How good are the ADCs inside Arduinos, ESP8266, and ESP32 And extenal ADCs (ADS1115)

I often get questions about how to measure voltage with microcontrollers we will look at this topic at the quality of built-in and external analog to digital converters and I will show you some secrets so let's start pretty youtubers here is the guy with a Swiss accent with a new episode and fresh ideas around sensors and microcontrollers remember if you subscribe you will always sit in the first row voltages are analog and our controllers are digital this is why analog to digital converters short a DC's became so important they are the heart of digitalization the opposite by the way are digital to analog converters or DAC s they create an analog voltage out of a digital number in this video we will see how a DC's work look at how we can determine the quality of ADCs compare the a DC's of different microcontrollers with external chips learn how to tweak the calculations to get the best out of any ADC see how we can extend the range of ADCs discover some hidden things of microcontrollers and there a DC's look at different external boards and their usage in the pre-digital age transistors or even valves were very expensive and big so many different ADC converter principals were invented and used to save such components today with our silicon technology we do no more need to optimize for parts this is why a few exotic principals were left behind today we mainly use these two principals parallel comparator a DC's and successive approximation ADC s let's start with a parallel comparator a DC's they are fast expensive and not too accurate fast means they can convert signals up to gigahertz which is crazy if you ask me their main turf is software device and radios and other extremely fast processes if you are interested in what software-defined radio is you can watch video number 286 but how do these parallel competitor ABCs work they are quite simple and consists of only a few parts the first is a stable reference voltage this part by the way is vital for all a DC's then they divide the reference voltage into many voltage steps let's assume for simplicity we want to build a two bit ADC with a voltage range of 10 volts then we divide the 10 bolts into four steps of 2.5 volts we can do this with a simple voltage divider where we cut one resistor into like that we get voltages of 1.25 three point seven five six point two five and eight point seven five volts we now connect one input of a comparator to each of these voltages and connect the second input to the input voltage it is quite apparent what happens now a voltage of two volts for example is bigger than 1.25 volts so the first comparator triggers and all others not at eight volts three of four comparators trigger immediately when we apply the voltage if we add a few gates we get the two-bit signal at these pins of course all comparators have to read the signal at the same time otherwise we do not get accurate numbers for changing signals this is why we apply a clock to all comparators its most significant disadvantage is scalability for each additional bit of resolution we have to double the numbers of comparators a quick calculation for a 12 bit ADC shows 4096 comparators including the precision resistors and all the connections I would call this a nightmare for a chip designer and here we can discuss another important topic resolution and a see if we have a voltage of 1.3 volts we get a 1 if we apply 3.7 volts we also get a 1 we get such a staircase and see that this ADC has a resolution of 2.5 volts so it would not be suitable to monitor a lion battery for example we will need more pits to get more steps for this calculation I assumed that the resistors and the comparators are precise let's assume this resistor is a bit smaller than the others or this comparator does not switch at precisely 0 volts then this switching voltage would be smaller and we would get a 243 point 7 volts which would be wrong or not accurate you see there is a difference between resolution and accuracy resolution automatically increases with the number of resistors and comparators accuracy depends on their quality both are cost drivers for chips the more resolution or the more accuracy the more expensive not to forget speed which is also a significant cost driver the same thing applies if the reference voltage for example is only 9 volts the resolution would still be the same but the accuracy would be miserable do you think this is theoretical then look at the data sheet of the atmega328 used in Arduinos they use VCC as a reference and your USB power supply never delivers precisely 5 volts now we defined the voltage range the resolution and the accuracy of an ADC the next important thing is speed it is quite evident that for this ADC it mainly depends on the speed of the comparators plus the speed of the logic gates as said before parallel comparator a DC's go up to a few gigahertz an example is the 8090 208 which covers up to three gigahertz not bad also the price of $1700 for one chip is not bad you definitely pay attention to what you do if you work with one of those one remark if you read the data sheets of those fast ABCs you often see DP FS and not milli or microvolts this is because our f engineers mainly work with DB now we leave the expensive world of parallel comparator ADCs and continue with successive approximation ADCs 

