The ASUS* toolkit Tinker Board S is an ARM* microcomputer competitor to the Raspberry Pi*. The Tinker Board S is an ARMv7 platform with a quick quad-core Rockchip* RK3288, 2 GB RAM, and a 16 GB onboard eMMC module giving you an extraordinary versatility when prototyping. Because it uses ARM and Linux*, you can use the OpenVINO toolkit for your vision learning applications. This article will walk through setting up a Tinker Board S with the Armbian* community’s Ubuntu* 18.04 (LTS) Bionic to make sure everything is ready for you to build and install the open-source OpenVINO™ toolkit on your Single Board Computer (SBC) of choice.
Preparing Your Board
Make sure that you have all of the hardware you need. At a minimum, you will need the following:
- ASUS* Tinkerboard S
- Ethernet Internet Connection OR available wireless network
- Compatible microUSB AC Power Adapter
- microUSB Cable
- Keyboard
- HDMI Monitor
- HDMI Cable
- Separate Windows*, macOS*, or Linux* computer to prepare installation image
Before you can begin, you need to install an operating system for your board. This SBC has an onboard storage module that mounts as an external drive on other computer, making it easy to write the image without a separate SD card.
The image that we are using is Armbian’s ARMv7-based Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic image, based on their mainline kernel. This image is covered by the GPLv2 License. It is available at https://www.armbian.com/tinkerboard/. Make sure you select the Bionic image.
You can use either the Desktop or CLI image, differentiated by the presence of desktop in the description. It should be noted that OpenVINO™ toolkit is only currently officially supported on Ubuntu 16.04 – while the toolkit builds and verifies on 18.04, any issues with using the toolkit with this image are out of the scope of this article.
To write your image to your microSD card, you can use balenaEtcher*, the Balena* open source image writer formally known as Etcher. You can download and install it at https://etcher.io. Attach your Tinker Board S with a microUSB cable to your computer.
Select the external storage device that appears in Etcher, select the downloaded image, and press flash.
Connect your monitor to your board with an HDMI cable, plug in your keyboard, connect your Ethernet cable, and provide power through the USB port. After a few seconds, your device should boot. After a few minutes of setup, the device will boot to a
login screen, either a desktop or command line.
The device’s default username is root and password is 1234. It is recommended to change this password to something more secure.
Make sure your device’s software is up to date:
apt update && apt upgrade –yIf your device can connect to the internet and update successfully, you are ready to move on.
Next, follow the instructions in the ARM7 Setup Guide to get the OpenVINO™ toolkit running on your device.