FriendELEC Releases $40 NanoPi K2 Board That Competes With ODROID-C2, Raspberry Pi 3 (cnx-software.com)

DeathByLlama writes: The single board computer market, broken wide-open just a few years ago by the Raspberry Pi Foundation, continues to flourish today as FriendELEC releases their $40 NanoPi K2 board. This SBC packs a 1.5 GHz 64-bit quad core Amlogic S905 processor, and paired with 2GB of DDR3 RAM and the Mali-450MP GPU, it is able to stream 4K at 60 FPS. Add in gigabit ethernet, onboard Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, IR (and a remote!), eMMC compatibility, a familiar GPIO header, and a $40 price tag, and you end up with some stiff competition for other market leaders like Hardkernel's ODROID-C2 and Raspberry Pi's flagship Pi 3. The release is clearly in early phases with Ubuntu images and house-sold eMMC modules still on their way. It's amazing to see such strong competition in this market -- and with so many sub-$100, incredibly capable SBC options, which will choose?

Comments

Just an Android Box?

[randomErr]

I've recent purchased a couple of Android TV box for usage as digital signage. They had the the same specs with the same price. But they came with a case and power supply. Why doesn't some Chinese manufacture make a vanilla Android box that is hacker friendly? Let us easily the OS as we see fit.

Re:Just an Android Box?

[LifesABeach]

How much would it cost to have one 3D printed to your specifications?

Re:Just an Android Box?

[randomErr]

$20-30 at local fab-lab plus my design time. So now we're talking $70 + power supply.

Edit harder!

[freeze128]

Is it FriendELEC, or FriendlyELEC? You owe it to the manufacturer to, for God's sake, AT LEAST GET THEIR NAME RIGHT!

Re:Edit harder!

[slashrio]

Typical case of copying from an article somebody else wrote, like this one.

Re:Edit harder!

[slashrio]

Then this article at least got the title right, but makes the same error in the first sentence already.

Next step

[somenickname]

These little ARM boards are great but, I'd love to see some super cheap ARM/FPGA boards become available. Something like a Zybo but in the $50 price range with just enough FPGA fabric to offload tasks that the CPU is abysmal at. The RPI brought embedded computing to the masses and it's been great but, a $50 ARM board with an FPGA could bring some flavor of High Level Synthesis (and AXI) to the masses. That's whole new level of nerdiness and enables a proper next generation type of hobby embedded stuff.

Re:Next step

[somenickname]

I've seen the ZynqBerry and it's the right idea but, it's still too expensive and not quite what I'm thinking. I'd like to see a 99% open source ARM/FPGA board appear and have an entire ecosystem develop around it such that it makes Vivado look like a clunky dinosaur.

Meh

[c]

A Pi clone is just a cheaper Pi. Nothing we really haven't seen before.

Now, FriendlyElec's Neo series is a bit more interesting... 40mm x 40mm, no GPU... sort of a riff on the Pi Zero, but not a slavish clone and with more port options (ethernet/full-USB on one, WiFi/camera on another, etc). I've got a couple of them running around the house in places a Pi would be overkill, but a Pi Zero would require extra components.

Re:Meh

[rrohbeck]

But it has Mali. That's a big fail unless you want to use it as a little server, for which you'd want SATA or USB3. Which it doesn't have.

Re:Meh

[c]

Yeah, I/O isn't blazing, but the Neo's are quite adequate for the workloads I use it for (some of which I've migrated from wifi routers using optware+USB keys, so the bar is quite low). OctoPrint works decently. YMMV, of course, but that's why it's nice to have a broad ecosystem of Pi-like devices rather than just a bunch of pin-for-pin clones.

I wouldn't use the FriendlyElec products for something like a media server; get a proper Pi for that stuff.

I'd happily pay $5 more for a SATA port

[darthsilun]

And more memory. 2Gig ain't what it used to be. (I had 16Meg in my 386SX rig back in the day.)
Waiting for my ExpressoBINs to arrive.

Re:I'd happily pay $5 more for a SATA port

[wonkey_monkey]

(I had 16Meg in my 386SX rig back in the day.)

Ee, when I were a lad I 'ad 32K and I were grateful for it.

Re:I'd happily pay $5 more for a SATA port

[ceoyoyo]

Wow, you had the expensive memory upgrade hey?

Re:I'd happily pay $5 more for a SATA port

[MillionthMonkey]

32K? Christ, your generation was spoiled.

