06-02-2018, 09:48 PM
(06-02-2018, 08:56 PM)Z80 Wrote: Yes, the RK805, definitely has the capability to provide a system RTC.
To do this they would have had to add a 32.768kHz crystal and a RTC battery connection header (about 25 cents worth of parts) but it seems that they didn't bother.
This was REALLY DUMB, but not much can be done until they re-spin the board.
For what it's worth, the ASUS Tinker Board did identically the same REALLY DUMB thing, which was even more disappointing (to me at least), because ASUS knows how to build motherboards, but seems to have forgotten EVERYTHING they ever learned in their mad rush to "me too" the Raspberry Pi.
The problem with ALL these SBC makers, is they like to play follow the leader with the Raspberry Pi, which is actually a pretty crappy design, which has NONE of the basic amenities we expect on even the lowest cost small PC motherboards. No power switch header, no power and drive activity LED headers (needed to connect external case switches and LEDs), no capability for a REAL hard drive like a SATA or M.2 drive - and of course NO REAL TIME CLOCK.
Some of the Banana Pis can do SATA, while a couple of the Hardkernel boards do have RTCs on board, but so far as I can tell no one checks all the boxes.
A board the size of the Rock64 with all the standard motherboard connection and control headers I mention above, plus a PC style onboard RTC, and M.2 socket for a high performance SSD, and 4Gigs of onboard RAM would be a killer product, especially with one of the new faster Rockchip or Amlogic CPUs.
Just my 2 cents worth...
Just 2 cents? Thought that was a whole dollars worth! :-P
Yeah, I actually think the pine64 was nearer to a fully featured board. It had RTC backup, lipo battery support and management, a fully rPi header and the extra euler bus, as well as integrated LCD and touch support. The new rockpro64 might be the nearest to the PC world... much beefier CPU, 4GB RAM, USB3 and GbE, miniPCI for SATA drives, rPi header, onboard leds, eMMC, SPI FLASH (so PXE and USB boot will also be options) plus one of the sockets is marked RTC. So getting warmer
Although I'm not sure what the fuss is about for a RTC on a SBC... what's wrong with the network time? Or just adding your own I2C RTC if you really need it (like we used to do with the rPi? :-P Gotta have some ingenuity... can't have it all served up to you on a platter... where's the fun in that? :-P