In brief: Aside from being the world’s fifth largest PC vendor by unit sales, Asus entered the single-board computer (SBC) business in recent years with its “Tinker” board line. The Taiwanese manufacturer is now expanding the Tinker offering with new Arm-based devices.
Asus is adding new SBC products to its “Tinker Board 3” products, a line of development boards introduced in 2023 with the Tinker Board 3. The original TB3 device was rebranded as Tinker Board 3N in summer 2023, and now the Taiwanese company is adding two new TB3 boards with the Tinker Board 3N PLUS and the Tinker Board 3N LITE models.
Despite being hailed as competitors to Raspberry Pi, the Tinker Board cards are much larger and offer more capabilities for embedded scenarios. Asus says its boards are capable of delivering the “ultimate computing performance” (as far as embedded applications go) in an NUC-size design. After experimenting with the RISC-V instruction set by releasing the Tinker V board, the new SBC units are back to a more traditional Arm-based computing platform.
The Tinker Board 3N line is based on a Rockchip RK3568 SoC unit, which includes a quad-core Arm Cortex-A55 CPU and an Arm Mali G52 GPU. Memory support (LPDDR4/LPDDR4X) ranges from 2GB to 8GB, while storage options include eMMC cards, a microSD card slot, and a 16MB SPI Flash. There’s also an M.2 slot for additional, PCIe-based storage units, while the more capable board includes a second M.2 slot for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity.
Other capabilities of the Tinker Board 3N line include multiple display interface support, a USB 2.0 pin header, audio, built-in LAN connectivity, support for several industrial interfaces, and a 0° to 60°C operating temperature range. The higher-end Tinker Board 3N PLUS unit also offers a wider operating temperature support, ranging from -40°C to 85°C. Operating system support includes Linux Debian, Yocto, and Android.
The Tinker Board 3N line has been specifically designed with industrial use in mind, Asus says. The boards’ optimized thermal design should reduce thermal throttling and provide more operational stability. The devices can work in harsh industry environments, the Taiwanese company states, providing advanced computing capabilities for outdoor use, “hectic” factory environments, and more.
Asus is also offering a unified management platform through its IoT Cloud Console (AICC), which can be used to analyze big data collected by IoT devices working with different operating systems. The Tinker Boards can be purchased through traditional retail outlets (Amazon) and local marketplaces such as Solid State Supplies (UK) and Scorptec (Australia).
