Rock Pi X - an RPi 4 alternative?

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I was doing an inventory of the small computer devices that I have knocking around - I am attempting to get them all in a line and figure out what they are; what they have on them; what I originally bought them for and then list out what I can actually now use them for.  There are a lot. :-)

This also raised the point to me that I have 2 x RPi 4 devices; purchased before the "great shortage".  I have one powering my Arcade cabinet, which is fair usage, it does need a fair amount of grunt to do what it needs to do (although I prob. don't need the 256GB SD-card in it, as I'm streaming the game files from my 4TB NAS drive over the network....) and then other one is being a huge overkill sitting inside a 4WD Freenove robot car... I should really swap that out for an RPi 3.  anyway, I was online yesterday just wondering if / when RPi 4's will become available again at £35...or £55 that I paid, they seem to have gone up to £65 - even though not available (oh, I'm referring to the 4GB versions btw).  I've seen some on fleaBay for over £250 - not touching with a barge-pole and those scalpers don't deserve the exploitation money.

This did raise my curiosity to ponder what other SMBs are out there?

I found this website HACKERBOARDS.COM :


Scrolling down, I then noticed ROCK PI and this jogged a memory, a quick search later and it looks like I actually bought on of these about 2 years ago!  I wonder where it is / went?

After a Sunday morning rummage around a LOT of boxes / cupboards / shelves / rooms / attics (yes, plural) - I eventually found a small box that contained a Rock Pi X device.

I did find it a little odd that it states it is a 9v device and not a 5v like the RPi - that'll explain the MASSIVE heatsink attached to the back of it then!

I am wondering if I did get an early version as I have external RTS (BIOS battery) and external WiFi antenna - but who knows, it was literally 2 years ago - that's forever in this world.

I then did a little bit of digging on the above website: https://hackerboards.com/board/radxa-rock-pi-x




....and I remember why I bought this now.  It is because it is running an x86 Intel chip inside it - y'know like a "normal" computer.  I think my plan was to be able to run MS-DOS and code some C programs on it, like it was 1992 again..... except this thing has a lot more grunt than anything I would have had access to in 1992, I think I had a 286, maybe a 386.... I still have the original 20MB and 40MB HDDs from those machines....anyway...

After borrowing a PSU from the Japanese IBM PC 110 device and plugging in the USB-C cable (with a voltage detector inbetween), I can confirm that it does sit idle at 5v and then when powered up, it shoots up to 9v.  The little green LED and the bright blue LED lit up.... but nothing happened on the HDMI output. Hmmm.... it has a 64GB MicroSD card slotted within it..... I fiddled around for bit, nothing.

I did notice there was a tiny little switch that was,, according to the website specs, the power switch, you can hold the switch for 3 or 10 seconds to do different things... took me awhile to figure out it wasn't a side-to-side switch but a pull up/down switch - very odd, but you get the hang of it.  Also, the blue LED light coming on just shows that the BIOS has booted....not the OS...

Anyway, I decided to follow the online guide to setup installing UBuntu linux to it.. I had a bootable USB with UBuntu on it (from last week), so I stuck it in the USB-3 slot (apparently it needs to be in there) and when botting up I had to repeatedly press the DEL key and eventually I got a BIOS screen - ah, again, just like it looked in 1992!  go to the end screen and select to boot from USB 3.0 - restart and.......




Now, we're in business.... the usual steps taken to do a default UBuntu install - I did notice no mention of WiFi when installing.... will come back to that.... a reboot later and we have:


That's QUAD-CORE CPUs and 4GB RAM.... actually, I just revived Mrs.Geeks old 2013 Dell Inspiron 15 laptop that has a lower spec than that... hmmm.... maybe I can make this into a decent "desktop / laptop" machine?

Now, that "missing WiFi".... it's not missing, it just needs some custom drivers:


I was about to download and set this up - obviously not able to do from the Rock Pi X as I have no network....so I'd have to do it to another laptop, onto a USB stick, copy it over blah blah blah...

Well, I got as far as plugging in another USB stick into another computer... and then I thought, well, it IS an x86 Intel machine.... and I don't actually have a Windows machine that I can use (I have a work one that I use on the rare occasion that I need to do something on Windows 10 - but that won't be around forever), so I thought, seeing as this board allows for a Windows 10 install, how about I set about setting it up....

