Youyeetoo YY3568 devkit review – Part 1: Unboxing, specifications, and Android 11 testing

Youyeetoo has sent us a review sample of their YY3568 “Bundle 5” devkit with the Rockchip RK3568-powered YY3568 SBC, an 11.6-inch touchscreen display, a MIPI camera module, and all accessories required to get started. We were especially interested in using it to play with the 1 TOPS NPU in the Rockchip RK3568 in Linux, but we’ll start the Youyeetoo YY3568 review with an unboxing, some specifications, and a quick review with Android 11 before switching to Debian 10 in the second part of the review.

Youyeetoo YY3568 devkit unboxing

The YY3568 single board computer itself is comprised of a carrier board and a YY3568-Core board with a Rockchip RK3568 processor, as well as 8GB RAM, 64GB eMMC flash, and WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0 module. The board is suitable for various applications from generic computing to video playback and AI workloads.

YY3568 SBC specifications and hardware overview

Youyeetoo YY3568 board features the Rockchip RK3568 quad-core Arm Cortex-A55 processor clocked at 2.0 GHz with a Mali-G52 GPU, a 1 TOPS NPU for AI workload. with dual GPU. The Mali-G52 comes with a fairly comprehensive range of connectivity for general usage needs. The board is feature-rich as it does not only provide GPIO headers and an SD card but many more interfaces. Let’s see what interfaces are supported by the board.

List of interfaces and key features.

Serial x 5	I2C x 2	CAN x 1
GPIO x 30	ADC x 4	PCIe 3.0 x 1
SATA 3.0 x 1	USB 3.0 x 2	USB 2.0 x 2
MIPI CSI x 1	MIPI DSI x 2	eDP x 1
HDMI x 1	Gigabit Ethernet x 2	WiFi (5GHz ,2.4GHz) + Bluetooth x 1

The company offers various accessories with the board and as part of the “bundle 5” kit, we also received the following accessories:

• 11.6-inch eDP with capacitive touch with required cables
• Wi-Fi + Bluetooth PCIe module
• MIPI CSI camera module
• USB cable
• 12V/2A power supply
• Heatsink

Youyeetoo offers a long list of accessories for the YY3568 single board computer which you can find on the Wiki.

Methods to install the OS image

The company provides two OS images for the YY3568 board with Android 11 and Linux (Debian 10) each with different flavors depending on the type of display used and whether you need to boot from the eMMC flash or a microSD card.

To install the image on the microSD card you can use the SDDiskTool program for Windows also known as the “Rockchip Create Upgrade Disk Tool”. After installation is complete, you can select the storage device, select “SD Boot” to install the bootloader, load the OS image (Firmware), and flash it to the microSD card by clicking on the “Create” button.

The method to install the OS image to the eMMC flash is different, and we’ll need to download the RK USB Drivers and the RKDevTool program and connect the board to our host computer with the provided USB cable using the USB 3.0 port (Blue) on the YY3568 SBC.

Then press and hold the Recovery (see picture below), turn on the board to boot into recovery mode, and release the Recovery button after about 3 seconds. RKDevTool program will then start writing the firmware straightaway.

Android 11 review on the YY3568 board

For the first part of the review, we went with Android 11, and considering we’ll use the 11.6-inch eDP display and the board comes with WiFi, we selected the file YY3568-Android11-wifi-edp-2023-1-16.img to flash it to the eMMC flash of the board as explained above.

The RKDevTool will be in Chinese by default. We can change that by editing the config.ini file in the installation folder and changing the 4th line from

to

Start RKDevTool program again (it should now be in English), select the Upgrade Firmware tab, click on the firmware button to select the downloaded Android 11 image, and click on Upgrade to complete the firmware installation.

After installing the Image, we have to press the Reset button to boot the board and the boto animation will show on the 11.6-inch display. If nothing is shown it means we may have selected the wrong OS image, one that does not support the eDP display, so make sure to double-check the image and cabling, and try again.

