Xunlong Orange Pi Plus 2E

Orange Pi Plus 2E is a development board produced by Xunlong, based on the H3 SoC. It comes with 2GB of DDR3, integrated 16GB eMMC, and gigabit ethernet. It is very similar to Orange Pi Plus 2, but comes with a newer RTL8189FTV implementation of WiFi and three USB ports with full USB2 bandwidth, but without an onboard SATA bridge,

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

= Expansion Port =



The Orange Pi Plus 2E has a Raspberry Pi model B+ compatible 40-pin, 0.1" connector with several low-speed interfaces.

= 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 the fex file (using USB stuff from PC and Ethernet from Plus/Plus 2) when using legacy kernels. Mainline kernel and U-Boot directly support this board. The board comes with the eMMC 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 =

Locating the UART


The UART header is between FEL and power button (simplified layout: ..MIC.. [TX][RX][GND] ..DC-IN..). 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 =


 * Orangepi-plus-2e-v1_1-schematic.pdf