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

jeffgeerling.com

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

#121

Post by sandGorgon »

gh02t wrote: post #117
johnthedebs wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who's been obsessing over SBCs recently, your comment really got me thinking. Many of the additions/changes I want to make to my Raspberry Pis is to make them more like a smartphone (microphone, camera, GPS, touchscreen, battery). And as an iOS user, I'm considering buying an Android phone just to play around with because it's so cheap and capable for odd projects. That said, some easy things that come to…

Also wired Ethernet. Running a server over WiFi is flaky, especially on a phone optimized for low power usage. The Pi's wired networking is lackluster, but it's still more stable than WiFi. And adding on to GPIO, the Pi has easy to use SPI and i2c busses. That opens up a huge range of sensors and other things like displays that work with easy to understand code. For a lot of use cases it's better to think of the RasP…

Hi, I'm looking to understand the sensors bit.

Beyond the fact that the most common sensors/peripherals are built in...I can find a lot of USB sensors that work with Android. In general you can also drop down to NDK (c code) on Android if you want.

So I'm still curious on which sensors would not work with a Android phone that people would want to.

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

#122

Post by kaoD »

sandGorgon wrote: post #120
kaoD wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- RPi isn't Chinese, as in, I'm not locked in (by default) into a Chinese stock OS with god-knows-what spyware installed. - It runs Linux as a first-party-sanctioned OS. Great ecosystem for tinkering. Not locked in to the whims of the manufacturer OS updates. - GPIO pins. - No built-in screen (which I guess draws less power). - HDMI, USB and Ethernet ports.

Any Android phone can be rooted and flashed to Lineage os atleast. For other points, I have mentioned in other comments.

Yes but that's not first party, voids the warranty (messing with bootloaders, yuck), in my experience has tons of problems with propietary drivers, is still Android (which is an awful OS/ecosystem for anything that isn't a phone), eventually stops being updated (as many of my not-so-old phones can attest)...

RPi and Android phones might overlap for some applications but I see them as very distinct devices.

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

#123

Post by elaus »

sandGorgon wrote: post #114
jsilence wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

GPS or Wifi could easily be attached via USB, you don't need GPIO for that. The huge benefit of GPIO ports are all those things that DON'T have standard ports like USB: sensors (temp/humidity/air, radar, …) or controlling lights (e.g. LED strips) or other basic electronics that you wire to your SBC.

Really the GPIO pins are what makes SBCs so great for me... a smartphone is just a closed-off portable computer with very limited built-in sensors.

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

#124

Post by saagarjha »

sandGorgon wrote: post #120
kaoD wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- RPi isn't Chinese, as in, I'm not locked in (by default) into a Chinese stock OS with god-knows-what spyware installed. - It runs Linux as a first-party-sanctioned OS. Great ecosystem for tinkering. Not locked in to the whims of the manufacturer OS updates. - GPIO pins. - No built-in screen (which I guess draws less power). - HDMI, USB and Ethernet ports.

Any Android phone can be rooted and flashed to Lineage os atleast. For other points, I have mentioned in other comments.

> Any Android phone can be rooted and flashed to Lineage os atleast.

If your manufacturer hasn't decided to lock the bootloader, that is.

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

#125

Post by kaoD »

sandGorgon wrote: post #121
gh02t wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also wired Ethernet. Running a server over WiFi is flaky, especially on a phone optimized for low power usage. The Pi's wired networking is lackluster, but it's still more stable than WiFi. And adding on to GPIO, the Pi has easy to use SPI and i2c busses. That opens up a huge range of sensors and other things like displays that work with easy to understand code. For a lot of use cases it's better to think of the RasP…

Hi, I'm looking to understand the sensors bit. Beyond the fact that the most common sensors/peripherals are built in...I can find a lot of USB sensors that work with Android. In general you can also drop down to NDK (c code) on Android if you want. So I'm still curious on which sensors would not work with a Android phone that people would want to.

USB sensors are more expensive and need an USB hub (which raises the price, what's the point then?).

Not to mention most sensors (humidity or CO2 for example, or even just a simple potentiometer) are not USB (and for a good reason, I don't want/need USB chips and connectors in each one of my sensors).

Example applications I use Pi for: automated irrigation, custom digital musical instruments.

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

#126

Post by jiggunjer »

crankylinuxuser wrote: post #97
pishpash wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 my…

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

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

#127

Post by johnthedebs »

sandGorgon wrote: post #116
johnthedebs wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who's been obsessing over SBCs recently, your comment really got me thinking. Many of the additions/changes I want to make to my Raspberry Pis is to make them more like a smartphone (microphone, camera, GPS, touchscreen, battery). And as an iOS user, I'm considering buying an Android phone just to play around with because it's so cheap and capable for odd projects. That said, some easy things that come to…

I made this comment in another reply. > 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? External ports like USB, HDMI,etc are easily done. In fact, there are zillions more accessories for…

> External ports like USB, HDMI,etc are easily done.

I agree that it's easily done, but can you do 2-4 USB ports and HDMI at the same time for a gaming console, or USB + ethernet for a file server? I genuinely don't know, but knowing what I know about iPhone accessories (admittedly also not a ton) I don't think you can. At the very least it adds to the cost and removes some convenience.

Some GPIO sensors I've played with are: IR receiver, RGB LED, waterproof temperature sensors, combination temperature/humidity sensors. You can connect many of these at once, and solder the connections for a more permanent tiny appliance. This link lists lots of interesting/useful sensors and components: https://tutorials-raspberrypi.com/raspberry-pi-sensors-overv...

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

#128

Post by BuffaloBagel »

pknopf wrote: post #85
ggg9990 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What camera do you use with the Tinker?

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. No…

I think you mean to say you are using these devices to simulate a camera?

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

#129

Post by quanto »

TheCycoONE wrote: post #75
StudentStuff wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can run Gnome just fine, hardware accelerated video decoding/encoding works, HDMI with a few features is mainline, the only thing left is the Mali GPU, which is a fairly simple GPU as far as that kind of hardware goes, as compared to AMD or Nvidia GPUs. On that note, there has been a fair bit of activity on Lima as of late, which is a big change from a few years ago: https://github.com/yuq/linux-lima/tree/lima-4.…

Isn't Lima for 200 and 400 series. Tinkerboard needs has a 700 which already has kernel support but will need Panfrost for open source userspace.

how mature is Panfrost? I have a board with Mali T720 (Allwinner H6) and I cannot get any GPU support currently.

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

#130

Post by pjmlp »

vardump wrote: post #40
andrewstuart wrote: post #18

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 Li…

> 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

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.

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