Radxa Zero: Tiny Quad Core SBC

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers this time we're going to take a look at this a radza zero single board computer this has got the same form factor as a raspberry pi zero but it's far more powerful with a quad core processor up to four gigabytes of ram and up to 128 gigabytes of onboard flash storage so let's go and take a closer look right here we have our radza zero and before we open up this little box it's worth noting there are a lot of different configurations of this sbc as we can see here on the all net website where i ordered my razer zero these range from a 512 megabyte ram model with no emc that sells for 15. one and two gigabyte models without emmc and four four gigabyte models with 16 32 64 or 128 gigabyte of onboard flash storage with the latter costing 85 dollars in addition all models appear to be available with or without an external wi-fi antenna and with or without a pre-soldered gpio header whilst in theory all of this choice is a great idea in practice manufacturing and stocking so many versions of the same product is likely to be problematic for all concerned and so i both hope and suspect that the number of rats are zero boards will be reduced anyway the model i've purchased is a four gigabyte radar zero with 16 gigabyte emmc no external antenna and no gpio header this cost me 45 or about 32 pounds 50 with 9.06 for 15 days shipping to the uk so let's bring in stanley my knife and open this thing up just need to take off the stuff here little bit of wrapping very exciting opening up a new sbc i've done this for a while there we are the rad cesaro and it slides out and yes it's in a little plastic box and if we open up the box here we have the razer zero and i just told you this was a board without a gpo header i think it's got a gpio header it doesn't matter of course let's bring in stanley again to go through the tape there mr scissors could have done that couldn't he but uh no stanley got in first here is our board all very exciting yes it's definitely got a gpio header here is our razer zero and if i bring in a raspberry pi zero you can see it has indeed got the same form factor there and in fact i'll also bring in another board of the same form factor the banana pi m two zero which i looked at on the channel a little while ago all these boards have got the same form factor as you can see although it is worth noting that on the radzer zero we don't have the camera connector but other than that the razer zero is a really powerful little board sewer let's go in for a closer shot and i think i'm also going to swizzle the board around like this so we can get a better look at its major components and the first of those components is here this is the system on a chip which is an amlogic s905y2 which has got four arm cortex a53 cores running at up to 1.8 gigahertz as well as an arm mallet g31 mp2 gpu next to the system on a chip we then find the ram down here which on this board is four gigabytes of low power ddr4 next to the ram we then find the board's wireless module which is an ap6256 which offers and 80211abgnac wi-fi at up to 433.3 megabits a second as well as bluetooth 5.0 note that the 512 megabyte and one gigabyte ram rad to zero models come with a lower specification ap6212 wireless module which offers 80211bg and n wi-fi at a speed of up to 72.2 megabits a second as well as bluetooth 4.0 if we take a look at the connector edge we first find a micro hdmi 2.1 socket that supports 4k output at up to 60 frames a second there are then two usbc connectors the first of which is usb 3.0 which is fantastic we've got a high speed usb connector on a zero form factor board we don't find usb 3 on the raspberry pi zero or the banana pi m two zero and then next to the usb 3 connector we've got another usb c connector this is used to power the board although it also offers a usb 2 otg connection note that the radar zero requires a 5 volt 1 amp power supply and without peripherals connected has a maximum power consumption of 3.3 watts if we go back to the top and flick the board over like that you can see that underneath we have got our emmc module on this board this is our 16 gigabytes of emmc flash storage and we've also got a micro sd card slot supporting cards up to 128 gigabytes in size and also on the base of the board there is a tiny little button down there i'll try and give you a better shot of it this is a very tiny button for forcing a usb boot or performing firmware upgrades finally if i flick the board back the right way up there we are it's much happier to be that way around we do of course have the 40 pin gpio header the gpo connector i mentioned earlier nicely color coded and so important for many of the projects we could do with this board and talking of projects i think it's now high time to take the rad to xero connect it up and to try out some operating systems greetings here i am back again i've now got the radzer zero all connected up as you can see so let's turn on the power there we are and we're now booting up and we're booting up from the operating system that came pre-installed on the emmc on the board so i've not installed anything this is what came on the board out of the box and we can see we've got our amlogic process there and oh look mbox making our life colorful isn't that exciting can you guess what we're booting into yes we're booting into a version of android and this is a fairly basic android install