Wednesday 15 February 2017

Where'd it go?

Well the Tinker Board seems to be suffering from a serious case of premature release. The lack of support has caught Asus out and I hear that very few people have managed to get their boards up and running.
The only supplier in Europe I know of has now withdrawn it from their catalogue.

I do hope that does not sink the chances of this very promising board, I will keep my eyes open for it

Book news....
not had any for some time have we, vurrentl y 825 pages, it was upp to 900 but I edited it down a bit. Its coming to an end (again), a couple of projects have proven to be harder to document than I expected, and I had to cut the scope of them down quite a bit but its coming

I'm due to hand over at the end of Feb, I don't think there's a real chance of that, which might annoy the publisher who's been incredibly support over my delays but I am pushing my luck now. But I do think it will be done next month (mid March), so hopefully I can post some screen shots and pics of the projects soon..


But to writing.





Saturday 4 February 2017

Asus Tinkerboard, a new dawn for SBC's?

Sorry to have been quiet for so long, been both working on the book and recovering from illness which in turn caused delay in the book, which in turn meant trying to catch up on the work....I'm falling very behind and have had a few extensions to my deadline but am doing my very best to get back into the groove again.

But I had to post something about this beast



This ordinary looking board may just be the most important new SBC ever released, for 2 important reasons,
1st, its from ASUS, one of the very biggest commercial electronic makers, these guys do everything from full Mother boards to tablets to Video cards...and video cards is kinda interesting.

Their release of an RX3288 power credit card board with a very soft and unheralded launch might mean they are checking out the market.

2nd the use of the RX3288 is in itself interesting, yes its 32bit, but its a very fast 32bit, More than capable of showing a Pi or even an Odroid its clean heels. But it won't be the outright champ, there are a few faster CPU's,
However it is running a Mali 760 series GPU....4 cores.  In theory...that means its capable of running OpenGLES3.2 making it the 1st sub $100 board to be so empowered.

If they are also able to use their experience of video cards to provide full drivers for this board, it will make this the most powerful SBC board available on the market if you are planning to do graphic applications, some of the 64bits will out pace the CPU, but none currently come close to a 760 series GPU.

The launch has been incredibly low key, only 1 supplier in the UK, and sadly they sold out before I could get one. What info I can find so far suggests that they don't really have the software side sorted out, and images are basic, and tellingly lacking in OpenGLES3.2 (or any) drivers....
But I hope that this takes off. If it does we might see all the other makes move up a level in GPU performance and might also see people taking more interest in coding graphically.

I'll let you know when I get my hands on one.

Back to the book