Raspberry Pi's Smaller, Cheaper Rival: NanoPi Neo Plus2 Weighs in at $25 (zdnet.com)

FriendlyARM, the maker of compact NanoPi developer boards, has released the NanoPi Neo Plus2 for $25. From a report: This board is an update to the recently released NanoPi Neo 2, a $15 cookie-sized developer board measuring 40mm x 40mm (1.6in) with a 64-bit Allwinner H5 processor, 512MB RAM, and one USB port. The NanoPi Neo Plus2 is slightly larger at 52mm x 40mm (2in x 1.6in) and has two USB ports. It has the same H5 quad-core A53 ARM Cortex processor, but comes with 1GB RAM and 8GB eMMC storage. The NeoPlus2's storage in addition to Gigabit Ethernet puts it ahead of the Raspberry Pi 3 on paper, and at $25 undercuts the better-known board by $10.

Comments

Allwinner. Nope.

[0100010001010011]

I have way too many cheap development boards floating around my house. The only truly useless ones are the Allwinners. uBoot is a non-standard locked down version with no source available. The Linux kernel is a custom version with no source available.

While Broadcom isn't exactly great, the RaspPi's success as pushed them into opening some things up and the RaspPi's community has the momentum behind it to keep it going. And my ~10 year old SheevaPlug with a Marvell chip is still going strong. Marvell went the exact opposite way of Allwinner and said "eh, screw it, here's everything" and has their code in the kernel mainline.

$10 is not worth the hassle of dealing with an Allwinner chip.

Re: Allwinner. Nope.

[John Allsup]

Exactly. I learned this with the OrangePi boards. And my 'kodi boxes' are retired in favour of Rpi2's (or pi3's, but pi3's slightly higher power needs are a annoyance so far as what USB sockets you can run them off).

Re:Allwinner. Nope.

[Lady Galadriel]

Agreed. Even though somethings about the Allwinner look good on paper, I prefer a product that is a bit more stable and well supported.

One other note, the Allwinner is from a Chinese source. I do not trust them yet to produce flawless products. (If Intel, AMD, Broadcom, and other western suppliers can't get things right, I doubt newer companies from China can do so.)

Re:Allwinner. Nope.

[makomk]

Huh? Most of the Allwinner boards will quite happily boot and run on 100% open source code these days, though the newer ones may require some patches that haven't been merged into the mainline kernel quite yet. (For instance, apparently Ethernet support for the H5 is planned for 4.13, HDMI is still stuck in mailing list hell, and support for the SoC itself requires 4.12 - fairly bleeding-edge stuff.) The same definitely isn't true of the Raspberry Pi, which requires a binary blob running on an undocumented CPU architecture to even boot the thing.

Re:Allwinner. Nope.

[MangoCats]

For $10, I'll take the HDMI port too, thanks. Not that I always use it, but just having it is a big plus.

I do like the smaller form factor, but Raspberry Pi3 is small enough that the accessories around it are usually bigger anyway.

Re:Allwinner. Nope.

[hughbar]

Thanks, saved me a post. I participate and help arrange (one) Pi Jam(s), apart from a certain (cough, cough) quantity of them in my house. The community is always going to make them win out, until something really, really spectacular in terms of spec and price point appears. But, even then.

Re:Allwinner. Nope.

[randomErr]

The Linux kernel is a custom version with no source available.

Huh?

The post was very self explanatory. They compile the kernel internally and drivers are all closed source. So yes the source for Debian and Ubuntu code is free (as in beer) but you will not be able to compile them and get the system running without the proprietary code. At best without the proprietary code you'll just be able to get a command line.

There has been very little support on these boards in the past beyond the community. So updates are slow and sporadic.

Re:Allwinner. Nope.

[0100010001010011]

Most of the Allwinner boards will quite happily boot and run on 100% open source code these days,

Awesome! Can you provide any instructions or links to make my CubieBoard 4 with Allwiner A80 not useless?

sunxi linux still lists most things as not supported and not worked on: http://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_m...

Under GPL violations they list:

As is usual, there are the libnand and libisp violations. But with A80, Allwinner decided to step this up a notch, or two, or all the way to 11.

I haven't checked recently but Ubuntu and Debian were both at least 1-2 versions out of date.

