Orange Pi PC

After a not so good experience with the Orange Pi One, their simplest board, I decided to try their more direct clone. And it did work out a bit better in some ways.

I burned a Rasbian clone from their website, and basically that worked fine, and the machine booted up right away. but it did boot up in 720p rather than 1080p and I had problems finding a way to fix that but no matter.

The Rasbian on board seems to be a copy of the Banana Pi version, which in turn is a copy of the Rasbian version, it even included the BC-Host.h files. which are useless on a Mali based system.

Wifi also does not get recognised, I tried 2 Pi compatible dongles but non of them worked, no matter, the wired networked worked fine and connected to my Windows PC no problem, but clearly no update and having to use SSH to send libs is a bit tedious.

Overall the Rasbian is a bit buggy, with window movement being a bit flakey so trying to use it for anything serious that works on the Raspberry is likely to be a disappointment.

One thing to take note of was how hot this board runs, it really kicks out some heat from the CPU, probably still within its safe limits but considering I did nothing more than boot up a low res OS and test connectivity which did not register as any form of stress on the taskmanger, I'd hate to think what temp it gets to when its run under stress.  A small investment in a heat sink might be a good idea.

Software support is.....almost non existent, there is a dedicated but very small group of enthusiasts working on porting various OS's and some media players, but not much more than that.
However for simply testing out my projects it should all be fine

It also has to be said, this is a very very nippy machine, that over-clocked and hot CPU has a lot of horsepower which I am looking forward to testing.

We'll soon find out ;)