What is the ASUS Tinker Board?
Before diving in, let’s discuss some basics. What is a single-board computer? What can it do? And why would you want to use one in a project?
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What is the ASUS Tinker Board? Before diving in, let’s discuss some basics. What is a single-board computer? What can it do? And why would you want to use one in a project?
A Little Context The maker movement has empowered the everyday person to tap into an intrinsic human element: making things. The ability to create robots or weather stations or other large-scale intelligent devices was once reserved for the most educated among us, with access to expensive equipment and fabrication tools. Now most of these items and skill sets can be acquired by anyone with a modest budget who just has the urge to learn. But as the abilities and interests of makers grow, the power and versatility of the resources must grow as well. The Tinker Board is a part of the next wave of more powerful maker tools. As a single-board computer, it offers a multitude of options for a maker. It can control hardware with code, it can run specialized operating systems for niche projects, or it can be a small–form-factor computer for personal use.
© Liz Clark 2019 L. Clark, Practical Tinker Board, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-3826-4_1
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Chapter 1
What is the ASUS Tinker Board?
What Is a Single-Board Computer? But let’s back up for a moment. What exactly is a single-board computer? A single-board computer (SBC) has a fairly self-explanatory name. It’s a computer that has all of its components fit onto one circuit board that usually fits in the palm of your hand. Most desktop computers have a motherboard with modules that plug in, including the CPU, RAM, graphics card, and so on. By contrast, an SBC usually has everything soldered directly to the board so that the user just needs to provide power and peripherals to be up and running.
System on a Chip A hallmark of SBCs is that they usually feature a system on a chip (SoC). An SoC is an integrated circuit (IC) that contains most of the main components of a computer in one package that takes up a single spot on a circuit board. The processor is often an Advanced RISC Machine (ARM)based architecture, which is also found in modern Android phones and Chromebooks. The power and technology found inside modern consumer devices in an unlocked form factor available to makers has a lot of possibilities. Makers can expand on their project’s limits without breaking the bank, which leads us back to the Tinker Board.
The Tinker Board’s Hardware The Tinker Board, illustrated in Figure 1-1, is a lot like other SBCs and does have its own SoC; specifically, a Rockchip RK3288. The RK3288’s processor is an ARM Cortex-A17, which has four cores clocked at 1.8GHz. Of course, more experienced users can try overclocking the chip at their own risk.
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Chapter 1
What is the ASUS Tinker Board?
Figure 1-1. The ASUS Tinker Board Its GPU is an ARM Mali-T760, which also has four cores and is clocked at 600MHz. For RAM, it has 2GB of LPDDR3 memory, which gives a nice amount of headroom to avoid bottlenecking with the processor and GPU specs. For inputs and outputs (I/O), as shown in Figure 1-2, it features fo
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