17 ms·

The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+

• IshKebab 9y ago
  I don't know. I think I take the Hackaday view that the software and community is way more important than the hardware in this field, and Raspberry Pi has it all.
  • FullyFunctional 9y ago
    It completely depends on what you want to do with it. If it involves a some quirky sensors etc then certainly. If the IO is simple and the workload is more traditional server style, then the Raspberry isn't particularity interesting.
• leggomylibro 9y ago
  Wow, they're down to $50 now? I remember seeing these and thinking they looked cool, but hard to justify at (iirc) $80. The ODroid-C2 is also mentioned; those look nice. That company also sells raw EMMC modules as an alternative option to microSD cards, which seems like it could be useful. Does anyone know if those EMMC modules are less likely to spuriously corrupt themselves? I haven't run them for any length of time, but it looks like an ODroid with EMMC would be on a similar price point.
  • codetrotter 9y ago
    I own an ODROID-XU3. Haven’t used it for a while now but back when I did — including using it as desktop computer for several months — I did not have any data corruption issues with the eMMC module. Meanwhile with Raspberry Pi I’ve had several instances of data corruption with different SD cards.
    • epalmer 9y ago
      The eMMC for me is worth the price. Too many corrupt SD cards.
      • StudentStuff 9y ago
        I've only ever had corruption issues on Raspi's, versus with the OrangePi's we have in production at customers sites, I have yet to see any mSD card issues. We do screen our Evo+ mSD cards pretty aggressively for issues though! One nice thing about Allwinner based SBCs is the strong development community that mainlines support for their chips in short order. Few other chip vendors have mainline support, which makes their boards abandonware in short order.
        • geerlingguy 9y ago
          This is a common theme in these SBC threads, but I've also had a pretty good experience with microSD cards in the Pi—one time I had corruption after unplugging the Pi. Two things that are immensely helpful if you want a stable experience with the Pi: 1. A good power supply. 2. A good microSD card. Most cheap power supplies (like those you get free with a phone) don't supply 2A or more consistently, which the newer Pis need to run stable. And as far as microSD cards go, [I wrote an article on that last week](https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2018/raspberry-pi-microsd-card-performance-comparison-2018); https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2018/raspberry-pi-microsd-... there's a huge gulf between the best and worst cards, even from name-brand manufacturers.
          • flyinghamster 9y ago
            Indeed, I've had nothing but good experiences with Samsung EVO and SanDisk Ultra cards. BTW, your link seems to end up on your front page, rather than the card comparison article.
            • geerlingguy 9y ago
              Oops, it gets cut off if I paste the whole thing. Here’s a [text link](https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2018/raspberry-pi-microsd-card-performance-comparison-2018 https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2018/raspberry-pi-microsd-...) instead.
    • saythebaby 9y ago
      any interest in selling your XU3? I'd be happy to take it off your hands
  • khedoros1 9y ago
    The Tinkerboard was introduced about a year ago for $60.
• steeve 9y ago
  There are plenty of boards that are much more powerful than the RPi and have comparable price (ODROID-C2 comes to mind). But the devil is in wether or not they run the mainline Linux kernel. I have several ODROID-C2 that I have replaced with RPis because of the poor hardware support (Amlogic kernel was way late at the time, may still is). Stick to mainline.
  • BlackLotus89 9y ago
    I got my odroid c2 running with the rc kernel for a while now. There were some problems at first, but it now runs my home automation and DHCP server without a hitch. I'm running archlinuxarm btw but I will soon try voidlinux as well on it (I tried kodi as well and it kinda could play h256 in software, but I now stick to my raspberry pi as a media center)
    • toopsss 9y ago
      You’ve gotta mean hardware. There is no way that arm chip could do h265 at any useful speed. The amlogic in the c2 can do hardware h265 (not hdr) and it works with Kodi. I use one this way and have been overall pleased with it though especially since I didn’t buy the board for this in the first place. It was a repurpose. I would only get something with 10 bit these days if media is the primary concern.
      • BlackLotus89 9y ago
        Nope I meant software I don't think h265 hardware decoding is in mainline yet (could be wrong thought) And yes I explicity tested software decoding and my 720p sample played without noticeable delay/framedrop and 1080p was uhm kinda running.
