Yep, I have had the “Orange Pi Zero” in my lab for a few hours, and a colleague had the “Orange Pi One” - an he had basically same experience.
Spent a few hours realizing:
[ul]Due to promising a board running too many GigaHertz it was fed with too high voltage to overclock it
The above leads to excessive over-heating after only 5-10 minutes, and the board being unresponsive or rebooting
The wifi-chip does not have a decent driver. which means that my primary purpose of using the board as lost
The forums related to the board was full of people complaining about wrong specifications, unstable operations, missing drivers and no support
no examples for many simple applications (like using the microphone, or even use of GPIO)[/ul]
I am guessing it would be possible to get the board running decently, equipping it with a heatsink, adjusting some kernel parameters and recompiling the kernel, participating in the driver projects to push it forward and downgrade your wifi access point to an old standard…
Please note this is solely my own personal opinion.
so it’s simple to get working with an Android image, that was totally a no brainer. The only gotcha was that it seemed it wouldn’t proceed with initial setup unless it actually had a USB keyboard attached, the normal “tablet” keyboard didn’t seem to allow setup to continue. After that though, it would boot fine without the keyboard attached. The screamer of a fan is, well, a tad noisy, and certainly would preclude it for “full time” use as a tablet replacement, and probably needs some time with a PWM controller / temperature feedback loop
Just got back from a short work trip to Singapore to find my nice new shiny M3 sitting waiting for me. The camera worked straight away in Android. Just waiting for some boxes to arrive from Japan and then I can start on my door monitoring system in Android.
The fan on both of the boards I have here is not that noisy though.
Need to power the board via the GPIO pins as the PC doesn’t supply enough via the Micro USB when debugging Android apps.
I don’t have much experience with armbian and can’t comment how that os compatible with oranges. But as i see most problems on your list related to the armbian, but not hardware. I do not work directly with that hardware, but we are using some model of oranges as bridges from wired to wireless network, in 24/7 environment and i don’t know any problems with them. I know people using them in another 2 projects, one project related to electrical equipment and as i know they don’t have much problems too. Also i’m following facebook and users posting there many working projects done on oranges. Seems that everyone have own experiences