their function in a way is very similar to what we saw before the input signal is compared to a reference signal what was done in parallel before is now done sequentially by only one comparator therefore we have to supply it with an ever changing reference signal and it takes longer let's assume an input voltage of 2.5 volts if our reference voltage starts at 0 volt and increases slowly at precisely 2.5 volts the comparator changes it output signal if we knew the reference voltage we would know the input voltage simple if we use a DAC to create the reference voltage we know of course which output voltage it creates because we apply the digital value at its input we just have to transfer this value to the output pins and ready is our ADC nearly as before we have to make sure that the value of the input signal is stable during the whole measurement otherwise the result would be wrong and as said before the measurement takes quite long this can be done by a sample and hold circuit which is mainly a capacitor and switch the switch is closed till the ADC wants to read a value and because the switch is closed the voltage of the capacitor tracks the input voltage as soon as the switch opens the voltage at the capacitor stays fixed at least if we make sure that we do not discharge it with our comparator another problem is quite apparent if we assume we have a 12 bit ADC for 10 volts and the input voltage is nine point nine volts the resulting digital value would be around 4050 our ADC would have to make 4049 wrong in tests until the comparator would switch from zero to one you can imagine this would be extremely slow fortunately we can do much better we can start with five volts the nine point nine volts are higher so the next value to test is 7.5 volts still not enough next eight point seven five and so on you see the principal instead of more than four thousand tests we will end with maybe ten tests and this is basically how these ABCs work just out of curiosity I show you how a typical DAC works it has a similar voltage resistant etwork as the parallel a DC's with two main differences the resistors are arranged in a r2r ladder and instead of a bunch of comparators we need a bunch of switches this network creates a voltage that is proportional to the binary value applied to the switches you find a link in the description if you want to do the calculations in the end an amplifier is added and ready is the DAC and of course also here a voltage reference but how about the resolution and the courtesy of a successive approximation ADC the same applies here the longer the ladder the more resolution of the DAC and with it also the ADC of course the accuracy is mainly determined by the accuracy of the DAC and the comparator most of the ADCs we use in our projects are of this type to save money we can even go a step forward and add a switch in front of the ADC like that we get four eight or even 16 inputs cool pay attention these chips only have one ADC and therefore can only convert one input at a time so their speed is divided by the number of analog inputs now we know the important stuff about a DC's let's apply this knowledge to the chips in our lab and start with the Arduino Uno the atmega328 has an 8 channel 10 bit successive approximation ADC so it is the type we saw before 1 ADC and 8 inputs it has a pin for a voltage reference but because this pin is not connected on the Arduino boards VCC is used as a reference which for sure is not optimal the Arduino has a built-in voltage reference but only for one point one volts with some tricks as shown in video number 10 you can increase its accuracy using this reference if we divide 5 volts by 1024 available steps we see that the resolution is 4.9 VD volt the smallest difference we can measure is around 5 millivolts it's a courtesy is around 2.2 LSP which is 2 point 2 times 4 point 9 equals 11 millivolt with an external voltage reference without it it can be much higher as we will later see its conversion time is 65 to 260 microseconds which is in line with what we learned slow and depending on how fast it hits the right value now we go on with the esp8266 it also has a 10-bit ADC without multiplexer so it has only one input and essential its initial range is only up to 1 volt which is vital to know fortunately many board manufacturers extend its range to 3.3 volts how is this done and how can we use it to extend the range even further they use a simple voltage divider like this one on the vemos d1 mini it reduces the voltage by a factor of 3 let's now assume we want to measure 24 volt our panels for sure we want the marching and set the maximum voltage to 30 volts we use a voltage divider like that at an input voltage of 30 volts we want an output voltage of 1 volt for the ADC pin this is the formula and if we enter the values we get 2.9 mega ohms minus the 220 K already there we have to add 2.7 mega and the remote should show the right value of course it will not display the proper value because the resistors are not precise and maybe we do not have the exact value this is why we use a mapping formula we first apply 30 volts and note the value measured by the ADC then we insert this value into the formula and get adequate values the same principle can be used for all other microcontrollers I probably would not try to measure about 50 volts with a simple method because it can become dangerous for humans and of course it only works for DC and not for AC voltages now we go on to the ESP 32 it also has its secrets it has two different 12 bit ADC s with a total of 18 channels their quality gives rise to discussions in my last video many people complained about the in accuracy of this ADC the datasheet has quite a lot to say which usually is not good because the manufacturer adds exceptions and prerequisites we will see if this is true when we lay to test it also keep in mind that the ESP s have quite a strong RF signal