New Orange Pi Zero LTS Development Board Hits the Market for Cheap

Orange Pi has released their new Pi Zero LTS development board outfitted with an Allwinner H2+ SoC. If that sounds familiar, you are not wrong; the Zero LTS features the same SoC and hardware as the Orange Pi Zero, only the company claims the new board consumes less power and reduced thermals. Make no mistake, using less energy and less heat production are good selling points, especially for those who do not own the original Zero.

On the hardware end, the Orange Pi Zero LTS is based on an Allwinner H2+ SoC with quad-core Cortex-A7 processor with 256Mb or 512Mb of DDR3–1866 SDRAM, SPI Flash, and Mali-400MP2 GPU. It packs a micro SD card slot, 10/100 Ethernet port with PoE (default off), Allwinner XR819 module with 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi with u.FL antenna connector and external antenna, USB 2.0 port, and micro USB port. Expansion includes an unpopulated 26-pin GPIO header compatible with the Raspberry Pi and a 13-pin header with headphone, two USB 2.0, TV-out, microphone and IR receiver. There’s also a three-pin header for console/debugging applications, a pair of LEDs, and power supplied via micro USB port or PoE.

As for software, Orange Pi offers Debian, Ubuntu, Raspbian, Android 4.2/7.0, and OpenWRT images, although they are under the Orange Pi Zero category on the company’s download page. It should be noted at this point that Orange Pi does not provide any explanation on exactly how they improved the power consumption and heat reduction, it’s likely they lowered the SoCs voltage, which would also reduce its performance. That said, the Orange Pi Zero LTS is available now on AliExpress for $8.49 (256Mb version), and $10.49 (512Mb version), respectively.