![]() ![]() This and the Khadas board look like they’re intended to be used primarily as media player devices – so this preloaded operating system is probably quite useful for that. The Orange Pi 3 ships out with an Android operating system image pre-installed on its eMMC storage, so let’s take a look at that first. ![]() It’s more likely that this layout will just be useful if you’re already familiar with the Pis GPIO layout. The GPIO pins roughly mimic pins 1 to 26 on a Raspberry Pi, so you may be able to use some shields and adaptors that only use a few pins on the Pi, but my experience is that these are few and far between. Let’s start by taking a look at the hardware around the board, we’ve got onboard WiFi and Bluetooth, an IR receiver, 26 PIN GPIO headers, USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports, a 3.5mm audio jack, microphone, full-size HDMI port, power button, USB C power input and then a microSD card slot on the bottom. This was just my first impression when looking through the documentation of all three boards, so that’s why we’re going to try them out.įor each board, we’ll take a closer look at the hardware features, then have a quick look at the operating system that it is shipped with, then try to get an LED to blink using the GPIO pins (which may require a different operating system to be loaded) and finally we’ll look at the power consumption of each. It also looked like it was the most suited for electronics projects using the GPIO pins rather than being used as a media player or home server like the other two. This board cost the most, at $120, which is a little more than the recommended retail price of even the 8GB Pi 4B, but it looked like it had the most comprehensive documentation. It’s got 2GB of DDR 4 RAM and 16GB of onboard eMMC storage. ![]() This board runs a 6-core Rockchip RK3399 SoC consisting of a dual-core Arm Cortex A72 processor running at 2.0Ghz and a quad-core Arm Cortex A53 processor running at 1.5Ghz. The third, and the most expensive of the three, is the ASUS Tinkerboard 2S: This was the midrange of the three at $80. It’s got 2GB of DDR4 RAM and 16GB of onboard eMMC storage. This board has got an 8-core Amlogic A53 SoC running at 1.5Ghz. It was the cheapest of the three boards at $35. It’s got 2GB of DDR3 RAM and 8GB of onboard eMMC storage. This board runs an Allwinner H6 Arm Cortex A53 quad-core processor running at 1.8Ghz. ![]() The Raspberry Pi Alternatives That I ChooseĪfter sifting through pages and pages of options, these are the three boards that I settled on. Here’s my video trying out the three boards, read on for the write-up: I also had a brief look at the documentation available for each before buying them to make sure that they had some basic guidelines for getting started. There might be more powerful or newer versions of these boards available for an increased price, but I looked at the ones that I felt provided the best value for money for use as a tinkering board. I’m not looking for high-end hardware, this isn’t meant to be a benchmarking exercise, my intention is for these boards to be suitable Raspberry Pi alternatives for tinkering with electronics as well as basic web browsing and video playback. The Raspberry Pi 4B is one of the most popular choices for current projects, so I looked for some alternatives that offered similar specs to the 4B and were similarly priced. With that said, there are a large number of single-board computers available that offer similar features to Raspberry Pi’s, so I thought it would be interesting to get a few and try them out. They’re out of stock almost everywhere, there are generally purchasing limits on any that are in stock, and they’re often being sold at way over their recommended retail price.Ī big part of what makes Raspberry Pi boards so attractive is that they’ve got really good documentation and support and a large online community, so you’ll easily find projects, tutorials and answers to any issues you run into along the way. If you’ve tried to buy a Raspberry Pi in the past year or so then you’ve probably experienced some level of difficulty in getting one. ![]()
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