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64-bit Orange Pi – A Quad Core Computer for $20
- pi-rat 10y agoNot for people with OCD, that's an interesting board layout :)
- jon-wood 10y agoI dread to think how long it took to lay that out, but I'm pretty impressed. A lesser person would have just given up and used a larger PCB, but they were clearly determined to fit everything in the same footprint as a Raspberry PI.
- userbinator 10y agoIt may have been routed with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TopoR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TopoR
- Gracana 10y agoThat was my thought as well, but the traces don't look like TopoR traces.
- david-given 10y agoHuh. That's... actually quite interesting. Is there a reason for the odd layout? Some pathalogical issue with utoplacement doing the best it can to fit components into a limited space? Trying to avoid sharp edges in the track for some weird capacitance reason? Or maybe it's deliberate to try and drive its users insane... anyone actually know?
- cnvogel 10y ago45° rotation make sense when you want to avoid having half of your traces exit a dense chip towards the board edges, assuming (which often is the case) a rectangular board. I guess in this particular case, the (many, and sensitive to total length and relative length with respect to each other) traces connecting CPU and RAM had been routed in isolation first. These chips seem to be 45° rotates against each other. Then the group of CPU & RAM had been rotated too leave enough space for power/camera/HDMI, I'd guess. It looks strange, but frankly there is no real reason (besides aesthetics) to favor any particular orientation.
- JulianMorrison 10y agoIt seems a sensible one. Why should components be aligned to 90 degree angles, when higgledy-piggledy might pack them in a smaller space?
- mb_72 10y agoI've worked with a PCB layout designer, and one comment he made is that it's far easier to do a 'by eye' check of, firstly, the virtual layout in CAD, and then the assembled board when things are arranged neatly or at 'nice angles'. Having done some PCB layout myself - mostly through-hole, although with a large number of parts - I never found circumstances in which odd angles made it easier to do the layout. However, I concede it might be for reasons of short traces or making traces certain lengths if required for timing reasons.
- planteen 10y agoYeah I was thinking the same thing. I imagine finding a part on that board by reference designator is hard. I can't imagine turning in a schematic drawn like that (parts rotated) for a test in college.
- PetahNZ 10y agoThe thing that got me was it blue!
- pjc50 10y agoIf you like that, you'll love oshpark's deep purple soldermask colour.
- rcarmo 10y agoMust be alien technology. :)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- simosx 10y agoThose with OCD would need to also buy a non-transparent case for their developer board :-).
- AstroJetson 10y agolots of prior psts on this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12887229 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12887229 and about the smaller board https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12876017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12876017
- paulftw 10y agoWhile really awesome on specs and price, downside of these boards is dev tools and community support. They are getting better at it and very fast, but living on the cutting edge is not pleasant.
- janoc 10y agoThat's the biggest problem with these boards, not just OrangePi, but most of of these SBCs. The ecosystem and development support leaves a lot to be desired. The community size is not comparable with what Raspbery Pi has and it shows. I have the original BananaPi and unless you are willing to do a lot of Linux hacking, it is most often not worth the hassle over RasPi. E.g. in the case of this Orange Pi most people don't need the 64bit performance, moreover the board still has only 1GB of RAM, so the advantage of a 64bit CPU being able to access more RAM is not going to be used here. Yes, Raspberry Pi is slower, doesn't have all the cool peripherals, but the ecosystem is much better. A fast CPU means little if you can't get a driver that you need working or a kernel hasn't been ported to your board ... Having to hunt stuff down on some Chinese forum is not fun.
- chx 10y agoIt's Allwinner. Nothing to see here, move along.
- y04nn 10y agoSame thing here, this is my only complain with my Orange Pi Plus, it worth checking the Odroid C2 which is great, but more expensive.
- na85 10y agoCare to elaborate?
- simcop2387 10y agoAll winner has had a terrible history of gold violations and Linux support. They'll release a kernel binary with support but not sources and not update things for ages.
- userbinator 10y agoAt least they release far more documentation than Broadcom...
- jandrese 10y ago...if you can read Mandarin.
- userbinator 10y agoPublicly available documentation in any language is infinitely better than NDA-only documentation.
