Due to the current shortage of Raspberry Pi’s around the globe, OKdo (https://www.okdo.com/) has started to invest in another Single Board Computer (SBC) called the Rock Pi.
This SBC contains a very similar layout to the Raspberry Pi 3 but has the speed and power of the Pi 4 with extra abilities (see the table further below for more details).
I am being offered the opportunity to be a tester for the RockPi 4 SE and as such will be getting one of them to test and play with.
As such, this blog will no longer be simple about Raspberry Pi but will expand to cover any SBC I can get hold of to test and evaluate.
My first testing will involve seeing how it operates as a small computer with a full desktop and YouTube experience. I will also be testing what it is like to use it as a drop-in Raspberry Pi replacement tool.
This will cover tools and software like HomeAssistant, GPIO usage, and more. But I won’t stop there. As this is more powerful than the Raspberry Pi, I will look to test that too. I will look at how well Android runs on this device and test things like emulation, and home media streaming.
ROCK 4 SE Board | |
SOC | Rockchip RK3399-T |
Processor | Arm® big.LITTLE™ technology (Dual Cortex®-A72@1.5GHz, Quad Cortex-A53@1.0GHz) |
GPU | Arm Mali™ – T860MP4 GPU, supporting OpenGL ES 1.1 /2.0 /3.0 /3.1 /3.2, Vulkan 1.0, Open CL 1.1 1.2, DX11 |
Memory | Dual channel (64bit) 4GB LPDDR4 RAM |
Power Req | USB Type-C™ PD/QC 9-12V |
HDMI | 1 x 4k@60fps HDMI |
USB | 2 x USB 2.0 1 x USB 3.0, 1 x USB 3.0 OTG (Switchable) |
Audio Ports | 3.5mm jack, analog stereo output, microphone input |
Connectivity | WiFi 5/BT 5.0, BLE, Gigabit Ethernet |
MIPI | 1 x 2 lane DSI/1 x 2 lane CSI |
Storage | Micro SD / M.2 (M key) / eMMC |
EMMC | B2B connector |
UARTS | 2 x UART |
RTC | YES (support for external battery) |
Software | Ubuntu Linux support Android 7.1/Android 9.0/Android 10/Android 11 support GPU-enabled AI stack such as CaffeHardware access/control library for Linux/Android |
Temperature | Operation Temperature: 0~50 ℃/ Storage Temperature: -20~80 ℃ |