

Especially for the writes, where the Tinker Board's much improved microSD controller bandwidth shines, allowing speeds up to 3x faster than the Raspberry Pi.

NetworkingĪfter my experience with the ODROID-C2 and Orange Pi-both of which clobbered the Raspberry Pi's wired networking performance-I was excited to see if the Tinker Board lived up to its promise of true 1 Gbps networking:įor file copies, which involve both networking and reading/writing on the microSD card, the Tinker Board does a respectable job. If you plug in networking, it will automatically grab an IP address and join the network via DHCP, just like the Pi, and it has SSH enabled out of the box, so you can ssh into it with ssh right away (I used sudo fing with Fing to find out the IP address of the Tinker Board from my Mac, so I could do everything headless). The Debian flavor of TinkerOS is as close to bare bones Debian as you can get, and it boots right into the desktop (no need for a login) when you turn on the Tinker Board. I am using the Debian-based OS (based on Debian 9 / Stretch), since that's the closest to Raspbian and has the best support and usability for general SBC usage and testing. Insert the microSD card into the Asus Tinker Board, and boot it up!.Eject the new NO NAME disk that appears after the image is written.Write the disk image to the card: pv YYYYMMDD-tinker-board-linaro-stretch-alip-vX.X.img.img | sudo dd of=/dev/rdisk2 bs=1m (I use pv to track progress while the card is written).Insert a microSD card (I recommend the Samsung Evo+ 32GB), and unmount it: diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk2 (use diskutil list to find which disk it is could be /dev/disk3 or something else).
#Raspberry pi os list 2018 download
Download and expand the TinkerOS disk image.

The process for getting the OS onto a microSD card is exactly the same as the Raspberry Pi's Raspbian or most other SBCs (this is written for a Mac, but it's similar if you use Linux):
#Raspberry pi os list 2018 software
a fan) might not fit the Tinker Board perfectly (one of my cases wouldn't clamp down all the way).īut as with many other SBCs, the software support is where the rubber meets the road, so let's dive in and see how things stack up! Getting started with the Tinker Board Note that the CPU seems to stand off ever so slightly higher than the Pi's, so some cases with active cooling (e.g.

My initial impressions of the Tinker Board hardware are very good the hardware is almost a perfect match to the layout of the Pi model 2 B, 3 B, and 3 B+-enough so that the Tinker Board fit in all my Pi cases. The color-coded GPIO pins are a nice bonus, too, as I spend less time fumbling around counting pins on the Pi's unmarked header when experimenting with GPIO projects. I'm leaving out a lot of other specs that don't affect my day-to-day usage of an SBC, but what really stands out to me-and what may still make the Tinker Board worth the extra $15-is the slightly higher-clocked CPU and GPU, the faster onboard networking (which isn't crippled by being shared with the USB 2.0 bus like on the Pi), and double the RAM. Here's a really quick overview of how the two models stack up: I just posted a comprehensive review of the Pi model 3 B+, and am now posting this review of the Tinker Board to compare and contrast it to the latest Pi offering. In the mean time, the Raspberry Pi foundation released the Pi model 3 B+, which ups the ante and also negates a few of the advantages the more expensive Tinker Board had over the older model 3 B (not +). I've had a long history playing around with Raspberry Pis and other Single Board Computers (SBCs) from building a cluster of Raspberry Pis to run Drupal, to building a distributed home temperature monitoring system with Raspberry Pis, I've spent a good deal of time testing the limits of an SBC, and also finding ways to use their strengths to my advantage.ĪSUS sent me a Tinker Board late last year, and unfortunately due to health reasons, I had to delay working on a review of this nice little SBC until now.