I still have my old ZX81 with the 16K RAM pack. You have to put ice cubes in Ziploc bags and rest them on the plastic above the heat sink, or else thermal expansion makes the edge connector lose contact with the board. Of course you can always go old school and just use the onboard RAM chip with 1024 bytes.

Of course by 2050 we'll be cracking up at the thought of a Raspberry Pi- another British computer.

Re:I'd happily pay $5 more for a SATA port

[Trongy]

The reason these boards are cheap is that they are using surplus SOCs designed for smart TVs and set top boxes. A board that had SATA or PCIe support would cost much more than $5 extra.

Re:I'd happily pay $5 more for a SATA port

[darthsilun]

(I had 16Meg in my 386SX rig back in the day.)

Ee, when I were a lad I 'ad 32K and I were grateful for it.

Well, I was referring to my 386SX rig, not the first Apple ][ I had access to.

Re:I'd happily pay $5 more for a SATA port

[darthsilun]

The reason these boards are cheap is that they are using surplus SOCs designed for smart TVs and set top boxes. A board that had SATA or PCIe support would cost much more than $5 extra.

Whatever. $5 more, $10 more. My point is that these SOCs are cute, but not worth wasting my time on.

Figures.

[eriks]

Of course they did, because I just got my RPI3 yesterday, and I had been hemming and hawing for months about what device to get for an HTPC. Decided on PI3 for software and community support, so while this one looks real nice spec-wise, I might still have gone with the PI had I seen this one first. My initial impressions of the RPI3 is that it's surprisingly responsive for such a modest machine. It'd probably be usable as a primary desktop for most non-gamers. I've only played with it for a short time, but it's pretty neat for $35, and LibreELEC seems quite snappy, and was installed within minutes of powering up the board.

Re:Figures.

[hughbar]

Yes, I actually used a Pi3 as a desktop for a few weeks when I managed to hose my main desktop. It was a little like the early 1990s but OK.

Specs

[Anonymous Coward]

The specs of this new NanoPi are closer to the specs of the Odroid than to those of the RPi. NanoPi and Odroid have Gigabit Ethernet (and NanoPi has wireless on top of that), the RPi only has 10/100 Ethernet (internally connected to the USB interface) and wireless.

Raspberry Pi Specs:

SoC: Broadcom BCM2837
CPU: 4× ARM Cortex-A53, 1.2GHz
GPU: Broadcom VideoCore IV
RAM: 1GB LPDDR2 (900 MHz)
Networking: 10/100 Ethernet, 2.4GHz 802.11n wireless
Bluetooth: Bluetooth 4.1 Classic, Bluetooth Low Energy
Storage: microSD
GPIO: 40-pin header, populated
Ports: HDMI, 3.5mm analogue audio-video jack, 4× USB 2.0, Ethernet, Camera Serial Interface (CSI), Display Serial Interface (DSI)

Odroid C2 Specs:

* Amlogic ARM® Cortex®-A53(ARMv8) 1.5Ghz quad core CPUs
* Mali-450 GPU (3 Pixel-processors + 2 Vertex shader processors)
* 2Gbyte DDR3 SDRAM
* Gigabit Ethernet
* HDMI 2.0 4K/60Hz display
* H.265 4K/60FPS and H.264 4K/30FPS capable VPU
* 40pin GPIOs + 7pin I2S
* eMMC5.0 HS400 Flash Storage slot / UHS-1 SDR50 MicroSD Card slot
* USB 2.0 Host x 4, USB OTG x 1 (power + data capable)
* Infrared(IR) Receiver
* Ubuntu 16.04 or Android 5.1 Lollipop based on Kernel 3.14LTS

FriendELEC NanoPi:

SoC – Amlogic S905 quad core cortex-A53 processor @ 1.5 GHz with penta core Mali-450MP GPU
        System Memory – 2GB DDR3
        Storage – eMMC module socket, micro SD slot
        Video Output – HDMI 2.0 up to 4K @ 60 Hz
        Connectivity – Gigabit Ethernet (Realtek RTL8211F), 802.11 b/g/n WiFi + Bluetooth 4.0 (AP6212 module) with chip antenna + IPX connector
        USB – 4x USB 2.0 host ports (GL825G USB hub) + micro USB OTG port for power and adata
        Expansion Header
                40-pin header with GPIO, I2C, UART, ADC, PWM, SPDIF, and CVBS
                7-pin I2S interface
        Debugging – 4-pin Serial console port (3.3V)
        Misc – Status & power LEDs, IR receiver, power key (populated)
        Power Supply – 5V/2A DC input via 4.0×1.7mm power barrel, or micro USB port
        Dimensions – 85 x 56mm

which will choose?

