The Orange Pi Zero 3 | Hacker News Reader

The Orange Pi Zero 3

taoofmac.com

25 pointsrcarmo5 comments

Very fitting, as I just ordered one the other day.

Price point in the $25-35 range is very tempting for projects where the newer Raspberry Pi's are just too expensive. I'd rather pick up a N100-based thing or one of those refurbished mini PC's if I need more CPU/RAM/storage etc, and while the Zero 2 is cheap it lacks physical Ethernet port and has only 512MB of RAM.

As such these feel more like the Raspberry Pi 3 successors I've been missing. Tradeoff is they require more fiddling like the article mentions.

Call me ignorant, but I am extremely put off by products that blatantly rip off naming schemes and essentially position themselves as a copy of another product. Granted, "Orange" went through a number of itereation and is now less similar to the product it originally copied.

From the article: "Like many, it is let down by its software support..."

Well yes, no news. This was always the strength of the original Rapsberry Pi and is the reason why most of the impulse-bought copied products end up in the parts bin.

Imitation is the truest form of flattery...

For this product: what's up with that 4GB RAM in such a small / cheap SBC that's rather sparse in connectivity & storage options?

For deeply embedded uses, uC board like RPi Pico seems more appropiate. Or go wild & do similar things with GPU-included, 256/512MB boards like RPi Zero.

For a tiny desktop machine: sure, but if you need an add-on connector board to be useful, wouldn't a compute module + carrier board be more appropiate? Or a slightly bigger board with more connectors?

Maybe this is targeted at specific application(s) that need gobs of RAM but not much else?

Or is 4GB RAM that cheap these days that manufacturer included it anyway?

To be fair, they have 1GB, 1.5GB and 2GB models, with prices to match. I picked up the 2GB model which should be plenty for what I want to use it for.

my guess, as spelled out after the BOM, is that this is actually a re-purposed Android TV box design. Taking out the EMMC and replacing it with TF/SD would be simple, and the RAM is handy in those situations.

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