Rock 3A: Dual M.2 ARM SBC with eMMC socket

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers this time we're going to check out the contents of this box which contains the new rok 3a single board computer along with various accessories the roc3a is a raspberry pi 4 competitor with a slot for an emmc flash module as well as two m.2 slots so let's go and take a closer look right here we've got my package of rock pie goodies that i ordered from allnet a few weeks ago and stanley the knife's already been in and cut through the tape down here because i needed to check this was the right all-net box i was getting somewhat confused but if we open it up you'll see i've not unpacked all the things yet and it is i can't quite remember everything i've ordered there's quite a few things in here i've got various bits and pieces let's first of all open this up i think i can see what this is but we'll have a look this is um oh yes lots of pieces this is an m.2 to a pcie slot converter which might be useful in what we're doing here with the rock pi but i might use that in other projects as well just so i get one of those whilst it was a possibility here we have in here another m.2 device this is i'm fairly certain a wi-fi module because we've got two m.2 slots on the rock pi 3a one of which is for communications yes this is i'm certain is there a wi-fi module bluetooth module which we can use in an m.2 slot that was from the thing we just opened this is a heatsink fairly obviously this is obviously the rock pi 3 a or rock pi 3 model a let's just open that up as well bring in watch where you stand in my knife on this other phone i think just to get this opened up can we get in hopefully we can yes i can get this off oh it's exciting isn't it a new single ball computer and in a little plastic box inside here we open it up there we are here is the pie 3a in a little bag no need for mr scissors to get in here there we are our new single board computer have a look at that in a second but also in the box we've got down here an emmc flash module we've got here a little package containing i think uh oh yes this is a an m.2 extender board we'll look at that later and in here we've got a interestingly an instruction leaflet about the rock pi 4 which is an entirely different board and this gets us back to the rock 3a and the next thing i think we should do is to put this down next to a couple of other single board computers and so over here i've got a raspberry pi 4 and if we put the rock 3a next to the raspberry pi 4 we can clearly see that they share a form factor and the other board i want to compare the rock 3a2 is this one this is the rock pi 4 c and i will freely admit i'm getting very confused here because the rock 3a and not the rock pi 3a i think i've sometimes been calling it the rock 3a comes later than the rock pi 4 a b or c i'm not quite sure what's going on with the naming conventions here with these radza sbcs anyway a more fundamental thing to point out is the difference in the soc that's driving these boards because if we look on the rock pi 4c or the a and the b that came before it the soc is under the board rather than on the top as on the rock 3a and on the rock pi 4 boards the soc is an rk33199 which has got two 1.8 gigahertz a72 cores and four 1.4 gigahertz 853 cores it is a hexa core processor whereas on the rock 3a we've actually got a quad core processor an rk3568 with four two gigahertz a55 cores and if you're wondering there is a rock 3b which as far as i can tell at the moment is not yet available but it has an entirely different form factor as we can see with all of the connectors on one edge two ethernet sockets and a sata port and i expect to be taking a look at this board in 2022 anyway for now i'll go back to the rock 3a it is the video about this board after all it's the wrong way round there we are and i think it's now time to take a closer look at this board's specification the rock 3a which as we can see here is also branded as the toy brick is available in three different models with either two four or eight gigabytes of low power ddr4 ram this particular board is an eight gigabyte model which cost me seventy five dollars whilst the two and four gigabyte boards cost 55 and 35 dollars respectively so pricing is very similar to a raspberry pi 4. as i've already noted the soc is an rk3568 with four 2 gigahertz a55 cores and it also has an arm mali g52 gpu next to the soc we find the low power ddr4 ram and also on top of the board we have a display connector a dsi connector and a camera connector a csi connector and then we also have this m.2 slot which is an e-keyed slot into which we can fit a wireless module and rads sell m.2 wireless modules called the a1 the a2 and the a3 and these are priced between 5 and 15 dollars and if you're wondering the module i purchased is the a2 the 10 one and this gives us 2.4 and 5 gigahertz wi-fi and bluetooth 5.0 so let's fit it to the board there we are we've now got wireless connectivity and if you're wondering this screw was in the package i almost missed it in the unboxing and i also missed also the antenna which i'll clip on at my heart's content when i'm not working on camera if we now turn to the main front edge we find a usb-c socket to power the board and then a full-size hdmi 2.0 socket that offers 4k output at up to 60 frames a second there's then a gold-plated 3.5 millimeter audio jack that notably includes a microphone input as well as stereo output and provides access to a 24-bit 96 kilohertz analog audio codec spinning 90 to the first short edge we find a gigabit ethernet port and then two type a usb 3 ports and