July 27, 2020

Orange PI - boards at a glance

This is by no means a comprehensive list of all the boards available from Friendly ARM or NanoPi. This is just a list of the boards that I have and use.

I buy the OrangePi boards off of AliExpress and usually have to add $4 shipping per board.

Orange Pi PC

This has the H3 chip, 1G of ram and costs $15.

Orange Pi PC plus

This also has the H3 chip, 512M of ram, but adds 8G of eMMC flash for $20. This is my favorite because I don't have to run out and buy a micro-SD card for it, which typically will cost me $6 anyway.

Orange Pi PC 2

This has the H5 chip (a quad 64 bit ARM), 1G of ram and gigabit ethernet. Price was $20. I bought two back in October of 2018. No longer available in July of 2020.

Orange Pi PC 4

I don't have one of these (yet), but one is on the way. The PC 4 uses the Rockchip 3399, which has 6 cores. Two of the cores are the large and faster A72, the other four are A53 like the H5 and H6. Price is $54. You do get 4G of ram and 16G of eMMC.

Orange Pi 3

This uses the Allwinner H6 and typically has emmc. The H6 is pretty much identical to the H5. The main difference seems to be the graphics chip that is integrated (which I never use anyway). This is a quad core 64 bit ARM. I see a 2G ram version with 8G emmc for $35 in 1-2023. There is an LTS and non-LTS version that I have yet to figure out. Both have 26 pin GPIO headers.

NanoPi NEO

This has the H3 chip and in the version I purchased, 512M of ram along with 10/100 ethernet. All for $20 on a tiny board.

NanoPi Fire3

This no longer seems to be offered by NanoPI. It was based on the 8 core Samsung s5p6818 and sold for $35. I see a 4 core "NanoPi-2-Fire", which is based on the 4 core Samsung S5P4418 but also seems out of production.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's electronics pages / [email protected]