There must be many TH-camrs capable of conveying the same information. I doubt that any could do so in such an engaging way that Chris does it: polished, well paced, and spiced with dry humor (humour). And, praise the Lord, no background music!
It is exciting to see so many new boards similar to the Raspberry PI. When the Orangepi 800 first came out, I picked one up. It was fun to play with, but had many annoyances... programs were broken in some way, no way to transfer most images to the EMMC reliably, Manjaro would break when you updated the OS, etc. We are 2 years along, and the images available have not been updated, and the issues still exist. There seems to be a trade-off between new and available boards, and future support. Just picked up an Intel N100 mini desktop with NVME for just over $120 that has give me no issues. Still interesting though. Love this channel. It gives me an 80's vibe that makes me smile.
@@ominguti6345 im petty sure you need to add an overlay for it, but i dont know if there is one already created or not. OR if there is a option inside "orangepi-config", i would look in there first.
I am "of a certain age" and can confirm that making an LED blink with a processor board is tremendously exciting. Even more exciting is making a few of them "chase" like KITT from Knight Rider. Go on, Make the noise with your mouth, you know you want to.
I have the 1 GB version of this board running Pi-hole in headless mode. The only issue can be seen at the 6 minute 41 second mark. If you look closely at the mounting hole near GPIO pins 1 and 2, there are three surface mounted chips. Be very careful when using spacers as they can crush these chips when tightening the case screws. I had to cut away part of my spacer to avoid these chips.
I am always astounded when I see a computer, with the specifications such as this, at this price and this form factor. I know I should be used to it by now, but I still find it amazing.... and I must thank you for your work in bringing these to us Chris, you have helped popularise these little marvels to all our benefit..
I think we're both "veterans" in computing and, if anything, I love the fact that I never cease to be amazed by the ever increasing power and smaller sizes of computing devices. Up to a few years before 1992, the first computer that I used to connect to BBSes and then the Internet was a Commodore Amiga - for dial up Internet it was an Amiga A1200 running at 14 MHz with 8 GB RAM using the "iBrowse" web browser. One of my favourite PCs (as a Thinkpad-collecting Linux bloke) is a Thinkpad T22 from around 2002 (a decade after the A1200) that has a Pentium III CPU running at 700 MHz and 512 MB RAM - so 50 times the CPU speed and 64 times the ram of that Amiga A1200, and that was 22 years ago! I didn't own the T22 from new, I bought it in a pile of broken laptops from "everyone's favourite auction site", repaired it and now I use it once or twice a week to program shell scripts on my server via SSH as it has a great keyboard and is a "long lost" way of doing distraction-free computing. I'm very lucky to have "the childlike eyes" of an old computing bloke who has never forgotten the importance of the word "perspective". And I find it utterly shocking (but in a nice way) that I can pick up a used HP, Lenovo or Dell SFF PC with a third or fourth generation Core i5 or i7 CPU and 8 GB RAM on "that auction site" for less money than I'd spend going out for a Chinese meal of an evening - any one of which makes a fine platform for Linux or BSD as a daily driver. At the same time, it's saddening to see people rushing like lemmings into immediate upgrade mode just because Microsoft has churned out another Windows version or some greedy company has churned out another buggy and derivative "game as a service" without even understanding why they're doing it - albeit I can snap up their old hardware cheaply when they get rid of it. Thanks for the effort you put into your content too - I'm still very much a Linux bloke but do have a few BSD systems kicking around as well.
I get the vibe the cool kids are getting into peer-to-peer LoRa mesh networking which is just screaming for a BBS-style app, these little boards may well become the hero of the day.
@@loginregional I missed BBS, the UK had nowhere near the same scene as the US. We had Cefax =), did love the BBS ANSI art tho. Localized mesh networks with no gateways, gatekeepers or bills could be quite useful and fun. Long Range Radio can't handle much by today's standard, but olde world BBS on the other hand. Right I'm off for a game of Legend of the Red Dragon
That's actually a good idea for a video. Perhaps Chris can do a video on peer-to-peer LoRa mesh networking. As for the other commentators, they apparently don't understand the bandwidth constraints of a LoRa network. BBS makes sense for such a network.
Just in case anyone is wondering (I was trying to find out this before), the Argon Pod case fits well with this board, luckily you can hide the antenna inside the plastic lid so it's a very clean way to use it. You just need to be careful with the thermal pad, the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W is thicker than the Orange Pi Zero 2W so you need to use a thicker thermal pad or an extra thermal pad to fit it. You also have to be careful not to bend too much the board so I use more thermal pad on the bottom of the board to compensate the pressure on the top, that's the only inconvenience. I don't have many complains about this board it's very low power, in idle it draws around 1W, I've even been using DietPi OS on it and it's perfect!
I just knew about this board this morning while googling for RP Pi Zero W 2 :D. It's much attractive than RP one with 1GB and USB-C ports. I just need a simple setup with Ubuntu so performance is not a big issue in case it's worse than RP Zero W 2 :). Very impressive, thank you.
how has yr Ubuntu setup being faring w the Orange? I seriously considered it because of more RAM & USB-C as well & opted to get a RP Zero 2W due to the stable ecosystem of software & community support. I didn't want my 1st experience w an SBC to be tainted by things breaking all over the place like I see in this video!
@@udance4ever I bought an Orange after a few days I watched this video (and commented above) but I have been busy since that day so I just opened the box to check items inside. Actually it's packaged well and I like it more a few RP Picos I bought in the past :)
@@tiendq hey you get around to playing with yr 🍊? I got my RP Zero 2W & while I knew it going in - 512MB doesn't seem practical for anything but embedded use. once you add a desktop (or any kind of graphical front end like ES in my case - I didn't realize how much memory it eats), u have like no memory left for apps! I prolly will order an Orange Zero 2W soon just to test it out :)
I just picked up one of these (2 GB model) to run my octoprint server for my 3D printer. I don't have it running yet, but hopefully soon. Thanks for the review and information about the device. Seems like a nice little board to run as a headless server like I plan to do.
USB-C is much better than USB-micro. Mating cycles differ significantly (connection amount before replecement). C is designed 10000 (10 k) and micro about 1000 (1 k).
