July 17, 2020

Rock Pi

I got an email from Seed Studio in July of 2020 announcing these boards. They are available for pre-order apparently, and I have not bitten yet. For $24 you get the D4W1P model, which features the Rockchip RK3328. This has 4 cores (64 bit, Cortex-A53) along with 512M of ram and dual ethernet. You get Wifi too. One ethernet is Gbit, the other os 100 Mbit. You can add an eMMC module.

For $2 more you can get the D8W1, which has 1G of ram, so why not? If you order a model with "P" on the end, you get POE on one of the ethernet ports, which could be handy (for $2 more). They also mention bluetooth.

The Technical Manual for the RK3328 doesn't look too bad, and with 645 pages, there is hope.

They say there is a "reset key", but I don't see it on the photos. If there is anything a board like this needs, it is a reset button, or at least a convenient header to attach one.

Orange Pi 4 and the RK3399

Two things sold me on this. One is the 16G of eMMC. The other was the RK3399 manual without "confidential" watermarks on all the pages (I am looking at you, Allwinner).

What I did bite on was an RK3399 board from Orange Pi. They call it their "Orange Pi 4". One feature than drew me to it rather than the other models with the RK3399 was the 16M of eMMC onboard, no need to add a module. Gigabit ethenet. Speeds to 2 Ghz (surely it will need a heatsink). Wifi too, but I don't plan to use it. 6 cores and 4G of ram for about $65.

The RK3399 is a 6 core "big-little" chip with 2 big A72 cores and 4 litle A53 cores. The A72 cores are high performance.

The above zdnet article is terrible (they keep showing a picture of a Raspberry Pi board at the top, which is totally misleading. But it does give a list of other RK3399 basedboards:

Some boards have an M.2 header so you can install a big SSD, which might be just the thing if you actually wanted to run linux on one of these. And this is not unattractive, however the way linux seems to work with boards like this, is that it is "stuck in time". Whatever kernel ships with the board is what you get and the mainstream distribution will not track your hardware like it does for a desktop. Only with the Raspberry Pi will you beat this rap, or so it seems.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's electronics pages / tom@mmto.org