very close to the ADCs this can easily influence its readings this is why specifications are done with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth off if you encounter issues with the readings my first step would be to switch off all radios and test again another trick is used in the specifications the addition of a 100 nano farad capacitor this also reduces noise on the analog line but of course it also read measuring speed talking about speed themaximum is two million samples per  second which translate in a conversion time of 0.5 microseconds which is much faster than the Arduino maybe this is partly responsible for the inaccuracy unfortunately this is not all in a small and casual post Igor mentioned the fact that all 10 pins of ABC 2 cannot be used if we use Wi-Fi so it only has 6 pins left GPIO 32 2 GPIO 39 fortunately some boards connect GPIO 36 and 39 to sensor VP and sensor VN so they should also work with Wi-Fi on Aliexpress we find modules with external ADCs the most common one is the ad s1 1 1 5 breakout port it has one 16 bit ADC with 4 input pins and it is connected via I square see it's sample rate is 860 samples per second maximum and it has a specialty a so called programmable gain amplifier short PGA it can be used to increase the resolution for smaller voltages we find a bunch of data about the courtesy in the datasheet and from the discussions before we can now understand most of it and see that this chip plays in a rather leek than the integrated a DC's of course you get other a DC's like the PCF 85 91 or the ad 7705 the PCF 85 91 is only 8 bits but it also has an 8-bit DAC so if you want to control something and measure the result this might be a suitable module the 80-77 of 5 also is 16-bit but only has two input channels and is connected by the fast spi bus and is primarily used for the digitalization of fast signals let's now check the different a DC's out I have here an exact voltage reference which can produce exactly two point five and five volts let's start with the Arduino Uno at 2.5 volts it displays 496 to 498 which is plus minus 1 LSB but is this correct we map the values with this formula and get mostly 2.5 or 2.5 1 volts not bad but now I increase the supply voltage of the Arduino to 5 point 2 volts which is still in the usb specifications now it shows only 2.4 volts at 4.8 volts supply voltage I chose 2 point 6 volts interesting but of course not good if I power the Arduino with 7 point 5 volts at the barrel check we get quite constant 2 point 5 1 volts so either you power your Arduino at precisely 5 volts or you watch video number 10 where I show how you can use the internal reference to stabilize these values next is the esp8266 it definitely is less stable and has glitches from 829 down to 821 but it is faster than the Arduino so I average across two values now we get fewer twitches if I average across 10 values we still have glitches even if I average across 100 samples we still get an unstable signal but at least we get 2 digits stable at 2 point 6 7 volts which is of course wrong you saw now one way to reduce noise in a signal by averaging and you saw how simple the average formula is we quickly can't correct the wrong voltage by adjusting this parameter to 3.09 now we get the desired 5 volts the chance all other measurements are also correct is high so let's check it with one bolt yes one volt is also okay of course not more precise but at least no gain error we corrected it using this method if I connect the AC rope in to ground it should read zero volts but it reads 0.01 volts this is the small offset error and we correct it here now it reads zero volts of course we should have corrected the offset before the gain error with averaging and the calibration formula we get at least the maximum out of a particular ADC as promised we want to extend the range to 30 volts we added 2 times 1 mega ohm resistors are sufficient and the factor is 31.8 now our we mostly one mini can measure 30 volts not bad let's look at the ESP 32 and do the measurements the raw data looks scary indeed but let's look at what we can do if we average across 100 values and adjust this factor to 3 point 6 1 we get a consistent 2.5 volts of course we have to adjust this number to the 12 bit of the ESP 32 average over 1,000 values creates a quite stable three-digit number but when we go to one world we see the non-linearity of the ESP 32 ADC it only shows 0.9 volts nearly 10% off so this ADC has a high resolution of 12 bits but because it is very inaccurate this resolution is useless now we use a real ADC chip the ad s1 1 1 5 connected to the ESP 32 we see it is much more stable and it has four bits more resolution impressive of course it is also much slower if I average across five values we hardly see the noise but we do not need averaging here it is good enough without only the fourth stitch it moves a little I removed the offset and adjusted its values to precisely the value of the 5 volts reference of course we have to adjust this number to the 16 bits of the ADC and the linearity at 2.5 volts it shows two point four nine nine four right on the reference overall this ADC is much better than all the built in a DC's tested before summarized we saw how the most used a DC's work and learned to determine their quality compared to a DC's of an Arduino Uno and to ESPs and saw that all of them could not be used for serious work because of their low quality we could apply some tweaking to improve the results we also extended the measuring range of a WHMIS d1 mini to 30 volts we discovered that the Arduino reacts on fluctuations of VCC and how to avoid it a tiny comment of Igor revealed that we could not use most of the ADC pins of the ESP 32 because they are used for Wi-Fi stabilization we tested an ad s1 1 1 5 external ADC board and saw that it has superior quality compared with all the internal ADCs and it became clear that we have to use external ADCs for serious work one last thing this is my nicest looking ADC in the lab it has eight parallel channels and is quite fast as always you find the relevant links in the description I hope this video was useful or at least interesting for you if true please consider supporting the channel to secure its future existence thank you bye