two type a usb 2 ports then on the second long edge there's a color coded and raspberry pi compatible 40 pin gpio connector and finally on the second short edge we discover two indicator leds a power button as well as a three pin header that i presume is for power and recovery buttons as well but we're not finished yet because if we take the board and turn it over there's lots of exciting things on the underside of the rock 3a for start we've got our second m.2 slot this is an m keyed slot and it supports an nvme ssd up to eight terabytes in capacity however as on other rock pie boards the connector points outwards to show you what i mean by that we'll bring in an nvme ssd which would have to plug in like that which is not terribly convenient and means we need some kind of mounting solution which we'll look at later in the video next to the m.2 slot we've also got a tf card start which will take a micro sd card up to 128 gigabytes in size we can boot from that and we've also got here the connectors for an emc flash module also up to 128 gigabytes in size and we can boot from that as well and then finally on the opposite side of the underside of the board if you see what i mean we've got an otg switch here and a connector for a real-time clock battery and so there we are this is the rock 3a a very well specified and reasonably priced single board computer right i've now fitted the heatsink and wi-fi antenna as you can see and if we take a look underneath i've also clipped on the emmc flash module this is 16 gigabytes in capacity and earlier i very carefully connected it to an emmc to microsd card adapter that i previously purchased in turn this allowed me to plug the module into my laptop so i could image debian to it using belena etcher as if the emmc module were a microsd card so if we now turn the board back over we're all ready to connect it up to the usual peripherals and to turn on the power and here we go we've got a green led and fairly soon we'll get hopefully yes the blue flashing led and if we go across the monitor output you'll see that very rapidly we arrive at the debian login requester and i'll just point out there's no fast motion was applied there this really is how rapidly we boot up into debian from the emc module on the rock three eight so i just need to put in the username and password and i haven't changed the defaults yet which are rock and rock i would have used paper and scissors but never mind we'll use rock and rock because they're the ones that currently work and here we are on the debian desktop and as usual in my videos this is not my first boot i have booted already and made a few changes to scaling so things read better on video but basically you're seeing what you get if you install the official debian image on the rock 3a this is what you get straight out of the box if we go up to the menu you'll see in applications there's not a lot pre-installed we've got reasonable number of settings you can configure things very nicely here as i have i think for my own judgement anyway and after that we've got a few accessories we've got an image viewer under graphics a couple of web browsers chromium and firefox we've got a xf burn under multimedia that is it and under office we've got a dictionary i haven't even installed the abbey word word processor let alone libra office so this is very much a debian image prepared so you can install all your own software under system though we do have eight stops so we'll uh run up h top so we can take a look under the hood there we are can i draw out corner there a little bit fiddly to draw up corners with the settings here must try and alter that but anyway the main thing we see here is how little memory we're using we've only got 280 megabytes being used right now with with this graphical distro running i think that's that's very impressive out of our 8 gigabytes under 300 meg use 280 meg this is a very resource efficient district anyway i'll stop being excited about that and we'll go down to the launcher down here let's launch a browser from down there and hopefully if i've got things set up correctly it'll take us to the wiki for the rock 3. and by jingo it has and here we've got some reasonable documentation from radza it includes a downloads page which is where of course i got my image from there we are you'll see we've got here a debian desktop and also a server image of ubuntu a non-desktop version of ubuntu there if you want to use that and there are a few third-party images as well becoming available including ambient and it's worth pointing out that for the official images there are install wikis and they're quite important i did have to do a bit of messing around here to get everything working properly particularly with wi-fi because as you might have noticed we have no icon here for wi-fi on the panel we've got one for bluetooth we can go down there and pick up the bluetooth adapters and things and see things no problems at all but there's nothing for wi-fi there's nothing to turn wi-fi on and off let alone to select your network and actually log into it and this is a bit strange i think given that here i've purchased an m.2 wi-fi module intended for use for the rock 3a and yet in the desktop image they make available for the board there's nothing graphically to work with wi-fi what you have to do is go down here under wi-fi you probably guessed that bit and you'll see under wi-fi connection it tells you how to install things how to connect to wi-fi how to connect to your network which i have to report isn't entirely persistent sometimes it keeps your connection next time you log in sometimes it doesn't