    • IntelMiner 9y ago
      The C2 is unfortunately difficult to find much documentation on. Things like kernel configuration etc for mainline releases are sorely lacking I'm going to try building the latest 4.17 RC later today to see if I can't get it to boot. But I didn't get very far a few months ago
• robhu 9y ago
  Also of note: Tinkerboard has b/g/n 2.4Ghz wifi. Pi 3B+ also has 802.11ac 5Ghz wifi. Tinkerboard has a superior sound chip, supporting 24-bit, 192kHz audio. Pi 3B+ has a totally garbage mono only analog sound (and presumably fine HDMI digital sound).
  • pishpash 9y ago
    RPi is garbage hardware propped up by overcompensated OS support. Sooner or later you regret putting the effort in because it's just mediocre at everything.
    • crankylinuxuser 9y ago
      Even though you're gray (modded down), there's significant issues with the RPi. Here's some. 1. Boot is still a mystery. It boots from the GPU with "magic registers", then passes to the CPU...? 2. There's no specs available for the GPIOs. 5v tolerant? SPI max speed? Pullups/downs? Nada.. 3. DRM baked in. RasPi foundation cheaped out on the MPEG2 decoder, and you need to pay $5 to enable hardware decoding. 4. Needs mystery black box kernel blobs. 5. No power management. No low voltage detection. Hope and pray method 6. Everything is on the USB. Bandwidth ends up sucking. They could have did ethernet on SPI.
      • jiggunjer 9y ago
        1. boot is a mystery with all commercial SoCs? Show me one that doesn't have an untouchable binary blob in onboard memory. 3. MPEG2 decoding can be done with software just fine? 4. Again, show me one without driver blobs. This is mostly the fault of the chip makers and not the RPi foundation. 5. Power management is a kernel feature? 6. agree
        • makomk 9y ago
          There's nothing mysterious about the Allwinner boot process at least. While there's an on-chip boot ROM that can't be modified, it just loads a chunk of code into SRAM from the boot device and jumps to it at the highest privilege level supported by the hardware. It's not uncommon for everything after the boot ROM to be 100% open source code. That simply isn't possible on the Pi, which is why Debian doesn't support it out the box. Also, the lack of power management on the Pi is mostly a hardware limitation. The hardware simply doesn't support any kind of software-controlled shutdown or suspend.
• LyalinDotCom 9y ago
  Their website is confusing on this part, does this support Windows IoT Core as the OS?
  • khedoros1 9y ago
    I don't see any mention of Win10Iot on Asus' site, and I don't see any mention of the Tinker Board on Microsoft's Win10Iot site (although they do say that the listed hardware isn't an exhaustive list).
  • shakna 9y ago
    > 22. What OS does the tinker board support? > Currently Debian is the only available OS for tinker board. [0] [0] Tinkerboard FAQ (PDF): http://dlcdnet.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/Linux/Tinker_Board_2GB/FAQ-Tinkerboard_20170425.pdf http://dlcdnet.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/Linux/Tinker_Board_2GB/F...
• X-Istence 9y ago
  Unfortunately this is not aarch64. There is something to be said for having a single instruction set, makes package building and distribution simpler.
  • simias 9y ago
    First thing I checked, I've been looking for a small and cheap aarch64 board for hacking around. Do you know of one? I guess as long as they won't ship more than a couple GB of RAM they won't bother with it.
    • Zekio 9y ago
      Pine64 are pretty good for CPU and RAM, but you will be loosing out on the great support things like Raspberry Pi SBCs have Edit: forgot to mention Pine64 starts at like 15 usd for 512Mb Ram or 19 usd for 1GB and like 29USd for 2Gb also from 19 usd up they have gigabit(can be hard to max out due to various issues IIRC, check forum), and the high end version is still cheaper than a RPi3 IIRC
      • lunchables 9y ago
        Anecdote warning: As the happy owner of quite a few RPi, I had a really poor experience with the Rock64 (I know, it's not technically a Pine64). Multiple SD cards, mulitple power supplies and I can't get it to run for more than 5 minutes at a time without locking up. Doesn't appear to be a thermal issue as far as I can tell. Of course I probably just got a bad board, unfortunately after multiple emails I can't get a response from their customer service. I'm ready to just throw it in the trash. Really disppointed because I really just wanted an RPi with usb 3.0 and gigaibit ethernet, it seemed perfect. edit: tried both armbian and android
        • X-Istence 9y ago
          I've got a Rock64 on order, I'll be interested to see what my experience is with it.
