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

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

#221

Post by michrassena » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 3:28 PM UTC

rasz wrote: post #213

michrassena wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

1GB ddr3 sodimms are pretty much free/garbage(friends, IT at work) due to being outdated and too small for anything, or $4 on ebay including shipping if you cant be bothered to ask around. Those were just first random links from ebay, you can get better deals if you search harder, for example EU $15 http://allegro.pl/org-sprawna-plyta-glowna-lenovo-x220-core-... whole lower case +wifi +bt +cooling, one usb mechanical…

Thank you for your reply. I made some off-topic comment a couple of months ago on HN about the lack of inexpensive, full x86 compatible SBCs. This gets close to the mark, especially if I can run the bare motherboard or something close to it.

As an aside, the schematics really take me back to a moment in the late 1980s. Radio Shack sold Tandys and TRS-80s at one point, and I remember an especially thick series of binders full of the system schematics for one (or some) of the computers they sold. I was too young with no money of my own then to buy them, and now I really wish I knew what that was so I could find it on eBay. Little did I know that was the end of an era, and not something I'd see the likes of again until today.

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

#222

Post by X-Istence » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 5:31 PM UTC

lunchables wrote: post #198

Zekio wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I've got a Rock64 on order, I'll be interested to see what my experience is with it.

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

#223

Post by Zekio » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 6:24 PM UTC

lunchables wrote: post #198

Zekio wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On my Pine64 I use Dietpi from http://dietpi.com/ and it just works, it even has a setup gui where you can install to USB Drive and it will have bootloader on SD Card IIRC

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

#224

Post by blacksmith_tb » Fri, Apr 20, 2018, 6:57 PM UTC

kachurovskiy wrote: post #158

mrpippy wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There seem to be better-performing x86 Windows Mini PCs available for less. Come in a proper case and with a power supply.

If you need GPIO, I see some mini or smaller ITX mobos available[1], though I don't know how painful it is to get working...

1: http://www.mini-box.com/Jetway-JNF9D-2550

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

#225

Post by khedoros1 » Sun, Apr 22, 2018, 4:17 AM UTC

noir-york wrote: post #143

khedoros1 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you asking if it's possible, or asking for advice on a practical way to get it done?

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.

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).

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

#226

Post by ahazred8ta » Sun, Apr 22, 2018, 4:54 AM UTC

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

re: your earlier comment about lightweight embedded crypto libs, https://github.com/GaloisInc/gec is an example

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

#227

Post by nbanks » Sun, Apr 22, 2018, 5:57 AM UTC

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…

The rock pro 64 will hopefully come out by May 1 from pine64 with faster dual A72 cores + quad A53 cores. Their shipping is slow.

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

#228

Post by TheCycoONE » Sun, Apr 22, 2018, 12:48 PM UTC

quanto wrote: post #129

TheCycoONE wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not useable yet. It has shaders and can draw triangles but no textures or FBOs.

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

#229

Post by makomk » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 2:36 PM UTC

jiggunjer wrote: post #216

makomk wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How is a blob not mysterious. The fact that it doesn't use some exotic gpu-based bootstrap is irrelevant. A black box is a black box. Also I'd argue it is uncommon for everything the kernel uses to be open source, I don't know of one where all the drivers are open source (without losing functionality).

The Allwinner BROM is about 32KB, almost completely reverse-engineered at least for the earlier chips, and in any case the only thing it does during a normal boot is to load a chunk of code from a fixed location on the SD card to a fixed location in SRAM and immediately jump to it. It's nothing the Raspberry Pi boot process, where even the initial boot ROM has FAT filesystem support and it loads a proprietary blob which runs continually on the "GPU" co-processor with full access to RAM handling various important runtime functionality.

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

#230

Post by saythebaby » Tue, Apr 24, 2018, 11:11 PM UTC

codetrotter wrote: post #3

leggomylibro wrote: post #2

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 tim…

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.

any interest in selling your XU3? I'd be happy to take it off your hands