Orange Pi Zero 2W Expansion Board, 24Pin Connector Interface Board for OPi Zero 2W Development Mini PC Board Single Board Computer (Zero 2W EB)

A lot of reviews had me believing I couldn't access this without a mini HDMI to HDMI adapter or cable. However that's just not the case. USB serial adapter gets you direct serial console. After you have serial console you can connect wifi easily with nmcli and from there you will find ssh already running. Connect to the device and use it. I went as far as tigervnc install inside the orange-pi arch image. As for the Mali GPU you will need to do a bit of reading to figure out what bit to flip and how. All in all the documentation isn't wonderful but it's thorough. The unit performs well this far during testing. Was good value in my book. Support is lacking . All and all a very versatile and powerful sbc.

I really like this board. There is a lot that can be done with it. I will note that all the OS are not maintained. You can get a diet pi os to kinda work, lets just say that I have not been able to get a lot of their provided OS systems working. Any sudo update will render a lot of errors and out of date packages. You’re going to have to fiddle around with repos if logs bug you. That being said. It makes a great little headless server. Maybe run tiny llama on it for some projects. I got mine for $35-40 and i think that’s is the best value. Anything over that price point is inflated and not really worth it. “To me” I rather spend extra money on an SBC with better specs at that point.

I purchased this expansion board solely for the PWR button feature. Unfortunately when you connect the expansion board, the PWR button only performed a Hard Shutdown. Not good. Apparently there is several software packages that need to be installed and configured. I guess that Raspberry Pi spoiled me in this area. The ethernet adapter did work perfectly fine.

I got the expansion board to go with an OrangePi Z2W I already owned. Cheaper than adding USB peripherals to get basic ethernet (10/100 FE) , additional USB, IR, and buttons to the base board. Works perfect with the official OrangePi Debian images. Not with the Armbian Trixie image. Its likely I could have gotten it to work with some custom edits to the armbianEnv.txt file but I opted to go with the older Bookworm official image. Customs (Agriculture division) did decide to apparently open it before it landed in the Amazon warehouse due to the word "orange" on the box. No fault of Amazon, thats how they got it.

Perfect for Makers. This is your Swiss Army knife. A handy little controller, these are perfect for just about everything as long as it's not compute intensive. Whether you want to control a robot or automatically water some plants or even run a low traffic web server. This board can do it all! It can even -- although just barely -- play a YouTube video. I have about half a dozen of these... I love that I can install Debian on them, plug in a monitor, and do my development work right on the board. it's a full blown desktop computer! Do you just need email and word processing? This can actually do it for a fraction of the cost of a ~real computer~. I tried using/programming an ESP32 and it was a pain.... For an extra $5 to $10 bucks you can get a flexible easy to use and a hugely more powerful system. The Docs could be better it took some effort to track down the info needed to directly control the I/O from asm64. But if you are using Python or C it comes with a pre-configured library so that should be simple. Hint: Instead of getting the Orange PI Expansion Board, just get a hub with a type C interface. It runs faster and is a lot more flexible. Another hint: An LED status monitor is really helpful and also fun to make a light show.... I have tried several different models of them and this is the one that I like the best: Ultra-Small RPi GPIO Status LED & Terminal Block Breakout Board Module for Raspberry Pi

I was looking for an alternative to a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 board for a hobby project and was excited to see this board come out recently. It has failed to work in pretty much all respects. First, I prepped the SD Card image even using the exact brand they tell you to use due to compatibility problems. A red power LED comes up, but no output to the screen. Changed out my HDMI cable and still nothing. Tried a third time and finally got a boot display. Unfortunately, the mouse and keyboard connected to the second port are never powered up by the system so it's unusable. Power off and swap ports and then adapters. Next I even reformatted the SD card from scratch. The system never booted again but still shows it's powered. Clearly a problem if all these fixes don't solve the issue. To make matters worse, when you try to go to their forum page to find other similar issues, the forum board is completely overrun with spambots, completely pushing out any legitimate posts. If you can't run proper forum measures for this in 2023, it's probably a sign of larger issues. I had high hopes, but it needs to go back as defective as it just will not work. Between this and the forum I have little hopes for a working solution any time soon.

I really wanted to use this pi to run Kali ARM however the Pi Zero 2 W release from Kali is NOT compatible with this chip, an issue you will run into with every single OrangePi. The hardware on these chips is different than a standard pi, which is why they're appealing. This is why I only rated 3 stars. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the hardware, it's fantastic, it's very powerful and capable for its size. As for the issue with finding a working OS, under OrangePi's downloads section you can find third party distro's that work exceptionally well. Personally I'm using the RPi version downloaded from the link of third party OS on the OrangePi website and it works perfectly on the base board. I suspect any hats I want to use will require a custom driver kernel which is fine for me, probably not feasible for the average DIY'er that just wants an easy project. Armbian also works VERY well on these, if you don't need a GUI I highly recommend using the Debian 12 bookworm Armbian release.

I have used multiple different SBCs over the years, back to the original Raspberry Pi. The Orange Pi boards have always been a great value and are well documented. This board is great because it's more powerful overall compared to the Pi Zero. I built a small linux system with the board, and it runs perfectly with the image provided by Orange Pi. Coupled with a good SD card, it is responsive and boots fast. I added heatsinks to the board because it needed passive cooling, but its easy to add a fan to the GPIO pins.