Orange Pi 3B – A Rockchip RK3566 SBC with an M.2 NVMe/SATA SSD socket, up to 8GB RAM

Orange Pi 3B

Orange Pi 3B is a new Rockchip RK3566 SBC that’s like a supercharged Raspberry Pi 3B board with the same form factor, but with a faster processor, up to 8GB RAM, and support for multiple storage options with a microSD card slot, an eMMC flash socket, an M.2 Key-M socket for NVMe (PCIe 2.1) or SATA III SSDs, as well as an SPI flash that should enable features like network boot. The board also features HDMI 2.0 and eDP display intefaces, a Gigabit Ethernet port, a WiFI 5 and Bluetooth 5.0 wireless module, four USB ports, MIPI DSI and CSI connector, and the 40-pin Raspberry Pi GPIO header. It’s powered through a USB-C port taking 5V instead of the micro USB port found in the Raspberry Pi 3B. Orange Pi 3B specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3566 CPU – Quad-core Cortex-A55 processor @ up to 1.8 GHz GPU – Arm Mali-G52 […]

Orange Pi Zero 3 Allwinner H618 SBC ships with up to 4GB RAM

Orange Pi Zero 3

The Orange Pi Zero 3 is a compact Allwinner H618 quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 SBC with 1GB to 4GB RAM, 16MB SPI flash, micro HDMI output, Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0, a USB 2.0 port, and two headers for expansion. It provides an update to the Allwinner H616-powered Orange Pi Zero 2 SBC quadrupling the maximum memory to 4GB and embedding a larger SPI flash. The new board basically offers the same ports but in a different layout and a slightly smaller form factor. Orange Pi Zero 3 specifications: SoC – Allwinner H618 quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor @ up to 1.5GHz with 1MB L2 cache and Arm Mali-G31 MP2 GPU with support for OpenGL ES 1.0/2.0/3.2, OpenCL 2.0, Vulkan 1.1 System Memory – 1GB, 1.5GB, 2GB, or 4GB LPDDR4 Storage – 16MB SPI flash, microSD card socket Video Output Micro HDMI 2.0 up to 4Kp60 Video composite (CVBS) via […]

Orange Pi 5/5B SBC gets a fanless aluminum enclosure

Orange Pi 5B Metal Enclosure

Orange Pi 5 and 5B are affordable single board computers based on Rockchip RK3588S processor, but so far they did not have a fanless enclosure nor an easy way to add a heatsink leading some to create an ICE Tower cooling fan for the boards. But Orange Pi has recently launched an aluminum enclosure for $12.99 on Aliexpress(or $25 on Amazon) for both models that should help with cooling and protect the hardware from dust. But note that it does not work with the Rockchip RK3588-powered Orange Pi 5 Plus SBC since its dimensions are different. The Orange Pi 5 fanless enclosure is made of aluminum alloy, measures 105.9 x 68.7 x 27mm, and weighs 126 grams with all ports accessible from the outside, except for the 26-pin header and the 3-pin UART header. The company also included a power button to cleanly shut down the system. We’ve given plenty […]

Orange Pi 800 Keyboard PC gets 128GB flash storage

Orange Pi 800 Keyboard PC 128GB eMMC flash

The Orange Pi 800 keyboard PC, launched as an alternative to the Raspberry Pi 400 last year with a Rockchip RK3399 hexa-core Cortex-A72/A53 processor and 4GB RAM, has gotten an upgrade to 128GB of eMMC flash instead of just 64GB. The keyboard PC still comes with HDMI 2.0 and VGA video outputs, built-in speakers and microphone, Gigabit Ethernet and WiFi 5 connectivity, a few USB ports, and a 78-key QWERTY keyboard, plus a 26-GPIO connector accessible without opening the device.     Orange Pi 800 specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3399 hexa-core big.LITTLE processor with 2x Arm Cortex-A72 cores up to 1.8GHz, 4x Arm Cortex-A53 cores up to 1.4GHz, and an Arm Mali-T860MP4 GPU System Memory – 4GB LPDDR4 Storage – 128GB eMMC flash, microSD card slot Video Output HDMI 2.0 port up to 4Kp60 VGA port up to Full HD resolution Audio 3.5mm audio (headphone+mic) jack Integrated speaker(s) and microphone […]

