheating.

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