Orange Pi 5 Review – Powerful, No WiFi

Hey Owl Creek Tech,

Any way you’d like to share these would be totally fine. I usually will clean up the formatting in the posts for stuff like that since I don’t have logins enabled on the site (which is typically where you would upload a picture after logging in). It’s because I don’t want to have to make all of you guys register and put in an email and create a password and all of that nonsense just to post a comment here. Not having an upload feature is a downside of that. I could probably work around it but to be honest I try to disable as much code on the site as possible to keep it fast/snappy for Google. At the size I am now it’s easier for me to reupload each of the images you guys upload one at a time. If the site got a lot bigger I’d probably have to figure out a better system.

I’m honestly kind of losing my mind waiting for all of this new hardware. I literally cannot wait for all the things I have ordered like the Rock 5B, the Orange Pi 800 and all the official Orange Pi accessories, the RISC-V VisionFive 2, the Radxa Zero, ugh! Fortunately everyone has been keeping me pretty busy on pibenchmarks. People have tested a lot of cool boards / hardware I haven’t really seen before (which I need to upload images for new models and a few things like that when people test them).

A lot of the content I want to do depends on some of these boards like I want to take my Minecraft Docker containers / standalone scripts away from the Pi generally to RISC-V or Pi competitors with better open-hardware practices. My Docker containers / scripts are all open source and the open-hardware nature of RISC-V matches the spirit of those projects a lot better than the Pi has been of late. All of the RISC-V boards I’ve got my hands on don’t have the power to be a Minecraft server but the VisionFive 2 will.

ARM boards are still great for this too though. My recommendations for a single board computer Minecraft server might end up looking something like the Rock 5B ($140-$150ish) for the absolute top end, the VisionFive 2 and Orange Pi 5 for the <$100 category and maybe the Libre “Le Potato” or “Renegade” for the dirt cheap end ($35-$45 respectively).

Since I’m waiting for so much new stuff though I’m more than happy to clean up / edit / reupload anything you can share. If you share these on something like imgur or one of those sites I am happy to rehost it too here (I’ll just download the picture and reupload it to the site, I do that sometimes for critical images people share that I still want to be here 5-10 years from now). Whatever works best for you!

Thanks, the OneDrive link work will work perfectly for anything you’d like to share, I’ll take care of the rest! That’s great information on what to expect with the Radxa Zero. You’ve touched upon some things I wanted to explore / cover which is using a TFT or e-ink displays with boards like the Orange Pi and Radxa.

From my point of view the Orange Pi 5 launch has been a huge success. We are up to 217 benchmarks on pibenchmarks.com for the Orange Pi 5. That is unbelievable! We are up to 41 tests with the Radxa Rock 5B and I’ve recognized some of the names like Gospa from here in the comments that have had some pretty impressive Rock 5B benchmarks.

I’m so delighted to see this kind of a response / usage for alternative boards. It would have seemed impossible to me 2 years ago and frankly I think people were a lot more hungry for alternative boards than even I had realized. I think a lot of Android people that may not necessarily have come from a Raspberry Pi background may be participating in these discussions as well and they are more than welcome. I’m trying to keep up with some of you with a more Android-heavy background as compared to my Linux/RPi-based background. These discussions have taught me a whole lot that I had not had a lot of exposure to such as the Google Play protect program (and the drama surrounding that).

I’ve also really enjoyed investigating some of the Orange Pi 5 accessories with all of you such as using E-key to M-key adapters, using USB WiFi adapters with certain chipsets, etc. including which operating systems they work with (Android vs. Linux). I definitely want to do some more content like that related to accessories for these devices. I think covering LCD/TFT screens / e-ink displays and other accessories (both official and unofficial) for boards like the Orange Pi and the Radxa would be worthwhile because there’s hardly anybody doing it that I can see out there.

There’s almost nothing published on screens/accessories for these when you search for them (other than the official ones in Orange Pi’s case). I definitely don’t want to just be a board review guy since lots of people just publish their review and move on as we’ve kind of talked about in earlier comments on the article. It definitely seems like there is precious little out there about using these types of screens/accessories with these devices and certainly nothing like a guide or walk through. This is the kind of stuff that is taken for granted on the Raspberry Pi that almost nobody has covered / written anything about for alternative boards relatively speaking (especially outside of the official accessories, which also have barely any coverage outside of official marketing/media).

