The other days I announced CubieTech and Olimex were working on low cost Rockchip development boards, but it turns out there’s already one on the market called Waxberrry Pi2, or WB-RK3066, made by Waxberry, a Chinese company.
Here are the specifications of this development board:
- SoC – Rockchip RK3066 dual core Cortex-A9 processor @ 1.6GHz with Mali-400 MP4 GPU
- System Memory – 1GB DDR3 RAM
- Storage – 8GB NAND Flash + micro SD card slot
- USB – Standard USB OTG + Micro USB OTG;
- Connectivity:
- 10/100M Ethernet;
- WIFI 802.11b/g/n (MediaTek MT5931)
- Bluetoothv2.1+EDR (MediaTek MT6622)
- Video Output – HDMI + AV
- Debugging – Serial port
- Misc – IR Sensor
- Dimensions – 72mm x72mm
The Flash and 2 other RAM chips are on the other side of the board.
The board comes with a Mini HDMI cable, a 5V/2A power supply, a USB Data cable, and a USB-serial board for debug. There’s also a CD with the board schematics, Android 4.1.1 SDK and Linux Kernel 3.x source code, Xubuntu image, and documentation which is partially in Chinese. The board is pre-loaded with Android 4.1.
You can purchase WB-RK3066 on Ebay for $129 excluding shipping, which seems a little high. They also sell it on Taobao for 499 RMB (~$81). The company has an official website http://www.wax-berry.com, where you’ll find more information, including (what looks like) how-tos and tutorials in Chinese. On another note, they also provide Waxberry Pi WB-A20, a mini PC board based on AllWinner A20.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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Looks really interesting but just if it has proper support. Would be nice to see quad core version
Way to expensive for a dual core RK3066, for this price you can get a ODROID-U2 which has a quad core Samsung SOC so I don’t really get it.
Sure, it’s good if you need a RK3066 dev platform but I’m afraid the RK3066 is already outdated and besides you can always get a TV stick for less than $40 and solder the UART stuff.
IMO its too expensive – simillar product are 33% of this price : http://www.aliexpress.com/item/UG008-Android-TV-Box-Google-Android-4-1-External-Antenna-RK3066-Dual-Core-1G-4G-AV/1005320426.html
Wet electrolytic capacitors?!? It’s 21st century, come on.
And I spy, with my little eye, that there are linear regulators on it too.
And worse yet, people should avoid those MediaTek WiFi/BT chipsets like a plague, nothing but trouble, and bad quality, let alone there is no FLOSS drivers for them in the Linux kernel.
If one were to remove the PC board from one of the existing box-type RK3188 (or RK3066) Android TV units, you’d have exactly (or more than) this. I have been offered RK3188 based units for as low as $40 in reasonable quantity. I don’t see how this board differentiates itself from existing products at far lower prices.
Sorry – a bit more: I second the caution relative to Linux on Rockchip devices. The state of Linux on the 3066 is gaining in robustness but the RK3188 state-of-the-art is far more fragile than articles on this and other sites have suggested. Chewing gum, duct tape and piano wire is the order of the day. Not something which is ready for prime time.
But… it comes “with the board schematics, Android 4.1.1 SDK and Linux Kernel 3.x source code”.
Does this include 3d Graphics Drivers and VPU Drivers? If so, sounds like more of a win…
@hroth
For Android yes, but Linux 3D GPU and VPU drivers most probably don’t even exist.
@cnxsoft
Too bad it looks like the limadriver has been stalled for quite a while now, so maybe it is not happening either, too bad, as for now the Olegk0’s rk30fb is the only real use method that actually works (good at that though, but is just an unaccelerated framebuffer after all) without any binary blobs.
Hopefully ARM’s V500 will not be so NDA/DRM ridden… But likely is as bad as the rest of the HW video encode/decode blocks.
This is the internal board for a UG008 not developed by this company is developed by hotack http://www.hotack.cn/
really can get by 40$ at ebay looking for UG008 and also I try to compile linux 3.0.8 and 3.0.36 get issues
with the ethernet phy…..
Cheers,
Mike
@Mikeloto
Going on the shape, is it this one:
http://www.hotack.cn/?g=Cn&m=Product&a=view&id=70
@onebir
Yes , I have a lot of them because are the same price than MK808B, etc but have good form factor and ethernet, now also comes without IR sensor, I’m on the way to compile 3.0.36 with eth phy support…. and MTK BT and wifi support.
@Mikeloto
It’d be great if you can get that working 🙂
But where can you get them for $40? I looked on Aliexpress; the cheapest there is $60…
@onebir
MK819 sells for ~$45 shipped on ebay and seems to the same same board as this waxberry and ug008
@onebir
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/UG008-RockChip-3066-A9-Android-TV-Box-DDRIII-Bluetooth-WiFi-Dual-Core-8GB-/271231795874?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_15&hash=item3f26acc2a2
@Mikeloto
Including shipping: 66 AUD = 60 USD, it’s about the same price as on Aliexpress or DX.com
Linux distributions are for China. Chinese forum can not download even if you sign up. Too bad! I know that Linux is open source and everyone has access.
http://www.wax-berry.com/bbs/forum.php?mod=forumdisplay&fid=44