Hello Mr Scissors! Long time no see! As you say Chris software is everything. The Ubuntu is nice but nearly 2 years old, which is a lifetime in SBCs….😮
The age of the official distro is disappointing, for sure. I've had success with the DietPi for this board. I use it to run a Snapclient for a multi-room audio setup. The added antenna makes for great connectivity compared to the vanilla Pi Zeros I have running in other rooms.
single board computers are still my top favorite thing to see as always and The fake explaining computers better back off commenting on my comment with the same comment over and over again spamming pin every time (i am referring to the scammer)
I have an Orange Pi Zero 3 it comes with the same processor and RAM options as the Orange Pi Zero 2 W but shares a similar from factor to the Orange Pi Zero 2. The Orange Pi Zero 3's expansion board goes onto the single set of pins. Excellent video as always.
Great to have another video with Mr. Scissors back at work. I agree that Orange Pi model names and numbers defy explanation. For instance, the OP 800 is closest to...the OP 4LTS in specs and GPIO setup. Even runs Armbian for the 4LTS. Go figure.
Yes! These are the types of SBCs I actually care about! The price of modern SBCs is so high that it's hard to justify the cost if you're just using it to tinker or making a small project. Once acceleration is sorted I think it will be a very capable little computer.
They missed a trick -- the board itself should have been orange. Branding is important, after all. But otherwise, it is a nice board. I really like the expansion board with all the connectivity. And at $11.99, it's not a bad price. As you point out, some of the software is a bit dodgy. But really and truly, this is not supposed to be a desktop substitute. Plus, (and this is a HUGE plus), the board is AVAILABLE! All in all, this looks like a promising piece of hardware. (PS: Hello, Mr. Scissors! I hope you and Stanley are doing well.)
We got retropie working on this board. I was hoping cloud gaming would work based on specs. But it lags. Another situation of lack of driver support. The raspi pi zero2w can run Dreamcast games just fine. This model lacks 3d acceleration. It’s more powerful than raspi zero 2w but hits and misses in performance
Thanks for this, especially Mr Scissors brief cameo. I'm glad that you tested it doing things that are beyond its intended capability. I don't know why one would want to run a graphical desktop, but it's great that Ubuntu is capable regardless. I may consider one if booting from SSD is possible. It might make for a nifty tiny NAS device.
I look forward to Sunday morning Explaining Computers, this channel has become the new Bob Ross painting program for me, ( compliment ) very good video, thanks for making this video, I look forward to the next one, see you again next Sunday.
After years of listening, i think i finally figured out what I'm hearing, It's like if William Shatner were White, and British, and not absurdly pretentious.. Love your content, have a great day.
Orange Pi hardware is nice, but Raspberry Pi still has better documentation and software support. The RPi Zero 2W isn't quite what I'm looking for yet hardware-wise, but I eagerly await its successor.
It's amazing seeing these evolve. It wasn't long ago I watched EC videos on full scale rPi clones (I think RP2 or 3?) having about the same performance in desktop and video playback. And now we get that kind of performance in something the size of a pack of gum. Can't wait to see what kind of performance we will get a few releases down the line.
Hey, man! I really appreciate your videos and your channel in general! I've been watching your channel for years now and can't thank you enough for your thorough, honest, and educated reviews of so many interesting products and IT topics. Always an entertaining learning experience! Keep doing what you do, man!
I have this SBC with the expansion. Orange Pi has launched the Zero 3 which also has the H618 SoC and supersedes(?) the Zero 2, and it also goes up to 4GB RAM. According to the sunxi project the differences both SoCs are minimal, the H618 has better support for newer versions of Android. In fact, the H61X SoCs were designed for low cost set-top boxes and the Android images provided are Android TV versions, not full Android. I haven't tried it yet, so I can't comment. Performance is fairly good in any of the OSes, but it lacks support from 3rd party OSes like Armbian. I've tried the Orange Pi OS, Ubuntu Desktop and Debian Desktop images (all kernel 6.1). I don't remember having issues with Orange Pi OS but I didn't spent much time with it, I prefer Debian. What I noticed on all of them is that at 4K (UHD) HDMI output the desktop is very graphically glitchy. When I resized to FHD the glitches went away, I think that even basic GPU support is not quite there yet. There are some other minor bugs, like the WiFi strength indicator only works ok after you click it, despite being connected. Changing keyboard layout to my native portuguese layout in the terminal console in Debian was a bit involved, despite everything in the orangepi-config utility being set correctly. Native XFCE preferences won't work at all. Hope Armbian picks up support for the H618 based boards like the Zero 2W and Zero 3, having 4GB of RAM is great. I'm sorry but I can't get myself to trust the Orange Pi images (being updated from repos in China...). Mainline kernel support is being worked on and probably we'll have more choice in the near future. As is, I rather place my trust on the Radxa Zero 3W despite being more expensive and more difficult to buy but the RK3566 is much better supported.
Hi, Chris, as usual a very good review. Thanks. However, I suggest you record the phrase "the GPU isn't enabled" 'cause I don't recall an SBC that did so you can just play it when ever you review an SBC.
Are there actually any non-pi SBCs with GPU drivers? They always advertise them in the specs but then neglect to tell you there's no way to use them...
A great review as always and a good little SBC too. It does stink hard that you can't even open the terminal on Orange Pi OS without getting blacked out. That's really silly and I hope that it gets patched quick. Also, this is the first time I'm hearing about 1.5 GB RAM! I had no idea that was a thing. And most importantly, WELCOME BACK, MR. SCISSORS!!! WE'VE MISSED YOU!!! 🎉
One day they will be able to make the circuitry so small, that the connectors will be the thing that limit's the size! "Where is the processor and all that"? "It's under the USB connector".😁
Very nice looking little board, shame it is let down by the software at the moment... but I imagine that will improve with time. The expansion interface is interesting, I had assumed it was a camera / screen interface until you discussed it
Peter another great learning experience always love to follow you on you tube and enjoy so much your exciting new SBCs I can't thank you enough for doing this as it is so helpful in my limited adventures and teaching so many new and exciting things in the world of computers Love your channel always a please to see you again.
It is a cool little board. It is a hybrid between ESP32 and the big Raspi and Orange board. I bought one of these for a dedicated cash application and it works great.
