It just got a little easier to find a Rockchip-equipped board supplier, like OKdo, the UK-based (but shipping worldwide) online store, part of RS Group. Announced Via eeNews Europein partnership with Chinese open-source hardware specialist Radxa, has produced a Rockchip-powered board, an alternative to the Raspberry Pi, stone (opens in new tab) Nickname.
The news comes less than a week after news broke about the end of RS Group’s 10-year Raspberry Pi license.
OKdo co-founder and CTO Richard Curtin said: Our mission is to solve customer problems and we are excited to announce our partnership with Radxa. This will enable us to offer cutting-edge technology to our customers around the world. ”
The process Rock 4SE, a £61.13 ($72.21) version of Radxa’s Rock 4C+, tweaked to keep costs down. The RK3399-T CPU features 6 Arm cores split between 2 Cortex A72 and 4 Cortex A53 and adds a Mali T860MP4 GPU and 4GB of RAM. It has a small Micro SD slot and can take an undetermined amount of eMMC. There is also an M.2 slot for NVMe SSD.
Expansion is via four USB ports, two 2.0 and two 3.0, a full-size 4K HDMI port, 3.5mm audio output, and Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It is powered via USB-C and has a 40-pin GPIO array that is said to be “broadly compatible” with SBC accessories. It remains to be seen how extensive the compatibility with Raspberry Pi accessories will be. It’s common to see boards being electrically compatible, but software support is often lacking.
Volume buyers can customize the board by adding or removing components (what can be added is not detailed, but it seems unlikely that there is a full-size PCIe 4.0 x16 slot in the middle) to tailor the board to their exact needs. can be adjusted according to This is common in industrial Raspberry Pi applications such as EV charging stations.
Operating system support comes in the form of Debian or Ubuntu Linux and Android from 7.1 to 11. It can use GPU-accelerated AI stacks such as Caffe and has hardware access and control libraries for Linux and Android.
As of this writing, the Rock 4 SE is out of stock on the OKdo site, but as the site states “coming soon,” this could be an early-stage issue. “To address the shortage of semiconductors in the market, OKdo worked with Radxa to ensure a long-term inventory of the ROCK 4 SE, saving you the trouble of searching for inventory,” says the product page’s “Availability”. read the section.