Thank you again for continuing to share so much useful information to everyone. I continue to be blown away by the testing/information you and others have shared here to the point where it is actively influencing what I want to cover/review (undoubtedly in a very positive way). Take care!

Hey Razor Burn,

I think 100% of the alternative boards would support the Raspberry Pi camera if they could. It’s closed-source hardware and firmware basically. Nobody can see it (except for Broadcom and Raspberry Pi). The Raspberry Pi ecosystem is pretty evil like that. Nothing works with it because it can’t. It’s absolutely stuffed with proprietary Broadcom code that they will not release to anyone else. Orange Pi *cannot* make their boards compatible with the Raspberry Pi camera.

It’s Raspberry Pi that won’t allow this. It’s not that the other board vendors wouldn’t be delighted to be compatible with all of their accessories. This is basically why the Raspberry Pi can use almost any accessory but basically *nothing* can use the official Raspberry Pi accessories. That’s by design and it’s evil. I can guarantee you that if the alternative board vendors could do this it wouldn’t just be one or two of them that are compatible with Raspberry Pi accessories. They would literally all do this if they could. It’s a no-brainer to ship a compatible device with all of those hats and accessories out there. They would 100% all do it if they could.

Some of them try really hard like Libre Computers. On Libre boards you can run Raspberry Pi OS and you can even use Raspberry Pi overlays. It can actually work with a *lot* of Pi accessories. Is it perfect though? No. The official accessories still have proprietary Broadcom code that won’t work. It mostly lets you use all of the hats and third-party accessories. It’s still quirky and there’s basically a “translation” layer that Libre has made to even make this possible. It’s definitely not plug and play though and that is the absolute best thing out there right now compared to using a legit Raspberry Pi. They have to do a huge amount of work to try to bypass all the proprietary code and use open-source implementations instead for some of this stuff.

Jeff Geerling did some good coverage of the Raspberry Pi camera module that just came out. He actually made an open source camera (with 3d printed parts and everything). I had a good discussion with him in his comments of the video about this. He has actually spoken to people that work for Raspberry Pi about this issue and it doesn’t sound to me like the Pi Foundation is quite there yet with open hardware. They have strong long-standing connections with Broadcom and Broadcom doesn’t really make open hardware. It’s all been closed-hardware since day 1 / the original Raspberry Pi (and to be fair back then nobody would have sold you open-hardware it but the Pi Foundation is big enough to call the shots now and other companies are starting to ship it).

I don’t think Jeff shared anything he wasn’t supposed to or that was under a NDA. He simply asked them about RISC-V/open-hardware and while they have done a little bit with it (they might even be a RISC-V association member, I can’t remember but they definitely have been involved early on in some capacity) it doesn’t sound like they are prepping a RISC-V Pi for the Pi 5. I 100% believe Jeff and trust him. I’ve been following his blog since before he even had a YouTube channel (he’s done so well on there it makes me wonder if it was a mistake for me to not become a YouTube creator as well but YouTube has changed a lot lately in not-so-great ways so 2-3 years ago would have been the time to do it). If he was NDA’d because they were making a RISC-V Pi he would not have been able to tell me this.

The next one legitimately doesn’t sound like it will be RISC-V unfortunately so we can expect the same closed-hardware for the next release (and then maybe hopefully they’ll really be ready to switch or at least open up their Broadcom hardware’s source code/firmware). The fact that Jeff could say this tells me they definitely aren’t making one right now or he wouldn’t have been able to (and he would have known it). Yes, they could have of course been hiding it from him but the way they answered his questions does not suggest that at all. They legitimately seem to just not be there yet otherwise they would have probably been a lot more protective / cautious about what they were saying about it.

I can tell you exactly what is going to happen. Raspberry Pi will wake up. They will remember that open-source is a huge part of their legacy and that open-hardware is great for the same reasons as open source software. They will realize they’ve made mistakes. It’s just going to be too late. I don’t see any way this situation is avoided. They’re too protected as a company and too many people are still telling them they’re doing a fantastic job. They aren’t ready to change or even admit they have a problem but they definitely do have one.

It doesn’t mean Raspberry Pi will go out of business. It just means that their days of basically being the go-to board for everything and completely dominating the entire market are over (and they probably could have held onto the market for another 5+ years if they had played things differently). The market is severely fragmenting right at this very moment and all of us are right in the middle of it / living through it.