        • 9y ago
• dtx1 9y ago
  I think the main issues with all of these rasbi alternatives is the software. As ... quirky ... as the rasbi is, the software support and optimisation is excellent. There are several speed comparisons on youtube where the rasbi beats a lot of the competition through sheer software optimisation. Honestly, without complete Upstream Kernel support and Open Sourcing of all necessary drivers, none of these Boards is really useful.
  • voltagex_ 9y ago
    Software can be fixed by a large enough number of developers and users. Where the Raspberry Pi wins is community. I've got so many other boards but none of them work quite as well as the Pi.
    • StudentStuff 9y ago
      Mainline kernel support is a big big issue, and it can't always be fixed by the community. There are a number of well supported Allwinner boards out there at very competitive prices though, we use them in production due to their price, lack of mSD corruption issues, and bandwidth (all the USB/Ethernet ports are directly wired on the OrangePi PC+, no bottlenecking like on the Raspi).
    • userbinator 9y ago
      Where the Raspberry Pi wins is community. From what I've observed, the community feels almost like a walled garden in terms of mentality: if you're doing what everyone else is doing, it's great. If you try to go beyond that, don't be surprised if you encounter hostility or discouragement. By "go beyond that", I mean simple things like trying to find the electrical specifications of the GPIO pins. The comments here are worth reading, for example: http://tansi.info/rp/interfacing5v.html http://tansi.info/rp/interfacing5v.html
  • StudentStuff 9y ago
    Allwinner based boards have mainline kernel support for most features, they're one of a handful of vendors that has mainline support (primarily due to community efforts). I personally like the OrangePi boards due to price & reliability, easy to set and forget without worrying about mSD corruption. http://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page http://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Page is pretty useful for a list of boards and info.
• jagger27 9y ago
  I've been looking at the new Rockchip RK3399 based devboards. Of note is the $99 Rock960[1]. The major draws for me are the DisplayPort support, so I can use it with my iPad 3/4 display controller board, M.2 PCIe 4-lane, eMMC, 802.11ac. Firefly makes a similar one as well. [2] 1. https://www.96boards.org/product/rock960/ https://www.96boards.org/product/rock960/ 2. http://shop.t-firefly.com/goods.php?id=45 http://shop.t-firefly.com/goods.php?id=45
  • hipboi 9y ago
    Hi, Jagger Founder of Vamrs, ROCK960 manufacturer here, iPad 3/4 display is eDP interface and you can drive with RK3399 directly, you don't need DP and controller board. ROCK960 doesn't export eDP due to the small size, ROCK960 EE version has eDP exported.
  • linuxlizard 9y ago
    I wonder what wifi chipset it has. Supports 802.11ac which I need. I should investigate this board, see if it allows monitor mode (low level wifi packet access). The RasPiB+ supports 802.11ac but the Broadcom based wifi doesn't allow monitor mode.
    • linuxlizard 9y ago
      "The wifi/bt module used on ROCK960s is AP6356s from AMPAK Technology." https://www.96boards.org/documentation/consumer/rock960/hardware-docs/hardware-user-manual.md.html#key-components https://www.96boards.org/documentation/consumer/rock960/hard... "AMPAK combines Broadcom Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips in single modules." https://wikidevi.com/wiki/AMPAK https://wikidevi.com/wiki/AMPAK Broadcom + Linux is a very mixed bag. Would require more investigation.
      • my123 9y ago
        The Raspberry Pi uses Broadcom WiFi and Bluetooth chips too. You need to install the linux-firmware package though.
  • imtringued 9y ago
• andrewstuart 9y ago
  Whether or not ever more powerful Raspberry Pi computers is a good thing depends on why you are using them. If you're wanting to put it to some practical application then probably more power is better. If, like me, it's a hobby, and you enjoy the idea of tiny machines, and the challenge of pushing a computer to do things a resource constrained environment, then tiny and powerful machines like RPi that can run full Linux distros are no more interesting than any other computer. There's nothing particularly interesting about loading and running Linux. So for the hobbyist wanting to be challenged, tiny machines/CPUs like the esp8266 and esp32 are where the fun is really at. It's a strange inversion because for 40 years I've always found that the most interesting computer is one that is more powerful than anything else - not so now when pursuing that old school feel.
