Radxa Dragon 6A

The Radxa Dragon Q6A is a credit card-sized single-board computer built around Qualcomm’s QCS6490 — the same silicon family found in the Fairphone 5 and Qualcomm’s own RB3gen2 reference platform. It packs an octa-core Kryo 670 CPU, an Adreno 643 GPU, and a 12 TOPS Hexagon NPU into a board with Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi 6, HDMI, triple camera connectors, and an M.2 NVMe slot. Starting at around $60, it sits in an interesting spot — significantly more compute per dollar than a Raspberry Pi 5, with a genuine ML inference pipeline that doesn’t require an external accelerator. Qualcomm provides Yocto builds for RB3Gen2 boards and Radxa mentions this in their documentation but doesn’t provide any how-to. In this article, we shall explore the steps taken to get Yocto running with Mainline Linux Kernel.

Here are steps to reproduce it by yourself, if you are the happy owner of this board, currently priced at 48 EUR on the Arduino shop for the 2 GB version. This is done without removing the original kernel. Your board will still boot such kernel by default.

Setup and prerequisites

To do this by yourself, you will need:

• An Arduino Q board

• A USB-C hub with external power, to power the board and to connect external devices such as USB mass storage or USB-Ethernet.