The official Mender documentation explains how Mender works. This is simply a board-specific complement to the official documentation.
Device description
Tinker Board is a Single Board Computer (SBC) in an ultra-small form factor that offers class-leading performance while leveraging outstanding mechanical compatibility. The Tinker Board offers makers, IoT enthusiasts, hobbyists, PC DIY enthusiasts and others a reliable and extremely capable platform for building and tinkering their ideas into reality.
It is based on RK3288 SoC from Rockchip and has the same form-factor as Raspberry Pi SBCs.
Web: https://www.asus.com/Single-Board-Computer/Tinker-Board/
Community: https://tinkerboarding.co.uk/
Test results
The Yocto Project releases in the table below have been tested by the Mender community. Please update it if you have tested this integration on other Yocto Project releases:
| Yocto Project | Build | Runtime |
|---|---|---|
| thud (2.6) |  |
|
| sumo (2.5) | |
 1
|
| rocko (2.4) | |
|
1. Fails to load U-boot when provisioned with sdimg
Build Means that the Yocto Project build using this Mender integration completes without errors and outputs images.
Runtime Means that Mender has been verified to work on the board. For U-Boot-based boards, the integration checklist has been verified.
Getting started
Prerequisites
-
A supported Linux distribution and dependencies installed on your workstation/laptop as described in the Yocto Mega Manual
- NOTE. Instructions depend on which Yocto version you intend to use.
-
Google repo tool installed and in your
PATH.
Configuring the build
Setup Yocto environment
Set the Yocto Project branch you are building for:
# set to your branch, make sure it is supported (see table above)
export BRANCH="thud"
Create a directory for your mender-tinkerboard setup to live in and clone the
meta information.
mkdir mender-tinkerboard && cd mender-tinkerboard
Initialize repo manifest:
repo init -u https://github.com/mendersoftware/meta-mender-community \
-m meta-mender-rockchip/scripts/manifest-rockchip.xml \
-b ${BRANCH}
Fetch layers in manifest:
repo sync
Setup build environment
Initialize the build environment:
source setup-environment rockchip
Configure Mender server URL (optional)
This section is not required for a successful build but images that are generated by default are only suitable for usage with the Mender client in Standalone deployments, due to lack of server configuration.
You can edit the conf/local.conf file to provide your Mender server configuration, ensuring the generated images and Mender Artifacts are connecting to the Mender server that you are using. There should already be a commented section in the generated conf/local.conf file and you can simply uncomment the relevant configuration options and assign appropriate values to them.
Build for Hosted Mender:
# To get your tenant token:
# - log in to https://hosted.mender.io
# - click your email at the top right and then "My organization"
# - press the "COPY TO CLIPBOARD"
# - assign content of clipboard to MENDER_TENANT_TOKEN
#
MENDER_SERVER_URL = "https://hosted.mender.io"
MENDER_TENANT_TOKEN = "<copy token here>"
Build for Mender demo server:
# https://docs.mender.io/getting-started/create-a-test-environment
#
# Update IP address to match the machine running the Mender demo server
MENDER_DEMO_HOST_IP_ADDRESS = "192.168.0.100"
Building the image
You can now proceed with building an image:
MACHINE=tinker-rk3288 bitbake core-image-base
Replace core-image-base with your desired image target.
Using the build output
After a successful build, the images and build artifacts are:
tmp/deploy/images/tinker-rk3288/core-image-base-tinker-rk3288.sdimgtmp/deploy/images/tinker-rk3288/core-image-base-tinker-rk3288.mender
The disk image (with .sdimg suffix) is used to provision the device storage for devices without Mender running already. Please proceed to the official documentation on provisioning a new device for steps to do this.
On the other hand, if you already have Mender running on your device and want to deploy a rootfs update using this build, you should use the Mender Artifact files, which have .mender suffix. You can either deploy this Artifact in managed mode with the Mender server (upload it under Releases in the server UI) or by using the Mender client standalone mode.
References
- The Mender integration layer for Asus Tinker Board and template files can be found in meta-mender-community.
Known issues
The current integration is based on the community based meta-rockchip. This layer focuses on running mainline components on the hardware, meaning that it is missing some features compared to downstream Linux kernel. One example would be hardware acceleration for graphics and video.
The official meta-rockchip layer which was based on downstream components but was more feature rich is no longer maintained by Rockchip.
Build error
| + install -m 0644 /home/user/hub/build/tmp/deploy/images/tinker-rk3288/u-boot-rockchip.img /home/user/hub/build/tmp/work/tinker_rk3288-poky-linux-gnueabi/core-image-base/1.0-r0/
| install: cannot stat '/home/user/hub/build/tmp/deploy/images/tinker-rk3288/u-boot-rockchip.img': No such file or directory
Can we worked around with adding the following to local.conf:
_MENDER_PART_IMAGE_DEPENDS_append = " u-boot:do_deploy"
This is not part of the templates, because this is actually a bug in meta-mender
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. The “boot firmware” is very specific to Raspberry Pi, and can not say that I have seen anything similar on other boards beside maybe NVIDIA boards which have some “special” requirements.