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1. Product Description Vending machines, combining modern technology with the idea of convenient shopping, have become essential in our lives. It breaks through the constraints of time and space, providing us with round-the-clock uninterrupted product purchasing services. Whether in busy transportation hubs or quiet residential areas, you can always find its presence. 2. Components: Body Compartment: Made from high-strength, corrosion-resistant metal materials to ensure the stability and durability of the vending machine. The warehouse's interior is well-designed and can be adjusted according to the size of the goods to maximize the use of storage space. Payment System: Integrated with multiple payment methods including coins, bills, card swiping, and mobile payments, satisfying various consumer payment needs. Display and operation: HD touchscreen shows product information and purchase process, simplifying steps to enhance user experience. Product Delivery System: Uses precise mechanics and sensors for accurate, fast delivery to the outlet after payment. Communication Management System: Enables real-time monitoring, sales data analysis, and remote fault diagnosis and repair of vending machines via wireless network. Business Logic Topology The vending machine's main control system acts as its operational core, akin to its "brain", overseeing and coordinating each module's functions. With the ongoing development of IoT, big data, and AI, automation has become an inevitable trend in the vending machine industry. This has led to new demands for the main control systems, focusing on: Core Controller: It is essential to choose a stable, reliable, and high-performance core controller to ensure the overall logic control and data processing capabilities of vending machines. Device Stability: It requires 24/7 uninterrupted operation, necessitating high stability and durability in both hardware and software. Specifically, the software system should have fault self-check and automatic recovery capabilities. Scalability and Compatibility: To meet various scenarios and demands, the main control system of vending machines needs to be scalable. As products evolve, the main control system should be compatible with new hardware and software standards. Payment Security: As payment methods diversify, ensuring the security of the payment process has become increasingly important. Vending machines need to guard against various security threats, such as data breaches and fraudulent activities. AI Integration: Vending machines need to have intelligent recognition capabilities and data analysis abilities to recommend products based on users' purchasing preferences. FET3568-C system on module(SoM) from Forlinx Embedded Systems offers high performance, low power consumption, and rich functionality, making it ideal for vending machines for these reasons: Powerful Performance: FET3568-C SoM is based on the Rockchip RK3568 processor, which features a quad-core 64-bit Cortex-A55 architecture with a clock speed of up to 2.0GHz. It supports lightweight edge AI computing and delivers strong computational and processing capabilities. Such performance meets the high demands of logic control and data processing for vending machine control systems, ensuring efficient and stable operation of the vending machines. Rich Interfaces and Expandability: The FET3568-C SoM offers 3 x PCIe slots, 4 x USB ports, 3 x SATA3.0 controllers, and 2 x Gigabit Ethernet ports. It supports 5 x display interfaces including HDMI2.0, eDP, LVDS, RGB Parallel, and MIPI-DSI, with up to three simultaneous display outputs. These interfaces provide great convenience for expanding the functionality of vending machines, enabling customized development to meet various scenarios and requirements. Multi-OS Support: FET3568-C SoM supports multiple operating systems including Linux, Android 11, Ubuntu, and Debian 11. This flexibility allows developers to choose the most suitable operating system according to actual needs, thereby simplifying the software development process and improving development efficiency. Meanwhile, Forlinx Embedded has made numerous optimizations in software, such as introducing a 4G watchdog process. This design ensures that the 4G communication function can automatically recover after a disconnection, significantly improving the stability and reliability of the vending machine's network communication. Advanced Security: In terms of security, the FET3568-C hardware can integrate encryption chips and trusted root modules. These hardware-level security measures provide solid protection for system information security. The ability to verify software integrity and authenticity from the hardware level effectively prevents the intrusion of malicious software and the risk of system tampering. High Stability: FET3568-C has undergone rigorous environmental temperature testing, stress testing, and long-term stability operation testing, ensuring stable and reliable performance in various terminals and operational environments. This is crucial for vending machines that require 24/7 uninterrupted operation, as it can significantly reduce failure rates and enhance user experience. In summary, the FET3568-C SoM not only features robust performance and stability, but also offers flexible operating system options, optimized software design, rich interfaces, and powerful expandability. These features make it an ideal choice for vending machine control solutions, capable of meeting the evolving needs of the industry.