Hopefully in the end this means that parts / accessories will end up playing nicer with each other over the long term as they no longer will ship with exclusively Raspberry Pi support anymore as people are no longer exclusively using Raspberry Pi boards for pretty much any project/build/etc. that requires a small single board computer.

I think this shortage has proven that absolutely needs to happen even if the Raspberry Pi Foundation becomes angelic again and completely embraces open-hardware. We need other options with decent communities / support / accessories / etc. because even if they’re doing a great job they are a single point of failure for the market. If they can’t provide the boards cheaply and in high quantities at any point for any reason the entire single board computer ecosystem grinds to a halt. We are living through the consequences of having a single point of failure like that right now (and for the past couple of years really) and I never want to do it again.

I’d argue especially at first that the entire maker market ground to a halt as a result of this dependency on Raspberry Pis (and them not using actual open hardware/firmware). Now days I see almost nobody using a Raspberry Pi in their maker builds. They’re all using ESP32 / microcontrollers which have evolved to be a lot more open of a market than the Raspberry Pi ecosystem ever was. Raspberry Pi was late to that party with the Pico and as a result they weren’t able to get a “lock” on the market like they did with single board computers.

The microcontroller market appears to be mostly free of this evil (although there’s some of it like RP2040 vs. other microcontrollers, like they definitely tried to do their same tricks on there, it just wasn’t as effective because they weren’t first-to-market for those). That isn’t from Raspberry Pi’s lack of trying though. I legitimately think that a lot of people in the maker community learned their lesson. They want to design their builds around something like a ESP32 that is much more open in design (the latest ESP32 chips are all RISC-V as are all 3 announced upcoming chips). Nobody in the maker community should have much of an appetite for being locked into the Pi ecosystem after this shortage with microcontrollers like the RP2040 when using a ESP32 or other microcontroller will do nicely and has none of those risks.

That’s definitely unfortunate news about the NVMe order! It may absolutely be worth just ordering it again and letting the other order run it’s course and either get a refund for that one or if it does finally show up you can keep it as a spare.

You are so right too about the ESP32 craze! I’m really struggling with the screens for them but there are some options. I have this one coming tomorrow that should let me connect my sensors I wrote about in the K1100 post you referenced to the RISC-V ESP32 module they sent me. It’s actually more than just a screen but is an expansion board giving me a lot more ports for sensors that also gives you a small screen. I actually ordered option A and B from that listing (the B one has no screen but way more ports and is only $6.99). I’m basically prototyping a whole bunch of different ways to break out the sensors to see what might make sense for stations in different places.

The Wio Terminal is a lot of fun. It has all sorts of sensors built right into the terminal such as a light sensor, a gyrometer, even a sound/decibel sensor before even connecting any additional sensor boards. I’m mostly trying to determine whether it makes sense to actually have a full Wio terminal for each station or to have something cheaper like this with a more minimal display (as well as being easier to connect additional sensors to). With all the additional sensors right on the Wio terminal it still might make sense to have the Wio terminal be part of every sensor station and have some sort of 3d printed enclosure or something so the sensors aren’t just hanging off the side (as well as some sort of breakout for the Wio terminal to allow more connected sensors). I’ll have to test more with the expansion boards to see what makes the most sense.

It’s mostly hard to just figure out what is compatible / what works well and that’s a lot of what I want to cover. I’m super hopeful some of this stuff will start arriving soon! I actually ordered a second VisionFive 2 from Amazon and a second Radxa Zero from eBay because I’m not confident my proper orders are going to come through any time soon.

Thank you for the support and participating in all of this (even if the NVMe drive is slow, it happens and my orders I’m waiting for are going slow too), I will definitely deliver on these promises as soon as the gear starts coming in!

Hey Razor Burn,

That’s excellent news, I’m so glad it did finally show up and that you didn’t have to go through any hassle! I’m sure you’ll have a lot of fun with everything coming together here now.

I definitely understand about wanting to keep your powder dry. That makes perfect sense. I’ll definitely keep an eye out and cover a bunch of these ESP32 accessories for sure!