  • vardump 9y ago
    > So for the hobbyist wanting to be challenged, tiny machines/CPUs like the esp8266 and esp32 are where the fun is really at. While I agree with you, ESP32 is over 1000 times more powerful than C64 and has more RAM than unexpanded Amiga 500. (Can't wait when my ESP32 arrives in mail soon. :-)) Doom for ESP32 (running from RAM connected over SPI of all things...!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gb_JFDa0AIo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gb_JFDa0AIo
    • andrewstuart 9y ago
      True, although I'm not saying that the mentioned chips have the power of 1970's CPU's, only that their unique capabilities/configurations make them more interesting and fun to play with than a Raspberry Pi for example (for my purposes, which is fun). For example the esp32 only has 520 KiB SRAM - that imposes constraints.
    • pjmlp 9y ago
      I am with you on that one, the ESP32 is my favorite tiny machine. Just like you said we did wonders back in the Atari, Amiga, MS-DOS days. Thanks for the video.
    • ahazred8ta 9y ago
• jacquesm 9y ago
  With that network speed it looks as if mounting a remote / is a good option.
• JD557 9y ago
  I actually won a Tinker Board recently and was disappointed to find out that, unlike the Raspberry Pi, it has no composite port. I guess that's something to be expected, it's probably not a very used feature, but I really enjoy being able to play old video games on a CRT, as they were meant to be played.
• bsder 9y ago
  Is there a reason why everybody just HAS to stick to the RPi's when the BeagleBone Black/Green/Blue/etc. are: 1) Far more open (you can get documentation and chip supply to build your own BeagleBone) 2) No more expensive 3) Mainline Debian
  • pritambaral 9y ago
    1) Is actually more expensive than RPi 3s; and 2) Hasn't been updated in a while; thus 3) Lower RAM; 4) Lower perf;
    • bsder 9y ago
      > 1) Is actually more expensive than RPi 3s; and The RPi people quote this incessantly casually leaving out the fact that the BeagleBone already includes 4GB eMMC (a uSD card is at least $5) > 3) Lower RAM; > 4) Lower perf; Less RAM but FASTER RAM. RPi3 is DDR2 vs BeagleBone Black's DDR3. So, between the eMMC being much faster than uSD and the faster RAM (and the Ethernet on the BBB is way faster), I suspect that the BeagleBone Black probably performs better for most workloads. In addition, people just blithely skip past the whole closed nature of the Broadcom SoC. If you are serious about creating a product ever shipping in real quantities, that's a killer. It disappoints me greatly that people never seem to have a genuinely good answer for this when I ask.
      • throwaway2048 9y ago
        RPI has mainline kernel support for all its components, pretty much every other ARM devices has at least a closed source GPU driver, meaning you are going to be stuck on some old kernel forever eventually.
        • bsder 9y ago
          RPI3 was still "blob"-bed as of about a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13396625 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13396625 Have they finally succeeded in pulling all the blob out yet?
• dtx1 9y ago
  Has anyone got any experience with this one? http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G151505170472 http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code... I'm thinking about buying two of them and using them as a NAS with offsite mirroring for critical data/important documents.
  • dogma1138 9y ago
    If you are building NAS for critical data just get a proper NAS board. If you don’t want to go for an embedded X86 then this one is a good option it comes with ECC memory and decent enough crypto acceleration for full encryption. https://kobol.io/helios4/ https://kobol.io/helios4/
    • dorfsmay 9y ago
      Or use S3 or equivalent. Who will know how how to take care of your personal NAS when you're dead?
• digi_owl 9y ago
  The tinkerboard, being backed by a big name like Asus, seems to at least have as good a distribution network as the RPi has built up. Many of the alternative boards, for all their improvements over he RPi, are virtually impossible to get hold of beyond directly importing from the OEM. That said, i already have an RPI3B sitting around that i have yet to do anything with.
• Const-me 9y ago
  Tinkerboard has amazingly performant GPU. Peak performance is 81.6GFlops, comparable to mid-range desktop GPUs from 2007 (e.g. GeForce 8400 GS had 67 GFlops, GeForce 8600 GT had 114 GFlops). It also supports 4k HDMI output resolution. RPi is more compatible i.e. the software stack supports OpenGL. But for cases where it’s OK to code against GLES, Mali-T764 is awesome. I once used NanoVG to build a very nice looking rich GUI, with alpha transparency, animated state transitions, etc. Moreover, it consumes practically no CPU time, because everything is hardware accelerated.
  • craftyguy 9y ago
    You mean Mali and not Mail? If so, boooo proprietary GL stacks. It seems like everyone wants to continue to follow PowerVR's lead, which is extremely unfortunate.