Banana Pi M2 Zero

welcome to another video from explaining computers comm this time we're going to take a look at this the banana pie m20 this has a form factor the same size as a Raspberry Pi zero 65 by 30 millimeters but this board has got a quad-core processor so let's go and take a closer look so here we have our banana PI + 2 0 which comes in this generic banana pie box but if we look on the back were assured it's definitely a an m2 0 it says it down there and if you're wondering about the price of this board this is one of the cheaper single board computers but the price seems to vary a great deal but I found in late February 2020 you could purchase it for the $20 , 99 or 16 pounds 54 so that's a open it up 

I think it's very simple we just open the box like that under or we are and to study bad which is a seals that will bring in a mr. scissors to get it inside here there we are cut into the the bag and here we have our tiny little 35 gram  computer which is based as you can see on an all winner 82 plus system on a chip which contains 4 arm cortex a7 CPU cores running at up to 1.2 gigahertz and an arm Mali 400 MP 2 GPU running at 600 megahertz located next to a system on a chip just here we have a Ram chip this is a 512 megabytes of ddr3 RAM and then along here we have a wireless module which provides 802 1-1 B G and n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 next to that here we've got our micro SD card slot this slot supports our card up to 64 gigabytes in size and then at the other end of the board we find a CSI or camera serial interface connector into which you can plug a Raspberry Pi compatible camera in terms of other connectivity on this long edge we meaning of the microwave mini HDMI connector supporting up to 1080p video at up to 60 frames a second and then over here there was a micro USB port for power and another micro USB 2 port for connecting peripherals and this also has OTG capabilities also on this edges between these we find buttons of reset button and a power button which is a rather nice and we've also got a connector here for an antenna if you want to extend the range of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth finally the last connectivity I've not mentioned are the pads on the top of the board 40 pads here where you could fit a Raspberry Pi compatible GPIO connector if you wish you could fit for example a header like this it's one of the nice ones with the colours on the pins but you could solder in a connector here to do all kinds of GPIO work with this board and finally we'll flip the thing over to see there anything exciting on the back there isn't it's just a sticker which don't be pushing this through the board a second ago but other than that nothing to write home about on the bottom of the board so that's a flickr banana pie m20 back the right way up before we test out the banana pie and to zero I thought it'd be a good idea to put it in the context of its most obvious competition which as far as I'm concerned or the Raspberry Pi 0w which clearly has the same form factor and the raspberry pie 3/8 plus which is physically twice the site and the banana pie m20 is very much between these two pies in terms of price and actual power in terms of price the best prices I can find online at the moment for the Raspberry Pi zero w are about ten dollars or nine pounds two thirty whereas the when I'll apply em to zero cost about $20 ninety nine or 16 pounds 54 and the pie 3/8 plus costs about $25 or 23 pounds for T in terms of the processors the Raspberry Pi zero W has got a single core 1 gigahertz processor whereas if we look at the banana pie m20 we've got a 1.2 gigahertz quad-core processor and on the Raspberry Pi 3 plus we've got one point 4 gigahertz quad-core processor so the power goes up here as the price goes up but other than that the boards are very similar they've all got 512 megabytes of RAM they've all got micro USB power they've all got one USB 2 port for connecting peripherals they've all got an HDMI port up to 1080p video they've all got a camera connector they've all got Wi-Fi and bluetooth on board the only real differences is that you've got the GPIO connector pre soldered onto the Raspberry Pi 3 8 plus and it's got their 3.5 millimeter jack for the audio out and composite video out oh it's also got a display connector but other than that very similar board you might want to use in projects so what I'm going to do now is to take fear and to zero and connect it up get it running try at a few operating systems and then I'll do some comparative performance tests with these other two boards right as you can see I've now got the banana pie m20 all connected up and running and I'm using a a hub as you can see here to connect him my mouse and keyboard because we've got the one USB port and right now we're booting into ambien and I've been trying various operating systems because there's lots of images available for this board but not many of them seem to work at least for me I've tried several versions of Android couldn't get into those