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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+

#171

Post by userbinator »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #81
bsder wrote: post #23

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

As open as they are, they still aren't fully open. For me, that means there really isn't any point to them. I'd take a 486 DX4 SoC with no better than VGA output if it was entirely open.

It depends on what you mean by "fully open" (i.e. you want the mask set and design files too...?), but if you're just looking for a PC-on-a-chip, there's this:

http://www.dmp.com.tw/tech/vortex86dx/

The site looks old but according to this, it's still in production:

https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/are-designers-still-us...

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

#172

Post by giancarlostoro »

detaro wrote: post #170
Kabukks wrote: post #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…

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

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/

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

#173

Post by madmulita »

steeve wrote: post #8

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.

I think the devil is in availability. I'm in the bottom of the world. Over here the only almost reliably available is the raspy.

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

#175

Post by pritambaral »

makomk wrote: post #153
pritambaral wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure, none of these chips are new, and the older models (which are easily & cheaply accessible... The then-older chips were not available with the future volume we needed, unless we increased our volumes a few times. We had little choice but to build on their newer chips for the volume bracket we fell into. Perhaps the situation has changed in two years. > I wouldn't expect jack from Allwinner besides their crummy…

I'd have thought they'd still be better than the chip in the Pi, which last I checked wasn't available at all to anyone but the Pi Foundation (and the proprietary bootloader license didn't allow you to run it on anything non-Pi anyway).

It might be better in principle — though shitty code is only so much different from unmodifiable code — but it turned out to be the best compromise available in practice. The boards put out by the Foundation were cheap and good enough for our purpose. Of course we'd have liked to go with our own boards. We actually designed and commissioned a small batch of builds using the H5. But then we saw the software provided by Allwinner. It was so fragile, it wouldn't even boot correctly a second time. Looking at the code itself revealed it to be a nightmare. And at that time (over a period of three months) there was no software freedom to be had since the only software that would even boot at all was the shitty dump. We'd have had to wait a year or two for the code to get usable or clean, and by that time both Allwinner would have moved on from the H5 (as we were told) and our product would have been too late to market.

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

#176

Post by pritambaral »

StudentStuff wrote: post #156
makomk wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd have thought they'd still be better than the chip in the Pi, which last I checked wasn't available at all to anyone but the Pi Foundation (and the proprietary bootloader license didn't allow you to run it on anything non-Pi anyway).

The licensing and supply for the RasPi were pretty off-putting to us. Sure, we aren't making a custom board, but I don't want to be held captive to a single supplier that can stop producing boards at any time, whether that is due to a lack of chips or a lack of desire.

We were afraid of that too. But Allwinner wasn't willing to give us any guarantees they'd even continue to make the H5 two years later. Nor was the H5 backwards compatible with either of its predecessors H3 and A64, giving us more reason to worry about the future.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation (and Broadcom, in contract partnership), on the other hand, had a proven track record of both continuing to manufacture RPis 1 and 2 and to maintain backwards compatibility when putting out new RPi SoCs and boards.

Perhaps the situation with Allwinner has changed now. Perhaps they're willing to support their products for longer for smaller clients. We'd have to look into that again. But, of course, without mainline support anytime soon (and the quality of their past code doesn't help a bit) it's very hard for us to actually build a good product with it.

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

#177

Post by Kabukks »

detaro wrote: post #170
Kabukks wrote: post #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…

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

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.

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

#178

Post by rasz »

jiggunjer wrote: post #103
dchest wrote: 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…

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

$20 https://www.ebay.com/itm/Lenovo-04W1431-ThinkPad-X220-i3-231...

$30 https://www.ebay.com/itm/Lenovo-ThinkPad-X220-Motherboard-FR...

~4-10x Raspberry pee 3 speed, SATA, pcie, 1Gbit ethernet, battery backup. Can get them as low as $10 with one USB port broken (either mechanical or fried).

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

#179

Post by opencl »

geppetto wrote: post #135
opencl wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The orangePi boards don't use microSD, they have built in eMMC storage. Far more reliable.

On my 5 years old cubieboard server I experienced NAND corruption more often then not when power outage occurs. Never had this kind of problems since I switched to SD cards. In my experience SD cards are much slower but more reliable and easier to manage (backups and such).

There's no real inherent reliability difference between SD and eMMC, it's all down to the individual controller implementation. Though some SD slots are quite flaky, i.e. the original RasPi models.

The eMMC that orangePi uses seems to be more reliable than the average SD card. Of course there are good SD cards out there and bad eMMC.

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

#180

Post by imtringued »

vardump wrote: post #161
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…

> 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.

How do you charge the phone and use ethernet at the same time?
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