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Raspberry Pi Competitor Ranks Swell With Orange Pi 4 LTS:
A new version of the Orange Pi, one of the Raspberry Pi competitor boards built around the hexa-core Arm-based Rockchip RK3399 SoC and with a distinctive Wi-Fi antenna, is now available for pre-order, with prices starting from $55, as spotted by CNX-Software.
The Orange Pi 4 LTS (not Long-Term Support, but LTS versions of Orange Pi boards tend to be more compact versions of previous releases) features a six-core processor that sees two Arm Cortex A72 cores matched with four A53 cores and a Mali T860 GPU. There's a choice of either three or four gigabytes of LPDDR4 RAM, and a 16GB eMMC chip can be specified.
The main difference between the Orange Pi 4 LTS and the 4 and 4B boards that preceded it is the GPIO. While previous boards contained 40 pins on their headers, the LTS houses just 26, just like the original Raspberry Pi. And while we can use some Raspberry Pi HATs designed for 40-pin GPIO with the original Pi. Don't expect true GPIO compatibility with the Orange Pi 4 LTS, a quick glance of the GPIO layout shows that I2C is mapped to different pins, effectively breaking compatibility with cards which use this protocol. The audio chip also seems to have been changed, from a Realtek ALC5651 to an ESS ES8316.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 03 2022, @08:19PM (4 children)
Tried to integrate Orange pi zero lts into a product. Was perfect form factor, but boy did I struggle with Wifi on that thing! Never got it, the driver wasn't solid enough I think.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 04 2022, @01:43AM (1 child)
With obscure Chinese ARM boards, the answer is always no.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 04 2022, @07:43AM
I'm not sure why.
There are dozens of "RPi Killer" boards on the market - why should I pick theirs if I can't get basic stuff working.
It is in their best interests to use well-known parts that 'just work'.
Of course if you're trying to save 75 cents on a $40 board more power to you. Caveat emptor.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 05 2022, @08:21AM (1 child)
RPi4 here, and I have had a devil of a time to get WiFi to work here too.
Had to enable 2.4GHz to function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 05 2022, @08:49AM
I didn't do much work to get Wi-Fi working on RPi4. But the on-board antenna is low quality and sometimes you can get better performance by using a Wi-Fi repeater and connecting it to the Pi with Ethernet.