Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don’t forget the Espressobin: http://espressobin.net/
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 ). Ended up getting a Ubiquiti UniFi switch + gateway to compliment the AC Pro AP that I already had and it works great — one management interfa…
The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+
191–200 of 232 posts
Re: The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+
#192Tinkerboard 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 r…
If the Mali-T764’s support GLES and provides the correct libraries you can compile an embedded version of QT5 which runs directly on GLES [cf 0, for an RPi example]. Though the NanoVG seems more fun! Edit: grammar 0: https://wiki.qt.io/RaspberryPi2EGLFS
Right, I have evaluated QT. There were reasons why I decided not use it in that project.
1. Licensing. Their commercial license was prohibitively expensive for the project. And their open source license was too limited for our purposes.
2. I wanted the software to work on top of bare Linux kernel, i.e. no desktop managers, no compositors, no mouse pointer. Also I needed to render different stuff to 2 displays at the same time, QT can’t do that.
The GUI wasn’t too complex, just a handful of screens on a 7” 800x480 DSI touch screen, plus simple 2D vector graphics on an external 4k HDMI display. That is why I was able to use lower-level stack without spending too much time on it. I only used C++ for DRM/KMS and NanoVG, everything higher level is in C#, running on .NET Core.
BTW, the most time-consuming part was on-screen keyboard for the “Connect to WiFi” screen, and soft keyboards are only available in commercial QT.
Re: The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+
#193Earlier 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.
Literally tens of thousands of them. Sensors are not interchangeable, if you have requirements on precision/accuracy for your project then it dictates what you have to use. And often enough the on board in a phone sensors aren't reliable (e.g. temperature sensor on a phone is useless for measuring ambient temperature) or not precise enough. Or other things like driving a stepper motor using an SPI-based driver, controlling a character display or interfacing with an external DAC/ADC.
It's important to note that I'm talking good old electronics projects, not things like single-use kiosk devices. Like I said earlier, the RasPi is similar to the Arduino in that it's suited to "edge" tasks - interfacing a computer / network with the physical world through sensors and actuators.
Some of this stuff is possible on an Android device, but more complex because they aren't designed for it. Meanwhile this is what the Raspberry Pi was always intended for and is much simpler. There are cases where an old phone might work better, but there are many where it won't work at all or would be a lot of extra work.
Re: The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+
#194I'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/ 2. http://shop.t-firefly.com/goods.php?id=45
The RK3399 based SBCs are very interesting. Not only are they not complete jokes in terms of performance but they also have PCIe which can be used for SATA.
Re: The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
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 Pi…
Sounds like someone needs to build a power supply with a tiny conditioner/battery to help ensure consistent power.
Re: The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+
#196Earlier 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.
I'm aware, but it's not a very clean solution. Now you need a USB-OTG cable with charging and a USB ethernet adapter.
Also in my experience (which was admittedly limited since it didn't work well) it was very crashy, with the connection going down after a few hours. Probably a quirk of my specific tablet or ethernet adapter but still it's a potential problem.
Re: The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
You can get USB-OTG cables that split off so you can plug in a charger, but I think (not sure) that it's not universally supported to use USB-OTG and charge at the same time.
Re: The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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
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
Re: The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah, if you don't have a custom PCB otherwise it's probably not the best fit.
Re: The ASUS Tinker Board is a compelling upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 3 B+
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
This is an interesting option. Is it possible run that bare motherboard attached to a compatible power supply and nothing else? I don't see heat sinks on the first link, or RAM, or storage on either.