Orange Pi held a Developer Conference on March 24, 2024, in Shenzhen, China, and while I could not make it, the company provided photos of the event where people discussed upcoming boards and products, as well as software support for the Orange Pi SBCs. So I’ll go through some of the photos to check out what was discussed and what’s coming.
While Orange Pi is mostly known for its development boards the company has also been working on consumer products including the Orange Health Watch D Pro and the OrangePi Neo handheld console.
The Orange Pi Watch D Pro is said to implement non-invasive blood glucose monitoring, blood pressure monitoring, one-click “micro-physical examination” and other functions to to help users monitor their health monitoring. The Watch D Pro uses a technique that emits a green light to measure glucose levels in the blood, and we’re told it’s accurate enough to be certified for medical use. I could not find other details at this time.
The Orange Pi Neo is an upcoming handheld console powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 7840U processor, equipped with up to 32GB LPDDR5 and a 7-inch display that is running Manjaro Gaming Edition. Mueller Philip, CEO of Manjaro, can be seen holding a sample in the photo above, and while we covered it last year the Manjaro website has now the full details.
Micha Fellechner (middle in the top photo) was also there to talk about DietPi lightweight operating system support for the Orange Pi boards (as a side note, DietPi 9.2 was just released last week) and explained how the company provided samples to help with development including Orange Pi Zero 3, Orange Pi 3B, Orange Pi 5, and Orange Pi 5 Plus. Representatives of software developers/communities for Allwinner, RISC-V, and others discussed software support for Orange Pi boards. The photo below notably teases an Orange Pi SBC based on Allwinner A527/T527 with mainline Linux support. We’ll see how it goes…
That board is the Orange Pi 4A SBC with an eMMC flash module socket instead of a soldered-in eMMC flash chip and an M.2 Key-M socket for an NVMe SSD. It will run Ubuntu, Debian, or Android 13 with Linux 5.15. While the name is similar to the Orange Pi 4 LTS with Rockchip RK3399, it’s based on the Allwinner A527 SoC.
Orange Pi 5 Pro and Orange Pi 5 Max powered by Rockchip RK3588S/RK3588 are coming soon. There’s already a product page for the Pro version, but Orange Pi confirmed the Max model will be based on Rockchip RK3588 with a WiFi 5 module and an M.2 PCIe 3.0 socket for SSD, while the Orange Pi 5 Pro – which should be up for sale soon – features a RK3588S SoC, a WiFi 5 module, and an M.2 PCIe 2.1 socket for SSD. Both boards have about the same port layout.
The Orange Pi AIPro SBC based on Huawei Ascend AI SoC with 20 TOPS of AI performance was also showcased. But we already wrote about that one last December, and it’s still unclear whether it will be sold outside of China.
The Orange Pi CM5 is an upcoming system-on-module/compute module that looks compatible with the Raspberry Pi CM4/CM5 form factor although it adds one extra high-speed connector. It’s based on the Rockchip RK3588S SoC and as such, serves as an alternative to Radxa CM5. The company also showcased two carrier boards, namely a “based” carrier with three Ethernet ports, and one named “OrangePi CM5_base_tablet” implying there may be a (thick) Orange Pi tablet or panel PC coming soon.
Finally, the company should launch its first RISC-V SBC with the Orange Pi RV powered by a StarFive JH7110 SoC – found in StarFive VisionFive 2 and Pine64 Start64 – and equipped with 8GB LPDDR4 RAM and four USB 3.0 ports. It will measure 89 x 56 mm, or in other words, be slightly larger than a business card.
The Orange Pi Developer Conference 2024 had quite a large attendance with Steven Zhao, Orange Pi CEO, telling CNX Software that over 5,000 developers, partners, technology leaders, industry experts, government representatives, and others joined either on-site or online with the theme “AI Enabled, All Things Renew”.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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Orange Pi Developer Conference. A perfect Oxymoron for company that has invested so little in terms of real development. It should have been called the Orange Pi Box Shifter Conference.
A dreadful company.
Developers, developers, developers!
Just say it enough and it will become real.
Can you elaborate?
Can you explain why you said that ?
He means that Orange Pi is not exactly known for its participation to upstreaming nor software development in general. Other vendors like Radxa and Hardkernel (Odroid) are early adopters and invest in R&D, taking the risk to go through first imperfect models until they fix all issues. Other ones seem to just be soldering chips on PCBs after all the difficulties have been ironed out by their competitors.
good job
Regarding their intent to release a JH7110 based board, that makes no sense. The device is super slow and its *only* value is for developers to have a RISC-V board to experiment with and to try to port their code. Given the availability of the VisionFive2 board, there’s no need for yet another one, and there isn’t even a huge market to share there, so all it can do at best is to annoy Starfive a little bit by stealing them a small share of this tiny market. They could instead focus on more powerful chips that users could turn into real products.
I don’t think they annoyed StarFive, as a company representative was there. I just did not include the photo in the post.
Zhang Xiaofei is the “Product Director” of StarFive.
If you look at the board layout, it would appear to be a drop-in replacement for the RPi3B+ so everyone still using those will be able to dev for RISC-V without outrageous expense, or having to change cases, and get the benefit of 8Gb RAM.
For what price? I expect same high price as raspi5 with 8gb
Yeah $80 is probably about right, although maybe OPi will bring it in at less than that, though there’s still shipping and import duties to consider. Sure, $80 is a lot more than the RPi3B+ but it’s not a separate order of magnitude.
Great article as per your usual, thanks!
Just a possible typo: “Orange Pi 5 Plus, and Orange Pi 5 Plus” — I think you meant to name some other board than just repeating “Orange Pi 5 Plus” a second time. Curious about what board would that be, that’s all
Sorry about that. It should read “Orange Pi 5, and Orange Pi 5 Plus”
No prob, and thanks for the clarification!
Orange pi 4A with 6* USB 2.0 ?
Magnificent.