but I have successfully installed ambien five point of 4:1 running the command line interface and got it online and that that's taught me several things at least this board runs a rather hot anyway here we riving in an ambien also 5.41 but with a new bug to xenial desktop and it works as you can see which is a rather good the only problem I've got here is this is running in 720p and whatever I do I can't get it to were than any other resolution 11:07 20 P 60 frames a second and I've been through all the configuration tools for arm bit all that sort of stuff and that's that's the only options I've got if I go into here into settings and - where are we display settings is there I just don't have other options available and I've been trying to go through config files and things but I'm afraid just can't be done but never mind I'm still running on bit here on the another pipe and to zero and we can go to things like well processor it's coming up here there we are we've got LibreOffice writer of all it's going to bring up word processor I know many of you be saying why would you run a word processor are on a half gig ram superball computer because i want to it somehow you always want to do so it'll come up and there we are we can printer pad I will type hello and put it into the obligatory very large letters which of course sir I think is the law in a test of a computer there we are nice big hello there that's absolutely fine and we could also know we won't save that I think the world can lose that we can go to the internet here we've got the chromium browser which works perfectly well I think hopefully it'll come up in a second or would you going to come up it's exciting isn't it yes it's getting there and that we can hopefully go to the world's a favorite web site without work you we can get to explaining computers here in Arlen but I'd like to try out some other operating systems as well so I think now what I'm going to do is to close things down that are Hickson to the board and to try out on raspbian greetings here I am back again I've now fitted a heatsink onto the Penelope m20 it's going to need it given what I'm about to do to this poor little board and we're now booting into a raspbian and do note the size of a text on screen here indeed the text that's just disappeared off the screen because that takes was at 1080p and we've now got Ted's coming back on the screen which is clearly not after 1080 people back to 720p we've got the four little penguins here to show we've got a quad-core processor that's very good and if we wait a second if we speed forward will arrive in raspbian and here we are we've arrived in raspbian but we are back in 720p which annoys me I've actually tried very hard to get this board running at 1080p and I've only managed it from the start of the boot process but if I show you here we just go into a terminal I'm just going to go I think like that's this run up idle I've been editing the config texture file here in idle I just like doing it in idle could use anything else but I happen to like idle we just bring up on the screen they're gonna go down a bit you'll see my frame buffer is set to a 1920 , 1080 and more significantly I've set my HDMI group to a group one which you see EA and mode 31 which should be at 1080p 50 frames a second but it makes no difference at all unfortunately if we look here under preferences and Raspberry Pi configuration we should be able to go into resolution setting we can't go into resolution setting it's not there so unfortunately for me at least the banana pie m20 is a 720p board this said it's running very nicely in raspbian everything is here it's nice and responsive we can go into the task manager there you can see it's running along not taking up too much of its half gig of memory just for running raspbian so that's a pretty nice and we can do all the normal things have even gotta minecraft here if you particularly want to use minecraft here on this board and we can get to the internet we can run up a browser again very much the same as we saw in ambient a few minutes ago not it takes a little while to run up chromium but it's quite a reasonably large program for this poor little board to run up but it'll do it I'm sure will it get there yes it will and we can hopefully go to the world's favorite web site and will that work yes so we can do browsing and that type of stuff and as you would expect but the thing I really want to do here is to test out this board relative to the other two boards we looked at a second ago the Raspberry Pi zero W and the Raspberry Pi 3/8 plus and so what we're going to do you might have noticed it a second ago and first of all go to just clear this displace I'd like to do that and I've got sitting in the buffer there there it is a syst bench command I've installed suspend on this machine and it's going to factor prime numbers up to a value of 10,000 which could be enough to give us a reasonable test and they will see it step to number threads equal forces to a quad-core processor so let's kick this thing off I would note that this board when you install suspense installs an early version that the zero point for point 12 is we can see that that's significant because this version of suspense the earlier version will run full of full 10,000 fracturing of prime numbers and see how long it takes whereas later versions of cyst benches we've discovered in other videos run for a set time and then tell you what's happened in the time but on this particular version assist bench which we run an all aboard were testing we'll see how long it takes a factor up to 10,000 and we'll get some comparable time figures normally I go