I have had the Tinker Board for two days now but no sign of the OS for it yet, not impressed and starting to loose interest.

Has the hardware been released too soon?

A rather expensive brick

Kodi 14.2 Linux Ported to Rockchip RK3288 with VPU Hardware Decoding

something to play with in the meantime?

Mike

Good to hear bwelsby Look forward to your review.

Mike

BTW, I googled for Rockchip RK3288 Linux Distro to find all the stuff I found.

Mike

Just running the debian distro... it's fast

 

It must have been fast to setup as well, that didn't take you long.

Mike

Michael Conners wrote:

 

Just running the debian distro... it's fast

 

It must have been fast to setup as well, that didn't take you long.

 

Mike

Fast D/L  on Virginmedia Broadband

Quick to write on a 16G Sandisk Ultra uSD  using USB3.0 adapter. (2.1Gbyte image)

Plugged in powered up and around 18 seconds to full boot into gui.

Brian

Nice!!!

Mike

did you pull down any of the API docs they had for the GPIO, looks like they had both C and Python?

Mike

I did yes but not had time to digest.

The (C) GPIO looks like very crude hack from Pi based stuff.

Have you found any I2C examples/library yet ?

I need to test something with I2C and I thought this might be  a good way to kill multiple birds with one Rock !

MK

For I2C, I expect that there is a kernel driver, and that you can use the standard I2C tools like i2cdetect.

Thanks Roger, I've never used any of these tiny Linux thingies so I'm not sure where to look for stuff.

MK

Thanks Roger, I've never used any of these tiny Linux thingies so I'm not sure where to look for stuff.

MK

Hi Michael,

The problem is, most documentation/tutorials online are often written just for one SBC, e.g. Raspberry Pi or BBB, and do not mention that its likely the code will work on all platforms. It is particularly

irritating when APIs even have the word 'pi' in the function names, when in reality they may work on other platforms too. Maybe it is information hiding, or maybe the developers of the documentation/tutorials didn't know.

Anyway, for I2C, the easiest way is to check in the /dev folder, if there is an entry called i2c-1 or i2c-2 or something. If so, then one of these will provide driver based access to the I2C pins on the connector, and the

access should work in any language with any library provided it uses the driver (which isn't often mentioned anywhere in the documentation but could be visible in the source code).

I don't know which language you wished to use, but (for example) for C programming the access is via the 'ioctl' function. Just to make it slightly higher-level (but still fairly low-level) I wrote some wrapper functions to

have an easier-to-understand API for I2C. It is available here, in the files i2cfunc.h and i2cfunc.c :

https://github.com/shabaz123/lcd3

(to see how it is used, the file lcd3-test.c could be examined). In short, to use I2C with this wrapper library, these are some of the functions that are available:

i2c_open

i2c_write

i2c_read

i2c_close

(the full list and short documentation is in the i2cfunc.h file, it is mostly self-explanatory to be honest).

It doesn't handle everything but handles things like the repeated start which some online tutorials etc miss.

Thanks for the info - I've just ordered a board but it'll be a while until I can play with it.

I'm keen on the 1GB  Ethernet done properly on this board so I have some hope of it being useful.

MK

Michael Kellett wrote:

 

Thanks for the info - I've just ordered a board but it'll be a while until I can play with it.

 

I'm keen on the 1GB Ethernet done properly on this board so I have some hope of it being useful.

 

MK

The big points for me are the 1G Ethernet, 2G memory and the ability to add a decent WiFi antenna. I am not too bothered about the 4k video at the moment.

Brian