Orange Pi 5 Plus SBC switches to Rockchip RK3588 SoC, brings dual HDMI 2.1, dual 2.5GbE, M.2 PCIe sockets

Orange Pi 5 Plus

Orange Pi 5 Plus is the first Rockchip RK3588 SBC from the company and succeeds the cheaper Rockchip RK3588S-based Orange Pi 5 and Orange Pi 5B single board computers that had a more limited number of high-end interfaces. Switching to the I/O rich RK3588 processor allowed Orange Pi to add two 2.5GbE networking interfaces, support for NVMe SSD storage up to 2,000 MB/s, up to four display interfaces with two HDMI 2.1 ports, MIPI DSI and USB-C with DisplayPort Alt. mode, as well as an extra M.2 socket for optional WiFi 6 and Bluetooth connectivity. Orange Pi 5 Plus specifications: SoC – Rockchip RK3588 CPU – Octa-core processor with 4x Cortex-A76 cores @ up to 2.4 GHz, 4x Cortex-A55 cores @ up to 1.8 GHz Arm Mali-G610 MP4 GPU with support for OpenGL ES1.1/2.0/3.2, OpenCL 2.2, and Vulkan 1.2 6 TOPS AI accelerator with support for INT4/INT8/INT16/FP16 mixed operation VPU […]

Orange Pi is working on a portable gaming console with Rockchip RK3588S or AMD Ryzen 7 CPU

Orange Pi Portable Game Console

Single board computer manufacturer Orange Pi Ltd is working on a portable gaming console that will come with either a Rockchip RK3588S processor for Android/Linux gaming, or AMD Ryzen 7 7800U/6800U for Windows gaming. The industrial design looks to be the same for all models with a 7-inch touchscreen display, a D-Pad, two joysticks, XBOX-styled ABXY buttons, two customisable buttons on the back, two microphones, stereo speakers, three USB ports including one only for charging, The Orange Pi portable gaming console will be offered in three variants when it launches in China in October during Golden Week: AMD Ryzen 7 7840U processor with 16GB RAM, 512GB storage running Windows 11 for an early bird price of 3,000 RMB ($434 US), or a regular price of 3,499 RMB ($506). AMD Ryzen 7 6800U with Windows 11 selling for 2,000 RMB, or about $289 US (early bird price). Rockchip RK3588S octa-core Arm […]

Orange Pi 5 SBC gets its own $20 low-profile ICE Tower cooling fan

Orange Pi 5 ICE Tower Cooling Fan

A few years ago I reviewed the ICE Tower CPU cooling fan for Raspberry Pi 4 which is an oversized heatsink with a cooling fan and some RGB LEDs that obviously does its job at cooling the board, but the main benefit is really its aesthetics. 52Pi has now designed another ICE Tower cooling fan for the Orange Pi 5 SBC, and the new Orange Pi 5B, with the same concept except for its low-profile design. It’s probably not needed for the Orange Pi 5 which should do fine with a heatsink, but it may help for the Orange Pi 5B due to the extra heat from the WiFi 6 module. A company representative for 52Pi told us that: I have seen this Orange Pi 5B motherboard posted on your site, there are quite a lot of reviews and discussions, so far after our engineer’s test, this motherboard has quite […]

Linux 6.3 release – Notable changes, Arm, RISC-V and MIPS architectures

Linux 6.3 release

Linux Torvalds has just announced the release of Linux 6.3 on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML): It’s been a calm release this time around, and the last week was really no different. So here we are, right on schedule, with the 6.3 release out and ready for your enjoyment. That doesn’t mean that something nasty couldn’t have been lurking all these weeks, of course, but let’s just take things at face value and hope it all means that everything is fine, and it really was a nice controlled release cycle. It happens. This also obviously means the merge window for 6.4 will open tomorrow. I already have two dozen pull requests waiting for me to start doing my pulls, and I appreciate it. I expect I’ll have even more when I wake up tomorrow. But in the meantime, let’s enjoy (and test) the 6.3 release. As always, the shortlog […]

EDATEC Raspberry Pi 5 fanless case