And that's putting aside the reset issues if you put it under any sort of load for over a few minutes.

Re:Allwinner. Nope.

[RabidReindeer]

In other words, there are additions and/or modifications to the source code used to generate the kernel that are not made public. Meaning that you cannot yourself generate a functional kernel for the unit using the standard open-source kernel processes. You therefore cannot customize the kernel for your special needs and you don't really have any way to know what possible nefarious activities it's up to.

Re:Allwinner. Nope.

[drinkypoo]

Not just that, but these specs are just stupid. Why would I need GigE if they're not going to give me SATA? What am I supposed to do with 512MB of RAM? The 1GB of the Pi already isn't enough.

I too have three different allwinner-based boards and all are suffering from the same lack of kernel mainlining. So they sit.

Re:Allwinner. Nope.

[makomk]

The A80 and A83T are, unfortunately, an exception. They're very different hardware-wise to the other Allwinner chips, there are few Pi-style hobbyist boards with them on (I think the CubieBoard 4 may be the only A80-based one out there actually), and what hardware does exist is very expensive. I know Allwinner have released source code to a lot of the stuff that's listed as GPL violations on the sunxi wiki, but even if they have released source for your board's drivers there's just not that much interest in them. Sorry. Most of the community effort seems to be focused on the much cheaper and more widely available H2/3/5-based boards like this one.

Re:Allwinner. Nope.

[swillden]

In other words, there are additions and/or modifications to the source code used to generate the kernel that are not made public. Meaning that you cannot yourself generate a functional kernel for the unit using the standard open-source kernel processes. You therefore cannot customize the kernel for your special needs and you don't really have any way to know what possible nefarious activities it's up to.

In that case, I find it very surprising that the FSF has not sued. They normally don't sue for violations of the GPL for non-GNU software, but they make an exception for Linux.

Re:Allwinner. Nope.

[Osgeld]

yep same, I have a couple allwinner boards, and they are stunningly useless

Re:Allwinner. Nope.

[drinkypoo]

I know Allwinner have released source code to a lot of the stuff that's listed as GPL violations on the sunxi wiki, but even if they have released source for your board's drivers there's just not that much interest in them. Sorry. Most of the community effort seems to be focused on the much cheaper and more widely available H2/3/5-based boards like this one.

That's moving the goalposts, maybe not on your part but on theirs. Allwinner promised up and down to do what has to be done to get the code mainlined. Until that happens, they're just liars and they can DIAF.

Re:Allwinner. Nope.

[TheRaven64]

They normally don't sue for violations of the GPL for non-GNU software

They don't sue for any software for which they do not own the copyright, because they would not have standing in court and the case would never make it to court.

but they make an exception for Linux

Really? And which court didn't throw this out without a hearing?

Re:Allwinner. Nope.

[thegreatbob]

Shall we, perhaps, present them this trophy? https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

Re:Allwinner. Nope.

[LiENUS]

Sue for what? There is nothing that says that the modifications are released under GPL.

Uh, the GPL says that the modifications are released under the GPL.

As long as the company is willing to provide the original source code without their modifications they are in the clear.

If they release modified binaries of GPL licensed code they must release the modified source

Re:Allwinner. Nope.

[Maury Markowitz]

And many of the features of the CPU, including the multimedia extensions, are not supported or only supported by specific software systems (one, IIRC). So in spite of some great performance numbers on paper, they generally perform far worse than the RPi at common multimedia tasks like recoding video.

Re:Allwinner. Nope.

[swillden]

In that case, I find it very surprising that the FSF has not sued.

Sue for what? There is nothing that says that the modifications are released under GPL. As long as the company is willing to provide the original source code without their modifications they are in the clear. They don't even need to publish it on a homepage, they could send it to you on a CD and charge you for the CD, stamps, and work spent on burning the CD.

You need to re-read the GPL. Or a summary of it. Or any discussion of it. Or, really, anything at all about it.

Re:Allwinner. Nope.

[swillden]

They normally don't sue for violations of the GPL for non-GNU software

They don't sue for any software for which they do not own the copyright, because they would not have standing in court and the case would never make it to court.

The FSF does own some contributions in Linux, and has sued over it. Cisco, for one.

