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