After playing around with tinkerOS I decided to give the Raspberry Pi 3b a try and see if I liked it any better. For some reason I did and have decided to use it as the board for the rest of the project.
The Raspberry Pi was much easier to install and got less warm than the tinker board. It seems like it also consumes less power, which I am not certain about. But when using the tinker board heavily, the led on my power brick was dimming as CPU usage went up. Regardless, to install Raspbian, the operating system for the Pi, I simply followed a tutorial from the official Raspberry Pi website and the installation was seamless.
Later on, I attempted to import cv2 in Python to check if OpenCV was already installed on the operating system. It turns out it is not. Its not that difficult to do yourself, just time consuming because it has to be compiled. I installed the precompiled version for Python by running the following commands:
sudo apt-get install python-numpysudo apt-get install python-opencvsudo apt-get install python-scipysudo apt-get install ipython
Now that the board is running and has all the libraries we need, we are finally ready to start on the project!