Re:Allwinner. Nope.

[LiENUS]

They can publish the modifications (and I believe they already do)

OP claimed they did not need to release the modifications source at all

but they do not have to release source code of the binary blob that is embedded in the code.

Not neciscarily according to the guy whos name is on the kernel.
http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/gpl_modules.html/
http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Kernel/proprietary-kernel-modules.html/

A bit like Nvidia has a part open code that is perfectly readable, and a part that contains the binary blob (that is completely unreadable).

Nvidia releases a driver, not a modified kernel. Said binary blob has to be very careful which parts of hte kernel it twiddles

Re:Allwinner. Nope.

[LiENUS]

Closer to home - the Broadcom code for the Raspberry Pi.

Do you mean the code that has been open source for 3 years now? I do believe the broadcom blob also executes under the vpu not the cpu. It sets up hardware that calls the kernel/the kernel calls. Not code running under the kernel. Any actual modifications to the kernel must be gpl'd. You can't just pre-compile the parts you don't want to open source and never distribute them. This has been discussed to death at length.

Re: Allwinner. Nope.

[KGIII]

They are kinda close. You can release blobs that interact with the kernel, and even compile them together - so long as the blob doesn't modify the kernel directly. This was altered with GPLv3 and the Linux kernel is still GPLv2. You can shim, system call, and all sorts of stuff - and not release your code AND be in compliance with v2. This is not true with v3 and is a reason that the kernel is still GPLv2.

I am 99.81124% sure my understanding is correct. Namely, I have paid someone to tell me the differences and they are an actual lawyer. I had a good reason, at the time. It's a long story...

Re:Allwinner. Nope.

[byrtolet]

I have a working Orange Pi PC (Allwinder H3) I use it as a network backed USB mass storage device for time-shifting on my smart TV.

usb-otg - wokrs

gpios - work

infrared - works

It uses a custom 3.xx kernel, but the source is definitely available.

Re:Allwinner. Nope.

[Wolfrider]

> And that's putting aside the reset issues if you put it under any sort of load for over a few minutes

--That's probably a cooling issue. My Cubietruck came with a heatsink back in the day (Amazon kit) and I have uptimes on it of over 200 days...

Re:Allwinner. Nope.

[Wolfrider]

--FYI, the Cubietruck has GigE, 2GB of RAM and a SATA port. Works pretty well for squid proxy cache.

Again

[Anonymous Coward]

And again.. "RPI Rival!!! Cheaper and better!!" Community? Standard? Support? AllWinner? Upps!

Allwinner

[tonywestonuk]

Yes, they are a shit company.

BUT, they are also very, VERY cheep. In any case, most of the GPL violating stuff has been reversed engineered.

I run this as a home server - it works great.

https://www.aliexpress.com/sto...

Re: Allwinner

[John Allsup]

I tried an OrangePiLite. The WiFi was unsupported, the Ethernet port was removed to make way for it, and USB Ethernet and WiFi adapters I tried did not work with the Linux images supplied. Not worth the time given Rpi's work.

Re:Allwinner

[Ryelah]

Very "cheep"? Hmm. Marketing slogan: "Allwinner is for the birds!".

Re:Allwinner

[Opportunist]

How about the legality of the RE effort? I don't know about your country, in mine this might be legal but I'm not really in the mood nor the position to duke it out in a court.

Re:Allwinner

[codeButcher]

Reminds me of all those "Integrate RaPi with Twitter - feed temp to Twitter" type tutorials.

1GB RAM and 2 USB ports

[abainbridge]

It seems like the summary is wrong. Or at least it disagrees with this wiki page http://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wi...

Not one word that it doesn't have a display?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can get started on any Pi just by hooking up an HDMI monitor and USB keyboard/mouse. This is a serious hindrance to any beginner and an annoyance to anyone beyond that.

Re: Not one word that it doesn't have a display?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

The original purpose behind the Raspberry Pi is to give to kids to plug into the TV and start experimenting. I think replacing the display ports with a serial port might hinder this somewhat.

Re:Not one word that it doesn't have a display?!?

[silas_moeckel]

Just serial is fine, reducing power is a big win, replace the space with a wide range input DC that's efficient.

Re:Not one word that it doesn't have a display?!?