it's android 9 but we do have a little test web browser down here let's see if we can get to the world's favorite website and it seems we can i have already run this up and put in my wi-fi details all this clearly wouldn't work and get online we can learn about single board computers and if we go back to the desktop here we've got a little media player there for things obviously it's empty but it is here and there's also a little application for looking at pictures and videos things like that and if we just flick up like that you can see what else is installed there isn't a great deal there is an app installer but it's for installing packages it isn't a graphical installer like the google play store and we've got settings here let's flick into settings where we can see things like device preferences we can look about the device where we can confirm we're running a android 9. so there we are this version of android that came pre-installed on the emc has proved to us that the radar zero works it is a functioning computer but i now want to move on to test out some other operating systems right here we are booting into a linux distro and specifically into twister os ambient focal beta 4 for the razer zero which i'm running here from a microsd card and not the internal emmc flash storage and whilst this boots up it's important to note that in mid-september 2021 software support for the radar zero is still at a rather early stage and indeed i've struggled somewhat to get things up and running to show you in this video anyway i'll say more about software support in the next section of the video as we've now arrived on the desktop and by the magic of filmmaking i'm going to do this to make things a bit easier to read on the screen but i've still got a very small mouse pointer as you can see here i can't find a way to change that anyway here in twister os things look beautiful they always do in twister os if you're not aware of twister os it's a distro that has got all sorts of themes windows like themes as you might guess from the icons down here i tried it out on a raspberry pi not that many videos ago so you might want to check it out on the pie if you haven't done it over there but for now here on the razor zero it's a doing for us very nicely the icons down here might look like word excel etc but if i click on the word like icon down there it of course launches libreoffice writer here on the rad to zero that came up pretty well didn't let's type hello because we have to do that and we'll just select all that and of course put it into a very large font because it's a law when making a video like this there we are we've said hello butter we will get rid of that we will lose our document into the mists of time if we go down to the menu we can see there's quite a lot of things pre-installed in this beta various accessories as you can see over here like that things for development including the genie editor for programming education we've just got libreoffice math it's probably enough lots of things here under games as you'll find in twister os because it's got a big focus that way using things like box 86 and wine to run various older games and things we've got graphics here including let's run up and gmu image manipulation program see how that comes up on the lorad ce0 which looks that wasn't bad was it that that was very good there are little menus and panels there they are we've got those here so that's nice to run that up what else is over here we got down to graphics under internet we've got various things all the usual tools we need including the vivaldi browser under multimedia we've got kodi and various things to play things and the usual volume controls and stuff obviously we've got libreoffice because we've just seen it and under system let's have a look in the system profiler and benchmark let's bring that up like that and i'll try and make it wider over there and deeper as well let's be wild have it bigger in both directions if i can get the mouse cursor in the right place there we are and as you can see we're running here our four arm cortex a53 cores we've got our four gigabytes of memory a little bit here will be allocated for graphics and if we go down to processor we can see the processors are running along at about 1.5 gigahertz which is a very nice for them i'm sure and if we look down to sensors we can see how warm the processes are they're running idling along here at just over 42 degrees the board has been running for many hours now and if i touch the processor itself it's not very hot it's barely warm really to the outside so that that's pretty good maybe i'll do a video in the future testing out this thing to its extreme and see how how warm it gets whether it needs a heatsink anyway shall we launch a browser let's go down to the valde down there and go on to online with this computer the roger zero come on browser come up you can do it there we are always give it encouragement if you want it to work for you there we are we're into the valde oh look we're on to explaining computers let's look at can we bring pages up we can look at singapore computers and quantum stuff i do like quantum computing you probably gathered that but it'll bring a youtuber embed eventually it it works and i'm sure you're wondering can we play youtube content here in the browser let's go to my test clip and here we are slightly painful to get up and running but it's now working for us fairly smooth transition