Xunlong Orange Pi Plus 2E

= Identification = The PCB has the following silkscreened on it: Orange Pi Plus 2E V1.1

= Sunxi support =

Current status
The H3 and Orange Pi support is progressing nicely. It is possible to find a usable mainline 4.x kernel (plus some patches) and a legacy 3.4 kernel in various work-in-progress git branches. See the Manual build section for more details.

Manual build
You can build things for yourself by following our Manual build howto and by choosing from the configurations available below.

Mainline U-Boot
Use the orangepi_pc build target (supported since v2016.01-rc2) unless an orangepi_plus_2e target is available.

It can boot from SD card, eMMC or via FEL. Only the initial basic functionality is implemented and there is still no Ethernet driver for H3 in U-Boot v2016.05 (it affects only u-boot functionality, device would work in linux as long kernel supports it).

Sunxi/Legacy Kernel
The 3.4 kernel from the official Allwinner's git repository does not support H3 yet. But it is possible to use one of the kernel forks, based on the lichee H3 SDK tarball:
 * Siarhei Siamashka's branch '20151207-embedded-lima-memtester-h3' at https://github.com/ssvb/linux-sunxi/tree/20151207-embedded-lima-memtester-h3
 * Yann Dirson's fork added a few more fixes and adopted most of Boris Lovosevic' great initial work on Allwinner's H3 kernel

In the meantime a newer H3 BSP variant appeared with tons of fixes which has been made available by FriendlyARM. A cleaned up fork has been adopted by Armbian project and can be found here. On top of that Armbian maintains a bunch of 3.4.x patches for H3 devices: https://github.com/igorpecovnik/lib/tree/master/patch/kernel/sun8i-default

Configure this kernel using sun8i_h3_defconfig, the rest is explained in the kernel compilation guide.

Use the xunlong_orange_pi_plus_2e.fex file for generating script.bin or Armbian's preliminary fex file for the Plus 2E containing performance/thermal fixes for dvfs_table and cooler_table.

When booting the legacy 3.4 kernel with mainline U-Boot, add the following line to boot.cmd:

setenv machid 1029 setenv bootm_boot_mode sec

Mainline kernel
Since all H3 based Orange Pi are more or less similar please have a look at the current state for Orange Pi PC instead.

= Tips, Tricks, Caveats =

FEL mode
The FEL button between microphone and UART header triggers FEL mode.

Compatibility
The Plus 2E is somehow a hybrid between Orange Pi PC and Orange Pi Plus 2. It shares the USB setup with the PC (not using an internal USB hub and no USB-to-SATA bridge) and exposes all 3 USB hosts ports as well as the USB OTG directly on USB receptacles without the need to share bandwidth. And with the Plus 2 it shares type/amount of DRAM and onboard eMMC storage, Gigabit Ethernet and the board size. Like all larger Orange Pi boards the SY8106A voltage regulator is used allowing fine grained control of the VDD_CPUX core voltage.

Regarding software compatiblity all that's needed are slight modifications to fex file or device tree (using USB stuff from PC and Ethernet from Plus/Plus 2) and then every available H3 OS image can be used. The eMMC is already populated with Android.

Like on Orange Pi PC Plus and Orange Pi Lite the formerly used 8189ETV WiFi module has been replaced with an onboard 8189FTV solution. The available driver has to be build differently, needs some fixes and shows currently the behaviour that it chooses a different MAC address on every reboot.

DRAM clock speed limit
DRAM is clocked at 672 MHz by the hardware vendor. But the reliability still needs to be verified. One of the ways of doing reliability tests may be https://github.com/ssvb/lima-memtester/releases/tag/20151207-orange-pi-pc-fel-test (developed for Orange Pi PC). An adoption of this using fex files suited for Orange Pi Plus 2E is available here (md5sum: ca8b910a5f60bbd11781423e8ade59fd fel-boot-lima-memtester-on-orange-pi-h3-v3.tar.bz2). Use the fel-boot-lima-memtester-on-orange-pi-plus-2e script inside.

Since the board features an Android populated eMMC the procedure to run lima-memtester through FEL is as follows: eject SD card, connect OTG cable to your host, press the FEL button, then provide power through barrel plug or GPIO pins, then start the fel-boot-lima-memtester-on-orange-pi-plus-2e on your host. Most probably lima-memtester will continue to run when you cut DC-IN since after the board has been powered on it can also use 5V provided through OTG port.

Orientation of the GPIO header
Xunlong chose to rotate the 40 pin GPIO connector by 180° so RPi HATs can still be used but will project over the board in the opposite direction than intended. Keep this also in mind when you want to power the board through GPIO pins 2/4/6 (2/4 being connected directly with DC-IN and 6 being GND)

= Adding a serial port =



The UART header is between FEL and power button. Just attach some leads according to our UART howto.

= Pictures =

Please note that the board is sold without heatsink. This is just the tester's standard heatsink for all H3 boards now.

= Variants =
 * Named almost similar the more expensive Orange Pi Plus 2 is rather different due to another USB setup (using a slow onboard USB-to-SATA bridge and an internal USB hub leading to shared USB bandwidth) and an older WiFi implementation (RTL8189ETV instead of RTL8189FTV now used)

= References =

= See also =