[Opportunist]

How about a completely novel, crazy idea: Let's create both. Or even better... you have the specs, right?

Re:Not one word that it doesn't have a display?!?

[Ol Olsoc]

I can get started on any Pi just by hooking up an HDMI monitor and USB keyboard/mouse. This is a serious hindrance to any beginner and an annoyance to anyone beyond that.

Accidentally marked an insightful post as flamebait so I'm posting to burn the mod point

Re:Not one word that it doesn't have a display?!?

[silas_moeckel]

You realize that the BCM chip is not open right?

Re: Where is the open source GPU driver for this?

[John Allsup]

You are very generous in assuming they give you good enough software for it to function. The OrangePi's taught me not to take this for granted.

It's a component, not a computer

[petes_PoV]

I have enough computers, thanks. I don't need any more. And if you need a $100 display + $5 mouse and $10 keyboard, then whether the single board computer costs $25 or $35 doesn't really matter.

My view of these (and I have used a few NanoPi Neo's) is that they are simply a part of a bigger project. Generally something that needs a WiFi connection, or audio / video / USB. They are just a step up from an Arduino.

Re:It's a component, not a computer

[bluefoxlucid]

I've been hoping for a Raspberry-Pi-like thing including a Snapdragon 850 with 8GB RAM. The Snapdragon 850 is ~$45, although some volume discounters have gotten it for $25-$30. That's 2.45GHz ARMv8-A with GPU, DSP, and 802.11a/b/g/n.

That's a nice place to start. With 8GB RAM and that much CPU, plus an M.2 or mSATA port, plus a SATA controller with 4 ports, you can actually build something like a viable FreeNAS box. You'll need a secondary PSU to drive hard disks; an SSD draws up to 5 watts, which is 1 amp at 5V or 42mA at 120V. USB 3.0 supplies only up to 1.5A at 5V at charging downstream, although the USB Power Delivery Revision specifies 20V at 5A or a maximum 100W.

The Pi 2 used up to 6.25 watts, and the Pi 3 uses up to 3.7 watts at peak; those Snapdragon 800-series can pull 8-10 watts at full load. That means 2A off a 5V USB or 0.5A off the 20V high-speed power delivery revision. Alternately, the engineers can just stick a DC power supply on there, and you use a wall wart that can give 12V at 5 amps or about 60W.

So the Pi is already based on a SOC. We're looking at a $45 SOC plus a $12 SATA controller. The PSU to carry all this power will cost you $5. That's up to $62 on top of the Pi 3 (at $40), but their SOC costs $25; you're looking at a $77 board.

With a 60W carry capacity, you can run a 5W M.2 main disk and four 5W Samsung 850 EVO 1TB SSDs all pulling peak at 25W, leaving 35W to run everything else.

Now you have a peak-power-usage of about 45W-50W for a NAS. Thing is those drives usually run 0.030W, maybe up to 1.5W during brief operations; and the CPU consumes approximately nothing when idle. You're going to average under 10W, under 88kWh/year.

It won't run your enterprise VMWare server farm. That's not to say you can't use this thing for 10Gbit/s iSCSI to a pretty active Web server (primarily reading!) or even a desktop OS, both of which would cache most reads. You can serve an NFS/SMB file share to hold your movies and music. Hell, in the enterprise, this could be your Gitlab and Owncloud server.

That's what I'm waiting for: getting the hard drives out of my desktop PC, getting the music collection off one PC or another, getting my non-cloud files somewhere that doesn't rely on a machine whirring loudly and chugging 50W just to idle. They're thinking too small with these boards.

Re:It's a component, not a computer

[Anonymous Coward]

In all honestly, what I'm looking for is an ARM board with RAM slots & SATA ports for expansion.

Re:It's a component, not a computer

[Anonymous Coward]

> Snapdragon 850

Is a mobile CPU, so it won't have Gigabit Ethernet, SATA ports, and likely no Gigabit Ethernet.

> They're thinking too small with these boards.

No, they're not. You're just expecting your ideal board to be talked about in the same circles as the Raspberry Pi, when it's in a completely different hardware class.

