Asus Tinker Board Introduction

The Tinker Board is a small ARM-based computer from Asus. The board contains a 40-pin GPIO connector, which can be used with a selection of our development boards.

Asus provides a Debian-based Linux distribution that can be downloaded from their support website. We are using Tinker Board S R2.0 Debian 10 V3.0.11 for this tutorial.

The default username and password are:

username: linaro
password: linaro

We have tested our Python libraries on the Tinker Board. To download our libraries from our GitHub account, you first need to open a terminal and install git with the following command:

sudo apt-get install git

Next, you need to navigate to the directory you want to download the libraries into and use the following command to clone the files to your local directory:

git clone https://github.com/abelectronicsuk/ABElectronics_Python_Libraries.git

Compatible development boards

We have a range of development boards compatible with the Asus Tinker Board when using TinkerOS Debian. Visit our shop to find a list of compatible boards.

Before using our Asus Tinker Board development boards, you must enable the I2C and SPI buses. We have the following tutorials to guide you through this process.

I2C and SMBus on the Tinker Board

SPI on the Tinker Board

Note 1:  When using the Tinker Board with the supplied heatsink, you may need to use an extended header between the Tinker Board and the development board to allow enough airflow to keep the CPU cool.

Note 2: The Asus Tinker Board uses a different SPI port from the Raspberry Pi, SPI2 instead of SPI0. To use our development boards that use the SPI bus, you will need to change the address of the SPI bus in the software libraries so that they work correctly.