Question support for OpenADK on the ASUS Tinker Board - dev

28 May 2018

I'm very interested in determining the effort to create a port of OpenADK
to the ASUS Tinker Board.  Does anyone have experience with OpenADK on this
or other Rockchip based hardware to use as a template to get started from?

Let me explain a little where I'm coming from with this.

Two years ago as a consultant I did a port of OpenADK to support the Google
"Project Blocks" tangible programming system for children.  See:
https://projectbloks.withgoogle.com/

The "Brain Block" in the Project Block system was powered by the recently
released Raspberry Pi Zero and I chose OpenADK was the OS.  I'm the
original creator of Raspbian, but with a bit of irony, I had to make the
decision that Raspbian was not the right fit for this project.  The fact
that OpenADK with stripped down kernel could boot almost instantly and
the rootfs being read-only were extremely compelling features for an
embedded Linux system that had to be VERY robust in the hands of children.
At the time I was under heavy non-disclosure agreements with Google
regarding my work with the project so I couldn't say anything about it at
the time, but I found OpenADK to be very pleasant to work with.  I don't
know the current status of things since finishing my work in 2016, but I
hope that they are continuing to use OpenADK with their research in
tangible computing.

Now two years later I'm an employee at a 3D printing start-up company where
we have the need to create some robust Linux based embedded systems for
robot control using Rockchip based ARM systems -- the ASUS Tinker Board
being a fairly computationally powerful system to start with.  I could use
a stripped down Ubuntu system (kids won't be anywhere near these robots),
but I think OpenADK or Yocto would be a better embedded solution where the
system just needs to work with minimal management that a heavy Debian or
Ubuntu system might entail.

If a port doesn't exist, I'm assuming I would have to get a good
understanding of the Rockchip boot process to create the first stage and
second stage bootloader (probably Uboot), a custom kernel for this
hardware, the image requirements for an SDK card and figure out how to put
it all together within OpenADK.  I think I have the skills to do this, but
I'm a little weary of the time it might take to figure it all out.  Also,
being a start-up, my budget is rather slim to pull in outside help.

I wanted to get some guidance from the folks on this mailing list to see
what I might expect with regards to such a porting effort for OpenADK.
Sorry for the long email on this question.

Thanks,

Mike Thompson