Tinkerboard2: Save your money

Phishfry

Phishfry

I bought one of these ASUS Tinkerboard-2. It seemed rich with M.2 on top at 2230.
RK3399 is well supported everywhere. Porting boards to it seems pretty easy.. I have done at least two,
The FrendilyElec NanoPC-T4 and something else.

Regardless this Tinkerboard-2 was expensive at $150 new fleabay from Japan.
Looked real and every detail matched available photos.
You can feel it was build professionally. Just had a feel to it. All the components were well marked. Very rigid.
Then i got to the software part.....

Versus every RPI-40 pin header this one uses a different pinout for UART. Strike One.
Then the OS. Started at Armbian becuase I know ASUS only supports TinkerOS(based on Debian). Period.
All forum answers from support say TinkerOS. TinkerOS or die.
Bastard U-Boot (8M instead of 16M but uses a partition too) from thier ancient tree never upstreamed and there is only a Community Build of Armbian.
Yikes.
I paid $150 bucks for that? Armbian folks have left several attacks on the ASUS people for zero help.
Stating they are not on the front page because they suck.(I don't blame them.)
They used a bastard buck regulator that was begrudgingly added to Linux later.

So If you have that much trouble, on FreeBSD you just have to throw in the towel.
Just no sense wasting my time on something half baked.
And they have all these other Tinkerboards like -R and other newer ones.

From what I have seen they need to be shunned. If you can't support people at that price then screw U.
RK3399 boards go for $50-$120 and they are getting well above that.

Oh yea and I did not study well because I got Tinkerboard-2 when I should have got Tinkerboard-2S with eMMC.
$150 Arm board with no eMMC and no official u-boot 3 years later.
ASUS really knocking your teeth in.
 
Phishfry said:
Then the OS. Started at Armbian becuase I know ASUS only supports TinkerOS(based on Debian). Period.
All forum answers from support say TinkerOS. TinkerOS or die.
Click to expand...
Linux distros that come with these things are always trash. The device looks really decent but mainly aligns to the "prosumer" market so I guess it is no wonder that the community only centers around TinkerOS, they probably don't know how to use anything else!

I was in a similar boat when playing with the Nvidia Jetson Nano. If there is no BSD that supports the device yet in a satisfactory way, then I possibly recommend extracting the vendor u-boot, kernel (+modules) and C compiler from the BSP (board support package) (or ratty OS "image" if that is all there is available). Then for the userland just build busybox and use that. Ignore the rest of the Linux shite. 👍
 
I got that with a Jetson where they changed from an elaborate Ubuntu BSP to u-boot. Flashing the eMMC to upgrade it.
I think the knowledge I have acquired I could do differently.
Was very daunting at the time. Now I would be trying to wipe eMMC so I could just boot of microSD. Screw custom Ubuntu.

But again the board had a MiniPCIe socket and a PC104. So very unique features.
Little did I realize a PCI bus driver was required. So another exercise in futility. Why did i buy 3?
Oh yea and it was NanoITX at 100x100mm. Plus the PCI card hung off side requiring a custom bracket. Not included.
(Maybe that was full sized card in a mini slot hung off side.)

I rode the Jetson and it was fun for a few weeks.
 
Anything better for FreeBSD than a Raspberry with scfb driver? I don't think they should dismiss it like the past few years. ARM-sbc's won't go away. Neither will SDIO.
 
I have nothing against BroadCom chips but the RockChip line really has been fun riding it upward.
They really have been pushing the features. I don't care for a baby desktop. I use laptops for that.

I think the RPi Zero2E is probably one of the best GPIO platforms out there. But sometimes you want a M.2 slot for fun.
So RockPro64 and then Rock Pi 4A. Then the NEXUS. NVMe with M.2 slot on top. Albiet one PCie3 bus and One PCIe2 for Wifi.
But instead of Pi and crappy wifi support on FreeBSD this is socketed. For your choice of wifi Intel or Atheros.
Rock3A.
See what they did there. RK3568 they dropped the Pi... Rock3A.
Unfortunately as you see in the CPU world they sometimes stomp on market by rapid releases. RK3588 came so soon people skipped RK3568 for the most part and now RK3588 is on the verge of greatness.
Have you seen the Rock 5 ITX?
120 bucks(+++SH) for an ITX Arm board is really getting cheap.
That is the cheapest model they sell but who needs MMC with 4 SATA sockets. Stuff uboot on eMMC and boot to a gmirror.

Raxda and company have not been the best at u-boot upstreaming but they have been changing using github workflows instead of "internal builds" with a Linero from whenever with GCC from who knows when... Really hard to replicate on FreeBSD.
They do contribute to u-boot now too.
I hope we see FreeBSD running on this one day.
 
i have no experience with TI but i found rockchip and allwinner boards to be hackable enough (besides video and wireless)
orange pi are probably the cheapest chinese manufacturer and they have okish support (for linux).
rk3399 has probably the best official freebsd support but they are more expensive than rk3566 or allwinner h61x.
i even have an android media box with h616 working but thats a bit hardcore.
openbsd seems to support more stuff than freebsd but their internals seem more hackish (less abstraction and more pinpointed support)
they don't support (most of the) wireless or video either
 
Jose said:
Any experience with the Beaglebone boards? I'm considering tinkering with them, but I'll probably try Openbsd first.
Click to expand...
The Beaglebone Black is the only one I have dabbled with.
For OpenBSD specifically the support has rotted slightly (There are problems when writing to the sdcard) so you need to use an older release if I recall. Also, the USB was never functional. So you have internal mmc and sdcard. No usb wifi adapter, etc which is a little bit of a shame.

