CNX Software

Arm Cortex-A55/R52 motor control microprocessor for robotics applications.
cnx-software.com/2026/11/11/ren…

@RenesasGlobal RZ/T2N industrial MPU supports up to four-axis motor control and includes PWM timers, encoder interfaces, and trigonometric accelerators. Its two 1.2 GHz Arm Cortex-A55 cores run Linux, while the 800 MHz Cortex-R52 cores handle real-time control. The SoC also integrates a three-port GbE switch with TSN and supports EtherCAT, PROFINET RT/IRT, and EtherNet/IP.

The MPU is supported by the RZ Flexible Software Package (FSP) with Linux 6.12 and Yocto 5.0, and the Eclipse-based e² studio IDE. Renesas also offers an evaluation kit and an inverter board kit for motor control testing.

3rd-gen @Amazon Echo Dot gets replacement PCBA for Home Assistant users.
cnx-software.com/2026/11/11/loc…

LocalDot board replaces one of the two original PCBAs while reusing the existing microphones, speaker, buttons, LEDs, and enclosure, so the device works without relying on Amazon’s cloud services.

The new board combines an ESP32-S3 for WiFi connectivity and device control with an ESP32-P4 for audio processing. It supports the original four-microphone array with beamforming, on-device wake-word detection, and local voice commands through Home Assistant. The device still uses the original Echo Dot enclosure and power adapter. #recycle #circulareconomy

Open-source MCU board simulator to speed up firmware testing.
cnx-software.com/2026/11/10/lab…

Andrii Shylenko’s LabWired is an MIT-licensed MCU firmware simulation core that runs compiled firmware against modeled CPUs and peripherals, captures UART and bus output, register state, and supports repeatable checks in CI.

The simulator works on Arm Cortex-M0+, Cortex-M3, Cortex-M4, Cortex-M7, Cortex-M33 cores, RISC-V architecutre, and Xtensa LX6 and LX7 (some ESP32 parts). It's mostly a CLI application, but there's also a (closed-source) Browser Playground hosted by the company.

KiCad 10 can now be used in a web browser or as an Android app (unofficially).
cnx-software.com/2026/11/10/kic…

We tested the Ziro Designer/ZiroEDA open-source project in Firefox and Chrome web browsers and could import an open-source hardware KiCad project from GitHub to view and edit it.

It doesn't work on phones, but there's another open-source project called "KiCad Android" which we installed as an APK and tested successfully on an Android smartphone. A keyboard and mouse are still recommended.

Raspberry Pi 5-based Home Assistant box for radiant floor heating (RFH) systems.
cnx-software.com/2026/11/10/con…

DomeCtrl’s ControlBox controls thermal valves, hydraulic PWM pumps, and related RFH devices, and can read multiple 1-wire temperature sensors over long cables (>6 m). It also features 32 LED-strip output channels for up to 2 kW output.

It supports Gigabit Ethernet and RS485 wired connectivity, WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 5, a W32-ESP01 header for control via ESPHome, and 433 MHz Tx/Rx.