Hey Razor Burn,

Very interesting. Here’s a page pulling the FCC certifications for Orange Pi:

FCC ID Application Date Product Purpose Application Type
2AQ9Y-OPI800 2022-10-31 Orange Pi 800 Original Equipment
2AQ9Y-OPI4LTS 2022-10-31 Orange Pi 3 LTS Original Equipment
2AQ9Y-OPI3LTS 2022-10-31 Orange Pi 4 LTS Original Equipment
2AQ9Y-ZEROLTS 2020-05-01 Orange Pi Zero LTS Original Equipment
2AQ9Y-PLUS2E 2018-11-20 Orange Pi Plus2E Original Equipment

Interestingly they did certify the new Orange Pi 800 according to the FCC. I don’t see the i96 certification but maybe they registered it under a different grantee code. The Orange Pi Zero 2 is also nowhere to be found which is one of their most compelling offerings. Maybe that’s why it’s only like $30 despite being a pretty great board. Most of their latest models are registered though. They registered the LTS versions it looks like.

My Radxa Zero I ordered from SEPTEMBER hasn’t shipped while it feels like literally every scalper in the world has had theirs for months. No idea how they get them. None. It’s a serious black eye on them and they’ll get the coverage they deserve based on the experience they deliver. I’m saddened to say Radxa might be a “great board” situation with a “bad distribution” problem making them just like Raspberry Pi and that’s quite a turnoff.

Maybe this is a North America reseller problem for Radxa. I know some of you from here have ordered and received it way, way faster than I have. I think some of you from here ordered it *after* I did if I’m not mistaken and already have it but I believe those of you I’m remembering were in Europe and possibly even Asia. I probably would have done better ordering it off AliExpress potentially (and avoided being scalped as much as I would from amazon.com flippers, although I don’t see any Rock 5Bs on Amazon right now at all anymore even for $250+).

Thanks for highlighting this issue as well as the Android certification. This is really important stuff and you’re right that it must be to cut costs I’d imagine. Take care!

UPDATE: I contacted Ameridroid and they said it’s the case and the power adapter holding up my order. I told them to cancel those parts and ship it without it so hopefully this order is unstuck here!

Hey Razor Burn,

Great thoughts! You had exactly the same thoughts I did about a lot of these as well. It seems really silly the Radxa Zero is so hard to get for even their authorized resellers. It’s literally the perfect time for them to be shipping those like *crazy* because of exactly what you mentioned with the Raspberry Pi Zero 2W not expected to replenish stock any time soon. That’s not even a board they are releasing extras for in their upcoming 100,000 Pi dump they are doing. The market is wide open for the taking and Radxa is sleeping on it!

I definitely thought what they said was interesting though as it did surprise me in a few ways like it did yourself. You’re right about the Radxa Zero being seemingly available on allnetchina so then why are their authorized resellers saying they can’t get my order from September? I guess when they try to ask Radxa about it though it’s really not sounding good.

I considered buying one from Okdo because they will apparently ship to the US. That was my plan actually if Ameridroid didn’t sound like they could get one to me. I was going to order it from Okdo. Maybe I’ll like the allnetchina.cn experience though. I’ll definitely have to see how that goes but I’d imagine it will be fine. I’m definitely excited to get my hands on the Rock 5A though and compare it to the Orange Pi 5!

You take care as well!

Hey Razor Edge,

Fantastic sleuthing! I think this must be part of it as well. I tried to get one of the models with the eMMC and I believe it was at least a 2GB model.

It says my VisionFive 2 is at my local post office (my back up one). I’m going to cancel my Ameridroid one since it looks like I’ll be getting the VisionFive 2 right away and I’ll also be getting the Radxa Rock 5B next week I’m sure.

Maybe it’s worth trying an allnetchina.cn one of those as well for me. I did ask them to cancel my Ameridroid one just now. I swear that I did order a second one of the Radxa Zero but I’m not seeing a receipt anywhere. I think when I tried to do it they were all $100+ on Amazon/eBay/etc.

EDIT: I ordered:

RADXA Zero 2GB / ONBOARD / AVAILABLE 1 $39.00

Cost summary
Description Price
Subtotal $39.00
Shipping $12.22
Total USD $51.22

I got the one with the onboard antenna and the header presoldered. Shipping really not too bad. We’ll see how it goes.

Thanks a ton for sharing this information about the Radxa Zero!

Hey Razor Burn,

Yes, I’m definitely very excited! The Pixel Buds Pro are pretty pricey. I got mine for $169 because they were running a $30 off but they’ve been as low as $149 on Cyber Monday. If they were $99 it would be a no-brainer as having good wireless headphones.

The issue is they are competing with Apple. Sure, the pricing on the Google devices is generally better than the Apple devices but that is a pretty low bar to clear. Apple’s hardware has always come at an *absurd* premium. Too absurd for me personally. The pricing makes more sense than Apple but still doesn’t make a lot of sense vs. a lot of their competitors.

