Radxa Zero

> On that last point, I felt it necessary to justify why RK3576 is an interesting target. Many more casual observers seem to see an SoC with older licensed core designs and miss the forest for the trees in the process. The talk details how RK3576 is more than a cost-optimised little brother: it's a stepping stone towards future designs. Unfortunately I bought a bunch of Radxa Zero 3W's, which use the RK3566. An older design though, from around when RK3588 was also arriving. Mainline support is not that bad. But I don't think there's much focus on improving it. Mostly I just want video encoding; my original use case was using it as an HDMI -> wireless transmitter. As we head into this computing crunch, alas, these lesser chips are going to be quite important. There's some really nice Allwinner A733 chips too, but I don't think support is nearly on par with what Collabora has cooked up for Rockchip. That's a huge advantage, and it's fantastic. There was a really scary time a year ago when it felt like Rockchip was going to disappear from open source. There's still a question of availability of SBC systems, but where we are is so much better than it looked like things were going to be, 15 months ago. Great follow up post here, on the post 5 days ago about the great progress with video decoding going to mainline. I wonder how Allwinner is doing with their A733 & maybe upcoming A737. https://mastodon.social/@geerlingguy/113698847221483936 https://www.collabora.com/news-a…

I've been looking into alternatives to the Zero 2W because I need something in the same form factor with more (processing) power; something closer to the Pi 3B+ or better. My conclusion is that although there is some nice hardware out there on paper, the poor circuit designs and atrocious software support mean anything I can get that meets my requirements will be an absolute nightmare; and I'm a software engineer of 1.5-decades with an Electronic Engineering degree, so the bar is high for something to be too-much-effort. Take the Radxa Zero 3W[0] for example; the WiFi doesn't work properly, GPU acceleration doesn't always work, the OS images are out of date and don't always boot, when it does there are power issues, thermal issues, performance issues. No Debian 12 expected until H2 this year, if lucky; Android OS images are Android 9 (we're on what Android 14-15 now?). [0] https://forum.radxa.com/c/zero