[frovingslosh]

Hey BeauHD. Nice to see that you're still not bothered by the complex editing job of seeing that what you post actually makes sense.

Does it have any binary blobs?

[mrchaotica]

If it can be controlled completely by Free Software then it becomes interesting. If there are any binary blobs -- or worse, blobs that cannot be replaced due to DRM -- then it's utterly worthless.

Re:Does it have any binary blobs?

[drinkypoo]

If it can be controlled completely by Free Software then it becomes interesting. If there are any binary blobs -- or worse, blobs that cannot be replaced due to DRM -- then it's utterly worthless.

That's a foolish thing to say. Most users have binary blobs, and still manage to get worth out of their devices.

On the other hand, what it is IMO is completely uninteresting, because we already have multiple options which have binary blobs, like Raspberry Pi or Pine A64+. (Banana Pi is an unreliable POS, or I would have mentioned it.)

Re: Does it have any binary blobs?

[ISayWeOnlyToBePolite]

AFAIK you can use it as headless server with free software only right now with a bit of google fu. There is a guy balbes150 (on cnx and armbian etc), who works for a company I've forgotten the name of that is bringing s905 and s905x support to the mainline kernel. He has a presentation of his efforts somwhere on youtube.

Re:Why do they all have a wifi attack vector now?

[slashrio]

Coz big guv wants to know what you're doing?
Why don't you just disable wifi in the settings.

Re:What?

[slashrio]

At least it's something that keeps you off the street.

No x265 support

[BenJeremy]

These are surplus s905 chips that nobody wants to use anymore, as they've move on to updated SoCs with x265 support.

Still, this might be slick to build a MAME tabletop arcade box.

Why is 4k video important?

[caseih]

It amuses me how all these SBCs advertize decoding high definition video. Of all the things I can think of to do with a Pi--robotics, remote sensing, UAVs, etc--decoding video is just not on my radar. Besides that I tried using a Pi once for a XBMC/Kodi box and found the experience to be lacking. 1080p video did play just fine most of the time until something crashed.

These devices can be used for amazingly cool projects. But I suspect 90% of them end up in the bottoms of drawers. I've got 4 in a drawer myself, waiting for time to use them in some cool project some day. In the meantime another more powerful one comes along.

Can anyone tell me if this board or any board (BBB maybe?) contains power management, such as suspend and resume, power on or wake on a schedule, etc? For remote sensing that is really what I need.

Re:Why is 4k video important?

[tannhaus]

I've got a raspberry pi3 plugged into an Xbox One TV Tuner running TVHeadend. It records all my tv shows for me onto my Western Digital Mycloud. I can watch them from any phone, tablet or TV in the house. I don't have it cutting out the commercials because it would bog it down so much...

Re:Why is 4k video important?

[thegarbz]

Besides that I tried using a Pi once for a XBMC/Kodi box and found the experience to be lacking. 1080p video did play just fine most of the time until something crashed.

You found it lacking and your complaining about companies attempting to improve those problems where it's lacking?
Crashing? How did you crash a Raspberry pi running Kodi? There's a lot of ways to describe it, but unstable isn't one of them, and while the original RPi was a tad slow on the interface subsequent ones made them almost the perfect media centres.

So here's a question: Why are they lying in a drawer? Because they were not suitable for your purposes? Why then complain that competition is driving an improvement in the hardware?

Personally I have 3 in service and 0 in a drawer.

Re:Why is 4k video important?

[Striktarn]

There are so many SBCs out there today. I wish there was at least _one_ that ran fully free software as defined by the FSF but I guess it is not a big deal for people.(https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/single-board-computers)

Re:Why is 4k video important?

[John Bokma]

On very rare occasions, in the past, a movie could indeed crash the player on a Pi. Haven't seen this for a year or two, though.

Re:Why do they all have a wifi attack vector now?

[mrchaotica]

How can you ever trust that it's really disabled?

Trademark infringement

[DrXym]

"It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see if it pays off for 'em"

Re: Why do they all have a wifi attack vector now?