    • Const-me 9y ago
      Yes, it’s Mali. Thanks for the correction. Yeah, pretty much all of them are proprietary.
  • 2bitencryption 9y ago
    does it require codes to unlock native x264 processing, like the RBP does (or did, back when I used it)? Also, does it have hardware support for HEVC? My poor RBP 2 can't handle HEVC at all.
    • Const-me 9y ago
      Unfortunately I don’t know. The product I was working on doesn’t need video playback.
    • flyinghamster 9y ago
      In my experience with the Pi, H.264 is baked-in, but you need a license key for MPEG-2 (a necessity if you're dealing with ATSC footage) or VC-1.
  • elcritch 9y ago
• gyrgtyn 9y ago
  Are you able to use the GPU with OMXplayer (do the drivers work) ?
  • duskwuff 9y ago
    No. Omxplayer is specific to the VideoCore GPU -- it only works on the Raspberry Pi.
• jburgess777 9y ago
  This website has useful information about the Tinker board and links to some alternative software distributions: https://tinkerboarding.co.uk/ https://tinkerboarding.co.uk/
• senatorobama 9y ago
  What is the cheapest RPi kit containing everything needed to get started?
  • abawany 9y ago
    I found the kits on pishop.us to be nice and priced well. For example, the PiZero W kit includes a case, Pi Zero W board, case with camera cable, and 2.5A usb power supply for $20+shipping.
  • awat 9y ago
    If you are willing to splurge a little bit (in the context of rpi) this is absolutely the best case I’ve used for them. https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07349HT26/ref=mp_s_a_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1524099489&sr=8-5&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=raspberry+pi+metal+case+aluminum+case https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07349HT26/ref=mp_s_a_1_5?ie=...
• throw2016 9y ago
  I looked at the Tinkerboard when it was released but it is limited to USB 2.0. The Rock64 is a better option with the same SOC as the Tinkerboard but USB 3.0 ports and decent Linux support. Even more interesting Odroid is releasing a new board the N1 based on the Rockchip 3399 SOC that has 2 A72 + 4 A53 processors. It also has 2 SATA ports, USB 3.0 and 2 Gigabit lan ports. And Odroid software support is significantly better than most other vendors except the Pi. Their previous C2 board based on the Amlogic 905 was a great buy at $45 and plays 4k content without missing a beat while my kabylake desktop on Linux seems to struggle.
  • lunchables 9y ago
    > The Rock64 is a better option with the same SOC as the Tinkerboard but USB 3.0 ports and decent Linux support. I've had a rough time with the Rock64, personally. Also I like to mention that you cannot power the Rock64 over MicroUSB like you can an RPi, which is really annoying to me.
• franciscop 9y ago
  "Once an SBC approaches $100 or so, there are other options (like a used Intel core i5 desktop) which offer 10-100x the performance and infinite expansion options" Anyone knows what kind of board he means? I have been searching and it seems that the next step from the pi would be something like the Intel NUC, which is quite a lot more than $100 when considering a full, minimum system build. Edit: totally missed the "used" in that sentence, which totally changes things. Thanks for the tips though!
  • ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    "Used Core i5" is not buying a NUC. At least, I don't think there's a huge aftermarket of NUCs at this point. I don't think they sell in the volume that leads to large aftermarkets, like your average Dell business machine. A five year old OptiPlex SFF PC though is available for around $100 or so, and capable of much more than any single-board PC.
    • geerlingguy 9y ago
      > A five year old OptiPlex SFF PC This is more what I'm talking about; I needed a faster option with much more RAM and a proper SATA SSD for one project. I bought a used Lenovo ThinkCentre for about $80, put in a small SSD I had on hand, upgraded the RAM to 8 GB for $20 (one 4GB stick on eBay), and had an i5 with about 100x better overall performance than a Pi 3 B+ (and maybe 10x more power consumption, so not a bad tradeoff). All-in $100 for me, though if you didn't have an SSD you can pick one up for $35-45 if you just need 32 or 64 GB. Basically, once you hit the $100 threshold, you have to really ask if an SBC is the right solution—unless you really, really need the small footprint. And if you need I/O for project stuff, an Arduino or similar project board is only a few bucks more and connects via USB.
      • oceanman888 9y ago
        How do you interface with arduino? serial?