- simosx 10y agoSome person from linux-sunxi made it his life mission to crucify Allwinner because they (Allwinner) messed up with some Linux kernel tarballs. What you have been reading is the result of this campaign against Allwinner. 1. Allwinner used to distribute Linux kernel tarballs with several device drivers in binary-only (object) files. They were in the correct place and you could recompile the kernel. Those binary .o files would be used so that you could complete the compilation. Such an example is the Mali driver and others that Allwinner did not make an effort to get the rights to redistribute in source. Obviously, this is a GPL violation. So, how do you deal with this issue? Do you get Allwinner to release the source of the Mali GPU driver due to the GPL violation? :-). Some people wanted to play lawyers and would mess up ANY action unless Allwinner complied fully by releasing source code to things that they did not have a licence (to release source). 2. Allwinner released officially the source of the 3.4 kernel for a range of SoCs (A10 to A83, the H5 should be similar to one of the A?? SoCs): https://github.com/allwinner-zh/linux-3.4-sunxi https://github.com/allwinner-zh/linux-3.4-sunxi Documentation: https://github.com/allwinner-zh/documents https://github.com/allwinner-zh/documents Bootloader code: https://github.com/allwinner-zh/bootloader https://github.com/allwinner-zh/bootloader A few months ago, there was a discussion on LKML on how to deal with GPL violations. Linus and Greg said that being aggressive in pursuing the GPL violations really does not help. Here is an example where it did not help.
- marmaduke 10y agoI first thought, oh noes I just got a RPi3, but then reading the specs I see it's not very different? USB2, 1GB RAM, A53, why would I (two weeks ago before ordering the Rpi) order this instead?
- m45t3r 10y agoGigabyte Ethernet for one, if you are using this in a project where Ethernet bandwidth is a problem, this would perform much better. I actually want one of those RPi clones exactly because RPi performs so poor in I/O applications, since all external bandwidth is shared by one USB 2.0 HUB (including the Ethernet port, and more recently, Wi-Fi/Bluetooth). I use my RPi as a media server/torrent client, and it is severe limited in those situations.
- nodesocket 10y agoAs I understand, even adding a 1000M port to the RPi3 would not increase the network bandwidth. The limiting factor is bus and cpu. My RPi3 Model B maxes out from speedtest.net at around 91Mbps. From my iMac I get 180Mbps (throttled from my provider) not the Mac.
- janoc 10y agoNo, it won't - because the ethernet on RPi is actually going over USB. The CPU doesn't have a built-in ethernet peripheral. So adding a gigabyte port would be pointless - the bottleneck would still be the USB bus.
- pja 10y agoThe data rate over USB2 after accounting for overheads is a lot faster than 100Mbit, so it’s not entirely pointless - you would be able to serve cache files faster for instance. But as soon as you have anything else hitting that bus, your real world bandwidth is going to be < 100MBit. Since 1G is more power hungry than 100MBit interfaces as well IIRC you can understand why the Pi people decided to stick with 100MBit.
- thresh 10y agoCan it run stock vanilla mainline kernel? It really sucks to be stuck with ancient 3.14 kernel on quite powerful things like Odroid C2.
- whyagaindavid 10y agoThe Orange Pi range are based on Allwinner SoCs which have poor Open Source drivers for the VPU (the bit of the SoC that actually plays video). There have been a number of attempts to improve this, and all so far have failed. All winner don't really seem to be that interested in working with Kodi devs to sort this, and apparently have a patchy history with open source licence compliance. http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=238060 http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=238060
- homarp 10y agoThe VPU is getting there: http://free-electrons.com/blog/support-for-the-allwinner-vpu-in-the-mainline-linux-kernel/ http://free-electrons.com/blog/support-for-the-allwinner-vpu... "Currently, the combination of the kernel driver and VA-API backend supports MPEG2 and MPEG4 decoding only. There is for the moment no support for encoding, and no support for H264, though we believe support for both aspects can be added within the architecture of the existing driver and VA-API backend."
- pantalaimon 10y agoSee https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort#Status_Matrix https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort#Status_Matri...
- jlebrech 10y agois there a circuit design app that'll compress a design into a smaller footprint like that?
- VMG 10y agoI'd rather have onboard wifi than onboard ethernet...
- pi-rat 10y agoThere's a lite version without ethernet: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Orange-Pi-Lite-Support-ubuntu-linux-and-android-mini-PC-Beyond-and-Compatible-with-Raspberry/32662738571.html?scm=1007.13339.33317.0&pvid=7fd595ee-243d-42d2-af21-4933323af597&tpp=1 https://www.aliexpress.com/item/Orange-Pi-Lite-Support-ubunt...