It’s absolutely a luxury item though. All of the wireless headphones pretty much are consumable/wearable products with the rechargeable battery that typically can’t be replaced when it wears out. The A Series are a lot more reasonably priced but don’t have the noise cancellation and some of the bells and whistles. They’re much more affordable though.

The Google devices aren’t where I would like them to be as far as how open they are but they’re a lot better than the competition at the moment. My Pixel 7 Pro comes with an unlocked boot loader meaning I can flash whatever I’d like on it. Not a lot of companies ship Android phones that are unlocked like that. The Android ecosystem is a lot more open and competitive than the Apple ecosystem and that’s why I’m using those kind of devices despite them not being perfect or nearly as open source / open hardware as I demand with my PC and single board computers pretty much.

The Google ecosystem is the most directly comparable to Apple. When I get my Google Pixel phone it has just pure Android apps on it. No Samsung or any of the competitors competing services or accounts. It’s just a clean experience from the company who made the OS similar to Apple. Unlike Apple though they don’t lock out their competitors. You can still use the Google Pixel accessories with all of the other Android phones without losing any features and that definitely lends itself to a more healthy ecosystem than Apple’s. Google also knows everything about me already and has all my data. I’d rather limit the damage of how many companies have my accounts/data at this point. Google probably has the best track record of protecting my account than anyone over the years.

This strikes me as the best place to be at the moment but I’m hoping in a few short years there will be a lot of other more open-hardware options available for both phones as well as wearable devices like smart watches. That’s the future I want to live in but we’re not there yet. I am starting to see some reasonable phones start to come to market that are actually open source but realistically you’re going back something like 2-3 years in technology from what I’ve seen with those phones. They haven’t quite caught up to flagship hardware or even one gen behind.

The wearables though are especially bad right now outside of the big manufacturers. You won’t find any open-source wearable nearly as sexy as the Google Pixel Watch or even really comparable in capabilities yet but that will change over the next 2-3 years I’m sure. Things are advancing incredibly quickly and I’m hoping RISC-V will also shake up the hardware offerings a bit over the next few years as well.

In other words I hope in the next couple of years that I can be covering products that are a lot more open in both their hardware designs and their software. People are starting to make them now. You can find open-hardware and open-source phones and wearables but they are bulky and have a lot of drawbacks. They’re so close though. I’ll be watching for open-source and open-hardware variants of these types of devices that are actually good and I think we’ll be seeing them soon.

You take care as well!

Hey Razor Burn,

Very interesting, thanks for the heads up! It seems that the Radxa boards are pretty hard to get right now:

James,
I've done that, and I added a rush note to the order. I apologize about the inconvenience, everything regarding the ROCK5 has been super hard to get.
-Brandon
On 1/21/2023 14:50, James A. Chambers wrote:
>
> Hey Brandon,
>
> Thanks for the quick reply. Let's cancel the accessories for the Rock 5B that are delaying it here. That should help a lot!
>
> Let's leave the rest of the orders in place for now. Thank you!
> On 1/21/23 12:37, ameriDroid wrote:
>>
>> Hello,
>>
>> Order AD65XXX is waiting for the "ROCK 5B Metal Case" and the "Radxa Power PD 30W with USB-C Cable" those items were added from the accessories and they were pre-order items, we should be getting more on February, the rest of the order has been pulled and it is ready to ship. You can request a partial shipment, we will ship the available items first, and the rest once they arrive pending payment for a second shipping, or we could just cancel the not available items and send the rest.
>>
>> Order AD62XXX this pre-order item, has been pushed to the manufacturer to the end of this month, we will be getting the first batch shipped to us at the end of January.
>>
>> Order AD59XXX this pre-order item has been hard to get as Radxa is fully focus on producing ROCK5 Model B, so unfortunately I do not have an update on that.

They said my September order for the Radxa Zero they have no idea on because apparently they’re fully committed to producing the Rock 5B. I figured I’d share this just because I thought it was interesting that even the authorized resellers are saying the Radxa stuff is really hard to get for them right now.

I got one of the $5 preorder discount codes from allnetchina.cn for the Rock 5A. I’m going to try getting one this way and see how it goes. It’s supposed to give me $30 off when it does release here so I at least got my place in line. I have no idea what the shipping will be but with the $30 off it should make up for that even if it’s a bit steep. Thanks for the heads up!