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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+

#161
post #117

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…

> Also wired Ethernet.

This got me curious: I tried to plug ethernet cable to a phone via USB adapter, and to my surprise, it worked!

Simply got a prompt to configure ethernet IP settings.

Disabled wifi and mobile data, web browsing via ethernet connection worked fine.

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

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any of those x86? or is that mutually exclusive with "cheap"?

Depends on how cheap, the Minnowboard starts at $150 https://minnowboard.org

Also https://www.lattepanda.com, around the same price.

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

#163

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... ) 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…

Well a RPi gives you a standard Linux with proper init system, tools like docker, proper headless support using SSH and so on. From a software point a RPi runs exactly the same stuff as any other Linux server out there. An Android phone on the other hand is a pretty quirky system for anything that's not a purpose built UI application

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

#165
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.

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

#167
post #74

Some more cheap SBCs from my bookmarks: - BananaPi (Allwinner, MediaTek): http://www.banana-pi.org/ - Le Potato (Amlogic) and Renegate (Rockchip): https://libre.computer/ - NanoPi (Samsung, Allwinner) : http://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/category&... - OLinuXino (open hardware, Allwinner A20, A64, etc, iMX, Ralink): https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/ - Odroid (Amlogic, Samsung): http://www.har…

I have both Raspberry Pi's and a few of the cheap "clones". So some takeaways:

The good: they're definitely cheaper, I paid about a third of the raspberry Pi 2 price for a comparable Orange Pi. Other models seem to have similar aggressive pricing.

The bad: Armbian distros are a mixed bag, I had the impression some of them were put together by developers who didn't even have the particular board on hand. I spent a good three hours just getting WiFi to work (not being familiar with linux didn't help either though) , while putting up with an invisible cursor editing config files. Setting up a raspberry pi zero W in comparison was 5 minutes. Also I found out later that the pin header was 180 degrees rotated compared to the Raspberry, which made it not compatible with standard hats.

In retrospect I did learn a lot, and the Orange Pi has been running without issue for 2 years now. But Raspberry's have my definite preference.

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

#168
post #74

Some more cheap SBCs from my bookmarks: - BananaPi (Allwinner, MediaTek): http://www.banana-pi.org/ - Le Potato (Amlogic) and Renegate (Rockchip): https://libre.computer/ - NanoPi (Samsung, Allwinner) : http://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/category&... - OLinuXino (open hardware, Allwinner A20, A64, etc, iMX, Ralink): https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/ - Odroid (Amlogic, Samsung): http://www.har…

Don’t forget the Espressobin: http://espressobin.net/

That is an exceptionally good looking board at that price.

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

#169
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.

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

#170

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…

The compute module has eMMC instead of an SD card, and there should be a few products based around that to look at.
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