Great review. Loved it. The thing that used to bother me, too was the lack of software support. Some of these boards in the years past, software support was a second or third guess. It seems to be slowly changing and evolving. Thanks for pointing that out. But your review is was great, you covered the basic board and also a presented a picture with the add-ons. Thank You.
This board is awesome, but the voltage regulator is kind of sensitive to high currents on the USB port. One of mine died a few hours ago after running an APRS decoder for a couple of hours. The culprit was probably the USB audio dongle used. So, beware and have fun!
- Sir. Thank you for reviewing these, amazing. Technological achievements............the power of a full "global system computer" at the price of a chocolate bar.....Chromium to do that world wide web.......... .......it's a great technological achievement Thanks to you..... sir.......!!!
looks really good, the cpu is a bit too old and weak but the os support seems to have improved drsically over the recent years, it is now a decent pi competitor
Orange Pi, once bought, never again. No software updates since September. As long as you accept that their software is just a trick to make you think that they are anything other than box shifters, where official user support is also as close to zero as you can get, so on your own/reliant on community development, then you know what you are getting.Software support for the Official Orange Pi 5 software support is equally woeful, so cannot possibly agree with this conclusion. And congratulations on the relocation to the USA.
Great review, Chris! It is an exciting little board. I've had mine for a while but options were much more limited for OSs until recently, it seems. It's also too bad OrangePI doesn't feel like using encryption for their website.
No spotted Rabbits in this edition, but nonetheless, a very informative look. What I'm really interested in is getting something to run CERTBOT without tying up physical resources -- an entire dead laptop (I have a few) just to get ACME certificates every so often is a little nutsoid, it's not like it's 2015 when I had a dozen machines at my disposal. And of course, my plans for the N100M are still on the horizon. And greetings to your inanimate friends, Stanley, Mr Scissors: may all your anti-static bags be easily opened.
These boards would go mainstream if their marketing teams could actually articulate specific use cases on what they do better than a comparably priced Raspberry Pi.
Why do they need to go "mainstream" when they are "hobbyist" boards? You're getting confused with the "anomaly" that is the Raspberry Pi as the single range of SBCs that have a huge amount of support and a large community to turn them into "near consumer" devices - because anything that you, as a newbie, could want to do with a Raspberry Pi will have a YT video or a web site article to follow for you to do it. But these boards were not initially released to be retro gaming platforms or desktop PCs - they were aimed at industrial applications and giving school kids cheap computers on which to learn programming. Sure, the "market" has dictated other uses for these boards since then (like retro gaming and desktop replacements) and that, in turn, has driven advancement in CPU power and memory on these boards - but most industrial applications or kids writing in programs in Scratch don't really need much beyond the original Raspberry Pi boards released back in 2012.
@@j_h_o I am an engineer and a "techie" and I have been for more than 40 years - I programmed my first computer in assembly language back in 1982 and I have had "the computer bug" ever since, both as a hobby and in my work. So, yes, I wouldn't put me in charge of marketing either - I'd be bored senseless within minutes and it's why I deliberately avoid sales meetings and events at work because there is no situation more hideous for me that being in the company of a group of drunk sales and marketing people.
When a manufacturer can't write a stable operating system for their own product it shows a serious level of incompetence. Even with that limitation it should make a great little python development system. Not running in its own native environment wont affect someone developing code for physical programing, and using the device as an intelligent controller. While I fully support the Pi pico, and Pi W2 . It's good to branch out and use other platforms when they present a more cost effective solution, or offer additional options.
additional to the OS, i thought i saw it when you opened the task manager it popped up and then went to monitor sleep mode. is it possible to mess around with the the power saving for the HDMI? might keep the screen on. Again rewatched the video... android with GPIO access is pretty useful!! suspect something wrong? boot to the android and test!
Thanks. Mr Scissors gets a cameo while Stanley the knife doesn't. Your eco system and distro needs to be strong enough and big enough to provide any missing pieces of firmware
The Orange Pi Zero, Zero LTS, Zero Plus and Zero Plus 2 have a real advantage over any Raspberry if you need two-way audio access. In addition, it has USB 2.0 on the pin headers too. In fact it is the perfect base for any amateur radio relay controller. On Raspberry you had to hack in some pogo-pins to contact the rear of a USB connector so you can add in a USB audio codec. On the Zero 2 you just need some OPAs to adopt levels, 1:1 audio transformers and there is enough space left to break out the serial port and some opto-isolated control lines for PTT, Squelch and other information. Unfortunately for the 2W they ditched that MIC in on the 24 pin FFC extension port. So, the only benefit is, that a FFC is a much more reliable connector compared to pogo-pinned USB...
Hi Chris, thank you for this nice review, got mine Opi Zero2W last week and i managed to get android tv 12 running, and it runs great! but i do want to learn more about GPIO led programming. i want to add some leds to indicate powerup, booting kernel and sd activity in this version. i am a beginner in SBC's so a tutorial how to use these GPIO pins and also how to attach a SPI display to it. on a raspberry pi it is not so difficult to do this, but Orange Pi is an other story. Greetings from the Netherlands!!!!
It's a shame that even the native OS is just not up to par. Also, I'd actually love to see another project with an SBC. A good little project is always fun!
Then build your own OS. You can start by learning how to build Armbian the way you want to or, as I do, teach yourself have to build Gentoo Linux across many different platforms and even build the kernel the way that you want to. These aren't consumer devices, they are hobbyist boards - you get the best out of them by learning to do a bit of "DIY" on them.
@@gloiloidn5752 Good luck! There is a very steep learning curve to overcome with Gentoo Linux but the rewards come later when you start to be able to make use of its power. I started using it back in 2003 and it is still my main OS to this day - but then I am an incessant tweaker!
I've been playing with these boards for few weeks. Be aware these boards are hit and miss. They have a batch on the market that the board overheats and just dies on you with default settings. If you have a board like that, and you ran out of the return window, your only option left to make it stable is to add an active cooling fan.
Hard to believe their own os doesn't work well! Lol. Did you test and Pi OS versions? Would love to see video of that. Thanks for this video. I have 2 1g and 2 4g versions of the Pi 0 2w. Just gave up when their own os wouldn't load.
Hey! Something you miss; The OPi Zero 2w runs on DDR4 RAM instead of DDR3 on the Zero 2. And there's also an OPi Zero 3, with the same factor as the 2, but with the same hardware as the 2W and gigabit Ethernet. To add more to the confusion 😂 I'm using this Zero 3 to run Klipper on my 3D printer and frankly it's an overkill.
