On Thursday, Michael Grunditz started a new thread on the RISC OS Open forums, titled “First post from Tinker Board (RK3288)” and a very simple opening post:
“Worth a separate post!
Posting with NetSurf from my new port! 🙂
http://www.update.uu.se/~micken/rkhellow.jpg“
That isn’t his first thread on the subject of the board – he started his “RK3288 initial rants” thread in May of last year, when he was about to get the board (which had only been released the previous month) and was thinking about the task of porting RISC OS to run on it – but here we are, almost a year later, and he has a working RISC OS desktop, although it’s not a complete and fully working port as yet.
Essentially, the board itself is (yet another) Single Board Computer, sharing the same physical footprint and basic layout as the ‘B’ series Raspberry Pi – so, for example, the RiscPiC cases from Soft Rock Software, the Ident CE case from Ident Computer, or many of the case solutions from RISCOSbits, should happily house the Tinker Board.
The basic specifications of the board are that it uses the Rockchip RK3288 SoC – which sports a quad core 1.8GHz ARM Cortex-A17 – with 2GB RAM, four USB 2.0 ports, a separate Gigabit LAN port (i.e. it’s not ethernet over USB), HDMI video output, a 3.5mm audio socket, and a 40 pin GPIO, a micro-SD socket for storage and OS, and of course micro-USB socket for power.
Compared to the latest Pi, the 3B+, that gives it a faster processor (the Pi’s ARM Cortex-A53, also quad core, runs at 1.4GHz)Â and twice the memory.
