Radxa Zero 3W

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers.com this time we're going to take a look at this the radza 03w this is a quadcore zero form factor single board computer with a number of different RAM and onboard storage options so let's go and take a closer look right here we have our Rader 03w which has 2 GB of RAM 16 GB of onboard emmc flash storage and which I purchased from allnet for $33 there models range from a 1 gab variant with no emmc and a gpio header for $19 up to an $864 board for $68 just to confuse matters OK do and rs also sell the same boards but call them the Rock zero 3w so for example on OK do our 2 GB Ram 16 GB emmc board cost £ 3270 including taxes but regardless let's open up our exciting new single board computer just take it out that wrapper like that open up a little box there we are it's in an anti-static bag it seems to be sort of seal but easy to open no tools required on this occasion let's get it out the bag there we are our new single Bo computer I always like opening up a new single Bo computer and clearly this is a competitor to a raspby pi 02w of which I've got one over here this rather rare board well as we can see if we flick around to the same orientation one of the differences is we have got USBC ports on the rad to 03w rather than the micro USB on the pi model and the other big difference is that compared to the Raspberry Pi 02w this board is actually available you can buy different variants of the rad 03w we still can't find rasp Pi 02 WS which is a great shame anyway let's turn attention to this board here and at the heart of the board we have a Rockchip RK 3566 system on a chip with four arm cortex a55 cores clocked at up to 1.6 GHz as well as n Mali g522 e GPU to one side of the S so we then find our low power ddr4 ram here 2 GB and on the other side is a wireless module that offers Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.4 next to this there was then both an onboard antenna and also an antenna connector and according to Rader's documentation these are selectable V software turning to the front edge we find a micro HDMI connector that supports 1080p at up to 60 frames a second as well as USBC connector that offers USB 3.0 host connectivity and then there's also a second USBC connector and this one can be used to power the board although it also offers USB 2.0 data transfer for programming the emmc finally on the top here we find a 40 pin colorcoded gpio header although do note that not all models of RZA 30 come with a populated header it just depends on the version of the board that you purchase if we turn the board over underneath are a few exciting things not least we find our emmc flash storage here 16 GB and we also have here a micr SD card slot and a CSI a camera serial interface connector for connecting a camera to the board and then finally down here we've got a tiny switch this is a mask ROM button and this is used when programming the emmc flash storage and so there we are the Rader 03w a very promising piece of Hardware clearly competing with a raspber pi 02w but offering usb3 connectivity onboard emmc and significantly more RAM finally it's worth noting that Rader will soon also sell a 03e which is identical to a 03w except that it's got a gigabit Ethernet port rather than the wireless module and has no emmc options and for good measure there's also going to be a dedicated power over Ethernet or Poe hat so very exciting although right now it is the 03w that's actually available so let's go and see how this board [Music] performs right I've now got everything connected up so let's turn on the power here we go and we'll do this boot in real time so you can see how quickly the radza 03w actually boots up oh and we now have something on the screen things are definitely happening and we're booting into Dean Bullseye with an xfc desktop and this is an image for the same provided by Rader and I'll say a bit more about it in a second anyway we now need to log in the default is Rader for the username and rad s for the password as well like that those are a default this is not my first boot I have gone in and made a few scaling changes so things read better on video but hopefully in a second we will arrive on my desktop it's exciting isn't it watching this little board boot up into a desktop Linux Dro I know some people will say Chris no one will use a desktop Dr on a board like this but it's available so I want to show you that it works and it's not too bad it's reasonbly responsive this obviously isn't the most powerful system in the world if we open up for example a fan manager like that there we are it's uh think things are working as you can see I don't think we've got GPU acceleration on this desktop there if we go to the menu you'll see it's a little bit laggy in fact it's h very laggy as you can see that but there's uh things are working there's not too much pre-installed we get down to settings there's lots of settings for xfc ETC few accessories something in development couple of browsers small bit of multimedia stuff but basically this is a minimal Dr you can do with what you wish so let's go to internet and launch the uh Chromium browser see what's going on there again we'll do this in real time so you can see how well this works and there we are it's not my default browser I don't care go away why does software ins system doing things like that anyway as you can see we're on the web page for the radza 03w and if we scroll down here we get to a download section which is where we logically go to find an operating system and here as you can see we've got Debian and auntu server well if we click on Debian it takes us to a page out on GitHub which has got various download options come on there we are it is working and if we look down here you'll see there are four operating systems available from ranser for the board there is Dean xfce desktop that's the one we're currently running which as you can see this is the officially supported tested and recommended OS for most users that's obviously why I'm running this we also have a CLI version and then we also have Ubuntu available with a desktop or without but it the services provided as is except for critical issues we certainly aren't intending to use that and that's why I'm running Debian this said if we scroll down here you'll see the actual images we can download which logically would be this one here Dean Bullseye xfc desktop and this is image B3 and if you use image B3 it works but you don't get any Wi-Fi and if you go up here you see we have got Wi-Fi we're obviously online that's how we're online using Wi-Fi and so I had to search around a bit to make this work and