I started to use SBCs when I started building robots. All the robotics info on explaining computers was of tremendous help. I have an SBC from Orange Pi: it fried itself in the first 10 minutes of operation. And orange Pi would not replace it. Having used 3BPi boards, including the M2 Zero, I have found Banana Pi has equivalents to the Orange Pi boards and they are much more reliable. PS...do you think you'll ever build the hovercraft. That would be very exciting.
Excellent video, as usual. I really like the reviews of the SBCs. One thing that you did not explained, unless I missed, what is the 16 MB of flash used for? Is it a boot monitor of some kind, or can it be programmed to do that? Thanks again for another video.
I always use Chris' 1080p test clip as a benchmark when trying a new board (with a desktop) I've not used before. Always seems to be pretty predictive.
If my memory serves me right, this board has identical specs as Orange zero3. 2w has better form factor and better connector layout. With zero 3, i always get the feeling i break hdmi usb-c 6 pretty cramped.
Thanks again for another informative video Chris. Although a powerful SBC at a great price, as you pointed out, not quite ready for Prime Time due to operating system limits. Like so many other SBC's you have reviewed. This remains a strong point for using Raspberry PI SBC. It would also be informative to see what software, or operating system would control and display results from this SBC's GPIO interface. Things like the DIO's, I2C, SPI, etc. Maybe a detailed look in future video?
It's Linux, an operating system with no limits. The only limits are defined by how good you are in building it to do what you want. If you're always reliant on (probably rushed) Linux builds provided with the boards themselves by the vendor, then what do you expect? It's your expectation of what a tiny board can do and should be able to do that is unrealistic. What do you mean by "Prime Time" when these are "hobbyist" boards anyway?
Thanks Chris for the review of the Orange Pi Zero 2W, if & when you revisit the board will you be testing out the the add on expansion board that you mentioned? It's a very interesting board with plenty of project possibilities, I like the ability to test the GPIO pins, time to get Sid the soldering iron out! I hope that you're keeping OK on this lovely sunny Sunday, take care kind regards Alan :)
I was hoping for a comparison video like you did with the raspi zero 1w and rpi zero 2w. Thanks for the vid tho. And in your opinion, which is the better board?
As usual, this is a great board, but the software support isn't very good. And I don’t think that the situation will improve much, just as it did not improve for all previous generations of single-board computers from this manufacturer. However, there is hope - community patches may appear in the AUR. Personally I have and use a couple of Orange Pi Zero just because they are the cheapest SBCs. They work well enough for my purposes.
considering how easily you can solder even as a beginner, including the header but not having it preinstalled is actually the better option, because theres a lot of things that can use a lower-profile pi header, sometimes even with pogo-pins, where the header would just get in the way of either the case, pins, or both
Well it is technically, software support is unfortunately still not on par. Problem is Allwinner (manufacturer of H series of chips used on many Orange Pi products) does Android only drivers and limited old linux kernel drivers. Everything up to date is done through open source projects like Lima and Cedrus. So if you're just using SPI, I2C, toggle pins and do CPU related stuff - yeah, that's fairly ok. Going into things like hw accelerated browser or some low level control with baremetal - nope.
I know this is an allwinner chip, but i really hope that at least rockchip CPUs will see mainline linux support one day so then we won't have to deal with downloading ISO's from google drive. That being said, these boards are sometimes necessary because the anemic specs rpi puts on their machines (512MB ram, really?) are simply not always enough.
There must be many TH-camrs capable of conveying the same information. I doubt that any could do so in such an engaging way that Chris does it: polished, well paced, and spiced with dry humor (humour). And, praise the Lord, no background music!
No background music means viewers can pick their own :P
It is exciting to see so many new boards similar to the Raspberry PI. When the Orangepi 800 first came out, I picked one up. It was fun to play with, but had many annoyances... programs were broken in some way, no way to transfer most images to the EMMC reliably, Manjaro would break when you updated the OS, etc. We are 2 years along, and the images available have not been updated, and the issues still exist. There seems to be a trade-off between new and available boards, and future support. Just picked up an Intel N100 mini desktop with NVME for just over $120 that has give me no issues. Still interesting though.
Love this channel. It gives me an 80's vibe that makes me smile.
I'm ashamed to admit I am the most impressed by the end: the neat and clean soldering of the blinky LED.
Composite output is always a plus for retro gaming
Yes, if it was possible to actually use it. Try searching online and you'll find lots of questions "how to use it" and no answers.
A working operating system is an even bigger plus.
Pin out diagram would help, and more than likely you'll have to add it then "address" it in the code.
@@ominguti6345 im petty sure you need to add an overlay for it, but i dont know if there is one already created or not. OR if there is a option inside "orangepi-config", i would look in there first.
I am "of a certain age" and can confirm that making an LED blink with a processor board is tremendously exciting. Even more exciting is making a few of them "chase" like KITT from Knight Rider.
Go on, Make the noise with your mouth, you know you want to.
Chris’s antenna is connected 👀 look how excited he is!
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
To be honest, it is rather exhilarating.
😏🤭
Oh my!? ..the innuendos 😀 This is about HW, good sir 😛
I swear I could see 👁the photons☢ as soon as he connected!🤯
I have the 1 GB version of this board running Pi-hole in headless mode. The only issue can be seen at the 6 minute 41 second mark. If you look closely at the mounting hole near GPIO pins 1 and 2, there are three surface mounted chips. Be very careful when using spacers as they can crush these chips when tightening the case screws.
I had to cut away part of my spacer to avoid these chips.
Dealt with the same issue myself.
5:38 "...if we turn the board over, I'm sure it won't mind, ...underneath our level of excitement is limited."
I am always astounded when I see a computer, with the specifications such as this, at this price and this form factor. I know I should be used to it by now, but I still find it amazing.... and I must thank you for your work in bringing these to us Chris, you have helped popularise these little marvels to all our benefit..
I think we're both "veterans" in computing and, if anything, I love the fact that I never cease to be amazed by the ever increasing power and smaller sizes of computing devices.
Up to a few years before 1992, the first computer that I used to connect to BBSes and then the Internet was a Commodore Amiga - for dial up Internet it was an Amiga A1200 running at 14 MHz with 8 GB RAM using the "iBrowse" web browser.
