Recently, I received a development board from Shenzhen Tactile Intelligence.

This might be the most worthwhile development board to buy recently.

It is called

Purple Pi

It is estimated that it is named this way because its PCB color is purple.

Its size is consistent with Raspberry Pi, both are 85x56mm.

The interfaces are also almost identical to Raspberry Pi, with differences mainly in three areas:

• Raspberry Pi has 2 USB2.0 and 2 USB3.0. Purple Pi has 3 USB2.0 and 1 USB3.0.

• It has some additional buttons and interfaces for convenience, such as a debugging interface, 1 PH2.0 power supply interface, a 6Pin FPC touch interface, and an RTC battery interface.

• The Raspberry Pi has an onboard antenna, while Purple Pi has an external antenna.

In terms of configuration, it is developed based on the Rockchip RK3566 SoC, with a quad-core A55 architecture and a frequency of up to 1.8GHz (RK3568 is 2GHz), featuring a built-in NPU with a computing power of up to 0.8TOPS.

It has 2GB LPDDR4 memory and 16GB eMMC storage. It supports Wi-Fi4 and Bluetooth 4.2. The price is

249

Purple Pi also has a Pro version that supports Wi-Fi 5, with 4GB memory and 32GB eMMC configuration. The price is

459

In terms of cost-performance ratio, the 2+16GB Purple Pi offers very high value. Currently, there are no competitors in the 200 price range.

Similar options mainly fall into two categories.

One is based on Allwinner H616.

Allwinner H5

H6

And Rockchip RK3328.

These chip development boards can be priced under 200, but there are two main issues: one is that the chips are several years old and gradually lag behind the times, and the other is that they completely lack the currently popular AI computing, while the RK3566 provides 0.8TOPS computing power and can handle AI tasks.

There is also a more expensive option than Purple Pi, the RK3568.

Its performance is the same as RK3566, but it has more interfaces.

However, the prices are all above 350. If you don’t need that many interfaces, then the extra 100 is actually unnecessary.

Here I also compared the differences in interfaces between RK3568 and RK3566, you can take a look at the screen and see if you can accept the trimming of the interface configuration. It should also be noted that although RK3568 has so many interfaces, not all RK3568 development boards will expose these interfaces, this is something to keep in mind.

• RK3568 supports up to 3 SATA3.0 interfaces, while RK3566 supports 1.

• RK3568 can display on 3 screens, while RK3566 only supports 2.

• RK3568 supports 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports, while RK3566 supports 1.

• RK3568 has 1 PCIe3.0x1, while RK3566 does not.

• RK3568 has 3 CAN interfaces, while RK3566 does not.

• RK3568’s memory supports ECC, while RK3566 does not.

This development board also interestingly supports the open-source HarmonyOS.

And it has obtained compatibility certification. I also tried HarmonyOS, and personally felt that the adaptation is not yet very complete, especially when I connected it to the TV, the UI was somewhat misaligned. I estimate that there won’t be any issues connecting to the official compatible touch screen.

I believe the fluency is fine, and the operating logic, interface, and Android system are basically the same, just without the mobile features of the Android version of HarmonyOS. It can be said that it is promising for the future. However, currently, it is mainly for engineers’ research and development use. Ordinary players are advised to wait and stick to using Linux distributions.

In summary, I believe that at the price of 249, Purple Pi is the best choice to replace Raspberry Pi. It is also currently the highest-performing development board you can buy under 300.

If you previously used Raspberry Pi 3B, this development board may exceed your expectations, with significantly better performance at a reasonable price. If you have used Raspberry Pi 4B, this is much cheaper, but the downgrade is completely acceptable, plus the unexpected surprise of 0.8TOPS computing power. Buying this is definitely worth it.

Purple Pi

Copy the link below

to open it on Taobao to place an order

https://m.tb.cn/h.UxzzRaZ?tk=LC1Adqfdh2j

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