Orange Pi Plus 2 is an improved version of the notorious Orange Pi Plus and costs about 50 US dollars. Powered by a quad-core Allwinner H3 family ARM Cortex-A7 processor up to 1.6 GHz, Mali400MP2 GPU @600 MHz, it has 2 GB of DDR3 RAM and 16 GB of built-in eMMC Flash memory, 4 USB ports, Gigabit Ethernet, SATA connector for an external 2.5″ hard drive up to 2 TB, a memory card slot up to 64 GB, Wi-Fi. There is a microphone, infrared port, LEDs to display the status of work, three buttons.
It is recommended to use a power adapter with an output voltage of 5 V and a current of 3 A, and the board power supply via USB-OTG is not supported. The monitor is connected to the HDMI output, and there is a MIPI-CSI slot for connecting a camera with up to 5-megapixel resolution.The Orange Pi Plus 2 has 40 programmable general-purpose contacts (GPIOs) compatible with the Raspberry Pi.
Orange Pi Plus 2 supports Android, Ubuntu, Debian, OpenSuse, Armbian, Raspbian, Lubuntu, Fedora, Arch Linux, etc.
Key Features
- Allwinner H3 SoC;
- 32-bit 4-core ARM Cortex-A7 processor clocked at 1.2 GHz;
- 2 GB DDR3 SDRAM;
- Mali-400 MP2 with Open GL ES 2.0/1.1;
- Wi-Fi;
- 16 GB eMMC;
- SATA 2.0.
Orange Pi Plus 2 – Specifications
| Processor | Allwinner H3 Quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 H.265/HEVC 4K 1.2-1.6GHz, 32KiB Instruction + 32KiB Data L1 cache per core and 512KB L2 cache |
| Graphic processor | Mali400 MP2 600MHz supports OpenGL ES 2.0 OpenCL 1x, DX9_3, OpenVG, 1080p45 H.264 |
| RAM | 2GB DDR3 672MHz H5TC4G83AFR-PBA (w/ GPU) |
| ROM | 16GB eMMC KLMAG2GEND-B031, microSD (up to 64GB), SATA 2.0 (via GL830 USB-to-SATA bridge, +5V power to JST XH connector 2.5mm) |
| Ethernet | 10/100/1000Mbps Ethernet (Realtek RTL8211E) |
| Wi-Fi | 802.11 b/g/n (Realtek RTL8189ETV) |
| Video input | 1 x Camera Serial Interface (CSI) connector: Supports 8-bit YUV422 CMOS Sensor Interface Supports CCIR656 Protocol for NTSC and PAL Supports SM Pixels Camera Sensor Supports video capture solution up to 1080P @ 30fps |
| Video output | HDMI with HDCP, HDMI CEC, CVBS, HDMI 30 functions |
| Audio input | Microphone |
| Audio output | Mini-jack (3.5mm) |
| USB | USB 2.0 x 4 pieces, USB 2.0 OTG x 1 piece |
| Other | IC port |
| Peripherals | 40 pin expansion bus: GPIO (General Purpose I/O Interface), Power (+5V, +3. 3V and GND), some pins can be used as UART, I2C, SPI or PWM |
| Buttons | Power, Reboot and U-boot |
| Indicators | Power indicator, status indicator |
| Power | 5V 2A (4.0mm/1.7mm), board power via OTG is not supported |
| Dimensions | 4,25 x 2,63 inches |
| Weight | 1,76 oz |
| OS | Ubuntu, Debian, Raspbian, Android, Lubuntu |
Useful Video: Orange Pi Plus 2 and Android
Conclusions
The Orange Pi Plus 2 is another member of the Orange Pi line of minicomputers. Compared to its predecessor (Orange Pi Plus), the Plus 2 has 1 GB more RAM (2 GB in total) and twice as much flash memory (16 GB in total). Accordingly, because of these features, the Orange Pi Plus 2 is used in more global projects. For example, to build a PC, 3D printer, radio, phone or video player, server, POS-terminal, thin client – even more, resources are available for the developer to implement new ideas. Orange Pi Plus 2 provides unlimited possibilities thanks to the open-source code.