        • 9y ago
• userbinator 9y ago
  For something called the "Tinker Board" you'd expect there to be lots of documentation, and for the RK3288, it does not disappoint: Datasheet: http://opensource.rock-chips.com/images/4/4e/Rockchip_RK3288_Datasheet_V2.2-20170301.pdf http://opensource.rock-chips.com/images/4/4e/Rockchip_RK3288... Technical Reference Manual: http://rockchip.fr/RK3288%20TRM/ http://rockchip.fr/RK3288%20TRM/ This is on par with what TI offers for its OMAP series, and a great deal better than anything Broadcom has ever released for its RPi SoCs. I remember around a decade or so ago, Rockchip was one of the main producers of PMP SoCs, mainly the RK26xx and RK27xx series (Actions was the other popular one), and there was a community around firmware-modding those PMPs, including, appropriately enough, porting RockBox to run on them. It's interesting to see them "growing up" in the market.
  • pknopf 9y ago
    4k60p too! I'm working on a simply Yocto image that will autoplay a music video. It will serve as a nice test camera source for the medical device recorders I develop. https://github.com/pauldotknopf/rockchip-camera-source https://github.com/pauldotknopf/rockchip-camera-source I still got to work out some kernel panics, but when it's done, I can just dd an image to an SD card. It beats the $10,000 medical camera I currently use :) I am currently using a Yocto image for Raspberry Pi for 1080p60. https://github.com/pauldotknopf/raspberry-pi-camera-source https://github.com/pauldotknopf/raspberry-pi-camera-source
    • ggg9990 9y ago
      What camera do you use with the Tinker?
      • pknopf 9y ago
        Tinker only does 4k30, I need 4k60. I'm currently using a RaspPi for 1080p60, but I am configuring the ROCK64 now. Also, in case you misunderstood, I'm not using a camera with these devices, I am using these devices as a camera. I plug the HDMI out directly into my capture device to test capture/rendering/encoding/etc. Previously, I had to use a real camera and point it at a move to get some nice motion and color. Now, I just power on my RaspPi and use the HDMI out. Our assembly line now also uses them to burn in our devices.
• dchest 9y ago
  Some more cheap SBCs from my bookmarks: - BananaPi (Allwinner, MediaTek): http://www.banana-pi.org/ http://www.banana-pi.org/ - Le Potato (Amlogic) and Renegate (Rockchip): https://libre.computer/ https://libre.computer/ - NanoPi (Samsung, Allwinner) : http://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/category&path=69 http://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/category&... - OLinuXino (open hardware, Allwinner A20, A64, etc, iMX, Ralink): https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/ https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/ - Odroid (Amlogic, Samsung): http://www.hardkernel.com/main/main.php http://www.hardkernel.com/main/main.php - OrangePi (Allwinner): http://www.orangepi.org/ http://www.orangepi.org/ - Pine64 (Allwinner) and Rock64 (Rockchip): https://www.pine64.org/ https://www.pine64.org/
  • Scramblejams 9y ago
    Don’t forget the Espressobin: http://espressobin.net/ http://espressobin.net/
    • seanp2k2 9y ago
      Have an EspressoBin sitting in my box of misc electronics parts. I wanted to run pfSense on it but last time I checked the Marvell CPU in it isn’t the same as the one in the Netgate SG-3100 that pfSense is exclusively compatible with ( https://store.netgate.com/Search.aspx?m https://store.netgate.com/Search.aspx?m ). Ended up getting a Ubiquiti UniFi switch + gateway to compliment the AC Pro AP that I already had and it works great — one management interface for all my home networking gear, VPN just works, wireless roaming + backups + 802.1x + rsyslog + emails of events + comprehensive monitoring and DPI make it a pretty nice home setup, especially with pi-hole running DNS.
      • lunchables 9y ago
        Support is coming very soon: https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=120015.15 https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=120015.15 https://twitter.com/gonzopancho/status/953758906689388547 https://twitter.com/gonzopancho/status/953758906689388547 https://www.reddit.com/r/PFSENSE/comments/7rat4n/pfsense_on_espressobin/ https://www.reddit.com/r/PFSENSE/comments/7rat4n/pfsense_on_...
• mwcampbell 9y ago
  Is anyone running mainline Debian, with the linux-image-armmp kernel package, on the Tinker Board yet? If so, what hardware is supported and what is not?
• ggg9990 9y ago
  Does the Tinker board have a pinhole camera module like the Raspberry Pi?
