The New Radxa Rock Lite Rockchip RK3188 Development Board Sells for $59

You may have heard about Radxa Rock Lite development board before, so let’s clear up the different versions of the Radxa Rock first. There’s a total of four Radxa Rock models:

• Radxa Rock (2013) – The original version with 2GB RAM, 8GB NAND Flash, and Wi-Fi/Bluetooth
• Radxa Rock Lite (2013) – 1GB RAM, 4GB NAND Flash, and Wi-Fi only
• Radxa Rock Pro (2014) – An evolution of the Radxa Rock still with 2GB RAM, 8GB NAND flash, Wi-Fi/Bluetooth but adding LVDS and camera interfaces.
• Radxa Rock Lite (2014) – 1GB RAM, no NAND flash, and Wi-Fi only

The fist two versions appear to have been phased out, as they are not listed for sale on Radxa Rock website, and today, I’ll write about Radxa Rock Lite (2014).

Radxa Rock Lite (2014) specifications:

• SoC – Rockchip RK3188 ARM Cortex-A9 quad core @ 1.6Ghz + Mali-400 MP4 GPU
• System Memory – 1GB DDR3 @ 800Mhz
• Storage – micro-SD SDXC up to 128GB
• Video Output – HDMI 1.4 up to 1080p@60hz, and AV output. LVDS interface.
• Connectivity – 10/100M Ethernet port, WiFi 150Mbps 802.11b/g/n with antenna
• Audio I/O – Audio S/PDIF, headphone jack
• Camera – CSI interface
• USB – 2x USB 2.0 host port, micro USB OTG
• Debugging – Serial Console
• Misc – IR sensor, power key, recovery key, reset key, 3 LEDs, RTC
• Expansions Header – 80-pins including GPIO, I2C, SPI, Line in, USB 2.0, PWM, ADC, LCD, GPS… etc

The only differences between Radxa Rock Pro and Radxa Rock Lite are the memory capacity (2GB vs 1GB RAM), the lack of NAND flash on Radxa Rock Lite (8GB on the Pro version), and Bluetooth 4.0 is not available on the Lite version. The rest of the features, including the camera and LVDS ports, are identical, and both board are hardware and software compatible. A Rockchip RK3188 board with internal storage is now possible, because instructions to boot Linux/Android from (micro) SD card has been made possible recently, and you can download SD card images for Radxa Rock (Pro) for Ubuntu 14.04 (desktop/server). There are also Android 4.4 and Debian images for NAND flash, so I don’t see why these could not boot from SD card.

Radxa Rock Lite is currently listed for $59, whereas the Pro version sells for $99.

Via Mini PCs community on G+.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

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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