One of my favourite PCs (as a Thinkpad-collecting Linux bloke) is a Thinkpad T22 from around 2002 (a decade after the A1200) that has a Pentium III CPU running at 700 MHz and 512 MB RAM - so 50 times the CPU speed and 64 times the ram of that Amiga A1200, and that was 22 years ago! I didn't own the T22 from new, I bought it in a pile of broken laptops from "everyone's favourite auction site", repaired it and now I use it once or twice a week to program shell scripts on my server via SSH as it has a great keyboard and is a "long lost" way of doing distraction-free computing.
I'm very lucky to have "the childlike eyes" of an old computing bloke who has never forgotten the importance of the word "perspective".
And I find it utterly shocking (but in a nice way) that I can pick up a used HP, Lenovo or Dell SFF PC with a third or fourth generation Core i5 or i7 CPU and 8 GB RAM on "that auction site" for less money than I'd spend going out for a Chinese meal of an evening - any one of which makes a fine platform for Linux or BSD as a daily driver.
At the same time, it's saddening to see people rushing like lemmings into immediate upgrade mode just because Microsoft has churned out another Windows version or some greedy company has churned out another buggy and derivative "game as a service" without even understanding why they're doing it - albeit I can snap up their old hardware cheaply when they get rid of it.
Thanks for the effort you put into your content too - I'm still very much a Linux bloke but do have a few BSD systems kicking around as well.
I'm right there with you, mate.
Thanks for your support, and so very true. :)
i always fall in love with these tiny boards
I get the vibe the cool kids are getting into peer-to-peer LoRa mesh networking which is just screaming for a BBS-style app, these little boards may well become the hero of the day.
BBS's? You still running dialup?? Dalnet is dead.
@@loginregional I missed BBS, the UK had nowhere near the same scene as the US. We had Cefax =), did love the BBS ANSI art tho. Localized mesh networks with no gateways, gatekeepers or bills could be quite useful and fun. Long Range Radio can't handle much by today's standard, but olde world BBS on the other hand. Right I'm off for a game of Legend of the Red Dragon
That's actually a good idea for a video. Perhaps Chris can do a video on peer-to-peer LoRa mesh networking. As for the other commentators, they apparently don't understand the bandwidth constraints of a LoRa network. BBS makes sense for such a network.
The cool kids were doing peer to peer LoRA four years ago!
@@sUASNews And they are back at it again because of all of the political instability these days.
Just in case anyone is wondering (I was trying to find out this before), the Argon Pod case fits well with this board, luckily you can hide the antenna inside the plastic lid so it's a very clean way to use it. You just need to be careful with the thermal pad, the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W is thicker than the Orange Pi Zero 2W so you need to use a thicker thermal pad or an extra thermal pad to fit it. You also have to be careful not to bend too much the board so I use more thermal pad on the bottom of the board to compensate the pressure on the top, that's the only inconvenience. I don't have many complains about this board it's very low power, in idle it draws around 1W, I've even been using DietPi OS on it and it's perfect!
I just knew about this board this morning while googling for RP Pi Zero W 2 :D. It's much attractive than RP one with 1GB and USB-C ports. I just need a simple setup with Ubuntu so performance is not a big issue in case it's worse than RP Zero W 2 :). Very impressive, thank you.
how has yr Ubuntu setup being faring w the Orange? I seriously considered it because of more RAM & USB-C as well & opted to get a RP Zero 2W due to the stable ecosystem of software & community support. I didn't want my 1st experience w an SBC to be tainted by things breaking all over the place like I see in this video!
@@udance4ever I bought an Orange after a few days I watched this video (and commented above) but I have been busy since that day so I just opened the box to check items inside. Actually it's packaged well and I like it more a few RP Picos I bought in the past :)
@@tiendq hey you get around to playing with yr 🍊? I got my RP Zero 2W & while I knew it going in - 512MB doesn't seem practical for anything but embedded use. once you add a desktop (or any kind of graphical front end like ES in my case - I didn't realize how much memory it eats), u have like no memory left for apps! I prolly will order an Orange Zero 2W soon just to test it out :)
I just picked up one of these (2 GB model) to run my octoprint server for my 3D printer. I don't have it running yet, but hopefully soon. Thanks for the review and information about the device. Seems like a nice little board to run as a headless server like I plan to do.
USB-C is much better than USB-micro. Mating cycles differ significantly (connection amount before replecement). C is designed 10000 (10 k) and micro about 1000 (1 k).
Hello Mr Scissors! Long time no see! As you say Chris software is everything. The Ubuntu is nice but nearly 2 years old, which is a lifetime in SBCs….😮
The age of the official distro is disappointing, for sure. I've had success with the DietPi for this board. I use it to run a Snapclient for a multi-room audio setup. The added antenna makes for great connectivity compared to the vanilla Pi Zeros I have running in other rooms.
Stanley the Knife must be banged up yet again ... if only he could stay out of trouble.
I would ordinarily use Mr Teeth for a job like this.
Mr. Scissors in vital bag opening drama! Stanley the Knife is jealous! 😎
single board computers are still my top favorite thing to see as always
and The fake explaining computers better back off commenting on my comment with the same comment over and over again spamming pin every time (i am referring to the scammer)
The scammers have certainly gotten bad in recent times!
I have an Orange Pi Zero 3 it comes with the same processor and RAM options as the Orange Pi Zero 2 W but shares a similar from factor to the Orange Pi Zero 2. The Orange Pi Zero 3's expansion board goes onto the single set of pins. Excellent video as always.
Great to have another video with Mr. Scissors back at work. I agree that Orange Pi model names and numbers defy explanation. For instance, the OP 800 is closest to...the OP 4LTS in specs and GPIO setup. Even runs Armbian for the 4LTS. Go figure.
Congratulations on 1 million subs Chris! Well deserved, great content and delivery
Thanks. :)
Yes! These are the types of SBCs I actually care about! The price of modern SBCs is so high that it's hard to justify the cost if you're just using it to tinker or making a small project. Once acceleration is sorted I think it will be a very capable little computer.