the first thing I did was to go to I went to the OK do software Hub remember OK do sell this board as The Rock 03w if we just go to their site like this you will see here are their software images for the various rock boards and if we go down to there is it 03w same images we just saw they are B3 images so that doesn't get you anywhere but fortunately I managed to find going around various places searching around I got to this forum post which will come in I'm sure come on Forum post you can arrive and show us your lovely self is he going to get there yes it is here we are and this is clearly a forum post about working images and down here there is a link somewhere there it is to build B4 and that's the one we're currently running I don't know why that isn't listed on the other pages but it's the one that works including a Wi-Fi on this board and in terms of what it can do you might be interested to see if we go to bookmarks again and we go to the GPU internals for chromium or Chrome you will see in a second here we are we have got some Hardware acceleration here and this is pretty typical of what we get with software from Rader for their boards they're pretty good at supporting hardare acceleration for the GPU in the browser rather than the desktop that's the right way around I think I'd much rather have it in the browser than the desktop I've got to have a choice and so that looks fairly reasonable and therefore you might be thinking can this board play a YouTube clip so I guess we have to try and again people say you wouldn't buy a board like this to play YouTube but it's just interesting to see what it can do so let's go to my sample clip and I'll speed on through till the clip is playing there we go and boy did it take YouTube a bit of time there to go full screen but now it has we can there are drop frames quite a lot of drop frames but playback isn't too bad here in a 1080p certainly much better than I would have expected massively better than you get for example on a on a rasp Pi zero board this is a this is not bad this is actually watchable YouTube on a zero form factor single board computer I'm rather impressed with that so uh there we are that's definitely a a positive if with some drop frames but a positive for the radza 03w anyway let's come out of that now now we've now we've got there we say goodbye like that because I want to go to the terminal let's go to the terminal down there there is our terminal because right now we're booting this operating system from a micr SD card we do have emmc on the board but the easier way to install an operating system is to a micr SD card however if I do an lsblk to L block devices like that we can see we do have on this system the 6 gab micro SD card we booted from and emmc flash storage it does look a little bit like there's something on that doesn't it but uh don't know what there is and why we've got these two little partitions there but anyway nothing nothing boots from it so there we are so at the moment we're running from microSD card I'd like to see if I can get this board to boot from emmc I'm not sure I can and I've been searching around to try and find a way to do it so I will go and have an experiment and I'll come back to you after that greetings here I am back again a few days later having spent many hours trying and failing to install an operating system on the emmc flash storage here on the rad 03w and we go across to Windows here we are in a browser these are some of the instructions available from Rader there's lots of documentation here I just can't find any that helps me out we have to use something called the arcade development tools you can see we install that as well as a driver tool that's all installed and run no problems at all and then we get to use this tool to in theory put an image onto the device and I've got that running here it is this is in Chinese but the instructions on the website are fortunately in English and in theory what you do is to hold down the mask ROM button on the board and then plug it into your computer and then you can use his software to a image across to the emmc and what we need to do is have both an operating system and image and I've got one of those that's the De Bu image I've been using from the micro SD card but we also need a bootloader file and that's where I'm stuck I can't find a bootloader file for the RADS Z 3w I can find one for other Rader boards but not the 3w and therefore at this point anyway I'm admitting defeat in getting an operating system to run from the emmc storage on the r Zer 3w so let's go across to Dean running still from a micr SD card on the board and I realized I hadn't shown you eight toop running on it in the last segment so here's eight toop running along you can see what htop showers memory use Etc just thought you might find that interesting I know some of you always do so we'll I'll shown you that now and then I'll get rid of it like that and I also thought it'd be worth just testing the speed of the drives on the system so I've set up first of all to test the speed of the micr SD card so let's do that let's see what kind of speed we get here very exciting oh it's doing its stuff come on give us a number there we are 64 is megabytes a second that's not too bad for a Micro SD card on a single board computer but you cry what is the speed of that emmc flash storage that so far Chris has failed to install an operating system on well let's just put that in like that and run the test again and there it goes what do you think it should be faster the question is how much faster and there we are oh 161 megabytes a second significantly faster so when it is possible to put an operating system onto the MMC storage on this board it should be a lot more fluid but there we are for now that is the end of this test I don't always get things working but I do hope to run an operating system from the emmc flash storage on this board in the future the ratza 03w is one of several zero form factor single board computers to have launched in the past few months with another being this the orange pi02 W which we'll take a look at in our next single board computer review but now that's it for another video if you've enjoyed what you've seen here please press that like button if you haven't subscribed Please Subscribe and I hope to talk to you again very soon [Music] a

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 110,861

Keywords: Radxa Zero 3W, Raspberry Pi Zero alternative, Rock Zero 3W, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt, Radxa Zero 3W eMMC, eMMC, Debian, Debian Xfce

Id: BaH4BBij5N4

Length: 15min 44sec (944 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 28 2024