Orange Pi Launches Its Zero 2W Single-Board Computer, Offering Faster Clocks and Eight Times the RAM
Designed to go toe-to-toe with the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, this SBC includes a handy 24-pin expansion header with USB, Ethernet, and more.
Orange Pi has launched its second-generation alternative to the popular Raspberry Pi Zero family, offering boosted performance and up to eight times the memory of its competition: the Orange Pi Zero 2W.
"[The] Orange Pi Zero 2W is powered by [an] Allwinner H618 high-performance quad-core Cortex-A53 processor," the company writes of its latest board design. "[The] Orange Pi Zero 2W adheres to the compact and exquisite design concept of the Zero series, with a PCB size of 30×65×1.2mm [around 1.18×2.56×0.05"], and can be widely used in TV boxes, smart screen casting devices, smart home, smart gateway, IoT [Internet of Things], and other fields."
The inspiration for the Orange Pi Zero 2W is, of course, the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, launched in October 2021 as a higher-performance follow-up to the original compact Raspberry Pi Zero. Like the Raspberry-flavor original, the Orange Pi Zero 2W includes a quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 processor — but running at up to 1.5GHz, half as fast again as the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W at stock clocks — and with an Arm Mali G31-MP2 graphics processor supporting OpenGL ES 3.2, OpenCL 2.0, and Vulkan 1.1.
To this, Orange Pi has added a choice of 1GB, 1.5GB, 2GB, or 4GB of RAM — at the least double and at the most eight times the 512MB available on the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W — and 16MB of SPI flash, with a microSD slot as the primary storage medium. There's a mini-HDMI 2.0 port with 4k60 support, two USB 2.0 Type-C ports — one for power, one for devices — and an unpopulated 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header. The board also includes an integrated radio with Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0/Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) connectivity.
Where the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W's Camera Serial Interface (CSI) connector is, though, the Orange Pi has something else: a custom 24-pin expansion interface which includes two USB 2.0 lanes, a 10/100 Ethernet connection, analog audio and video, support for an infrared receiver, and connections for a power button and two user-defined buttons.
There are no CSI lanes on the expansion connector, but those who need camera support could use the USB 2.0 connectivity instead. For software, Orange Pi claims compatibility with the somewhat outdated Android 12, Debian 11 and Debian 12, Ubuntu 20.04 and Ubuntu 22.04, and the company's own Arch Linux-based Orange Pi OS.
The company has begun taking orders for the boards starting at $12.90 for the model with 1GB RAM, peaking at $23 for the 4GB variant, on its AliExpress store; bundles with an expansion board, which uses the 24-pin header to break out analog audio, two full-size USB 2.0 ports, the Ethernet port, three buttons, and an infrared receiver, start at $17.80. All prices exclude shipping.