- VMG 10y agothanks!
- kozak 10y agoIs this layout an output of some optimization algorithm that computationally finds the best layout without considering non-relevant constraints like human aesthetics? Or are we used to "perpendicular" layouts simply because assembly machines weren't able to rotate components like that?
- afandian 10y agoI don't know, but if I were responsible for layout, that's the kind of thing I'd do. I think it looks great. I wonder if this design makes PNP more expensive.
- ohitsdom 10y agoI worked on a pick and place SMT line for a few years- part rotation is pretty basic so it shouldn't affect cost.
- DanBC 10y agoIt might increase the cost of the one-off programming.
- janoc 10y agoWhich gets exported from the PCB CAD package anyway as a pick & place file, with correct orientations.
- anotheryou 10y agoI'm no expert, but it also depends on how you solder them. That ethernet chip is at 45 degrees to allow better soldering (is it wave soldering?). The big chips have melting balls underneath to make the connections, I guess here you are more free on the rotation.
- DanBC 10y agoEDIT: This is wrong! See Kliment's post below. Wave soldering is used for through hole, not surface mount, components. With wave soldering you have a bucket of molten solder that is pushed over the lip of one edge of the bucket. This is the wave. The circuit board is transported over the wave, just touching it. Solder flows to the exposed copper, but not anything else (which is referred to as solder resist in this context - that blue colour is solder resist). Surface mount would tend to use screen printed solder paste and then a hot oven to melt the paste. The Slow mo guys have a video about how expensive cameras are made which covers some of the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaqeLrLxYOg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaqeLrLxYOg
- singularity2001 10y agoAnyone worried about the device coming from China? What's even the name of the Chinese NSA analogous backdoor specialist? "Party"?
- edblarney 10y agoEven though your comment may seem facetious / funny ... and even though I'm not remotely a conspiracy theorist ... There is some truth to wha you are saying. Certain governments are pretty aggressive these days with these things and have an established track record of doing such things. That said, since it's fully 'open' perhaps it would be more difficult to insert malware than say in a Huwaeii or Cisco router :)
- pulse7 10y ago> I'm not remotely a conspiracy theorist ... These things are becoming reality... so you are a "realist" now, and not a theorist...
- genkaos 10y agoYeah, having Intel ME is good enough.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- todd8 10y agoI would be after this incident with the manufacturer: http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/05/chinese-arm-vendor-left-developer-backdoor-in-kernel-for-android-pi-devices/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2016/05/chinese-arm-vendor-l... Although no state actor would leave in a kernel backdoor that is opened with "rootmydevice" as the magic word.
- cabalamat 10y agoIndeed. I expect the backdoor is in the chip anyway, not the kernel.
- rcarmo 10y agoSpecs are OK. I am waiting for these dev boards to break the 2GB RAM barrier around this price point to update my home cluster, though :)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- voltagex_ 10y agohttps://www.kickstarter.com/projects/874883570/marvell-espressobin-board https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/874883570/marvell-espre... for one that'll actually have vendor support and a chance of mainlining.
- FilterSweep 10y agoThis is very interesting. the $79 price point is for the 2GB RAM model - and seems worthwhile with other accessories options provided. The one concern I have with this board is that it ships in March 2017, which is getting very close to the next iteration of RPi4/Odroid C3, and that it opted for more LAN/WAN instead of adding more USB 2.0/3.0 Ports like the Odroid/RPI. Many thanks for giving me something to heavily consider this next week for SBC projects though....
- yuhong 10y agoI wonder what DRAM chips they are using.
- whyagaindavid 10y agoThey have dismal linux support. Old kernels; and no releases. Poor video drivers. http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=238060 http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=238060 the current lubuntu image does not even exist. http://www.orangepi.org/downloadresources/PiPlus2e/2016-06-06/piplus2e_283fd175b5088ab3a61f92aec50.html http://www.orangepi.org/downloadresources/PiPlus2e/2016-06-0...
- webaholic 10y agoIs it only the raspberry pi which sees effort to have upstream kernel support? Or are there any other similar boards doing better than the pi?
- Uberphallus 10y agoIf you don't care about graphics, i.MX6 boards are pretty well supported.
- carussell 10y agoThere's a lot of uncertainty about how long that will last since NXP/Freescale is now Qualcomm's manufacturing arm.
