RoadTest: RIoTBoard
Author: Nitin_Bhaskar
Creation date:
Evaluation Type: Independent Products
Did you receive all parts the manufacturer stated would be included in the package?: True
What other parts do you consider comparable to this product?: Beaglebone Black, Raspberry pi
What were the biggest problems encountered?: Installation of OS images from e14 due to lack of information
Detailed Review:
My initial impressions from this board were an excellent candidate for beginner to get into embedded linux/Android ocean since it is open source. But me being at intermediate level found it difficult using the OS images available from e14. The board design is excellent. Almost all features of iMX6 solo are available to be explored. Board doesn't heat after hours of usage.
To begin with android that came installed by default, the performance is pretty good. No lag can be seen while extensively using user interface and while playing 1080p video too
. But a crash was encountered while booting. This can be seen in the boot log attached. When connected to PC after boot-up using the USB cable provided, a device was recognized and after installation of driver, adb was up and running. I installed AnTuTu benchmarking tool and results is as shown in images below,
So the overall score is 7657. This result is for the combination of RiotBoard Hardware plus it's software. Although I like the performance of RiotBoard while playing 1080p videos. Even after hours of playing, the processor didn't heat up much.
I also tried Linux BSP available from e14, but with no luck in booting from SD card. I encountered issues during file system mount. Next I tried was debian. The performance was good, pretty light-weight. The supporting PC software for downloading images on to RiotBoard is pretty good for windows and linux platforms. For Linux, I used imx_usb_loader. This was useful in debugging u-boot. The Blog post on debugging u-boot is posted here. I was able to build uImage on Riotboard and flash the same without using host pc. The Blog post on this can be found here.
Overall RiotBoard is pretty good board. But has to improve in terms of software in order to compete with other open source boards.
