[Raspberry Pi alternative BIGTREETECH CB1 core board & PI4B] Review 3: Hardware system familiarity

天意无罪

[Raspberry Pi alternative BIGTREETECH CB1 core board & PI4B] Review 3: Hardware system familiarity [Copy link]

 

Due to the company's many things at the end of the year, there was no time to update the evaluation plan of Biqu before the New Year. I thought that I would be less busy after the New Year and could evaluate the development board properly, but I saw that the evaluation of Biqu ended on February 6th. It seems that a lot of evaluation work has been left behind.

As the saying goes, if you want to do your work well, you must first sharpen your tools. I have a habit when playing with any development board, that is, I must first familiarize myself with the hardware design of the board before getting started, so that I can have a general understanding of the hardware system.

For this review, the official still did not provide relevant hardware design instructions or schematics for the development board. They only provided a simple PDF instruction document. There is no relevant QQ or WeChat technical exchange group, so it is indeed a bit difficult to use.

1. Hardware Architecture Introduction

According to official introduction, BIGTREETECH CB1 is a replacement solution launched to address the shortage of Raspberry Pi CM4. Its core board size and interface are fully compatible with Raspberry Pi CM4, and the base board size and interface are also compatible with the Raspberry Pi design.

The CB1 core board hardware consists of MPU, DRAM, PMIC, WIFI/BT Bluetooth module, etc. There is no onboard solid-state FLASH storage, but an external microSD card is used. The MPU uses Allwinner H616, a quad-core ARM Cortex-A53, 1.5GHz microprocessor, and the DRAM uses Kingston particles with a capacity of 1GB. There is no silkscreen on PMIC and WIFI/BT, so it is impossible to know what chip solution is used.

The CB1 core board uses the same two 100-pin micro board-to-board connectors as the Raspberry Pi CM4 to connect to the baseboard, so it is directly compatible with and can replace the Raspberry Pi CM4.

Figure 1

The CB1 core board's supporting baseboard PI4B is mainly used to bring out various commonly used interfaces of the core board, including: power, USB, Ethernet, SD card, display, etc.

Figure 2

(II) Interface Introduction

The peripheral interfaces of the CB1 core board are brought out through the PI4B baseboard, including 1 RJ45 Ethernet interface, 4 USB2.0 interfaces, a TYPE-C power interface, 2 Micro HDMI display interfaces, a camera interface, a MicroSD card holder, and a 40-pin pin header.

Figure 3

3. Comparison with Raspberry Pi CM4

	BIGTREETECH CB1	Raspberry Pi CM4
MPU	Allwinner H616	Broadcom BCM2711
CPU	Quad-core ARM Cortex-A53, 1.5GHz	Quad-core ARM Cortex-A72, 1.5GHz
DRAM	1GB	1/2/4/8GB optional
FLASH	External SD card	0/8/16/32GB EMMC optional
Video Decoding	H.265 4K@60fps hardware decoding H.264 4K@30fps hardware decoding	H.265 4K@60fps hardware decoding H.264 1080P@60fps hardware decoding
Video Encoding	H.264 1080P@60fps	H.264 1080P@30fps
Video Output	Single HDMI 4K@60fps	Dual HDMI 4K@60fps MIPI DSI/CSI*2
WIFI	2.4G	2.4G/5G dual mode
Ethernet	100M	1000M
size	55 x 40 x 4.7mm	55 x 40 x 4.7mm
price	138 yuan	About 450 yuan (1GB memory, WIFI, without eMMC)

From the above comparison, we can see that the performance of BIGTREETECH CB1 is not much different from that of Raspberry Pi CM4, but the price is only 1/4 of that of Raspberry Pi, which is really cost-effective. The only drawback is that it does not have MIPI DSI and CSI interfaces.

okhxyyo

Happy New Year! Thank you for your hard work. You can also check out the sharing of other testers for evaluation materials.

天意无罪

okhxyyo posted on 2023-1-21 19:15 Happy New Year! You have worked hard. You can also check out the sharing of other testers for evaluation materials

Admin, New Year is coming soon!

tagetage

There is a DSI interface on the back of the board and a CAMERA interface on the front.

tagetage

There is no silkscreen on PMIC and WIFI/BT, so it is impossible to know what chip solution is used. See the link below.

https://en.eeworld.com/bbs/thread-1229885-1-1.html

lugl4313820

As the saying goes, if you want to do your work well, you must first sharpen your tools. I have a habit when playing with any development board, that is, I must first familiarize myself with the hardware design of the board before getting started, so that I can have a general understanding of the hardware system.

This habit is very good, happy new year!

天意无罪

tagetage posted on 2023-1-21 21:39 PMIC and WIFI/BT have no silkscreen, so it is impossible to know what chip solution is used. See the link below. https://en.eeworld.com/bbs/thr ...

I looked at it again and could see the silk screen clearly. It might be because it was night and the light was not very bright.

wangerxian

Although its performance is slightly worse than 4B, its cost performance is still very high.

天意无罪

tagetage posted on 2023-1-21 21:37 There is a DSI interface on the back of the board and a CAMERA interface on the front.

This interface is prepared for CM4.