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All posts tagged vivid unit

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.

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.

 

 

Vivid Unit Now in Stock and Start Shipping!

We have good news: Vivid Unit is now in stock, and we start shipping those back-orders TODAY!

The day comes earlier than we thought, and TODAY is the day 😀

We are Seeking for Reviewers for Vivid Unit!

Are you passionate about trying out innovative products and sharing your honest opinions with your audience? We’re on the lookout for enthusiastic content creators (e.g. bloggers, YouTubers etc.) to review our newly announced product Vivid Unit. We currently do not have the final product in stock, however we have limited amount of Vivid Unit beta prototypes that are almost indentical to the final product, and we would like to give them away for honest reviews.

Vivid Unit is palm-sized single board computer with 5.5″ touch screen. We believe your unique perspective and engaging content would be a perfect fit for showcasing the benefits of Vivid Unit to your audience.

Vivid Unit on hand

If you’re interested in featuring Vivid Unit on your platform, please reach out to us at . Since we only have limited number of beta prototpe for this giveaway, we could only choose some of you as reviewers of Vivid Unit. If you have been chosen, we will send you a Vivid Unit beta prototype and provide you any additional information you may need.

Thank you for your kind consideration, and we look forward to the possibility of collaborating with you!

New Product & New Milestone: Vivid Unit!

We have not released any new product for a long time, and today we finally can announce proudly that we have a new product: Vivid Unit!

Vivid Unit

This is a brand new product line, and we have invested so much on it. Vivid Unit is a palm-sized single board computer with 5.5″ touch screen. It is our first fully open sourced product: schematic, software, mechanical designs are all open sourced.

Vivid Unit

This lovely little device features RK3399 CPU, 4GB RAM, 32GB eMMC storage, 5.5″ 1280×720 touchscreen, speaker, microphone, WiFi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, USB (3&2), HDMI, headphone jack, M.2 NVME connector, MIPI CSI and various other interfaces.

Oh, did I mention it is also a PoE device?

Vivid Unit PoE

Full technical specification of Vivid Unit can be found on its product page.

Retail Price

Vivid Unit has a very friendly retail price tag: €99!

We hope more people can have it 🙂

How to Buy

At the moment we do not have Vivid Unit in stock yet. However it is possible to place back-order of Vivid Unit in our e-shop. We expect to start shipping Vivid Unit orders in about 3 weeks.

Soon you may also be able to order Vivid Unit via our resellers/distributors.

More Information

We have created a dedicated website for Vivid Unit. This is a wiki based website and we hope the community will contribute more content about Vivid Unit there!

Join Waitlist We will inform you when the product arrives in stock. Please leave your valid email address below.