there just went wrong at the end didn't it but this is what you get straight out of the box i've done nothing to the browser to try and optimize video playback i always like to show you the out of the box streaming media experience on any sbc and i'm not surprised this is not perfect we've got a lot of drop frames at the top as a as you can see we're still in in beta in terms of the software we'll have to see how this develops in time but right now i wouldn't recommend the razer zero as a streaming media video playback device at least using a browser greetings here i am back again in twister os on the radce0 and i want to say a bit more about software support for the board at this point in time which is mid-september 2021 it's the 16th of september to be exact and if we go to the vivaldi browser here i'm on the download page for different operating system images for the razer zero and these are the official images you can see android nine we've seen that pre-installed on the emmc on the board and we've then got debian buster and i thought i'll try out debian buster and if you click on this nothing is there and we've then got beneath that window back again there we are got ubuntu bionic and there's nothing there for that either and if you look at things like the install wiki there's a once over android there's a nothing on that page other than some holding text so what we've got here is not ideal and this is one of the reasons i've struggled to get things up and running on the board the other issue is that the board has a default boot order of booting first from the emmc flash storage and then from a micro sd card and i can't find images for anything and there's lots of third-party images here it looks like support is fantastic i can't find any images i can get running from the emmc i can't find a way to get them onto the mmc you have to mess around with boot loaders and serial consoles and i'm sure it can be done it's just i've not managed to do it the time i've had available and if you write things to a micro sd card i've tried manjiro various versions over here i can't get to boot from them because it keeps booting from android on the emmc so here's twister os which i did get running because it will boot twister os even with android on the emmc because it picks it up as an allowed operating system to boot first from microsd if you see what i mean but really things here should be better and i'm very surprised by this because i've reviewed several boards from radza before particularly things like the rock pi 4 which is a fantastic sbc with amazing operating system supports the android support is great it's got the play store or all that type of stuff and the razer zero is not that new now it was introduced or at least announced the world in june 2021 and at the time a few test boards were made available to reviewers to have a look at lots of publications and youtube channels talked about the rata zero at that time i didn't i never talk about and show a singapore computer on my channel until there was a production model available i purchased a board i'm working on here and i hope that by the time there were boards available for sale there would be better operating system support and currently that isn't the case so i just want to caution here that the razer zero is a fantastic piece of hardware i've no doubt about that i love the specifications of the board i've had no problems with it with the board working at all but operating system support is not where it needs to be so do be aware of this the rad to zero at the moment is a fantastic board for operating system enthusiasts but if you expect to have straightforward images available you need to wait a bit make sure they are available make sure when you click on these links there's something there before you invest in the board the radza zero is a fantastic new single board computer it's a great piece of hardware now admittedly right now the software support isn't quite there yet but radza have got a very good track record of supporting their boards and so i'm sure that software support will improve fairly quickly but now that's it for another video if you've enjoyed what you've 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] you

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 112,663

Keywords: Radxa Zero, Zero form factor SBC, Zero formfactor SBC, Pi Zero alternative, Radxa SBC, tiny SBC, small SBC, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt, Radxa Zero review, Radxa Zero software support, Radza Zero operating system, Radxa Zero OS, Radxa Zero Android, Android Radxa Zero, TwisterOS Radxa Zero, Radxa Zero TwisterOS, Radza Zero Armbian, Armbian Radxa Zero, TwisterOS, Twister OS, Armbian

Id: HS6MIM3bol4

Length: 17min 58sec (1078 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 19 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/8-bit-Felix]

There's not a lot of info on getting ES and the like running on it.

I'd love to put one of these in a SNES cartridge for the spare room.

[u/Ok-Suit-8930]

For me and personal projects I think this is a good microcomputer, I have seen some videos and could replace some Raspberry Pi Zero.

I want to take one and see what happens xD

[u/those2badguys]

I wonder if this would work with a gamepi20. I got one sitting at home but I never bothered installing a pi zero in it.

[u/sixtyeightmk2]

Does anyone know if the pogoplug usb A addon for the pi zero would work with this device?