They missed a trick -- the board itself should have been orange. Branding is important, after all. But otherwise, it is a nice board. I really like the expansion board with all the connectivity. And at $11.99, it's not a bad price. As you point out, some of the software is a bit dodgy. But really and truly, this is not supposed to be a desktop substitute. Plus, (and this is a HUGE plus), the board is AVAILABLE! All in all, this looks like a promising piece of hardware. (PS: Hello, Mr. Scissors! I hope you and Stanley are doing well.)
We got retropie working on this board. I was hoping cloud gaming would work based on specs. But it lags. Another situation of lack of driver support. The raspi pi zero2w can run Dreamcast games just fine. This model lacks 3d acceleration. It’s more powerful than raspi zero 2w but hits and misses in performance
Thanks for this, especially Mr Scissors brief cameo. I'm glad that you tested it doing things that are beyond its intended capability. I don't know why one would want to run a graphical desktop, but it's great that Ubuntu is capable regardless. I may consider one if booting from SSD is possible. It might make for a nifty tiny NAS device.
Christopher you are doing a great work in teaching the masses about computer science! I hope you get 10 million subscribers soon!
Many thanks. :)
I look forward to Sunday morning Explaining Computers, this channel has become the new Bob Ross painting program for me, ( compliment ) very good video, thanks for making this video, I look forward to the next one, see you again next Sunday.
After years of listening, i think i finally figured out what I'm hearing, It's like if William Shatner were White, and British, and not absurdly pretentious.. Love your content, have a great day.
Orange Pi hardware is nice, but Raspberry Pi still has better documentation and software support. The RPi Zero 2W isn't quite what I'm looking for yet hardware-wise, but I eagerly await its successor.
I bought one of these with 4GB of RAM. A good performance for such a small size.
Am struggling with having wiringOp-Python to work!Is it working on yours?And if yes..Are you willing to help please?
It's amazing seeing these evolve. It wasn't long ago I watched EC videos on full scale rPi clones (I think RP2 or 3?) having about the same performance in desktop and video playback. And now we get that kind of performance in something the size of a pack of gum. Can't wait to see what kind of performance we will get a few releases down the line.
Hey, man! I really appreciate your videos and your channel in general! I've been watching your channel for years now and can't thank you enough for your thorough, honest, and educated reviews of so many interesting products and IT topics. Always an entertaining learning experience! Keep doing what you do, man!
I find it strange that after Orange pi have been in the market for so long, it still not supports hardware decoding in the browser. It's astonishing!
I have this SBC with the expansion. Orange Pi has launched the Zero 3 which also has the H618 SoC and supersedes(?) the Zero 2, and it also goes up to 4GB RAM. According to the sunxi project the differences both SoCs are minimal, the H618 has better support for newer versions of Android. In fact, the H61X SoCs were designed for low cost set-top boxes and the Android images provided are Android TV versions, not full Android. I haven't tried it yet, so I can't comment.
Performance is fairly good in any of the OSes, but it lacks support from 3rd party OSes like Armbian. I've tried the Orange Pi OS, Ubuntu Desktop and Debian Desktop images (all kernel 6.1). I don't remember having issues with Orange Pi OS but I didn't spent much time with it, I prefer Debian. What I noticed on all of them is that at 4K (UHD) HDMI output the desktop is very graphically glitchy. When I resized to FHD the glitches went away, I think that even basic GPU support is not quite there yet. There are some other minor bugs, like the WiFi strength indicator only works ok after you click it, despite being connected. Changing keyboard layout to my native portuguese layout in the terminal console in Debian was a bit involved, despite everything in the orangepi-config utility being set correctly. Native XFCE preferences won't work at all.
Hope Armbian picks up support for the H618 based boards like the Zero 2W and Zero 3, having 4GB of RAM is great. I'm sorry but I can't get myself to trust the Orange Pi images (being updated from repos in China...). Mainline kernel support is being worked on and probably we'll have more choice in the near future. As is, I rather place my trust on the Radxa Zero 3W despite being more expensive and more difficult to buy but the RK3566 is much better supported.
This orange pi looks interesting. I’m ordering it today. Thank you for the great video.
Hi, Chris, as usual a very good review. Thanks. However, I suggest you record the phrase "the GPU isn't enabled" 'cause I don't recall an SBC that did so you can just play it when ever you review an SBC.
:)
Are there actually any non-pi SBCs with GPU drivers? They always advertise them in the specs but then neglect to tell you there's no way to use them...
The GPU can be enabled by editing the settings at the dtb
It's really easy to enable the GPU, just open orangepi-config.
A great review as always and a good little SBC too. It does stink hard that you can't even open the terminal on Orange Pi OS without getting blacked out. That's really silly and I hope that it gets patched quick. Also, this is the first time I'm hearing about 1.5 GB RAM! I had no idea that was a thing.
And most importantly, WELCOME BACK, MR. SCISSORS!!! WE'VE MISSED YOU!!!
🎉
Plus one for Mr Scissors, I'm looking forward to when Chris gets Sid the soldering iron out to get those pesky GPIO pins in place
Great explanations and amazing details during comparison with other boards. Thanks for the time you put in this video!
Exciting what hardware can be put on such a small board. Looking forward to your next video!
One day they will be able to make the circuitry so small, that the connectors will be the thing that limit's the size!
"Where is the processor and all that"? "It's under the USB connector".😁
Sounds good to me! 👍
Very nice looking little board, shame it is let down by the software at the moment... but I imagine that will improve with time.
The expansion interface is interesting, I had assumed it was a camera / screen interface until you discussed it
Always look forwards to your Sunday video
Peter another great learning experience always love to follow you on you tube and enjoy so much your exciting new SBCs I can't thank you enough for doing this as it is so helpful in my limited adventures and teaching so many new and exciting things in the world of computers Love your channel always a please to see you again.
Thanks 👍
It is a cool little board. It is a hybrid between ESP32 and the big Raspi and Orange board. I bought one of these for a dedicated cash application and it works great.
Thanks Christopher, interesting SBC there. Nice to see that Mr Scissors is in fine fettle.
Great review. Loved it. The thing that used to bother me, too was the lack of software support. Some of these boards in the years past, software support was a second or third guess. It seems to be slowly changing and evolving. Thanks for pointing that out. But your review is was great, you covered the basic board and also a presented a picture with the add-ons. Thank You.
Thanks, Chris! A juicy video with lots of vitamin C is always welcome!