An intelligent service robot is a robot that integrates advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, perception technology, and machine learning. Its purpose is to provide a variety of services and support to meet the needs of people in daily life, business, and industrial fields. These robots can sense the environment, understand speech and images, perform tasks, and interact naturally and intelligently with human users. Areas of Application: Business Services: It includes services such as reception, shopping assistance, and information inquiry, and can be used in places such as shopping malls, hotels, and exhibitions. Health Care: It provides services such as drug delivery, patient companionship and health monitoring for hospitals and nursing homes. Educational Assistance: It is used in educational scenarios to provide auxiliary teaching, answering questions and other services. Family Services: Provide cleaning, handling, home control and other services to improve the quality of life. The hardware structure of the service robot includes several key components. The functions and roles of these hardware components are as follows: Controls: As the core of the robot, the control device is responsible for receiving and processing the data provided by the sensors, executing the corresponding algorithms, and issuing instructions to the driving device to achieve the various functions of the robot. High-performance, low-power ARM chips are often chosen for the control unit, ensuring that the robot has sufficient computational and storage capacity. Drive unit: This includes motors and drivers, which are used to execute the motion and action commands of the robot. The motor is responsible for providing power, while the driver converts electronic signals into mechanical motion. This part is the motion system of the robot, which determines the execution of actions such as walking, turning, and the mechanical arm. Camera: As the ''eyes'' of the robot, the camera is used to capture images and facial information of the external environment. These image data can be used for tasks such as environmental perception, navigation, target recognition, allowing the robot to better understand and adapt to the surrounding environment. Sensors: Sensors provide the robot with various perceptual abilities, including vision, touch, hearing, and distance sensing, among others. Angle sensors and current sensors reflect the robot's own state, while temperature sensors, laser sensors, ultrasonic sensors, infrared sensors, etc. are used to collect external environmental information, allowing the robot to perceive and understand the surrounding situation more comprehensively. Display and Audio: As an important part of human-computer interaction, display and audio devices realize the presentation and interaction of user interface. The touch display provides an intuitive graphical user interface, while the voice interaction system enables the robot to understand the user's instructions and respond accordingly, thus better communicating with the human user. Folinx Embedded has launched the FET3588J-C SoM as the main control platform for this intelligent inspection robot product to meet customers' needs for machine vision and high-speed interfaces. FET3588J-C SoM is developed and designed based on Rockchip's RK3588 processor, integrating Cortex-A74-core-6 + 4-core Cortex-A55 architecture. The main frequency of A76 core is up to 2.4GHz, and the main frequency of A55 core is up to 1.8GHz, which can efficiently process the information collected by patrol inspection; The built-in NPU with comprehensive computing power of up to 6 TOPS greatly improves the calculation speed and energy efficiency of neural networks,providing robots with powerful AI learning and edge computing capabilities, enabling them to intelligently adapt to different work scenarios. RK3588J supports a 48-megapixel ISP3.0, which enables lens shading correction, 2D/3D noise reduction, sharpening and haze removal, fish eye correction, gamma correction, wide dynamic range contrast enhancement, and other effects. This significantly enhances the image quality. With abundant interface resources, it meets the robot's access requirements for various sensors. More sensor access helps the device to collect environment data more comprehensively. This platform also supports external storage interfaces such as SATA3.0, USB3.0, allowing data to be locally stored. It also supports wireless communication methods such as WiFi, 4G, and 5G, making it convenient for users to query device information on mobile devices. The rich functionality enables robots to perceive and understand the surrounding environment more comprehensively. It also has high stability. The platform’s SoM has undergone rigorous environmental temperature and pressure tests, and can operate for long periods in harsh industrial environments ranging from -40°C to +85°C, adapting to applications in various scenarios.

Introduction: In March of this year, I attended the Embedded World Exhibition, which focuses on embedded systems. During my visit, I explored the Forlinx booth. Forlinx is renowned for developing System on Modules (SoMs) and Evaluation Boards for industrial PCs. I previously acquired an evaluation board from Forlinx last year. This year, I am excited to present the new Forlinx OK3588-C board in this video. Presenting the OK3588-C Development Board (featuring a Rockchip RK3588) Today, we will explore the Forlinx OK3588-C board. Allow me to switch off the camera and transition to the desktop view. Here, I have the hardware manual for the OK3588 board. If you require this hardware manual or the necessary SDKs to develop software for this board, please contact Forlinx, and they will provide you with the required resources. SoM Appearance Diagram: The evaluation board comprises two primary components. Firstly, this is the physical appearance. Here, we have the System on Module (SoM) mounted on a carrier board, which connects all peripherals to the SoM. Let's begin by examining the System on Module. This module includes the Rockchip RK3588 main processor, two DRAM ICs, and eMMC storage for non-volatile data. Various components on the module generate the required voltages for the chip's operation. The Rockchip RK3588 is a robust processor. RK3588 Description: Displayed here is a block diagram of the RK3588. It features a dual-cluster core configuration. One cluster consists of a quad-core Cortex-A76 processor clocked at 2.6 GHz, and the second cluster includes a quad-core Cortex-A55 processor, clocked