[Zero__Kelvin]

It doesn't have a "WiFi Attack Vector" ... A phrase you clearly choose to sound like you are a security expert. Of course if you were, you'd know how to blacklist the driver if you didn't want the "Attack Vector".

Re: Why do they all have a wifi attack vector now?

[Zero__Kelvin]

Somebody should create some kind of OS where you have all the source code!

Re: Why do they all have a wifi attack vector now?

[Zero__Kelvin]

This is hilarious actually. Every anti Linux person spouts the myth that WiFi never works. Now we are hearing people worry that it will spontaneously work even without a driver loaded. So precious.

Re:how much for a horse whip mount

[darthsilun]

SATA is old and dead in 2017

emmc and PCIe are the interfaces of the present

why not just mount it via NFS

NFS on a 100baseT on the USB bus and a slow chipset. yeahrite.

over a PPP connection

you're a funny dude. First you tell me that SATA is old and dead in 2017, then suggest using PPP. I haven't used PPP since around 1994 on a 56K modem. Sure, PCIe would be nice, but it's even more expensive than SATA. We're already not getting SATA, so I'd wager getting PCIe is even further behind.

Hardware great! support sucks

[petes_PoV]

The hardware side of all these Pi "clones" is fantastic. They blow past the original Raspberry version all the time. There are varieties that are smaller, cheaper, more powerful, more innovative, more features.

However their operating systems and general support are awful. What little information is available is usually only made known by amateurs who's interest waxes and wanes, The operating systems are largely undocumented, old, and hit'n'miss as to whether they will work on any particular board - and frequently don't have features like SPI implemented, (Although part of this is due to the system config file and its vagaries.)

If the hardware manufacturers put half the development skill into the software as they do into the hardware, they would dominate the world and leave the RPi crushed into a stain on the rug. It is only the support, forums, and large amount of "how to" information that keeps the RaspberryPi viable. If the others ever caught up, the RPi would cease to exist.

Re: Why do they all have a wifi attack vector now?

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Why would WiFi need a *Linux* driver loaded to work? You can always arrange for it to work (in itself) regardless of the OS. In fact, it you're manufacturing "spyable" hardware, you practically have to. What if you want it to work even when the machine appears to be turned off, for example?

That still doesn't mean it will work for *you*, anyway. ;)

Good old days?

[DontBeAMoran]

Are we returning to the good old days of computing, where there was more than two or three main platforms? Remember the days of MS-DOS, Mac, Amiga, Atari ST, TRS-80, C64, etc? The more fragmented the world because, the harder it becomes for viruses and all that crap to migrate and grow.

Desktop?

[JimSadler]

How far away is such a device from becoming able to be a good desktop PC from non gamer types of users?

Re:Why do they all have a wifi attack vector now?

[ceoyoyo]

Soldering iron?

Still no SATA

[JustNiz]

Still waiting for the day when someone finally releases one of these small computers with SATA interfaces so I can make my own NAS.

Re:Still no SATA

[JustNiz]

No, its Sata is only one channel (no good for say a 4channel NAS). Also its connected via the USB bus so performance is VERY slow.

Re: Still no SATA

[JustNiz]

You need to purchase a cubietruck then that only gives you a single sata2. I need 4 SATA3s for a 4 bay nas.

Re:how much for a horse whip mount

[rickyslashdot]

on SATA - I believe that the majority of the external USB spinning rust consists of a generic SATA drive coupled thru a SATA-to-USB interace.
What I'd really like to see is one of these SBC's with a generic SATA connection along with a set of USB ports so that I could have a chance of recovering the data from old external USB drives.
Someone is going to make a small fortune designing and configuring one of the SBC's for this specific application . . .

Break open the 'dead' external USB drive box, connect the appropriate cable to your SBC, plug in to the USB port for your desktop link, and BINGO - the dead drive can now be copied out to another storage location.

MANY of the external USB failures are because the interface has failed, and replacing that with a generic SBC link, plus appropriate power to the drive and platter, will allow you to recover most, if not all, of the data from the 'dead' external USB drive.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you could always cannibalize a working USB drive for its interface, but that means taking down a working drive on the off-chance that the interface is compatible - not the best solution.

AND there is the issue of compatibility between various interface cards - - - but that is the purpose of using a SBC for the interface - configurable software packages for each type of SATA-to-USB configuration.

cheers . . .