Enjoyed the video, Chris. Many thanks for your offerings
Heavenly work, thank you 👍
14:47 -- Android GPIO intriguing indeed.
Kindest regards, friends and neighbours.
Love Sundays too and it's about a orange pi you rock Christopher. Have a nice week too Miguel.
This board is awesome, but the voltage regulator is kind of sensitive to high currents on the USB port. One of mine died a few hours ago after running an APRS decoder for a couple of hours. The culprit was probably the USB audio dongle used. So, beware and have fun!
The board is respectably compact, only lacks is software other wise it's 🔥👍 .
And greetings!🎉
WE TOOK A CLOSER LOOK!!!!
Any SBC manufacturer that gets the features, price and ecosystem right, could dominate the market.
-
Sir. Thank you for reviewing these, amazing. Technological achievements............the power of a full "global system computer" at the price of a chocolate bar.....Chromium to do that world wide web..........
.......it's a great technological achievement
Thanks to you..... sir.......!!!
looks really good, the cpu is a bit too old and weak but the os support seems to have improved drsically over the recent years, it is now a decent pi competitor
Mr. Scissors coming out of retirement!
He always returns . . . eventually! :)
Orange Pi, once bought, never again. No software updates since September. As long as you accept that their software is just a trick to make you think that they are anything other than box shifters, where official user support is also as close to zero as you can get, so on your own/reliant on community development, then you know what you are getting.Software support for the Official Orange Pi 5 software support is equally woeful, so cannot possibly agree with this conclusion.
And congratulations on the relocation to the USA.
Great review, Chris! It is an exciting little board.
I've had mine for a while but options were much more limited for OSs until recently, it seems.
It's also too bad OrangePI doesn't feel like using encryption for their website.
No spotted Rabbits in this edition, but nonetheless, a very informative look. What I'm really interested in is getting something to run CERTBOT without tying up physical resources -- an entire dead laptop (I have a few) just to get ACME certificates every so often is a little nutsoid, it's not like it's 2015 when I had a dozen machines at my disposal. And of course, my plans for the N100M are still on the horizon. And greetings to your inanimate friends, Stanley, Mr Scissors: may all your anti-static bags be easily opened.
These boards would go mainstream if their marketing teams could actually articulate specific use cases on what they do better than a comparably priced Raspberry Pi.
Why do they need to go "mainstream" when they are "hobbyist" boards?
You're getting confused with the "anomaly" that is the Raspberry Pi as the single range of SBCs that have a huge amount of support and a large community to turn them into "near consumer" devices - because anything that you, as a newbie, could want to do with a Raspberry Pi will have a YT video or a web site article to follow for you to do it.
But these boards were not initially released to be retro gaming platforms or desktop PCs - they were aimed at industrial applications and giving school kids cheap computers on which to learn programming.
Sure, the "market" has dictated other uses for these boards since then (like retro gaming and desktop replacements) and that, in turn, has driven advancement in CPU power and memory on these boards - but most industrial applications or kids writing in programs in Scratch don't really need much beyond the original Raspberry Pi boards released back in 2012.
@@terrydaktyllus1320 While much of what you say is true, I definitely wouldn't put you in charge of marketing.
@@j_h_o I am an engineer and a "techie" and I have been for more than 40 years - I programmed my first computer in assembly language back in 1982 and I have had "the computer bug" ever since, both as a hobby and in my work.
So, yes, I wouldn't put me in charge of marketing either - I'd be bored senseless within minutes and it's why I deliberately avoid sales meetings and events at work because there is no situation more hideous for me that being in the company of a group of drunk sales and marketing people.
When a manufacturer can't write a stable operating system for their own product it shows a serious level of incompetence. Even with that limitation it should make a great little python development system. Not running in its own native environment wont affect someone developing code for physical programing, and using the device as an intelligent controller. While I fully support the Pi pico, and Pi W2 . It's good to branch out and use other platforms when they present a more cost effective solution, or offer additional options.
Good lord, how Orange just take the Pi and kick it in the chops, every damn time.
i never thought about having an Orange Pi!! but omg though loool "lets..... have....... a closer............................ look" ABSOLUTE CLASS!!!
additional to the OS, i thought i saw it when you opened the task manager it popped up and then went to monitor sleep mode. is it possible to mess around with the the power saving for the HDMI? might keep the screen on.
Again rewatched the video... android with GPIO access is pretty useful!! suspect something wrong? boot to the android and test!
Thanks. Mr Scissors gets a cameo while Stanley the knife doesn't. Your eco system and distro needs to be strong enough and big enough to provide any missing pieces of firmware
The Orange Pi Zero, Zero LTS, Zero Plus and Zero Plus 2 have a real advantage over any Raspberry if you need two-way audio access. In addition, it has USB 2.0 on the pin headers too. In fact it is the perfect base for any amateur radio relay controller. On Raspberry you had to hack in some pogo-pins to contact the rear of a USB connector so you can add in a USB audio codec. On the Zero 2 you just need some OPAs to adopt levels, 1:1 audio transformers and there is enough space left to break out the serial port and some opto-isolated control lines for PTT, Squelch and other information. Unfortunately for the 2W they ditched that MIC in on the 24 pin FFC extension port. So, the only benefit is, that a FFC is a much more reliable connector compared to pogo-pinned USB...
Thanks again for a great video. It seems the specs match better with the ORANGE Pi Zero3 which, for the price, is very impressive. My daily driver...
The naming of the Orange Pi boards confuses me! The Zero 2W specs are very much like the Zero 3 as you say, so why is this new board not a Zero 3W?
Greetings! I was expecting this new review video.
Hi Chris, thank you for this nice review, got mine Opi Zero2W last week and i managed to get android tv 12 running, and it runs great! but i do want to learn more about GPIO led programming. i want to add some leds to indicate powerup, booting kernel and sd activity in this version. i am a beginner in SBC's so a tutorial how to use these GPIO pins and also how to attach a SPI display to it. on a raspberry pi it is not so difficult to do this, but Orange Pi is an other story. Greetings from the Netherlands!!!!
It's a shame that even the native OS is just not up to par. Also, I'd actually love to see another project with an SBC. A good little project is always fun!
Then build your own OS. You can start by learning how to build Armbian the way you want to or, as I do, teach yourself have to build Gentoo Linux across many different platforms and even build the kernel the way that you want to.