into a fast-forward mode at this point but it can't take that long to finish I wouldn't imagine so let's sit here and be very excited about what it's going to do what result is going to come up let's just move the window around whilst we're doing it so we'll put that up there come on little board you can get they're probably getting very hot yes I've just touched this heat sink it is getting slightly hot but - never mind hopefully in a second it'll give us a result I once threatened to learn to play the harmonica to cover moments like this when things were not happening but oh oh there we are we've got a result well then it's sixty two point five seconds it's taken two factors a prime numbers up to a value of ten thousand and you might be thinking what's the relevance about number well of course we need to have something comparable and earlier I ran this on the Raspberry Pi zero W and it took quite a while this is a single core board so I actually used the command just for Swan's thread and it gave us a result over 230 point six seconds so it is the case that via Bernardo pi m20 is about four times faster at least running this suspense test than rugby PI 0w I also did a test using the Raspberry Pi 3 a plus and that completed this this bench test in twenty nine point nine seconds so significantly faster so there we are we've got some comparable numbers showing us the relative performance of the banana pie m20 the Raspberry Pi zero W and the Raspberry Pi 3 A+ banana pie m20 is a low-cost single board computer that packs more processor power than the Raspberry Pi 0w into the same very small form factor this said software support for this board is not what it could be it's not as good as it is for the Raspberry Pi models and therefore unless you need a low-cost board with this much power in this form factor I would suggest you probably should consider buying a Raspberry Pi 0w or a Raspberry Pi 3 A+ but now that's it for nother video if you've enjoyed you seen a pre-specified like button if you haven't subscribed please subscribe and I hope to talk to you again though reason

Asus Tinker Board

welcome to another post from explaining computers calm this time I'm going to take a look at the assuit tinkerer board which is the first single board computer to be launched by a mainstream computer manufacturer the tinkerer board has also been described at least in some quarters as a Raspberry Pi killer which is a pretty bold claim so let's go and take a closer look so here's a tinker board in its white and purple box and it's interesting to see a single board computer in a more traditional manufacturers box and if we flick it over you will see on the back we have icons to tell us a bit about the thing you can see when it's got a quad-core 1.8 gigahertz processor 2 gigabytes of RAM there and it's also got 4k hardware decoding indeed it's even apparently compatible with jigsaw don't quite know what that means well of all the technical specs of course a bit later on but for now let's flick it over and get inside the box of course that's what you want to see and there we are there is the tinker book let's get the thing out come on come on yeah we all thought it was caught that and anything else in here I'd answer all we have in the box I hate think that's a bit unusual for a single board computer that's a sign of things to come I think elsewhere as well others also here oh look a manual instruction leaflet with all sorts of exciting information all about our tinker board oh very nice .

I'm sure we'll read that in depth a little bit later on but of course the thing you really want to see if the tinker board itself here it is and we'll just get it out of this little bag and all mr scissors awaiting to cup something and nothing needs cutting because a bad just something a solo like a tree to get sprayed in Russell Russell Russell and here we have the assisting keyboard which is a very very Raspberry Pi lighted net as I'm as I'm sure you will agree and to show you quite how I sleep I like it is let's bring in a Raspberry Pi 3 and putting those two together you can see straight away these are very similar computers the form factor is pretty much identical at the end we've got the same position for the connectors USB port and ethernet we've got full-sized HDMI in the same place 3.5 millimeter jack in the same place display and camera connectors in the same place and 40 pin GPIO connectors in the same place or not a bit more colorful here on the tinkerer board so the fourth factor is pretty much identical they've even got the mounting hold in the same position if you're thinking to yourself does this mean therefore you can take a tinkerer board and put it in a Raspberry Pi case or apparently you can isuzu comas will fit in most raspberry kind cases include that's very handy now of course the technical specs on the board's differently the Suzie's and more powerful bosses we'll see in a second and that means it's also got a higher price so if you wondering what the price differential is it's now what February 2017 and in February 17 a Raspberry Pi will cost you about $40 in the United States or about 32 pounds in the United Kingdom in contrast a tinker board I bought this one for 55 pounds including that including sales taxes that's about 45 pounds first sales taxes but at 55 pounds that's about $69 so the tinkerer board is about 70% more expensive than the Raspberry Pi 3 and so the next question to ask of course is do you actually get that much more for that extra investment joint now let's delve the tinkerer boards technical specs and we'll start with this which is its system-on-a-chip which is a rockchip rk3288 and this