What you describe wanting sounds a lot like the Solidrun MACCHIATTObin: http://macchiatobin.net/

Just don't expect these features to come at a Raspberry Pi price. The MACCHIATTObin costs $349. You can buy the cheaper ESPRESSObin for $79, but you lose expandable RAM (2GB) and 10Gbit interfaces (3x1GBit).

Re:It's a component, not a computer

[erapert]

ODROID XU4 === $60

This guy built one for about $200 and claims he got over 80MB/s through SMB.
But it looks like that enclosure he bought ate up a huge chunk of that price. If you're willing to put all the parts into a leftover beigebox or a shoebox or something then you could probably get it all for less than $100 including the price of the ODROID XU4.

This guy did something similar but doesn't say how much he spent.

Re:Where is the open source GPU driver for this?

[makomk]

I believe the answer to this should be zero closed binaries. None. Nada. You'll need a bleeding-edge version of uboot and either Linux 4.13 or a patched version of 4.12 with the ethernet driver and board config backported, and I'm not sure when the Plus2 will be supported as it's just been announced, but in theory it should work with 100% open source code.

Re: Where is the open source GPU driver for this?

[MangoCats]

RTFA - no GPU, therefore no missing driver.

proof ?

[johnjones]

wait... the drivers are all closed source ? how does that work ?
(yes I know you can load binary drivers but it means they have to work hard to even make it work...)

can you point to the blobs ?

uboot certainly is better than the raspberry pi closed boot loader

again can you point to something rather than just making criticism ?

thanks

John

Re:proof ?

[johnjones]

so this contradicts your comments :

http://wiki.friendlyarm.com/wiki/index.php/NanoPi_NEO_Plus2

Re:proof ?

[Anonymous Coward]

no it doesn't.

Show me a link to the kernel source with all drivers without binaries.

Allwinner is a somewhat notorious GPL violator

quite

[johnjones]

the comments seem over the top and less informed...

uboot and patchs make it much much more open than the pi

Is "PI" not copyrighted

[wisnoskij]

This does not sound like it is an official PI product. Yet it is using the name. What is going on here?

On Paper?

[wisnoskij]

In my experience most of these boards are limited by their board speed. Many of the PI ports get significantly less bandwidth than they can handle normally, and even that is shared between the ports. It might be a gigabit port, but if it is similar to other single board computers it cannot utilize half of that.

Re:On Paper?

[drinkypoo]

It might be a gigabit port, but if it is similar to other single board computers it cannot utilize half of that.

Even the Sheevaplug can't meaningfully saturate its GigE link. But it's still nice to be able to pull 20MB/sec instead of 10MB/sec from a connected HDD, which is my use case. I'm using a Pogoplug V4 for convenience and the reduced CPU overhead of USB3, because the CPU overhead of USB2 on such limited hardware will punch it right in the breadbasket and I have the system doing some other simple jobs as well.

Re:On Paper?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pine A64 has a dedicated controller chip for the gigabit network. As a network Synology work-alike server, its fantastic

Re: Where is the open source GPU driver for this?

[c]

Yeah, no GPU. You need to use a USB-to-TTL adapter to bring them up the first time or you have to put in the effort in setting up the SD card to boot it headless.

Once they're up and running, NEO's are decent little units. Armbian installs painlessly.

A major problem with the NEO's is that their documentation and tools for using the GPIO's is, apparently, shit. I've got some NEO's, but I haven't tried to do anything with the GPIO's so it hasn't been a problem for me.

I would never pay $25 for one, though. At $10 each it's an attractive buy. At $25 it's worth the extra $10 to get the real thing.

Could the names be more confusing?

[DarthVain]

NanoPi Neo 2 VS NanoPi Neo Plus2

Can they not just call it something different, is it just me or do those name hurt your head, more so when trying to tell the difference between the two or which one is which... ugh.

Re:Could the names be more confusing?

[DontBeAMoran]

I'm waiting for the NanoPi Neo Plus 2 Mega v3 Mk5 Super.

Funny

[DontBeAMoran]

When people say "Macs suck" it's because they don't have the most powerful hardware components yet cost more than a PC. They keep a blind eye to the software side of the Mac.

But when it's time to talk about the Raspberry Pi and its competitors, hardware performance isn't everything and software support is more important than hardware speed, specifications or price.