These aren't consumer devices, they are hobbyist boards - you get the best out of them by learning to do a bit of "DIY" on them.
@@terrydaktyllus1320 Thanks for the recommendation! I'd love to customise my own OS with my own kernel!
@@gloiloidn5752 Good luck! There is a very steep learning curve to overcome with Gentoo Linux but the rewards come later when you start to be able to make use of its power. I started using it back in 2003 and it is still my main OS to this day - but then I am an incessant tweaker!
I've been playing with these boards for few weeks. Be aware these boards are hit and miss. They have a batch on the market that the board overheats and just dies on you with default settings. If you have a board like that, and you ran out of the return window, your only option left to make it stable is to add an active cooling fan.
Hard to believe their own os doesn't work well! Lol. Did you test and Pi OS versions? Would love to see video of that. Thanks for this video. I have 2 1g and 2 4g versions of the Pi 0 2w. Just gave up when their own os wouldn't load.
Hey! Something you miss; The OPi Zero 2w runs on DDR4 RAM instead of DDR3 on the Zero 2.
And there's also an OPi Zero 3, with the same factor as the 2, but with the same hardware as the 2W and gigabit Ethernet. To add more to the confusion 😂
I'm using this Zero 3 to run Klipper on my 3D printer and frankly it's an overkill.
GPIO in Android...I agree that is interesting and would be good to investigate further :)
I started to use SBCs when I started building robots. All the robotics info on explaining computers was of tremendous help. I have an SBC from Orange Pi: it fried itself in the first 10 minutes of operation. And orange Pi would not replace it. Having used 3BPi boards, including the M2 Zero, I have found Banana Pi has equivalents to the Orange Pi boards and they are much more reliable. PS...do you think you'll ever build the hovercraft. That would be very exciting.
2030 $35: 20mm*40mm, 24 core @ 4.4GHz , 32GB RAM; Can run AIOS fullstack multimodal for all your integrated robot needs. :-)
The W stands for wertical
Awsome review, as usual. Maybe you can add in every single board computer a review of the really power drained in your experiments?
Great. Can't you make a vidoe on how to build and deploy an Android OS on a SBC? I would watch it! 🙂 Soon 1M.
excellent review, only missing thing is video playback on android operating system.
One other thing, this board support CEC over HDMI?
Excellent video, as usual. I really like the reviews of the SBCs. One thing that you did not explained, unless I missed, what is the 16 MB of flash used for? Is it a boot monitor of some kind, or can it be programmed to do that? Thanks again for another video.
I always use Chris' 1080p test clip as a benchmark when trying a new board (with a desktop) I've not used before. Always seems to be pretty predictive.
If my memory serves me right, this board has identical specs as Orange zero3. 2w has better form factor and better connector layout. With zero 3, i always get the feeling i break hdmi usb-c 6 pretty cramped.
different images for different memory sizes has to be only the tip of the iceberg of usability shorfalls with these raspberry alternatives
Thanks again for another informative video Chris. Although a powerful SBC at a great price, as you pointed out, not quite ready for Prime Time due to operating system limits. Like so many other SBC's you have reviewed. This remains a strong point for using Raspberry PI SBC. It would also be informative to see what software, or operating system would control and display results from this SBC's GPIO interface. Things like the DIO's, I2C, SPI, etc. Maybe a detailed look in future video?
It's Linux, an operating system with no limits. The only limits are defined by how good you are in building it to do what you want. If you're always reliant on (probably rushed) Linux builds provided with the boards themselves by the vendor, then what do you expect?
It's your expectation of what a tiny board can do and should be able to do that is unrealistic. What do you mean by "Prime Time" when these are "hobbyist" boards anyway?
Another great video Chris, thanks!
Thanks, My best friend....
Hello, another informative video as always!
Thanks Chris, informative as ever 👍
Thanks Chris for the review of the Orange Pi Zero 2W, if & when you revisit the board will you be testing out the the add on expansion board that you mentioned? It's a very interesting board with plenty of project possibilities, I like the ability to test the GPIO pins, time to get Sid the soldering iron out! I hope that you're keeping OK on this lovely sunny Sunday, take care kind regards Alan :)
Clever little SBC, I especially like the expansion board concept. Surprising that the native OS is so poorly implemented.
I was hoping for a comparison video like you did with the raspi zero 1w and rpi zero 2w. Thanks for the vid tho.
And in your opinion, which is the better board?
did you forget to add 'project possibilities'? I am looking for ideas on how to use this sbc.
Thank you for the video. Fantastic!
As usual, this is a great board, but the software support isn't very good. And I don’t think that the situation will improve much, just as it did not improve for all previous generations of single-board computers from this manufacturer. However, there is hope - community patches may appear in the AUR.
Personally I have and use a couple of Orange Pi Zero just because they are the cheapest SBCs. They work well enough for my purposes.
considering how easily you can solder even as a beginner, including the header but not having it preinstalled is actually the better option, because theres a lot of things that can use a lower-profile pi header, sometimes even with pogo-pins, where the header would just get in the way of either the case, pins, or both
6:28 if you plan on getting the expansion, print this out please! good luck getting it to work without a decent screenshot.
Orange Pi boards are a very interesting alternative to Raspberry Pi ones
Well it is technically, software support is unfortunately still not on par. Problem is Allwinner (manufacturer of H series of chips used on many Orange Pi products) does Android only drivers and limited old linux kernel drivers. Everything up to date is done through open source projects like Lima and Cedrus. So if you're just using SPI, I2C, toggle pins and do CPU related stuff - yeah, that's fairly ok. Going into things like hw accelerated browser or some low level control with baremetal - nope.
Related: I feel raspberry pi is heading for a Nokia scenario more and more each day. Market leader at one time but too slow at improving/innovating.
I know this is an allwinner chip, but i really hope that at least rockchip CPUs will see mainline linux support one day so then we won't have to deal with downloading ISO's from google drive. That being said, these boards are sometimes necessary because the anemic specs rpi puts on their machines (512MB ram, really?) are simply not always enough.
Wish the RPi model A+ and Zero's would have an external WiFi/BT antenna. Both BPi Zero's have one. Thank you for the video as usual. 🙂
I still like bananas way more than raspberries!😢