- brudgers 10y agoMy take is that nobody is doing better than Pi in terms of the community Pi targets, e.g. students, amateurs and greenhorns alongside professionals. There's a critical mass with Pi that attracts industry players to be on the platform with what counts for decent support in the embedded world, e.g. Microsoft and Canonical. For me, that's worth $15 per board.
- geezerjay 10y ago> For me, that's worth $15 per board. Unfortunately, the Raspberry Pi 3 sells for over 50€ per board. The Raspberry Pi zero, in spite of being marketed as a 10€ computer, in practice can't be purchased at all.
- edblarney 10y agoI love the PI movement. It's the essence of creative hobbyists. Anyone walking in my company who owns a PI ... I would be inclined to hire on the spot.
- pjc50 10y agoI love it too. And because I love Raspberry Pi, I'd like to point out that Orange Pi are nothing to do with Raspberry Pi and are infringing on their trademarks. Raspberry Pi purchases fund their Foundation, which produces educational material for and liases with UK schools.
- pjmlp 10y agoWhat about Beagle and Panda boards?
- stryk 10y agoAnd don't forget Cubieboards :)
- erdewit 10y agoI wonder what CPU frequency it runs on.
- bdz 10y agoI still think that Odroid is a better choice, both over this and RBPI http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php
- Brakenshire 10y agoHow is Odroid for open source drivers?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- fnj 10y agoA brand new 64-bit clean-slate board that has only USB2 and no USB3? Brain dead. A big yawn.
- simooooo 10y agoIs a device of this nature really going to be able to saturate USB2 ?
- vardump 10y ago8-bit microcontrollers can saturate USB2... This and Raspberry Pi 2+, etc. would have absolutely no problems saturating multiple gigabit ethernet interfaces.
- pjc50 10y agoFew (possibly none) of the chips in this market segment have USB3 PHY interfaces. It's significantly more complicated.
- amelius 10y agoWhat does it cost per FLOPShour? Does it make sense to replace my GPU for a rack with these units?
- annnnd 10y ago> 64-bit ... Does anyone know, is this "RaspberryPi-like 64-bit" or real 64-bit? That is, is there a compatible 64-bit kernel available with all the drivers?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- virmundi 10y agoI'm a little confused. Hopefully HN can teach me. At 1 GB isn't the 64-bit detrimental? I thought 64-bit addressing cost about 5-10% of performance, but didn't matter since the system has hundreds of more MB of RAM. I guess this makes sure it runs on more modern operating systems. I thought that most still support 32-bit.
- brudgers 10y ago64 bits means bigger integers before overflow, wraparound or whatever. Big ints may be useful when working with big data. It also means double precision floating point will tend to be faster. That may be useful in signal processing applications. All that said, mainly the board is 64b because popular recent versions of the ARM core are 64b. The Raspberry Pi 3 is also 64b but Raspbian Linux typically comes as 32b...or at least did last I looked.
- paulmd 10y ago32-bit refers to the memory addressing. There's nothing that says that a 32-bit processor has to have 32-bit instructions, 32-bit ALU, etc. And most 32-bit processors are perfectly capable of working with long-int/double types. Assuming the processor is otherwise identical, 64-bit addressing on a SoC with 1 GB of RAM doesn't do anything except waste memory on an excessive address space.
- noselasd 10y agoWhich 32 bit processors has native 64 bit integer support ?
- monocasa 10y agoYou're right in the abstract sense, but we're talking in the context of AArch64 vs. AArch32.
- brudgers 10y agoI think that historically, n-bits refers to the architecture's word length and that may or may not match the size of the address bus for a particular processor. Likewise, historically, multiple smaller than word-length data structures were sometimes packed into single words. The mantissa and exponent of IEEE 754 kinda' sorta' do something like that if I squint real hard. Not that bitpacking words is particularly execution efficient, but maybe the space savings is worth it. Probably the sort of thing that's worth benchmarking in an actual app. Likewise with memory usage; I mean 1GB may be more than enough for a particular application and minimizing the OS may be a useful tradeoff for saving halving reads on 64b or greater data structures. Anyway, the intent of my comment was to provide an explanation not promote one dogma over another...I think the big reason the SoC is 64b is 64b seems to be a sweet spot in the ARM powered credit card sized computer market place right now. And if I were considering this board but 2GB RAM was a concern, I'd probably go with an AllWinner board with that much. For example a BananaPi: http://www.banana-pi.org/ http://www.banana-pi.org/
- kogepathic 10y ago> and a standalone graphics chip So, having the GPU on the same SoC qualifies as "standalone" now? So any Intel with iGP also has a "standalone" graphics chip? Or is this Tech Crunch writer just clueless? > physical power switch No. It has a GPIO mapped button that can be used for soft power down. The original Orange Pi has the same button and to my knowledge it can only be used to turn the board off. The board powers on as soon as power is applied.