at either 1.5 or 1.8 GHz. This setup allows for power-saving capabilities by disabling the A76 cores when full performance is not required. Another notable feature is the high-performance Neural Processing Unit (NPU), which is advantageous for tasks related to artificial intelligence and machine learning. In the future, I hope to demonstrate the NPU's capabilities. The chip also includes a multimedia processor supporting various video decoders, even up to 8K resolution, and an embedded Mali-G GPU. For external memory interfaces, it has two eMMC controllers and support for LPDDR4 and LPDDR5. Additionally, it includes standard system peripherals, such as USB OTG 3.1, PCIe interfaces, Gigabit Ethernet, GPIO, SPI, and I²C. Development Board Interface Description: The carrier board includes numerous peripherals. There is a 12V power supply, a power switch, a reset switch, up to five camera connectors, microphone and speaker connectors, USB 2.0 host, and two USB 3.1 OTG ports. These USB ports can function as either hosts or devices. It also features two HDMI ports (one input and one output), a real-time clock with a battery, eDP ports, ADC connectors, an SD card slot, a fan connector, and M.2 slots for Wi-Fi and cellular cards. The board also includes two full-size PCIe connectors, user buttons, CAN interfaces, an RS485 interface, a USB-to-serial adapter, and two Gigabit Ethernet ports. The overall setup is impressive. Operation: Let's power on the board. I have also connected a PCIe card to a free slot. Before proceeding, let's open the serial terminal to monitor the output. The board is booting, and the kernel is starting successfully. Currently, we are running a minimal BusyBox root file system. In a future video, I will demonstrate how to build a custom Linux for this board. For now, this setup is sufficient. We are running kernel version 5.10.66, built for ARM64 architecture. The board has eight processors, consisting of different Cortex-A cores. The available memory is 3.6 GB, with 155 MB currently in use. Background processes and the Mali GPU likely consume some memory. We have eight I²C buses available, with one connected to the display connector for Display Data Channel (DDC) management. The eMMC storage has multiple partitions. The board features seven GPIO chips and eight I²C connectors. Lastly, I have connected a PCIe card, and the system detects it successfully. The card operates at PCIe Gen 1 speed with a link width of x1. Higher-end cards could achieve link speeds up to 8 GT/s and wider link widths. This concludes the initial demonstration of the OK3588 board. In future videos, I will compile software for this board and provide more in-depth coverage of this compelling embedded system platform. I'm excited to showcase the full potential of the Forlinx OK3588-C development board and how it can be leveraged for a wide range of innovative projects. Stay tuned as I delve deeper into the capabilities of this board and explore how it can be leveraged for various applications.

Embedded systems play a key role in many applications, from smart home devices to industrial control systems. To ensure these systems continue to operate efficiently and maintain the latest functionality, firmware upgrades and remote maintenance become critical. In this article, we will explore how to perform firmware upgrades and remote maintenance of embedded systems. The importance of firmware upgrades Firmware upgrades for embedded systems are to fix vulnerabilities, add new features, improve performance and ensure system stability. Since these systems are often distributed across various geographical locations, remote firmware upgrades can significantly reduce maintenance costs and reduce downtime. Advantages of remote maintenance Cost-Effectiveness: Remote maintenance reduces the need for on-site maintenance, saving time and money. Maintenance personnel can diagnose and repair problems without having to visit the site. Quick response: Remote maintenance allows for quick response to issues. Maintenance personnel can take action quickly without having to wait to arrive on site. Regular maintenance: Remote maintenance also allows for regular inspection and maintenance of embedded systems to prevent potential problems from arising. Implementation of firmware upgrades and remote maintenance The following are general steps for firmware upgrades and remote maintenance of embedded systems: Firmware Development: First, firmware upgrades must be considered during the development phase. The development team should design firmware with remote upgrade capabilities. Remote connections: Embedded systems must be able to establish remote connections to external servers. This usually involves network configuration and security considerations. Remote server: Create a remote server to store firmware upgrade files and maintenance tools. This server should be reliable and have good data security. Firmware Signing: To ensure the integrity of firmware, firmware should be digitally signed to verify that they are trusted. Automated processes: Set up automated processes to trigger and execute firmware upgrades. This can be scheduled, on-demand, or manually triggered by the maintenance team. Monitoring and reporting: When performing remote maintenance, monitoring the performance and status of your system is critical. Also, make sure to generate reports to document maintenance activities. Rollback plan: Even if something goes wrong while doing a firmware upgrade, a rollback plan is needed to restore the system to a previous state. Security: Ensure communications and data are encrypted during transmission to protect systems from potential threats. Case study: Upgrading smart home devices remotely Let's say you develop a smart home device that can be controlled via a mobile app. You need to implement firmware upgrade and remote maintenance functions. Firmware Development: During the development phase, firmware is designed for your device that supports remote firmware upgrades. Cloud server: A cloud server was established to store firmware upgrade files and maintenance tools. Remote connection: Your smart home devices can establish a connection with the cloud server via WiFi or cellular network. Firmware Signing: All firmware is digitally signed to ensure its integrity and trustworthiness. Automated processes: Users can trigger firmware upgrades in the mobile app, or you can set up scheduled upgrades on a cloud server. Monitoring and reporting: The cloud server monitors the status of the equipment and generates maintenance reports.