Christof Meerwald from cmeerw.org blog
Got a $20 voucher code for a review of a Rock Pi S SBC. Although the cost of the board is only $13.90, with shipping at just over $8, it's a bit over $22 in total. When the board arrived, I did actually wonder if shipping could have been made a bit more economical by not putting the tiny board into a huge box (175 mm x 115 mm x 95 mm) which had a plastic case (70 mm x 50 mm x 25 mm) with the board in it.
Anyway, two things to note about the board are that the serial console uses 1.5 Mbps (which is different to the more common 115200 bps used by other boards), and uses a USB Type C connector for power (like the Raspberry Pi 4, but unlike older SBCs).
Downloading the Ubuntu image and writing it to a SanDisk Ultra 16 GB MicroSD card seemed to work fine to get it to boot. One thing I did notice was that the SSH server keys seemed to have been written to the image and not regenerated on first boot. The other thing to be aware of is that the kernel being used is fairly old (4.4.143) with mainline kernel support only starting to appear now.
One thing that appears strange to me is that total memory is only shown as "MemTotal: 432280 kB
" - I am not entirely sure what this isn't (much) closer to 512 MB.
Finally, power consumption seems to be quite good. With WiFi turned on, but otherwise completely idle, my USB tester shows the device using only around 0.2 W. Doing a "ping
" and it will go up to around 0.36 W. Reading from the MicroSD card also uses around 0.4 W. Keeping all 4 cores of the CPU busy and power consumption goes up to around 0.85 W.