• watsocd 9y ago
  Our IoT service uses the RPi2. We will move to the RPi3 when our stock runs out. In our B2B application, the Pi's are just headless data collectors and all C code and data normally runs in RAM with the SSD card only written to as a backup if the device loses Internet connectivity (rare). The SSD card's system partition is configured as read only and we have had no problems with data corruption. I think many people are trying to use these small computers for things that were not intended. The RPi's are cheap, well supported, and more than powerful enough for the price. If you need more power, spend more on some of the other options or step up to a full computer.
• throwaway84742 9y ago
  At that price you should get an Odroid C2. A53 is a better core and C2 also offers 2GB of RAM and a rather large heat sink to avoid thermal throttling. It’s a no brainer IMO.
• JBiserkov 9y ago
  While searching for it on Amazon, I noticed I have misspelled it as 'Thinker Board' :-D
• cluoma 9y ago
  I was using a Raspberry Pi 2 as my home webserver for a long time but I recently switched to a Tinker Board and was really pleased with the process. Same form factor was very convenient since I could use my old case and hats. ASUS ported WiringPi as well, so all my Rpi scripts worked without modification. And finally, a dedicated Ethernet controller means I get way better speeds than my old Pi 2 could even dream about. If you care about Ethernet speeds the decision is pretty much a no-brainer.
  • ktzar 9y ago
    This article compares the tinkerboard with the raspi3+, which bums the ethernet wprformancw by a degree of magnitude.
• concrete-faucet 9y ago
  The thing that gets me most of all with the SBCs is that I need to go out and buy another power supply. I know - they aren't really that expensive, but I just don't want to do it. I already have so many 5V USB power supplies that I don't even know what to do with them all. I doubt I am the only one. I like that the Pi Zero seems to be perfectly stable with any old phone charger I've used, and they seem to range from 800mA to 1mA. I have a couple iPad chargers that go up to 2.1A, so I'd be really happy if I could find a multicore SBC that was good to go with one of those.
  • dbuder 9y ago
    Orange Pi
• Karupan 9y ago
  After days of looking around, I purchased the Pi 3 B+ for one simple reason: cost. The price of the other boards like the Tinker or BeagleBoard Black is almost twice the price of the Pi here in Australia.
• sandGorgon 9y ago
  what kind of projects does the Raspberry Pi shine in which a 35-50$ phone cant do ? let's say this one - https://www.aliexpress.com/item/3000mAh-Homtom-HT16-5-0-inch-3G-Smartphone-MTK6580-Quad-Core-1GB-RAM-8GB-ROM-Wakeup/32814472811.html https://www.aliexpress.com/item/3000mAh-Homtom-HT16-5-0-inch...) running Android 6.0 in a 1GB RAM package. You have access to battery, GPS, wifi, USB, acclerometer and a display out of the box (which you typically pay extra for on rpi). And obviously... Android. P.S. remember Android 6.0 has COSU mode to set your device in a single-purpose single-app mode (https://developer.android.com/work/cosu.html https://developer.android.com/work/cosu.html) just like the rpi3. Which has the pleasant side-effect that you can manage a ton of these devices using a central enterprise-grade management system. In addition, you can build custom hardware that interfaces with Android in a standard way (the AOA protocol) - https://source.android.com/devices/accessories/custom https://source.android.com/devices/accessories/custom. Which makes doing a hardware startup prototyping easier on the android platform than rpi. Is the rpi (or the Asus Tinker Board) merely a consequence of what was possible at a particular price point some time back ?
  • jsilence 9y ago
    Regarding the first question of your post: two things. one: no gpio pins on the phone. two: short model production cycles. Sure, there is a certain fluctuation on the SBC landscape, but the models lifetime and availability is usually much longer than with phones.
    • sandGorgon 9y ago
      Why would model production cycles impact you in the Android world. My current app runs seamlessly on nearly 200 hundred different models (in India). The application dev ecosystem and abstractions are very different in the Android world. Accessing the GPS is completely independent of underlying hardware and is already something we run happily on a daily basis. On gpio - curious. What applications would you use it for ? Generally they are useful for attaching peripherals like GPS modules, wifi,etc....And I grant there might be some modules that you might need. But isn't the phone solving the 99 percentile use case without need for gpio?
• noir-york 9y ago
  Maybe someone can help: is it possible to build an SBC can boot Linux and has just a CPU, gig ethernet and gobs of RAM (at least 8gb)? Don't need display port, GPU, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPIO pins, etc - just a CPU + lots of RAM + an ethernet port to get stuff in/out.