- bencollier49 10y agoI would have thought <fruit> + Pi would be a trademark violation. [EDIT] - Ah, apparently it's a Chinese clone. Typical.
- coupdejarnac 10y agoThe icing on the cake is how it is noted in the device description that Orange Pi is a registered trademark.
- bencollier49 10y agoThat's frankly disgraceful.
- tiredwired 10y agoHow much smaller would it be if it only had 1 USB-C connector instead of all the other connectors?
- phyushin 10y agoDoes it bug anyone else that the chips aren't aligned to the board
- brink 10y agoI like it. Especially if it's a more efficient layout. (I don't know if it actually is.)
- phyushin 10y agoIt bothers me that the chips aren't in line with the board
- tobiaswk 10y agoYes they are cheap... but their hardware has a high fault-rate. Hardware support is there but the software support is crappy at best. Allwinners SoC's pretty much have zero support in the open source community. They use old kernels. You will be running old kernels and graphics drivers. Also... the old Orange Pi SoC got notoriously hot. 60-75 degress celcius. You needed an active cooler or very big passive one. Lets not forget the ridiculous patched kernel by Allwinner. They forgot to remove their "debug" code which basically allowed total control over devices shipped with the kernel; http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/1108-security-alert-for-allwinner-sun8i-h3a83th8/http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/1108-security-alert-for-allwinner-sun8i-h3a83th8/ http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/1108-security-alert... I'd be very causcius about using this SBC. Sure it's fine for fiddling around. You're better of with ODroid.
- _joel 10y agoHaving been burnt several times buying 'cheap' SoC's like these and then spending hours trying to get them working due to crappy upstream support then I'd steer clear of this. If you value your time and don't want to get out SPI interfaces and the like to debug something then save your time and subsequently money, buy a Pi3. Side note: One vendor (Pine64) even shipped binary images in a RAR format. I'm not sure why this was chosen, but makes you wonder how they got to that decision and if they spent much time working with 'proper' distro's for embedded, where nothing is shipped as a RAR but gz/bz/xz whatever
- diimdeep 10y agoI hate that everyone marketing this as x $ but actually charge x $ + really_expensive_shipping $
- Tepix 10y agoThe shipping is super cheap, have you actually checked?
- linker3000 10y agoThere's useful insight into some of the SoC-based boards on Pete Scargill's IoT site chronicalling his gadget and MQTT-based work; it's well worth a browse... http://tech.scargill.net/ http://tech.scargill.net/
- megous 10y agoSo much negativity and misinformation here. Orange PI PC boards are well designed, with attention to things that many other board makers fail at, like heat spreading, space for heat sink (you don't really need one usually), quality DC connector, fine grained CPU voltage regulation, USB not being crippled by on-board hub, etc. Mainline support is also progressing well. With some patches you can get temperature regulation, HDMI support, audio support now on mainline kernel. Video decoding is also progressing as someone noted in other comments. SoC on Orange PI PC is also very nice for people who care about not having binary blobs running show on some hidden internal processor. There is additional OpenRISC CPU on the SoC, but it doesn't run by default on mainline kernel, and you can also program it yourself, without too much trouble. Armbian supports these boards quite well, including video decoding support. Allwinner is also not that bad at releasing code/datasheets. They release a lot of code. The issue is that it is designed for old kernels (3.4, 3.10) so it's not directly usable/easily portable to newer kernels. But still it is helpful and community is actively working on mainlining the support for various SoC parts. Orange PI PC (H3 soc) is quite usable as a desktop for web browsing and audio/video playback. I'm glad to see H5, because it looks like performance wise it will be still better and I'm also optimistic about the open source software support in the future. It certainly is a very motivating board to develop for at the current price/performance level. The only annoying thing I find is Mali GPU.