and i think in 2021 nearly 2022 this is really not ideal other than this as you saw previously it's a fairly nippy distro it boots up very rapidly it does have some stability issues particularly with the browsers installed here firefox cross-cut is quite a lot chromium a little bit less and i'm sure some of you want to see how well it handles online video streaming media so we'll look at my standard youtube playback test which i will tell you in advance will not work terribly well i don't think this hardware accelerated playback here in fact i'm pretty certain there isn't but let's just uh try and get it running you can see already it's not going to be the fastest thing in the world but there we are it's trying to play an advert let's take it full screen and skip past the advert here we are and if we now try and get to the settings it's on 360p at the moment i'll try it in atp i think you know what's going to happen and i'll try to bring up stats for nerds down there like that and it does all right apart from the bits it doesn't there we are the internet speed also seems to be very low here which is weird because my internet speed is about 50 megabits and it's it's not showing that at the moment anyway it got there eventually and um it's playing it's not playing perfectly there are clearly drop frames this is not the thing i think you'd purchase this board for but anyway i thought i'd show you youtube player because if i didn't you'd ask anyway but i think we'll now move on to test out an nvme ssd greetings here i am back again and i've now added this wd black nvme ssd to the rok 3a using the mounting kit we unboxed earlier and this is the same type of mounting kit i've used previously on a rock pi 4b and a rock pi 4c and indeed it's really designed to work with one of those boards if you just bring that in you might remember these boards are up pi 4 a b and c can have a big heat sink mounted on the base and the mounting kit for the nbmb drive fits in with that that's how the thing is is designed but it still works pretty well here on the rock 3a and so if we get the board all connected up and running we can go across to our debian desktop and here if we access a terminal and i type the command lsblk or list block devices it should list all the devices on the system and sadly when we do that we find that the only device on this system is the emmc flash module up here mmc blk0 we don't find our nvme ssd and i've been trying to get this work for quite a lot of hours now a very large lot of hours today and yesterday i've tried doing various system updates i've tried using a different power supply because i've read in a forum the power supply can be a problem i am using the official rock power supply but i've tried three others they don't work either and i did get to the point of almost giving up and saying i can't get the nvme ssd working on the rock 3a but i then suddenly had a thought which was what about trying ubuntu server so i've installed that terminal interface distro and a microsd card and if we use the magic of filmmaking we can go across to ubuntu server and here we are on its command line where if i execute an lsblk lo and behold the nvme drive appears as nvme 0n1 with a single partition called mvb0n1 p1 and also here we can see the emmc modules we could back in debian listed as mmc blk 0 with its partitions and we can also see the 32 gigabyte micro sd card but i've installed ubuntu server on listed as an mmc blk1 in this distro i've also installed hd parameters so if we find the right syntax in the buffer we can run a speed test on the nvme drive and clearly it can't read the identity information from the drive but all we want is the speed which is 10 33 97 effectively 1034 megabytes a second and whilst the wd black ssd we're testing i know can deliver a read speed of well over 3 400 megabytes a second this is as far as i can recall the fastest drive speed i've ever measured on an arm sbc and whilst we're here i'm sure you want to know the speed of the other drives so let's start with the emmc module there we go and i'll scroll up a bit on this zoomed in display and we get a read speed of about 125 megabytes a second for the emmc flash module finally we'll test the microsd card interface and here we are running from a sundisk ultra card but the funnel reported speed over the rock 3atf interface is only 56 megabytes a second which is a little disappointing however as i've just noted over one gigabyte a second for the nvme ssd is fantastic on arm and opens up all kinds of possibilities at least here in ubuntu server at 35 for the 2 gigabyte model or 40 plus dollars if you choose to add an m.2 wireless card the roc3a is a very good value single board computer you get a lot of hardware for your money now clearly at the current time software support needs to improve how often have i said that about a new single board computer but i am prepared to cut the the rock 3a some slack because the hardware is very good the m.2 slots open up all kinds of future possibilities so i'm going to watch the board at its community support and how it grows with great interest and i'm also looking forward very much to taking a look at the rock 3b with its different form factor 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 recent [Music] you

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 66,469

Keywords: Rock 3A, Rock3A, Rock Pi, Rock Pi 4B, Rock Pi 4C, NVMe SBC, Rock 3A NVMe, Rock 3A demo, Rock 3A Debian, Rock 3A Ubuntu, Christopher Barnatt, NVMe ARM SBC, RK3568, RK3568 SBC

Id: cn0FPHDdUoY

Length: 20min 22sec (1222 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 12 2021