How to Change your Android Screen Resolution for the Asus Tinker Board

Screen Resolution

I’m a massive devotee of the Android Marshmallow image for the Asus Tinker Board. It’s remarkably responsive on this device. While it’s one version behind the latest version of Android, this isn’t a concern. However, a real omission is Google Play Store, although this walk-through shows you how to install this essential app on the device.

My Tinker Board is hooked up to a Benq 24″ monitor running with a 1920×1080 resolution. On this monitor, Android’s icons and font are too chunky for me, wasting screen real estate. Asus’s Android image is configured to use 240 DPI. Here’s a very simple way to make better use of the screen real estate by reducing the DPI, making icons and fonts appear smaller. After some experimentation, I’m pretty satisfied with 160 DPI.

We’ll use the adb command line tool. This enables us to communicate with an Android device. adb stands for Android Debug Bridge. Check you have adb installed on your Linux box. If not, install it via your distribution’s package manager, or from the command-line (e.g. for Debian based distributions):
sudo apt install adb

Determine the local IP address of your Tinker Board. Go to the Application folder, select Settings, then select About tablet (in the System section), and choose Status. As you can see from the graphic below, the IP address on my local network is 192.168.1.106. Your IP address is likely to be different. Use your local IP address instead of 192.168.1.106.

Now connect to the Tinker Board by typing the following commands at a Linux shell (replacing 192.168.1.106 with the local IP address of your Tinker Board).

adb connect 192.168.1.106
adb root
adb connect 192.168.1.106

Change the DPI to 160 by typing the following command:

adb shell wm density 160 && adb reboot

The Tinker Board will reboot. Following the reboot, you’ll immediately notice a distinct improvement in usability. If you have any customization tips for Android on the Tinker Board, please comment below.