  • khedoros1 9y ago
    Are you asking if it's possible, or asking for advice on a practical way to get it done?
    • noir-york 9y ago
      If its at all possible, and if so, has someone built such an SBC? Alternatively, is there a practical way to attach external DDRAM to an existing 64-bit SBC, perhaps using the GPIO pins? I have zero electronics knowledge so forgive my questions if they are stupid.
      • deftnerd 9y ago
        DDRAM requires too much speed to do something through the GPIO or USB... What you could do is use the Tinkerboard S, boot off of a microSD card and use the integrated eMMC storage as a big 16gb swap partition... or just partition the eMMC into an 8gb boot and 8gb swap to give you 10gb usable.
      • khedoros1 9y ago
        It's definitely possible. Has someone built exactly that? I don't know; there are hundreds of variants of single-board computers, and I'm only familiar with a few. It's not something that you'd build by buying a couple of parts and soldering them to a breadboard. As for attaching memory, GPIO probably gives you a transfer rate on the order of a few MB/s. There are various things like SPI-connected SRAM chips, but those don't provide a lot of memory (think KB, not GB).
• gbajson 9y ago
  Has anyone of you seen such fan-less board with PCI express slot? I'd like to use it in a mining rig.
  • Zekio 9y ago
    Some might arrive later this year https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=5614 https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=5614
• danielivert 9y ago
  It would really compete against the RPi if it was on the same price category. Being 15 dollars more expensive breaks the whole purpose of having a descent, small and cheap computer/board as the RPi has been all this time.
  • trishmapow2 9y ago
    I'd pay $10 extra just for the Gigabit functionality. 100Mbps is unacceptable for any sort of media/file server applications and 230Mbps is only 1/4 of my Internet connection.
• CaptainJustin 9y ago
  This is fantastic. I'm running two Pi 3 Bs with two O-Droids in a docker swarm cluster. The O-Droids feel a bit experimental. https://photos.app.goo.gl/wWTKOLbiXooyYmkA3 https://photos.app.goo.gl/wWTKOLbiXooyYmkA3 I was disappointed to see that the folks at Raspberry are not interested in upping the specs by much. For my workloads I wanted to get more RAM on each node as my processors were not working all that hard. I've bought ASUS products with confidence for years and I'm glad they have an offering in this space.
• znpy 9y ago
  Can it network boot ?
• nottorp 9y ago
  Say, how well are the various hardware features supported on this tinker board? For example, I've had trouble with enabling I2C on an Orange Pi and there's precious little documentation about this niche-ish use. Since the reason for using these boards is ease of development, as in not doing a custom kernel, how well the SOC specific bits work is pretty important. Note: while externally these boards are all similar (same expansion connector etc), internally they use different SoCs and different kernels and configuration utilities. And this sometimes bites.
• eeZah7Ux 9y ago
  I'm surprised nobody mentioned CHIP from https://getchip.com/ https://getchip.com/ - when they where available I paid 10 euros for each including shipping. It came with WiFi, bluetooth, 512MB of RAM, 4GB of flash, plenty of GPIO
  • squarefoot 9y ago
    Nobody mentions them anymore because that platform sadly is gone. https://bbs.nextthing.co/t/chip-pro-officially-dead/20285 https://bbs.nextthing.co/t/chip-pro-officially-dead/20285
• Kabukks 9y ago
  I'm currently prototyping a product using the Raspberry Pi + GPIO. I've often wondered - if the thing makes it to market - how I would substitute the Rpi in mass production (1000+). The SD card is a big point of failure for many Rpi users for example. So storage is probably something I would change. Does anyone have experience with a mass produced product that used the Rpi in prototypes? I know element14 is offering Raspberry Pi customization for mass production.
  • detaro 9y ago
    The compute module has eMMC instead of an SD card, and there should be a few products based around that to look at.
    • giancarlostoro 9y ago
      For clarification (for those who may not know) the compute module is the version of the Raspberry Pi intended for commercialized use. See: https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/compute-module-3/ https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/compute-module-3/
    • Kabukks 9y ago
      I've looked at the compute module. It is positioned as the way to go for mass production - but the price point seems higher than the Rpi as you still need a base board for it to function.
      • detaro 9y ago
        Yeah, if you don't have a custom PCB otherwise it's probably not the best fit.
• k__ 9y ago
  I use one on my TV. HW acceleration (its USP) only works with TinkerOS and it is buggy as hell :/