Revisiting the Tinkerboard, it works...kinda

There's new imgs of the Tinkerboard available now, and I noted that OpenGLES2 and ES3 have been made available so I set about burning a new img

Sure enough there they were so I set up my test project and .....sooooo much hassle, lots of confusion issues with extension defines needed and installs of X11 and GDB but eventually I did get it up and running, and was a little surprised at how unremarkable it was in terms of speed. Well my demo isn't really optimized for speed so its very hard to be sure.

But sadly the keys don't work, even using the chmod "fix", I'll need to investigate furner

But...it runs.. its not comfortable using mostly generic code, so perhaps some specific graphics code is needed to get the best out of it, but hey ho.

It runs :D I'm happy, and that also means at some point I can have a tinker (see what I did there) with the OpenGLES3x options it provides


No clue about the keys though, I hope I don't have to write whole new chunks of keyboard coding.

To add further curiosity to the speed, I installed and run GLMark2-es2 on it and it came out with a woeful score of 48....48??? thats terrible...

Orange Pi One Plus the new H6 stop gap

Here we go, the 1st accessible H6 based board on the market, essentially a small upgrade to the original H3 version of the same board. But an H6 is in theory a lot more bang for buck, with most notably a Mali 720MP2 GPU, thats an OpenGLES3.1 and OpenCL1.1 capable GPU and markedly more powerful than most other chips on the market.

MP2 is always upsetting I would like to see at least MP4 but even so, it gives an extra level of performance that most Pi clones can't compete with.

Sadly though its from Orange Pi, who I respect for pushing out all kinds of nice tech, but who have not demonstrated any desire to supply decent OS's, making the boards mostly useless for games. They chuck the boards out, let users figure it out and by the time they do, they've moved on to a new board and people lose interest.
Its a shame..they could be market leaders if they would only look at the software they supply.

Allwinner did release specs on their GPU's last year though, so there's some hope that the 3rd party market will actually produce some decent drivers for this....some hope...only some.

For now, only an Android img exists, so for me its going to go back in the drawer for a few months, and I'll wait till there's a stable Linux with drivers to play with.
Its available from AliExpress for just under 20euro's (incl delivery)