Raspberry Pi and the boom of single-board computers are big business with the credit card-sized British computer selling more than 10 million units in the past five years. Read more: Raspberry Pi: the best projects to get started with the Pi 3
Asus now wants a share of this with Raspberry Pi rival, Tinker Board. It is the same size as the Pi (3.4 inches x 2.1 inches) but comes with a quad-core 1.8 Ghz Rockchip processor capable of playing 4K video and 24-bit audio. By comparison, the Pi 3 is powered by a Broadcom quad-core 1.2 Ghz processor.
Other features include Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capabilities, four USB 2.0 ports, 2GB of RAM (compared to the Pi 3's 1GB) and one HDMI 2.0 port to support 4K resolution, so you can code your way to a new media centre. Read more: What is Kodi and is it legal? A beginner's guide to the home media server
In terms of software, Asus has released its own OS for the Tinker Board, which is a variant of Debian Linux and is similar to what is run on Raspberry Pi.
Asus claims to be working on wider OS support and offers Kodi support to allow at-home media streaming. The £55 device is more expensive than the Pi's £34, or the £4 for the Pi Zero.
There are hundreds of things you can program the tiny computers to do, whether that’s using a Raspberry Pi, a Kano mini computer or the new Asus Tinker Board.
You can code your way to a camera, a connected candy dispenser or even turn an Amazon Dash button into a medical tool. And with the Tinker Board’s 4K capability, you’ll be able to do a lot with this tiny piece of kit.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
