Orange Pi Zero 2W

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers.com this time we're going to take a look at this an orange pi 02w and as you can probably guess this is a single board computer with a raspber pi 0 form factor and it's also got a quad core processor and this particular model has got 4 GB of RAM so let's go and take a closer look right here we have our orange Pi 02w which I purchased for $31.99 from amazon.com and what we have here is technically the orange pie 02w 4G I think we'll find that printed on the back of my label there it is and this is because this is the 4 GB version of the board but there's also a 2 GB version and that sells for $26.99 and there's also a one A2 GB version no there really is for a $23.99 and also a 1 GB version for $19.99 so let's open this up simple box we just uh go inside I haven't looked I always like to get the surprise of uh oh the GP connector is uh supplied but separate as we can see and this is the board itself the bag is the bag is sealed we'll have to bring in Mr scissors to open up the bag let get inside like that and uh here we are all the antennas preconnected as well very exciting this is our brand new single board computer and just before we turn to the specification let's compare it to some of its SBC friends and over here we have a rasp pi 02w and the radza 03w that we looked at on the channel a few weeks ago so let's put our new orange pie down between them there we go and clearly all three of these boards have got the same form factor and they've also all got a quadcore system on a chip but all models of the orange pi and the radza zero have got more RAM you can get on the rasp Pi 0 to W as we can see like the arader board the orange Pi 02w uses USBC connectors rather than micro USB for its power and data although like the raspby pi it's got a mini rather than a micro HDMI connector and so in my view the orange Pi 02w offers the best set of physical connectors next let's also make a comparison to this board which is the orange pi02 without a w on the end and this is a board I reviewed on my channel a couple of years ago and it's a very cool lowcost SBC from Orange Pi with a 53 * 60 mm form factor so putting our new 02w down next to it is a little bit confusing because the lack of a w in a name would normally signal the same board but with no Wireless connectivity although here both of these boards have got onboard Wi-Fi and Bluetooth however the difference clearly is that the 02w has got a standard Z form factor and it's also got a standard 40 pin GP layout the 02w is also available with more RAM because the 02 is limited to 1 gab although the 02 is very interesting board we just turn it around you'll see as you probably suspected it has got an ethernet port on the board it's also got a full size size USB 2 port and it's also got connectivity for two more usb2 ports and composite video and audio on this 13 pin header and so both of these boards are rather interesting although right now we're going to turn our attention completely to the new orange Pi 02w at the heart of a 02w lies an all winner 8618 system on a chip this contains four arm cortex a53 cores clocked at up to 1.5 GHz as well as a Mali g31 mp2 GPU next VC we then have our low power DDR full Ram here 4 GB and next to that a micr SD card slot in front of all these we then have pads for a 40 pin gpio header we could sold on the header it came with the board and then on the other side of 8616 we have a wireless module that supports Wi-Fi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0 and this is paired with a connector for the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth antenna that comes attached to the board turning to wired connectivity as noted earlier we have a mini HDMI connector this is 2.0 and supports 4K output at up to 60 frames a second and we also have two USB C ports the first of which offers us B2 data connectivity and the second is used to power the board with a 5V 2 amp power supply being required if we turn the board over I'm sure it won't mind underneath our level of excitement is limited although we do have a 16 megabyte SBI nor flash chip however if we flip the ball back the right way up again I'm sure it's relieved about that we can see down here the last thing I haven't mentioned I'm sure you have actually noticed it and this is what orange p I describe as a 24 pin function interface and this turns our excitement dial back up to 11 as it contains connectors for two more usb2 ports 100 megabit ethernet an IR receiver an audio output a composite video output a power button and two userdefined buttons and if you're wondering how could all of these be connected up orange pyell an expansion board that looks like this and which enables a rather smart little system to be built with loads of connectivity and a rather novel form factor and so there we are the orange pi 02w and I think it's now High time to grab a micr SD card I'm going to use this SanDisk Extreme Pro which I'm now going to image with an operating system greetings here I am back again with everything connected up and we're now booting into aun 22204 with an xfc desktop and this is not my first boot I have gone in and made a few scaling changes so things read better on video as I always do but other than that you're seeing exactly what you get with a clean install of this operating system for the orang pi 02w and uh here we are arrived on the desktop very clearly we're on an orange pi and what we have here is a pretty responsive Linux distri running on this Hardware if we go to the menu you'll see that it's uh very responsive here things are running just uh nice and fluidly it really is impressive isn't it a small board like this can run a nice fluid District in terms of what we have here this is a fairly minimal installation we've got the usual settings lots of those few accessories not much else pre-installed we got Chromium browser we've got VLC media player we don't have an office package in the default image we do have various system tools and things including the system monitor so let's just run that up and we can see our four processor cor is not currently very busy and we've got about what 2/3 of a gigb of memory being used as we are idling along just running the system monitor let's run up the browser see what's going on there internet and Chromium browser and this comes up reasonably quickly remember we're running from micr SD card here it won't be massively fast but this isn't too bad there we are arriving in chromium come on chromium you can do it there it is we're on the explaining computers website I have to add this board to the other rsbc reviews once it'll go in somewhere over here with all these boards and let's just take a look at the orange Pi 02 W's own web page got that somewhere here in bookmarks and uh there it is