Designed to help Asus capture a slice of the lucrative maker market, the Tinker Board is a one-for-one feature-and-footprint clone of the Raspberry Pi 3: it’s a roughly credit-card-sized single-board computer with an ARM processor, wired Ethernet, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios, four USB 2.0 ports, an HDMI port, analogue audio, Camera Serial Interface (CSI) and Display Serial Interface (DSI) ports, and a 40-pin general-purpose input-output (GPIO) header. So far, so cloned.
Where Asus has tried to improve upon its inspiration is in the raw specifications: the processor, while 32-bit to the Raspberry Pi 3’s 64-bit, is considerably faster; there’s double the memory, a supposedly gigabit network connection which isn’t bottlenecked by a single-channel USB bus, support for 4K video playback, and high-resolution 24-bit 192KHz audio. If all of that were true, it’d be easy to overlook the higher selling price of the Tinker Board compared to the Pi on which it is based.
Sadly, my review didn’t go smoothly. The Tinker Board has hit the market in a parlous state. The 4K video playback is choppy, the GPIO port barely works and none of its features beyond simply toggling a pin on and off are available, hardware accelerated video playback is barely functional, and the ‘gigabit’ Ethernet port no faster than the 10/100Mb port on any standard Raspberry Pi.
To be fair to Asus, the majority of the problems I encountered – bar, possibly, the Ethernet performance – were likely related to the software provided, which appears to be in a very early alpha stage. It’s a device I’ll be keeping to one side in the hope of revisiting it in the future, should Asus ship improved software.
For a full run-down of my experience with the board, pick up the latest PC Pro at your nearest supermarket, newsagent, or electronically on Zinio and other digital distribution platforms.