includes a quad core ARM Cortex a 17 cpu running at 1.8 gigahertz and that compares to a Raspberry Pi 3 which has got a arm cortex a53 cpu running at up to 1.2 gigahertz there's also as you would expect on a system on a chip a GPU here and the GPU on the tinkerer board is an arm mali t760 running it up to 600 megahertz and that compares the video core for GPU undergraduate pi/3 adds up to 400 megahertz so you've got more powerful processor and GPU on here the tinkerer board and it's work loading but intervals supports up to 4k video it should over it HDMI 1.4 output be able to output 3 840 by to 160 and it's got onboard hardware decoding of h.264 and h.265 video perfect the board over we can see the RAM is on the back of the board there's the 2 RAM chips and we've got 2 gigabytes here of ddr3 memory and that compares to 1 gigabyte of ddr2 memory on a Raspberry Pi recruit the board's back again we have got a Wi-Fi and Bluetooth module there it is looking close up and you can see the antennas got a little cable there which you could disconnect so as you can as described in the manual masseuse you can upgrade it you can connect it to a better external antenna or a longer antenna something you can't do with a Raspberry Pi so you should get better wireless performance from a tint ball gun the Raspberry Pi at least in theory can also see in terms of hardware here we have got a camera connector and display connector on the board exactly the same as you got on ty and the display connector here we'll take Raspberry Pi displays so there's things like the 7-inch Raspberry Pi the spoke of plug in here and this means we've got pretty available displays to use with the tinkerer board but it also means if a Siuslaw peripheral to the tinkerer board they shall work with a PI so it's good for everybody I think we turn the thing around on this side we have got our HDMI connector as I mentioned HDMI one for four words far as I can find some review to say HDMI to but certainly the documentation from the zoo says this is HDMI 1.4 and that's about over hit as you would expect with a micro USB connector for connecting five volt power next to that we've also got a 3.5 millimeter jack and this is for audio only there's no composite video from this board but the audio here is stereo audio at 192 kilohertz 24-bit audio so you should be able to get very good quality audio out of this you certainly can't get good quality audio out of the jack on a Raspberry Pi and it's also worth noting here because we haven't got composite video out on this jack it is a TRS jacks every extra slave is used formic inputs you've got mic input and a good quality audio output that returns the end of the board you can see we've got four USB connectors sadly all USB 2 but at least we've got four four sides connected and next to that we've got our wired network connection we've got a one gigabit ethernet socket yes we've finally got free of having just hundreds made a bit Ethernet like on the Raspberry Pi we've got one gigabit and you'll be pleased to hear that this is not sharing its bandwidth with the USB controller we've really got fantastic wired connectivity here on the ticker board well you might notice just to be slightly different it's upside down or at least via the socket the other way up to the one you'd see on a Raspberry Pi also on terms of connectivity you can't fail so notice we've got these fantastic GPIO connectors for T GPIO pins just as you have on the Raspberry Pi but as you can see they're color-coded never again will you wonder if you've plugged in your ground connector to the right connector your 5 volt or your 3.3 volts connector to the right pin because you can see they're in a nice red and black and and yellow and green color very simple but very effective innovation that to mention before we have of course a microSD card slot on this you'd expect that it'll back of machine there's no onboard flash memory on this machine but we do have a micro SD card slot there which is a UHS one rated slot earth that's pretty good as well so there we are that's the tinkerer bought a nice piece of hardware and I would just note that it's free was really nice it's a little bit heavier than a raspberry pi's it has a little bit of quality to it the way the board is printed you could probably see all those labels are on on the board it's just a nice thing to handle a nice single board computer and in theory given the hardware it has at least according to with seuss it's twice as powerful as a Raspberry Pi 3 and so I think it's now high time to go and download an operating system image put it on a micro SD card put it in our tinkerer board and to put this thing through its paces right as you can see I've now got the tinkerer board all connected up all going to go and to start off to get to this position I went to the support section of the assuit website that include a link to the page in the video description and on this page under driver and told I selected others and but I expanded things up and downloaded the tinkerer OS Debian file and in the standard Singapore computer fashion I use the free SD cards formatter to form up a micro SD card and I wrote the debri an image to it using win32 disk imager and then of course put the card into the tinkerer book as you probably noticed I've also removed the backing from the heatsink which came in the box with the tinker board and I've fitted the heatsink on top of the rockchip rk3288 and in case you're wondering you really have to fit the heatsink on with tinker board they advise you that in the manual that you'll get burnt on the chip if you don't and I think that's true it just get very warm if you