FriendlyARM NanoPi NEO & AIR

= Identification = Small, square board, blue soldermask, ⌀3mm mounting holes in the corners. USB type-A, Ethernet jack (with integrated magnetics) and four-pin header for UART/power near one of the edges, microSD and USB micro-B at opposite edge mounted on top side, 12 and 24 GPIO pin headers (not fitted, pads only) near other edges. Allwinner H3 and single DDR3 chip mounted on the bottom. Sticker indicating amount of RAM is placed on the Ethernet jack. Device can also be ordered without USB and Ethernet soldered (see gallery below)

On the top side of the board, next to USB A connector, the following is silkscreened: FRIENDLYARM NanoPi NEO

= Sunxi support =

Current status
The H3 and NanoPi NEO support is progressing nicely since NanoPi NEO shares nearly all hardware details with Orange Pi One. 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.

Detailled device information can be found on FriendlyArm wiki

Images
FriendlyARM's UbuntuCore with Qt-Embedded image can be found here. It boots a new variant of Allwinner's 3.4.39 BSP kernel, USB and Ethernet are working fine. A preliminary Armbian image for NEO based on 3.4.112 (not containing new IoT low power settings) can be found here.

BSP
FriendlyARM provides a BSP based on a newer Allwinner 3.4.39 variant on Github

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_one build target (supported since v2016.05) unless nanopi_neo target is available.

The boards can boot from SD card or via FEL. Only the initial basic functionality is implemented and there is still no Ethernet driver for H3 in U-Boot v2016.07 (it affects only u-boot functionality, device would work in linux as long kernel supports it).

Sunxi/Legacy Kernel
NanoPi NEO is just another H3 device sharing all pin mappings with Orange Pi One so please have a look there.

Mainline kernel
Since NanoPi NEO is more or less identical with Orange Pi One which shares most hardware details with Orange Pi PC please have a look at the current state for Orange Pi PC instead.

= Tips, Tricks, Caveats =

FEL mode
No FEL button. UBOOT/FEL signal pulled-up by R254 (10kΩ, mounted on the bottom side, close to H3).

LEDs
The board has two LEDs, mounted on the top side, between micro USB and microSD:
 * A red LED, labelled "PWR", connected to the PL10 pin and to 3.3V via weak pull-up, thus being able to represent three states:
 * full brightness when GPIO is set to output high
 * reduced brightness when GPIO is set to high impedance state
 * turned off when GPIO is set to output low.
 * A blue LED, labelled "STAT", connected to the PA10 pin.

Voltage regulators / heat
NanoPi NEO uses the same voltage regulator as NanoPi M1 and Orange Pi One/Lite switching between 1.1V and 1.3V (SY8113B datasheet). Unlike the Xunlong boards which contain a thick copper layer inside the PCB to spread heat away from the SoC FriendlyARM chose a different design. This and maybe the smaller PCB size lead to higher temperatures compared to Orange Pis and in case you want to operate the NEO under constant high load think about adding a heatsink (FriendlyARM provides one combined with a 2mm heat pad that can be securely mounted on the board -- see gallery images below.

U7 next to DRAM is an LDO voltage regulator that provides 1.2V for various SoC parts and 1.1V for the internal Ethernet PHY. It overheats a lot and is rated 500mA max. When ordering FriendlyARM's heatsink maybe combining it with a larger heatpad that covers the whole SBC's surface is a better option than now (using a small 15x15 heat pad that connects SoC with heat sink but decreases heat dissipation for all other SBC components this way).

DRAM
NanoPi NEO is available with 256 MiB or 512 MiB but only in single bank configuration.

DRAM is clocked at 432 MHz by the hardware vendor. User:Tkaiser did some consumption and thermal measurements just to find out that the board pretty fast deadlocks when running lima-memtester regardless of DRAM clockspeed (happens within minutes) but as soon as an annoying fan will be added to FriendlyARM's heatsink blowing also air between heatsink and SoC the board survives lima-memtester running at 600 MHz for several hours (board found powered off after increasing up to 672 from userspace after another hour). Since visual feedback is impossible on a board that lacks any display output we should consider 432 MHz to be a sane default since it both helps decreasing heat and consumption.

Based on User:Tkaiser's tests reducing DRAM clockspeed by 24 MHz more (with BSP kernel 408 MHz is the lowest allowed clockspeed) is even better since it does not affect performance that much (negligible according to tinymembench) but both temperature and consumption are lowered a lot by switching from 432 MHz to 408 MHz. Test results here and description of test setup there (using another sunxi board's AXP209 to do consumption measurements). BSP kernel boots happily with CONFIG_DRAM_CLK=408 and CONFIG_SYS_CLK_FREQ=480000000 set in u-boot 2016.07.

The single bank DRAM configuration is slower than dual bank configuration on all other H3 devices. Even more when taking the different DRAM clockspeeds into account. Using tinymembench and looking at standard memcpy numbers, the NEO clocked with 408 or 432 MHz shows ~435 MB/s while other H3 boards with dual bank DRAM clocked at 624 MHz reach ~900 MB/s (for more details see post #13 in this thread in Armbian forums). When using cpuminer then NEO clocked with 1200 MHz achieves 1.83/1.85833 khash/s with DRAM clocked at 408/432 MHz while an Orange Pi Lite with identical settings (HDMI/Mali disabled and also clocking at 1200 MHz) achieves 2.10867 khash/s with DRAM clocked at 624 MHz (that's a ~12 percent performance loss with this specific workload only due to different DRAM configuration and clockspeed)

USB
The one USB host port exposed as type A receptacle is usb3. Both usb1 and usb2 are available via solder holes.

= Locating the UART =



Four-pin UART0 header is placed next to USB type-A connector. Pinout: GND, 5V, TX, RX. Pin 1 (GND) is the one furthest from the board edge. Logic voltage is 3.3V. For more instructions refer to our UART Howto.

= Pictures =

= See also =


 * device page on FriendlyARM wiki page
 * Armbian forum thread
 * board schematic
 * board mechanical drawings (dxf)

Manufacturer images

 * Ubuntu-Core with Qt-Embedded: image, build instructions