Re: Funny

[Anonymous Coward]

No. People say that Macs suck because of the whole culture and that has grown up around Apple the company.

Jobs proudly proclaimed that the Mac was 'hacker proof' in 1984. And he meant the proper definition of hacker. It was a sealed box unit, difficult both physically and software wise to get into except by 'proper channels.' It was a 180 degree spin from the open Apple ][.

Re:Funny

[DontBeAMoran]

macOS is what makes a Mac. Their hardware is either the same as a PC or years behind yet still sold at insane prices.

A Hackintosh running macOS is a Mac, a real made-by-Apple computer running Windows/Linux is not a Mac anymore.

Re:Funny

[DontBeAMoran]

And yet our choices are either macOS which should be a lot better than it is right now (me and AC are talking about stability and reliability here, not how many freakin' features the OS has), Microsoft Windows 10 Spying Edition or Linux with no proper commercial software support (ex: Photoshop, etc).

Re: Funny

[Anonymous Coward]

If you think the Apple ][ was in any way "open", I'd like to introduce you to the Franklin line of Apple "clones". I had an Ace 500, and found far too many apps that didn't run like they did on the genuine Apple hardware, because of the things Apple did to keep anyone from duplicating that "open" system you talk about...

http://oldcomputers.net/ace500.html

Re: Funny

[Maury Markowitz]

> People say that Macs suck because of the whole culture and that
> has grown up around Apple the company.

I'd posit it's much safer to say that the people saying "macs suck" are a whole culture that has grown up around hating Apple the company.

I know lots of people that have one Apple product and have no emotional investment in the company. On the other hand, I don't know a single hater that isn't just hating because they're invested in being a hater.

Re:Funny

[Maury Markowitz]

> And yet our choices are either macOS which should be a lot better than it is right now

Yeah. 10.4 was good, and 10.5 kicked the crap out of everything on the market. But as I write this on my T431, I'm the first to agree that the delta is basically gone in Win10.

Actually, the only things that don't make me say Win10 has parity for most things is the terrible browser situation, and the email client. I know I can replace them both, but that's precisely the point, you have to.

The dev side is no different. When I got 10.5, Cocoa was way in front of .Net. Not so much now. And the IDE itself, no contest, VS passed Xcode years back (compile times alone, wow!)

Re:Funny

[drinkypoo]

A Hackintosh running macOS is a Mac, a real made-by-Apple computer running Windows/Linux is not a Mac anymore.

Both bollocks. A hackintosh is a hackintosh explicitly because it is not a mac. A mac says it's a mac right on it, or at least, in the sales literature.

Units of measurement

[Anonymous Coward]

"Cookie-sized"? So you mean 250 nanofootballfields.

"8GB eMMC storage" - how much is that in libraries of congress?

But it's still not a RaspberryPi

[CrazySpence]

The RaspberryPi community still trumps it for beginners. If you're not a beginner then it doesn't matter, choose what fits the job. I am glad there are lots of boards popping up all over the place, Choice is good but I am puzzled at the fact that there's so many allwinner SoC's running around but the drivers are still...questionable. You'd figure that would be sorted out by now.

Support schools?

[CoolCash]

Does nanopi make development software for schools? Do they donate their products? I am guessing no, this is one of the biggest reasons I support the Raspberry PI foundation. They make a great product, but also use their profits to help children learn to code.

Why Pi?

[crafoo]

BeagleBone is superior, and with better options, and a far better, technology-first web site. I honestly can't stand the white space and marketing trash pile of the Rasp Pi landing site.

Re:Why Pi?

[hackel]

Who gives a shit about the *design* of their friggin' website? Seriously...get your priorities straight!

Re:Cost?

[bugs2squash]

well a dollar is 0.77 pounds at the moment so 25 dollars is about 8750 grams

What version of Qt?

[RogueWarrior65]

Anyone know what version of Qt this runs?

Re:What version of Qt?

[hackel]

Whatever version you choose to compile/install, presumably.

Dear god, who came up with that name?!?

[hackel]

Dear god, who came up with that name?!?

Also, dollars are *not* a unit of weight, msmash.

will it run ArchLinux for ARM?

[0111 1110]

ArchlinuxARM doesn't list it under supported platforms but does that matter?