Xunlong Orange Pi Zero

Orange Pi Zero is H2+ based development board produced by Xunlong.

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

= Sunxi support =

Current status
Unsupported but a preliminary Armbian legacy image with nearly full hardware support already exists. To discuss issues or look for tweaks see the respective thread in Armbian forum.

Mainline U-Boot
Just use the orangepi_one_defconfig until specific Zero support has materialized.

You can define CONFIG_SPL_SPI_SUNXI=y and CONFIG_SPL_SPI_FLASH_SUPPORT=y to get SPI flash support (if you have a chip soldered). If the U-Boot build boots (test by either writing u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin to a uSD card or booting via FEL), you can write this very image to the SPI flash to boot from there: $ sunxi-fel -v -p spiflash-write 0 u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin

Mainline kernel
Use the sun8i-h3-orangepi-one.dtb with an H3 enabled kernel.

= Expansion Port =

The Orange Pi Zero has a 26-pin, 0.1" unpopulated connector with several low-speed interfaces.

The Orange Pi Zero has another 13-pin, 0.1" header with several low-speed interfaces.

A cheap 'Expansion board' for this connector is now available exposing all interfaces (2 x USB, IR receiver, microphone and combined AV TRRS jack) and can be ordered together with the board on Aliexpress. Attention: Expect problems when using the Expansion board to connect more USB devices when you want to power the board through the Micro USB connector (known to cause all sorts of troubles). Voltage drops affecting stability are likely to happen so better think about providing power through 5V/GND pins on the 26 pin header in this case.

= Tips, Tricks, Caveats =

Compatibility
The H2+ SoC used on this board seems to be a featureless H3 (no Gbit Ethernet MAC and no 4K HDMI output). Orange Pi Zero uses the same SY8113B (datasheet) voltage regulator as used on Orange Pi One/Lite that can adjust its output voltage driven by two resistors between 1.1V and 1.3V. DVFS configuration and settings for Orange Pi One/Lite work exactly the same on OPi Zero.

It should be noted that the official OS images from orangepi.org currently use broken settings leading to VDD_CPUX voltage remaining at 1.3V all the time and leading to unnecessary overheating (see here for details).



Powering the board
Orange Pi Zero unlike all other Orange Pi boards so far can be powered through the Micro USB jack (being a normal USB OTG port otherwise) or the pin headers (2/4/6 on the 'RPi header' or pins 1/2 on the 13 pin header). The board also provides a PoE (Power over Ethernet) option since Ethernet pins 4/5 and 7/8 are routed to solder pads (see picture on the right and below in gallery). By soldering zero ohm resistors passive PoE providing 5V could be used which won't work over large distances since cable resistance is too high. But of course it's also possible to solder a buck converter in between so that passive PoE with the typical voltages (24V or 48V) can be used.

Of course also an 802.3af compliant active PoE converter could be soldered in between (works only with 802.3af mode B) and it's also possible to use an Orange Pi Zero as PoE injector (both passive or active).

SPI NOR flash
Xunlong has been asked to add support for Bootable SPI flash and while Orange Pi PC 2 comes already with SPI NOR flash soldered it's optional on Orange Pi Zero (see lower PCB side). We can only hope that once we get software support ready for this Xunlong will also solder at least 8 Mb (1 MB) flash by default since then the bootloader could be stored there so not even an SD card would ne needed to use these boards (booting from network or USB storage).

WiFi
On OPi Zero PG10 pin seems to be used to implement WoWLAN. XR819 module contains an own ARM core and iw list when used with Allwinner's BSP driver mentions: WoWLAN support: * wake up on anything (device continues operating normally) * wake up on disconnect



Locating the UART
The UART pins are located next to Ethernet jack on the board. They are marked as TX, RX and GND on the PCB. Just attach some leads according to our UART Howto.

LEDs
The board has two LEDs next to DRAM:
 * A red LED, connected to the PA17 pin.
 * A green LED, connected to the PL10 pin.

Note: All other H3 devices currently supported connect the red led to PA15 pin so in case you want to toggle led status in u-boot pretty early OPi Zero needs special treatment.

= Pictures =

= Variants =

= Also known as =

= See also =


 * Xunlong Orange Pi site
 * Official Github Repository.
 * Official Orange Pi Forums.
 * Orange Pi Zero Schematics 1.1

Manufacturer images
= References =