Orange is the New ($15) Pi

Hackaday is writing that  Orange is the New ($15) Pi. And I must say that it looks promising. It looks like the very cheap Raspberry Pi like single board computer. Originally, the board cost about $30 but sports WiFi, a 1.6 GHz processor, 8 GB of flash, and a SATA interface. There’s now a reduced version of the board for about $15 that deletes the flash and SATA along with the WiFi and one of the original’s 4 USB ports. It seems that $15 Orange Pi PC “Orange Pi Mini 2” has the things you’d expect on a Pi (HDMI and Ethernet) along with other extras like an IR receiver and an on-board microphone.

Not bad for $15 considering it has a quad-core processor, a GPU and 1GB of RAM. The Orange Pi PC is compatible with Lubuntu, Android, Raspbian, and more. The board is based on AllWinner H3 chip (newer chip following the A20 used for example in IBOX I have reviewed). If you are building networked applications, it is good to know that the H3 chip used in the Orange Pi has a built-in Ethernet controller with on-chip 10/100 PHY (no need to use external USB-ethernet IC like in Raspberry Pi). For more details check Orange Pi Mini 2 product page and http://www.orangepi.org/ (which has information on other interesting boards as well).

So where you can get one? $15 PC makes the Raspberry Pi look expensive article tells hat if you’d like to get your hands on an Orange Pi PC or 12, you can head over to AliExpress. Even with the shipping charges, you’ll still end up spending less than $20 to acquire a very capable computer that can run Linux or Android.