With FreeBSD, things are better (although the support has rotted a little too (no premade images)) but you can still install manually, i.e armv7 image, add dtb and uboot, etc.

The following might be useful:
https://freebsdfoundation.org/wp-co...-Started-with-FreeBSD-on-BeagleBone-Black.pdf
 
Jose said:
Any experience with the Beaglebone boards?
Click to expand...
I have BeagleBoneBlack and Green. Both are great platforms.
Avoid BeagleBoneAI it uses a processor we don't support.

It is really a shame TI got out of the business. The were the best documented and feature rich boards.
Gerald at Circuitco was a main driver as they produced the original boards for Ti. The BB whites.
One of the first Arm boards to put eMMC onboard.
 
covacat said:
i have no experience with TI but i found rockchip and allwinner boards to be hackable enough (besides video and wireless)
orange pi are probably the cheapest chinese manufacturer and they have okish support (for linux).
rk3399 has probably the best official freebsd support but they are more expensive than rk3566 or allwinner h61x.
i even have an android media box with h616 working but thats a bit hardcore.
openbsd seems to support more stuff than freebsd but their internals seem more hackish (less abstraction and more pinpointed support)
they don't support (most of the) wireless or video either
Click to expand...
About 10 years ago, I saw the Minecraft mini-version with accellerated rendering on a early Raspbian release for RPI Zero. That's what's required.
Later, I managed to get wifi and a Videocore demonstration working on a RPI0 with NetBSD. It takes a lot of time because you have to do a native earm6hf world build that takes 4 days on a Zero. It might be possible to recreate it on FreeBSD but I'm afraid they will refuse any effort in this direction. It should have existed for many years. Why are they against it?
 
On Arm it seems like we are incrementally getting features of x86/amd64.

But if you look back to the Beaglebone it was truly an feature rich embedded platform.

It seems like it was developed for embedded engineers.

What other Arm CPU's provide PRU's ?

All the great OMAP features are in base. It is the best supported platform we will ever have.

Quadrature Encoder Built In? Check. The features are so deep you will be impressed. Research it.

Heres a taste:
github.com

GitHub - DTJF/libpruio: Fast and easy Input/Output driver for digital/analog lines on Beagleboard hardware

Fast and easy Input/Output driver for digital/analog lines on Beagleboard hardware - DTJF/libpruio
github.com github.com
 
Maybe the problem is MG has one set of expectations for the Arm platform and I have another.
Headless operation versus quad 4K outputz...

Why hasn't one board stepped up to be master? I like that BBGreen dropped HDMI. Maybe that is why.
Everybody wants something different from their Arm board...

There are only so many developers and so many platforms.

Reading your PWM output stream with eCAP
github.com

libpruio/src/c_examples/pwm_cap.c at master · DTJF/libpruio

Fast and easy Input/Output driver for digital/analog lines on Beagleboard hardware - DTJF/libpruio
github.com github.com
 
Well, if nothing gets further than syscons framebuffer to bitmap conversion, everything can be considered headless.
I'm not having particular expectations of FreeBSD but this really looks like avoiding. The key is SDIO. Is it a legal problem?
 
And for what purpose did you buy this...
What will you build on it? Such devices are very expensive here. For $150 you can buy this.
Maybe I'm stupid, but I don't get it, why pay SO MUCH for such a toy? :)
Untitled.jpg
 
You could look at it as an expensive learning experience. ASUS sucks for Arm.
On the other hand FriendlyElec board cost me $120 and supports NVMe. NanoPC-T4
I simply made my own slave u-boot port for it and it worked because they contribute to u-boot.
This box could be used a media player or mini desktop albeit with scfb.

But not content with just NVMe I want Wifi too and in removable slot.
Then we have the trifecta of reliable removable storage, wireless networking and GPIO.

Looking back at Beaglebone it does make me wonder why I want so much.

I really thought of re-basing my GPIO Power Strip project on a Pi-Zero type board.
Weirdly all those seem to have HDMI too.

I might start a new thread for Zero Boards.
Smitten with this Raxda Zero-3E since we now have some RK3566 support.
Lack of RTC is disappointing.
 
USerID said:
And for what purpose did you buy this...
What will you build on it? Such devices are very expensive here. For $150 you can buy this.
Maybe I'm stupid, but I don't get it, why pay SO MUCH for such a toy? :)
Click to expand...
For me, it is the direct access to GPIO that is worth paying for (which works on the Beaglebone Black btw, I forgot to mention).

I feel that standard x86* PCs are missing a trick here. Just expose it at the back along with USB.
 
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