Unboxing & install OS on youyeetoo YY3568 RK3568 SBC

01. Unboxing, Install OS

I'm really, really excited! I made it onto the trial list for the YY3568 board. I've been wanting this board for so long, and in the days leading up to the announcement, I was checking every day to see if they'd posted it. It's just fantastic! The performance surpasses the Raspberry Pi, with Rockchip's latest chip. I'd be thrilled even with an RK3566 board, but I can't believe I got the Rockchip RK3568. It's simply amazing. Thanks to youyeetoo Technology.

• Unboxing

Indeed, the board was arrived very fast. The parcel was well packed, with three small boxes inside. Let's take a look at the whole kit first!

Hmm( ╯□╰ ), please ignore my messy desktop. By the way, there probably aren't many embedded developers with tidy desktops, right? Let's open boxes one by one and have a look what each box contains！

First it is one of my favorite development board, the YY3568. It comes with 2GB of RAM and 16GB of EMMC storage, which is really great. The core board is already installed on the baseboard, and youyeetoo team also sent Wi-Fi module and antenna along for review.

Next box contains 7-inch 5-point capacitive touchscreen, with a DSI interface.

Guess what this is? A screen holder, can you believe it? The official team is really considerable. I can't believe it, it’s a surprise.

They even included a dual-A port USB data cable for you. The youyeetoo team is probably worried that you might not find a cable for flashing the firmware, although everyone should have one. But look at the quality, it's really fantastic!

Next is the main part of the board, which has power ports, audio ports, dual USB 3.0, dual USB 2.0, HDMI, and dual Gigabit Ethernet ports. There's also a heat sink, and we suggest to use it on the chip.

On the back, what's mainly used is a TF card slot and an M.2 hard drive slot. There's not much to say about that. Please note that the SATA port and the Wi-Fi module cannot be used simultaneously, but the M.2 hard drive is not affected. We won't discuss that for now; we'll talk about it later.

2. Install the System

Connect the HDMI, then power it on. It starts with a cute little rabbit, followed by the youyeetoo Technology logo. Just wait a moment; it appears so fast!

Well, once I’ve inserted it, I found it to be an Android system. How should I put it? I'm more proficient in Debian system development compared to Android. So, let's get ready to flash the firmware. First, open the official repository or go directly to the LOADER upgrade mode, as the official instructions are excellent, and I have nothing significant to add. You can follow the official instructions. If you encounter driver issues and are sure your drivers are correctly installed, you can try using a different computer.

It's worth mentioning that the official DEBIAN firmware is on Baidu Cloud, you can use Google drive if you are located oversea, and downloading it typically takes some time. After opening the official firmware, you'll see six different firmware options. Let me guide you on how to choose.

The prefixes are the same, all labeled "YY3568-Debian10, " and the compilation date is consistent. The key difference is in the middle two terms. In the first three, the first term is "WIFI, " and in the last three…

The first term is "SATA, " do you remember I mentioned earlier that SATA and the Wi-Fi module cannot be used together, right? So here, you need to make a choice. Since we currently don't have a SATA adapter board but have the Wi-Fi module, we only need to download the first three options. You can find the SATA adapter board in youyeetoo.com.

Now, let's look at the second term. The second term actually represents the screen output selection. For example, if you have an EDP screen, choose the EDP option and connect the EDP screen to the EDP port on the back of the development board. The official firmware provides a DSI screen, so we won't select EDP. DSI has two options, DSI0 and DSI1. It's worth mentioning that the board has two DSI interfaces. If you want to connect to DSI1, plug it into the DSI1 port on the back of the development board and download the DSI1 firmware. Similarly, if you want to connect to DSI0, plug it into the DSI0 port on the front of the development board and download the DSI0 firmware. However, since we're using the HDMI port, either choice is fine. I downloaded the Wi-Fi-DSI0 firmware. Now it's time to flash the firmware, and here's the interface after a successful flash.

Yep, now it looks familiar – Debian, Xfce. You can plug in an Ethernet cable to check the IP address in your router settings, or you can open the terminal in Xfce and enter "ip address" to view the IP address. Of course, you can also use a serial cable to connect to UART2 on the YY3568 for monitoring. But for me, the first step is to check the IP, and most of the subsequent operations will be done via SSH connection to this board.