Our sole product for the week carries a lot of weight on its shoulders. And it is more than capable of performing! Favorited Favorite 0 Hello everyone and welcome back to another Friday Product Post here at SparkFun Electronics! This week we have a single new product to present to you, and it’s a big one! We originally announced this board on Tuesday at Embedded World with our friends at Renesas. This board combines a Renesas RA6M5 microcontroller for exceptional speed and efficiency with the familiar Feather form factor. Perfect for real-time applications, the Thing Plus handles demanding ..read more

Organizations across industries want to categorize and extract insights from high volumes of documents of different formats. Manually processing these documents to classify and extract information remains expensive, error prone, and difficult to scale. Advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) have given rise to intelligent document processing (IDP) solutions that can automate the document classification, and create a cost-effective classification layer capable of handling diverse, unstructured enterprise documents. Categorizing documents is an important first step in IDP systems. It ..read more

We know L-band is the best frequency for GPS, but why? Follow along on our journey through history today as we discuss how satellite navigation as we know it came to be. by Member #1882265 April 11, 2024 5:31 pm UTC 1 Favorited Favorite 0 We mention L-band a lot here at SparkFun, from our RTK Facet L-band to our RTK mosaic-x5, which boasts triband reception. Recently on the blog, we discussed the basics of what it is, but didn’t get to why we use it – we saved that for today! Buckle in for a history lesson. L-band has been crucial in the development of GPS, helping to transform it from a mil ..read more

In January 2024, Amazon SageMaker launched a new version (0.26.0) of Large Model Inference (LMI) Deep Learning Containers (DLCs). This version offers support for new models (including Mixture of Experts), performance and usability improvements across inference backends, as well as new generation details for increased control and prediction explainability (such as reason for generation completion and token level log probabilities). LMI DLCs offer a low-code interface that simplifies using state-of-the-art inference optimization techniques and hardware. LMI allows you to apply tensor parallelism ..read more

This blog post is co-written with Caroline Chung from Veoneer. Veoneer is a global automotive electronics company and a world leader in automotive electronic safety systems. They offer best-in-class restraint control systems and have delivered over 1 billion electronic control units and crash sensors to car manufacturers globally. The company continues to build on a 70-year history of automotive safety development, specializing in cutting-edge hardware and systems that prevent traffic incidents and mitigate accidents. Automotive in-cabin sensing (ICS) is an emerging space that uses a combinati ..read more

With the widespread adoption of generative artificial intelligence (AI) solutions, organizations are trying to use these technologies to make their teams more productive. One exciting use case is enabling natural language interactions with relational databases. Rather than writing complex SQL queries, you can describe in plain language what data you want to retrieve or manipulate. The large language model (LLM) can understand the intent behind your natural language input and data topography and automatically generate the appropriate SQL code. This allows analysts to be more productive by not h ..read more

With Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock, you can securely connect foundation models (FMs) in Amazon Bedrock to your company data for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). Access to additional data helps the model generate more relevant, context-specific, and accurate responses without retraining the FMs. In this post, we discuss two new features of Knowledge Bases for Amazon Bedrock specific to the RetrieveAndGenerate API: configuring the maximum number of results and creating custom prompts with a knowledge base prompt template. You can now choose these as query options alongside the search t ..read more

For a special Tuesday product release, we are pleased to announce our newest Thing+ development board, featuring the RA6M5 from Renesas! Favorited Favorite 0 Hello everyone, and welcome to a special Tuesday Product Announcement from us here at SparkFun Electronics! Today, we are pleased to announce our newest Thing Plus Development board, this time featuring the RA6M5 200MHz Arm® Cortex®-M33 module from our friends at Renesas! The SparkFun RA6M5 Thing+ is a high-performance, Qwiic-enabled pocket development board perfect for real-time applications. [embedded content] Clocking in at 200MHz ..read more

Unlocking accurate and insightful answers from vast amounts of text is an exciting capability enabled by large language models (LLMs). When building LLM applications, it is often necessary to connect and query external data sources to provide relevant context to the model. One popular approach is using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to create Q&A systems that comprehend complex information and provide natural responses to queries. RAG allows models to tap into vast knowledge bases and deliver human-like dialogue for applications like chatbots and enterprise search assistants. In this ..read more

This is a guest post co-authored by Shravan Kumar and Avirat S from Gramener. Gramener, a Straive company, contributes to sustainable development by focusing on agriculture, forestry, water management, and renewable energy. By providing authorities with the tools and insights they need to make informed decisions about environmental and social impact, Gramener is playing a vital role in building a more sustainable future. Urban heat islands (UHIs) are areas within cities that experience significantly higher temperatures than their surrounding rural areas. UHIs are a growing concern because they ..read more