I like the Rockchip brand.
We have good support for RK3399 as seen on the Wiki for RockPro64
But sound chip unsupported. No audio output for me. DRM driver needs much patching to get working. SCFB is capable.
So not an ideal media player.
What do you expect from your ARM64 board? There is alot of broken-ness on aarch64 that you do not find on X86 platforms.
The mainstream image files for RockPro64 work great and I would recommend that board for a starter. Its bigger than any Pi board but it works.
HDMI working or not. That one is a big question mark on other RK3399 platforms. I have Rock Pi4SE but I use RockPi4 firmware because HDMI works.
Basically any RK3399 CPU has the same layout. Some boards may or may not breakout these CPU features.
I find myself stripping Armbian U-Boot for boards we do not support. Most of that is because the companies never upstreamed their work to master U-Boot.
Instead they use stinky old U-Boot trees that are hard to replicate.
I recently fell back to these boards I tossed aside to try and get them working on FreeBSD with a linux uboot:
TinkerBoard2--No Ethernet. Put Atheros in M.2 slot and used Wifi. Wish I got a Tinkerboard2S. Adds eMMC.
ROC-PC-PRO aka StationP1 Pro. This is OEM box SceenCloudOS. Nobody has support for ROC-PC-PRO including Armbian. Must use ROCK-PC-PLUS images.
Neither working with HDMI for me. So partially succeeded. Flaws with both. Many hours trying different DTB files.
That is a problem for boards without a DEFCONFIG file in U-Boot configs.
You must scape and plunder other u-boots from anywhere versus build your own..
I would love to try a Arm64 commercial touchscreen but where do you get firmware? Generic U-boot for rk3399 are very stripped out.
Will the screen component be MIPI or eDP or LVDS?? Will it just work?
UART-to-USB cable is usually needed to kickstart everything on ARM. You want a quality one that does 1500000 baud. FTDI are my choice.
Real Time Clock is something you may want to look for. Many have the battery connector without battery. Some have no RTC at all..
I would not dismiss the ROCK64. There is an official image for it and it works. I like the removable eMMC on these.
RK3328 is not very powerful but what are you using it for? A small webserver on it works fine for me. Lackluster eMMC speeds.
The ReconSentinel appliance has a ROCK64 inside and you get a 2 line LCD that
Andriy wrote a driver for. You see them new on ebay for ~$40
The HDMI seems finicky for me. Some monitors work some don't. RTC does not work. I still like it.
I also have NanoPC-T4 with RK3399 and they have the best setup for NVMe in my opinion. No clunky adapters just a 80mm M.2 slot on the bottom.
Can't remember if HDMI worked on it. I can check if interested.
These are all older boards. RK3399 is old.
But it is what we support the best. There are ARMv7 boards but those are nearing EOL. I would not recommend them without a reason.
Beaglebone has various complex I/O interfaces unfound anywhere. That would be an exception.
Rockchip has many newer chips. RK3566 and RK3568. Then came RK3588. I am sure there are newer ones I am missing...
I found them mostly experimental.
www.freebsd.org