- camperman 10y ago"Mainline support is also progressing well. With some patches you can get temperature regulation, HDMI support, audio support now on mainline kernel." Patches to get HDMI and audio? More work needed I think. "Video decoding is also progressing as someone noted in other comments." So it doesn't work out of the box then? "SoC on Orange PI PC is also very nice for people who care about not having binary blobs running show on some hidden internal processor." AllWinner is a GPL violator: http://linux-sunxi.org/GPL_Violations http://linux-sunxi.org/GPL_Violations "Allwinner is also not that bad at releasing code/datasheets. They release a lot of code. The issue is that it is designed for old kernels (3.4, 3.10) so it's not directly usable/easily portable to newer kernels. But still it is helpful and community is actively working on mainlining the support for various SoC parts." Allwinner does NOT cooperate with the linux-sunxi community. At all. "The only annoying thing I find is Mali GPU." That's just the final peanut on the turd I think.
- sorenjan 10y agoHow come there aren't any Raspberry Pi competitors using Intel Atom CPUs? There's plenty of cheap tablets running Windows 10 on Intel Atom on Aliexpress and similar, remove the screen and battery and it should be doable at an affordable price, no?
- benwilber0 10y agoI think it's mainly price point. It's hard to sell a $40-50 board equipped with an Atom CPU. Also I think they had heat issues at one point?
- MarkusWandel 10y agoIt's a question of expectations. Me, I want a cheap, wifi-capable motion sensing camera on my LAN, behind a firewall, not on the public internet. So I ordered the Orange Pi Lite and its camera module, altogether a smidgen less than $30 Canadian (a current model Raspberry Pi will set you back $50+ around here, and then another $10 or so for the camera module (or a clone of it) from China. Not impressed initially. Not much documentation, so how do you know you even got it powered up right? No lights come on, no video signal comes out, nothing. Eventually hooked up a TTL USB/serial converter to the GND/TX/RX three-pin connector and hallelujah, it did boot and let me log in and set up wifi remote login. The only thing I found that booted was the Lite-specific Armbian distribution and yes, it uses a 3.4.x kernel, and I still haven't managed to get any HDMI output. But on the plus side, "motion" was cinch to configure, works great with the camera in 800x600 mode (CPU temperature 43 degrees Celsius with no heat sink, board out in the open at room temperature) or 1600x1200 mode (CPU temperature about 48 degrees Celsius). That load also includes a script which periodically rsyncs the collected pictures to a server, and cleans up (I use /tmp in RAM disk to avoid SD card wear). Happy? You bet. I'll probably order a couple more. Use this for direct internet facing stuff? No. Use this for general purpose computing where every feature has to work and the CPU performance is absolutely maximized? No. But for the specific application I want it for, peachy keen. At least it's been stable in two days of running and over a gigabyte of pictures taken and saved. I've also got a Raspi and its camera module. All in all, the experience with the Raspi isn't any better, though the camera sure is, and now you can get an 8MP camera too (the OPi's camera is 2MP).
- jandrese 10y agoI don't know about the Orange Pi directly, but one of the other Allwinner boards I tried would only output on the HDMI if the display negotiated HDCP. So you had to hook it to a TV, not a computer monitor, to get the picture. In general if you want something that just works, the Raspberry Pi is a much safer bet. These alternate boards always seem to have something stupid you have to fix before they work properly.
- MarkusWandel 10y agoTrue, it's not a safe bet, but at the price it's a fun experiment. I've now concluded after further playing with mine that 1600x1200 mode effectively doesn't work (you get a picture, but it's mirrored horizontally and auto brightness/contrast doesn't work). Still at 800x600 good for the price.
- Animats 10y agoThe board layout looks strange. All those odd angles. It looks like someone copied partial layouts from other projects and crammed them into the available space. I wonder what board design program they use. Can this be used for ZCash mining? (Never mind, ZCash is down 95% from the peak 9 days ago.[1]) [1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/zcash/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/zcash/
- ChuckMcM 10y agoI'm really surprised the naming types for the Arm8 (64 bit) low cost boards didn't call them 'Tau' rather than 'Pi', and 'Orange Tau' or 'Dragon Tau' sounds reasonably identifiable to me and it would quickly become the defacto way of distinguishing between 64 bit machines and 32 bit machines.
- payne92 10y agoI am very amused by the non-Manhattan layout.
- nirav72 10y agoWithout good marketing and community support..this thing will be DOA like many other boards that tried to take on the RaspberryPi in the past few years.