It would give me that ability to do non-linux things, shock! horror! and remember how the other half live / experience the world.  Of course I wasn't going to pay for an Operating System; I'm not totally mad - M$oft have made far too many $Billions over the years fleecing people for that old dead donkey, so I downloaded the image.WIM file as suggested by Rock Pi themselves and then set it up like so:


Now, I will say.... I did follow the instructions a bit further up the page where it said to use GParted to blitz the USB stick... I originally had it as FAT and I switched it to NTFS as shown in the images....
This then meant that copying the install.wim file took 4 hours - YES, 4 hours to copy over into the USB stick.  I did the same task as FAT earlier, but got the "file is too large" error (understandably as the file is too large for FAT,hey-how)....

Right, now to boot to that USB and see if we can install Windows 10 - by using the above install.wim file all of the drivers should be installed and setup for me.  let's see.


fingers crossed.


NOW, I will say, the only reason I pushed doing this task is that I cannot get hold off another RPi 4 device at the moment... and I found I had an "old" device that was as powerful that I could use an an alternative, seemed daft not to use it....

Hmmm...well, that didn't work out as I initially expected.  I did eventually get it to boot from the BIOs screen (by removing the RTS battery) and then got it to boot from the Windows USB stick... it did load up the Windows installer as you can see... oh, it was in Chinese and it exited after about 5 seconds...


....and then it disappeared and rebooted into the earlier UBuntu install.  Okay, I now copied over the files and copied into the /lib/firmware/brcm/ folder and rebooted... nope.  we'll that was a "fun" waste of time.  After wasting a bit more time on this, turns out it wasn't my fault, I did all the right steps (for once)

https://forum.radxa.com/t/wifi-not-working-with-firmware-installed-in-ubuntu-20-04-3/8610/39

basically says that the driver from broadcom isn't picked up / supported in UBuntu.  sigh.

..and unless I want to recompile the entire UBuntu kernel, not going to work.

Oh, also I think that the OS runs from internal RAM, the 64GB microSD card is just "extra" storage / usage.



Now, I can look at doing this all again using a legit Windows 10 .iso and giving it a go, I wasn't going to do this, but I thought "what the hell"....

well, that was even "more fun"... it is now 23:25...and I have spent the past 5-6hours attempting to put Windows 10 onto this device and get the Broadcom drivers to work on the WiFi.

It was a bit of a journey..... I spoke too soon....oh maybe, maybe not... (repeat that cycle for that many hours).  I "believe" I have it working now.  How did I get there? follow, me...

I downloaded a legit .iso, opened it up as a zip file on my Linux machine, then copied over to a USB stick.  Then booted from the USB 3 on the Rock Pi X:




Yep, it didn't pick up the WiFi at all.....



OMG, there is a desktop....

and it is actually pretty responsive:

Ah, there is the lack of Broadcom wifi card being detected:

I must have gone though about 20 different .cab files, even the one's on the Rock Pi X website; apparently this is what I "should be seeing":


This is where I wasted many many hours.. I even went here to try some of these:


...and now to just show off:

I had a bit of a brain wave.... I wonder if I needed a "Windows Update", you never know?! So I plugged in the ethernet cables (borrowed it from my NAS storage device for a short while):


after about 10 mins, I then saw this on the screen! woohoo!

oh bugger?!? was that short lived?

I did a re-install drivers and then it seemed to work okay and be stable.

And, there it is picking up the WiFi networks and letting me connect:

and for the past 30minutes it has been stable and connected okay.


Hmmm... it was a trauma getting here, but I'm glad I persisted (and was stubborn), I now have a decent spec Windows 10 "desktop" machine that boots and runs from the internal RAM thingy, so fantastically fast.  I'll evaluate whether I keep it like this or not with Windows 10.

Right, now, apart from going to bed and sleeping, I wonder if I need to purchase a little case for it to fit into, like this:


yes, yes, of course I do!


and yes, there are many others for RPis:

one that has UPS for RPi4: 

just the UPS on it's own (might get this at some point):


a newer UPS one that does auto-shutdown (but double  the price):

and one for the older RPi 3s (of which I have many):



right, time for sleep / bed / rest...

UPDATE:
okay, so after the rather traumatic exercise of getting Windows 10 to work, I was pondering... how do I make a safe backup; as i'm not going through that random sequence again!
These instructions look like they will work for now:

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