always good when the board can look at his own web page very nice and uh if we look at downloads here we can see all the software available and there's quite a lot made available for this board Al the official images are here uh orange posos Ubuntu Deb and Android Etc as you can see and in fact there's lots of options inside these so for example if I click on Ubuntu image as we're running right now it'll take us out to Google Drive where the images are stored we can choose a version based on either Linux kernel 6.1 or 5.4 here we're running 6.1 but if we go into that you'll see we have versions of a different boards in terms of the memory they have and inside there we then get options to run either a server version or a version with a desktop that's the one we're running here if we take a look at the GPU situation here in the browser let's go back to a bookmarks there we are and to Chrome GPU internals you'll see that we don't have Hardware acceleration we're not using the GPU to play things in the browser that's a bit of a shame and it won't be therefore surprised you to learn but this board doesn't have good streaming media playback at least with this particular Linux install but I'll just prove it to you because I always do let's just nip down to my sample 1080p clip and we'll speed on through until it's playing full screen and here we are bit of a struggle there to convince this board to play YouTube full screen but here we are and in fact it's not doing that badly it is dropping frames as we can see even now it's settled but it's not a it's not stunningly bad playback if you see what I mean better than we've seen on many single board computers in the past but anyway let's now check out a few other systems right here I am back again and we're now booting into orange pios which is the native operating system for the orange P boards and it's based on Arch and looks although it's also pretty friendly here for example of a setup screens you see on first boot so it does try and guide the user through and if we go back to real time we just need to uh log in like uh that there we go and let's just give the machine a bit of encouragement to finish the boot come on you can do it get us to the desktop it's having a think isn't it you've got to encourage small single board computers to need a bit of vocal assistance and here we are we've arrived properly on my desktop where as you can see by default we get this orange pie hello screen with various help although I think for now I will turn this off as in ubun we've got a fairly minimal install here here we get down to the menu you'll see we got accessories as we have previously but not many actual end user programs pre-installed obviously we've got settings systems things like that and we've got the browser here we got the Chromium browser as we had in Ubuntu let's just launch the Chromium browser again we'll give it encouragement come on Chromium browser you can launch for us it'll get there in a second once you there we are things are happening isn't Computing a wonderful thing and as you can see we've arrived back on the explaining computers web it and I'll also here just take you I've got bookmarks the Chrome internals look at GPU acceleration and it's exactly the same situation we saw in Ubuntu so there's no point in me trying out things like a YouTube here and more fundamentally it's important to point out there are some serious stability issues here in Orange Pi OS for example if I click to launch the terminal or I click to go into home or F system in the F manager this system will hang so let me demonstrate this to you like this we'll click on home there we are we now have a black screen and sometimes the system comes back sometimes it doesn't it seems we going to some form of sleep but to be honest I don't really care this should not happen when we open the file manager and if we use a magic of film making to get back to the desktop we can go down to the menu and let's try and launch the terminal the same thing will happen as we can see if I click Like This there we are and so orange Pi OS is not an operating system I would recommend running on the orange Pi 02w at this time guess what we're now booting into Android it's very exciting and we get the all with the logo on the screen here during the Android boot to remind us of the S so in the board we don't get the standard Android animation but that doesn't matter cuz here we are on an Android desktop and this is a minimal install of Android there isn't much pre-installed if we look for example over here we can see things like settings go into a device settings down there device preferences lots of things available to set like that just go back with my mouse and there are a few apps pre-installed but they're very much the minimum basic things we don't get YouTube we certainly don't get the Play Store but we do have some basic stuff and there's one thing I do want to point out here because we do get up here wiring op wiring orange pipe and wiring op is the utility you use normally in a Linux Dro to control the gpio pins on an orange pip board so we run this up like that if I get it right there we are we can do various tests as you can see we've got for example a gpio test at the top and this can blink LEDs connected to all of the gopo pins on the board and I've yet to solder a header too my orange Pi 02w but I've done this little lashup here with an LED connected by various means and so if I click on blink called GPO yes the LED is blinking isn't the blinking of an LED still the most exciting thing we ever do in the whole world of computing I think it is and in particular here I find it very interesting to be controlling GP pins here in Android and this is something I might return to in a future video it's beyond the scope of this video to take this any further but there are certainly many interesting possibilities presented here for Android GPO control the orange Pi 02w is a nice piece of hardware and therefore as is so often the case it all comes down to software support and here software support I think isn't as good as it is for example for the orange Pi 5 or the orange piie 800 but it's better than we find for some other orange P ball and I think there are lots of exciting project possibilities with this SBC but now that's it for another video if you've enjoyed what you seen here please press that like button if you haven't subscribed Please Subscribe and I hope to talk to you again very soon [Music]

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 109,006

Keywords: Orange Pi Zero 2W, Orange Pi SBC, Orange Pi, Zero 2W, Zero 2 W, Pi zerp alternative, Ubuntu, Orange Pi OS, WiringOP, GPIO control, Android, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt

Id: 4o1TT0B42hs

Length: 16min 11sec (971 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 11 2024