First boot and system information

Android 11 boots relatively fast on the YY3568 SBC and the touchscreen works out of the box. We noticed a small lag with the touchscreen, but not to the point where it made us feel frustrated. We then tried to set up Wi-Fi and both 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks can be scanned and connected to.

Since this is a development board, Google Mobile Services is not installed and we can’t use Google Play to install apps, so instead we need to download APKs and install them with ADB. For example, we installed CPU-Z with the command:

As usual, CPU-Z does not recognize Rockchip processors correctly and will always show the RK3066 processor, but other parameters look fine.

Android 11 benchmarks

Since we had to install a bunch of APK, we figured out that installing APKPure would make it easier to install all the benchmark tools and test apps required for the review. Antutu did not work on the Rockchip RK3568 SBC, so we went with Passmark PerformanceTest to test the CPU, storage performance, 2D and 3D graphics, and memory performance.

3D graphics performance was tested with the 3DMark program using both Wild Life and Sling Shot Extreme benchmarks. The results are slightly lower than expected possibly because of thermal throttling since cooling is only done with the heatsink.

 

Video playback with VLC

We tested H.264 and H.265 videos (Big Buck Bunny) using VLC with Hardware Acceleration Decoding mode turned on, and both samples played smoothly without any frame drops or tearing.

 

WiFi and Ethernet testing

We also quickly check WiFi and Ethernet to make sure they work to an acceptable level.

The link speed to the router was 867 Mbps. Speedtest should not typically be used to test the performance of WiFi or Ethernet since the ISP or the Internet itself may be the bottleneck, but we still gave it a gp to show WiFi is not a disaster and the online tools measure 75.74 Mbps.

We could also play YouTube videos at full HD resolution (38 Mbps) over WiFi.

We repeated the tests over Ethernet with SpeedTest and YouTube 4K videos (90 Mbps).

We’ll test the WiFi and Ethernet performance with iPerf3 in more detail in Linux.

Conclusion

The YY3566 has been used for more than two weeks both in rooms with and without air-conditioners and we found out that if the weather is really hot the board may stop working, so heat dissipation must be addressed, especially in hot climates like in Thailand, and a fan may be required for cooling. We could not reproduce the stability issue in an air-conditioned room. A fan is highly recommended if the board is to be used in environments with higher temperatures (35°C and up).

Otherwise, the Youyeetoo YY3568 board works well for browsing the Internet, playing videos with VLC, and streaming YouTube videos. We also liked the 11.6-inch eDP display with wide viewing angles, an IPS display with 1920×1080 resolution, and a 10-point capacitive touchscreen.

Our test of the 8MP camera module found that the aspect ratio of the camera does not match the one of the screen causing the image to be incorrectly proportioned, and we’ve yet to find a way to adjust it. But aside from this issue, the camera is very clear and comes with a really good auto-focus system.

We also like the good documentation for the board and accessories that the company provides in the Wiki.

If asked what this board is suitable for, we would say kiosks or vending machines because of the large number of serial ports which enables it to be easily connected to devices such as coin and/or banknote acceptors or other control mechanisms, as well as the ability to connect one or more displays through HDMI, MIPI DSI or eDP. The YY3568 SBC can be used as a development platform for the YY3568-Core system-on-module to be integrated into the customer’s own product with a custom carrier board.

In the second part of the review, we will install Debian 10 Linux on the YY3568 board and test the NPU capability with the RKNPU2 toolkit. Continue reading “Review of Youyeetoo Rockchip RK3568 SBC with Lubuntu 20.04 and the RKNPU2 AI SDK”

We’d like to thank Youyeetoo for sending the YY3568 “Bundle 5” devkit for review. The YY3568-Core CPU module, YY3568 SBC, and the Bundle 5 kit review here can all be purchased on Aliexpress, Amazon, or Youyeetoo store with prices starting at $36.99 for the module only. The “Bundle 5” kit reviewed here with a module equipped with 8GB RAM and 64GB eMMC flash sells for $206.15 plus shipping.

CNXSoft: This article is a translation – with some edits – of the original review on CNX Software Thailand by Arnon Thongtem.

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