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Comment by rubatuga | Hacker News Reader

I could see this costing $30, but $49 is quite a stretch. What are your main advantages over Orange Pi Zero [1] which costs $8.49? I can only see the DDR3 rated to -25 and the secure enclave.

1. http://www.orangepi.org/orangepizero/

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The Orange and Nano Pis are not FCC-certified, so they're not likely to be integrated into any product sold in the United States, at least legally-speaking, assuming the manufacturer doesn't want to be fined. Orange pretends to be certified[1] (the PDF is named FCCCERTIFICATION), but it's mere verification (now called Supplier's Declaration of Conformity, or SDoC), and SDoC is not the same as certification[2].

If a manufacturer were to use the on-board wireless they could be heavily fined. Certification for these boards would cost around $15k, significantly increasing the price of an integrated product.

At least FriendlyElec doesn't pretend to have gotten their boards certified.

[1] http://www.orangepi.org/download/FCCCERTIFICATION.pdf

[2] https://www.fcc.gov/general/equipment-authorization-procedur...

I can't speak to pretending or not, but at the bottom of this NanoPi/FriendlyElec page, there are very similar looking pdfs for fcc, rohs, and ce.

http://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&p...

Thank you. I couldn't find that with a Google site search[1]. But yes, that's not full certification.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=fcc+site%3Afriendlyarm.com&r...

I've always wondered where the line is on a product's FCC certification. Obviously US retailers such as Adafruit and Sparkfun have sold fully assembled unlicensed radio equipment for over a decade. What subtle changes could these companies make with their products that would suddenly gain the interest of the FCC?

Do you have an example? SparkFun even has a blog entry about certification that's a useful read, although not entirely accurate. https://www.sparkfun.com/tutorials/398

thanks, thats an interesting link.

That said, a manufacturer could still use an Orange or Nano Pi to integrate. Simply disable the onboard Wi-Fi and include a certified USB Wi-Fi adapter.

Apart from temperature range and secure chip which you already mentioned there is also a 8GB eMMC, different processor (H2->H5), more RAM, more peripherals available. Neutis is not competing with Orange Pi as the applications are different, it is meant to be a part of a product, so it has all peripherals available on board-to-board connectors.

But you are marketing this to "Makers". The Orange Pi, Raspberry Pi, and other single board computers, are maker-friendly, because of their adherence to the standard of 0.1" headers, USB or wall wart power, and a large community of users to drive support and development.

Makers largely don't care about import duties to China, or FCC certifications, or manufacturing tools, or barcodes, or Yocto, or secure enclave chips. Just give us the hardware in an easy to use, all in one form factor, with good drivers and support.

> But you are marketing this to "Makers".

I don't get that from their page at all. At minimum, it seems like they're marketing it to "Makers" who are trying to make an actual product, at which point they do have to care.

There is also the Nano Pi Neo 2 [1]. $18 for Allwinner H5, 512MB RAM, Gigabit Ethernet.

Haven't used the Neo2 yet. But its predecessor, Nano Pi Neo is $10, has excellent Armbian support, and is on par with a RPi3.

[1] http://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&p...

I have a Neo2 seedbox. It runs great. Rock solid. Pulls 900mb/second over gbe. Barely hits 5% cpu running dozens of torrents, over a VPN it handles, saving everything over NFS. Size of a damn oreo. The OLED kit is great. Easy library and you can write text or 1bpp images to it. Refresh rate 0.3Hz is a bit annoying but it looks cool as hell. Nice undocumented feature: the microusb and full-size usb ports have the +5v and ground wires bridged, so you can power it from an A-A cable. I like this because the A cable is the same side as the ethernet and looks cleaner. [1]

1: http://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&p...

Orange Pi is also one and a half times larger

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