Is "Asus Tinker Board 2" supported by Armbian?

[laurentppol]

Hi there,

as the Chinese market is missing "in stock" OPi4 (not B), RockPi 4B (for more than a month) I am looking for alternative.

Found "Asus Tinker Board 2", same RK3399, 4GB RAM, 4xUSB3 as plus (OPi4 has 2x3.0 + 2x2.0, AFAIK).

https://pl.aliexpress.com/item/1005002304966362.html

 

Is it compatible with Armbian or have I to wait until OPi4 / Rock Pi 4B will be available? (as it is not listed in subforum header).

 

Laurent.

[Werner]

All supported boards are listed here:  https://www.armbian.com/download/

 

I think @TonyMac32 tinkered with the TB2 a while ago but not sure.

[Igor]

I declined samples they want to send us, because we have too little support from them and you. This way:

or by donating enough to hire people which will deal with this.

[JMCC]

You've got other RK3399 alternatives supported by Armbian, like NanopiM4, NanoPCT4, or Station P1

[TonyMac32]

6 hours ago, Werner said:

All supported boards are listed here:  https://www.armbian.com/download/

 

I think @TonyMac32 tinkered with the TB2 a while ago but not sure.

 

I have a Tinkerboard 2, the only thing causing any issue is the use of a variant of the standard buck converters to power the big cores and the GPU.  I have not gotten this converter to operate properly using the (really ugly and hackish) mainline Linux driver.  Since the existing Mainline Linux driver is pretty much crap, it makes it very difficult to add the variant.

 

@JMCC a differentiating factor for the Tinker 2 includes it's power input/management, which is extremely robust (it can power all USB ports per specification, unlike any other SBC I am aware of save the Tinker Edge R) and its use of the newer revision RK3399 which supports 2.0 GHz with no overclock and uses less power overall.  The nanoPC T4 would be my only recommendation for an alternate that is currently supported due to its feature set and design.  Ah, it also has a socket for standard PCIe wifi modules, which makes it possible to upgrade.

 

I will be revisiting the driver code to figure out why I haven't been able to make it happy, the variant is not incredibly different from the normal device.

[mgrl]

I recently bought a tinkerboard 2 and would like to use armbian. Did somebody successfully use it in the meantime? I found community releases but the hdmi display does not come up with any of the provided releases. 
seems buying this board was a suboptimal decision…

[Igor]

5 hours ago, mgrl said:

would like to use armbian.

 

The reasons why we don't officially deal with this HW is lack of people / resources / time. We would like to hire few developers to offload, but nobody wants to finance consumer needs and competition.

If few dollars is to much, you are welcome to use builds with random support status and fix problems on your own.

 

5 hours ago, mgrl said:

I found community releases but the hdmi display does not come up with any of the provided releases. 

 

This hardware is even in automated testing setup, but equipment for checking HDMI output is limited. Not even sure why we have this HW in test system.
 

Spoiler

 

[DaveWK]

First wanted to give a shout-out to the community devs who are working on this board; I think a lot of people see the price tag on the TinkerBoard 2 and assume it would have better linux OS support like other rk3399's before they buy it. Also just donated a little bit because this is the second time I bought an under-supported board (Libre Renegade rk3288) and armbian came to the rescue.

 

It seems like a lot of the problem with the TinkerBoard 2 is some kind of proprietary buck converter that Asus made specially for this board? Sorry if this is too off-topic but I am curious why Asus wouldn't document and publish the specs for this piece of the puzzle, since it seems low-risk that anyone would try to manufacture their own..

 

Considering the lack of documentation for this hardware, is there a way to figure out/map the correct regulator start-up that is more pragmatic than black-box reverse engineering Asus' design? I have tried a few guesses at porting the custom dtb and drivers from their old proprietary linux distro, but it hasn't been fruitful.