Orange Pi Zero 512MB + WIFI

The 48 x 46mm Orange Pi Zero runs Linux or Android on a quad-core Allwinner H2, and offers WiFi, 10/100, microSD, USB host and OTG, and a 26-pin RPi header.

Shenzhen Xunlong has added a Raspberry Pi Zero competitor to its Orange Pi lineup of open source hacker boards. The new Orange Pi Zero is selling for just $7 plus shipping, for a total price of $10.30 when shipped to the U.S.

 
Orange Pi Zero, front and back
(click images to enlarge)

Designed for primarily headless IoT applications, the Orange Pi Zero is smaller, lighter (26 grams) and cheaper than the $12 Orange Pi Lite and the earlier $10 Orange Pi One. Its 48 x 46mm footprint gives it a total area of 2208mm2 vs. 1950mm2 for the 65 x 30mm Raspberry Pi Zero.

Whereas the Orange Pi Lite and Orange Pi One use the Allwinner H3 SoC, the Orange Pi Zero offers the rarely seen Allwinner H2 variant. As far as we can see, the only notable difference between the SoCs is that the H3 supports 4K video while the H2 is limited to 1080p. Like the H3, the H2 has four Cortex-A7 cores clocked to 1.2GHz, as well as a Mali-400 MP2 GPU clocked at 600MHz. The H2 is still much more powerful than the 1GHz, single-core ARM11 Broadcom BCM2835 on the Raspberry Pi Zero.

 
Orange Pi Zero (left) and Allwinner H2 block diagram
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The earlier Orange Pi Lite was closely based on the Orange Pi One, with the same 69 x 48mm dimensions, but it added WiFi and a USB port while removing the Ethernet port. The Orange Pi One reverts to one USB 2.0 host port, but offers both WiFi and 10/100 Ethernet with PoE support.

What the Orange Pi Zero lacks compared to those two boards, as well as the Raspberry Pi Zero, is a real-world video output. You can hook up a screen to a TV video out interface that’s located on the board’s 13-pin function header, which also offers audio, IR, and two more USB interfaces. The Zero also has half the RAM of those three boards, with 256MB, although you can buy a 512MB version for only two dollars more, at $9 plus shipping.

 
Orange Pi Zero detail views
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The Orange Pi Zero is limited to the old school, 26-pin Raspberry Pi B compatible expansion interface instead of the more modern 40-pin interface on the RPi B+, 2, and 3. Shenzhen Xunlong misleadingly calls the interface B+ compatible, which is true only in the sense that the B+, 2, and 3 have 26 pins that are backward compatible. In any case, the Orange Pi Zero helps to compensate somewhat with the non-standard 13-pin header and a 3-pin GPIO interface.

Other features include a microSD slot, a powered micro-USB OTG port, a serial debug port, and a mic interface. The SBC lacks the camera interface of the Orange Pi Lite and One.

The Orange Pi Zero also competes with the Allwinner H3-based NanoPi Neo from FriendlyElec (FriendlyARM), which sells for $8 (256MB) or $10 (512MB). The smaller (40 x 40mm) Neo has almost identical features except that it lacks onboard WiFi, TV out, and unlike the other NanoPi SBCs its 36 expansion pins are not Raspberry Pi compatible.

The Orange Pi Zero is the first Orange Pi we’ve seen that ships with listed support for Armbian, a quickly maturing Debian distribution that offers specific support for Allwinner chips. There is also support for Android 4.4, Debian, Raspbian, and Ubuntu.