ASUS Brings Powerful Tinker Board Raspberry Pi 3 Competitor To U.S.
Today, ASUS is announcing that the Tinker Board is now available in North America, where it will be priced at $54.99. ASUS says that the single-board system is capable of powering all of your projects from robots to media boxes to coding machine for budding programmers. The Tinker Board is powered by a Rockchip RK3288 quad-core ARM SoC that is clocked at 1.8GHz, and has an integrated Mali-T764 GPU (600MHz).
The Tinker Board is no slouch when it comes to rest of its specs either:
- Video: HD/UHD video playback support – including H.264/H.265 decoding
- Audio: 192kHz/24-bit audio support
- Memory: 2GB of dual-channel LPDDR3
- Storage: Micro SD(TF) slot features SD 3.0 support
- Connectivity: Bluetooth 4.0 + EDR and on-board 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi
- Networking: 1Gb Ethernet
- Ports: (4) USB2.0 ports, (1) HDMI 1.4 out port, (1) 3.5mm audio jack
- I/O Ports: (1) 40-pin GPIO interface header, (1) 15-pin MIPI DSI, (1) 15-pin MIPI CSI, (1) 2-pin contact point for PWM and S/PDIF signals
- Power: Suggested 5V/2A AC adaptor via the micro-USB port (power adaptor not included)
ASUS adds that the Tinker Board is capable of working with adapters designed to accommodate the Raspberry Pi and that it will even fit inside cases that were designed for the popular single-board computer. Likewise, the company has developed its own homegrown Debian Linux distro called TinkerOS to leverage the power of the Tinker Board.
“TinkerOS provides a good foundation for browsing the web, watching videos, coding scripts, and other basic tasks,” writes ASUS. “We chose the LXDE desktop environment for its low resource requirements. Version 1.8 of the OS is based on the latest Debian 9 core. It includes an optimized Chromium web browser, Python and Scratch coding apps, and a media player we co-developed with Rockchip. The TinkerOS media player is currently required for hardware-accelerated 4K video playback.”
ASUS is working to support Android on the Tinker Board, but it is currently Marshmallow-based (instead of Nougat).
The ASUS Tinker Board is available to purchase now at both Amazon for $54.99 and Micro Center. With Nintendo bailing on the NES Classic Edition, maybe it’s time to build a new Tinker Board-based alternative….