don't fit the heatsink on top of the system on the chip anyway things are clearly all ready to go here so I'll turn on the powers and get to a switch somewhere around here and there we are switch it on and you can hopefully see we've got a little tiny red LED there and if we now look to the screen you'll see the screen is completely black nothing at all comes up on the screen when you boot your tinker ball which I find extremely disconcerting it's one the only single board computers I've ever bought when I've connected the thing up first booted it which is not the first boot and gone oh it doesn't work can't be working because they're looking on the screen but the first thing you see anything working is when it actually arrives as it has done there when you actually see something on the screen and we've arrived in Debian on the tinkerer board and this is what you get if you can see with this interesting blue pattern and for some reason down here the thing does not like to accept the fact there's no wide connection here if I don't disconnect that it sits there being upset forever I've got by working Wi-Fi connection that that's absolutely fine you will see basically it's a fairly minimal installation which in many ways is a good thing it's not wasting space on our microSD cards we go down to the manuals who is not lot installed accessories there's really not a lot there is a calculator limit set arow that i've installed on this GIMP which I'll be using the second in a test Internet wise we've got the chromium web browser found the video I've added to VLC media player but other than that that's what you have system tools terminal basically in the file manager and there are various practices and settings which obviously you can work out but basically they let you put onto this machine what you want to put on yourself we just launched the web browser we should also do some down there I will just bring up chrome is to show you what chrome comes up put fairly fast that's not bad for single world computer and assuming the world is with me if I just click on that hopefully we can show we can get to it you know the page in pretty fast this is a fairly responsive web browser on the system other one that was not a lot to say here really because them as if there was not a lot instantly installed it feels quite a responsive system the thing works you know nicely but there's not a lot to write home about here which is basically a working version of a Debian running on our or tinker board and working quite nicely I will of course do some tests of this particularly in the video facilities and how it might play media but I'm not to do that to date at least I haven't got any facilities here for running 4k stuff and really we want to be testing it out up to 4k to see really if it's worth doing that so I'm going to wait till I've got Kobe and media players on the machine and then a future video I'll check out the video capabilities right I told you I installed GIMP for a reason and I want to do a test comparing the speed of the tinkerer board with a Raspberry Pi 3 applying a filter in GIMP attest I've got several times before so I'm going to go to filters I'm going to then select edge detect and neon which is quite a compact so it gives a good test of purchasing power I will zoom things down which is hitting together press the button at the same time girl ego and fortune we come to the progress indicator on the tinkerer board it seems to be off the screen somewhere but hopefully it'll be raspberry PI's can be very very close and all the tinkerer boards it has one 10.1 seconds to apply that filter to e 3000 by 2000 pixel image but it's automatic we did it it's not to double the performances that we've been led to believe by a suit in terms of tinker balls vs. Raspberry Pi 3 now of course that's just one test but it is a good test of processor power I did expect the tinker balls do better there with its faster processor and more RAM available so there we are the tinker board it's a nice machine it's yet to prove itself at least in my eyes fees that much more powerful in practical use with a Raspberry Pi 3 it's great to see a mainstream manufacturer like a Seuss entering the single-board computing marketplace and that first offering the tinkerer board does seem to be a very decent piece of kit as we've seen it runs with Debian Linux operating system very well I'm sure it will also make a great media player and indeed in a future video are be installing totally unworkable and we'll see how that works out this all said we do need to remember they've called it the tinkerer board they do expect us to tinker with the thing to do projects to get things connected up to those GPIO pins to do all those things we do with the Raspberry Pi on thinkable it has after all been : completed a Raspberry Pi killer and in that respect we do need to remember that a single board computer will rise or fall live or die on the basis yes of its hardware but also its support and right now there isn't a lot of support for the tinkerer board indeed when they launched it a SUSE didn't even want a dedicated tinker board website and right now we want February 2017 there still isn't a dedicated tinker board website to go and do things like downloading its operating system images etc and without that support I think it's unlikely it really take on the Raspberry Pi and be fully adopted and embraced by the single board computing community but we shall see what happens anyway that's now wait for another video if you enjoy what you've seen here pre-stressed add a like button if you haven't subscribed please subscribe and I hope to talk to you again very soon