If you want to use the external connector for WiFi you need to move the resistor from the internal antenna to the external one. There are two unoccupied pads nearby.
If MangoiPi's manufacturer offers more support, it's a nice alternative, but they don't do anything about it. I've been using it for a few weeks and it's giving me a headache. Also nice review thank you
Nice review. It seems the main connectivity difference is not the USB-C, but the misc connector instead of the MIPI-CSI connector. Would like to see this using a camera. I got one of these a few months ago and found also that the video output was unusable due to artifacts/tearing/corruption when trying to output 4K, so that's worth noting (it is okay at 1080P, but there there was a distracting amount of flicker with the mouse cursor still). It's also worth noting that this thing runs hot and needs the big passive heatsink enclosure they sell with it to run without throttling. It is unclear whether your tests were done with cooling, but it will perform better with it. May I also suggest you get an FNB58 USB power meter? They're a relatively inexpensive way to properly log the power level to your PC and have a screen with oscilloscope style graphing as well.
Yes, I think the reviewers need to make this clear that the connector on the end is not a camera connector, at least not for Pi style/Arducam cameras. Of course, Mango Pi silent on this as well.
I bought some Orange Pi Zero 2 boards and USB expanders for running Octoprint and Octodash for my 3D printers to free up the Raspberry Pi3 and 4 boards I had been using, I would love to see a comparison between the Mango and the OPiZ2.
I tested the H616 and all went well until the CPU did get overheated. The default CPU speed and high quality heatsink did not prevent the Mango Pi get overheated. (70°C) After less than 2hours the Mango Pi was dead. I tested 4 boards, all are in no time overheated.
This is what I was wondering. I think the CPU is the same as the Banana Pi Zero. That board is absolutely useless due to uncontrollable thermals. Putting a Raspberry Pi heat sink on it does nothing and there’s no header to install a fan. At least, not without soldering in the GPIO pins. I do have a new heat sink for the Banana Pi Zero that covers the entire board. I’m hoping that will provide enough thermal mass to cool it. But I would be wary of the MQ-QUAD without an appropriate cooling solution available.
I have enjoyed seeing the alternatives lately. I a few days ago actually bought a le potato and set it up for klipper. I notice no difference between le potato and the pi4b for my use.(3d printing) Will check back to your channel to see other alternatives.
@@GnuReligion I can confirm le potato is fine, have printed at 300mm³ and 14k accel on a core xy with no noticeable difference between it and the pi4b Going to test it on one of my modded delta printers soon.
Are you willing to share your general method of setting up these obscure Pi clones? In many cases I end up not being able to make much use out of these products due to the lack of support materials and software.
Hi, Orange pi has a H616 board called OrangePiZero2, which has more peripherals. Actually, OrangePi is the second largest SBC manufacturer after RasPi. Please do checkout their product lines.
That is meaningless, do the also have the community, do they have the documentation? Do they have fully working images across many different distributions? Bare metal support? No? Then they are not important.
lol never again, wasted so much money on these alternatives. rockchip, allwinner. great specs. no software support. dont repeat the same mistake as me. nice looking paper weights. the forums are full of people begging manufacturers to provide software support so they can be used, let alone long term support. stick with a well supported board like tha raspberry pi. i laughed at the videos title... "true competitor".. no.
I heard some of the rock chip boards have good support. I've had good luck with my raxda zero two pro which is 100$ but it's 2.2 times faster wait no that's only in single core. It has 4 2.2 ghz cores. And two 1.8 ghz cores. It's a 6 core monster for it's size and it's quite capable. No, its very capable
If you want the pi zero form factor and 512MB ram does the trick then yes, the pi zero 2(w) is ideal. But if you want more ram then you're gonna have to roll the dice with one of these clones. I suggest going with one that has an Armbian image available
It's an impressive looking alternative spec wise but I really have a hard time looking at those crooked soldered components. I hope it's just esthetics and there are no other quality issues (i.e. garbage grade components) on this board.
Is heat-dissipation a concern with these chips? I only have experience with Raspberry Pi 2, and it definitely could suffer problems there. Stacking the ram could complicate it.
Have you seen Radxa Zero? That thing is also a small beast and there are many variants. Its 1.8 ghz quad core, comes with EMMC, DDR4 Ram and many other features you can choose from. The price depend on what model you choose, and you can get yourself a tiny little beast that have insane ammount of features on board. I dont think there is anything this size out there that beat Radxa Zero, but who knows, maybe I'm wrong.
@@LearnEmbeddedSystems I only found for instance a Kali Linux demo for the Radxa Zero on RUclips with some emulated games. But can we do something other with this device?
Everything I would want? Well, with an AllWinner H616, you can expect the worst when it comes to multimedia, except with Android. I read the same kind of comments and benchmarks before I bought my OrangePi PC2... Catastrophic as a multimedia machine when connected directly to the screen, excellent as a headless Plex server (it has gigabit ethernet). There is still no direct support for the GPU on AllWinner H5 or H6 family in Debian, despite some efforts from Free Electrons. Thus, as long as you don't expect anything solid from the GPU (unless you're using Android), get the cheaper Raspberry Pi 2. It's slower in every aspect (that's only Fast Ethernet), but it works fine for an HTPC or a game console (RetroPie).
Other than the form factor, which is a RPI Zero 2 ripoff, this is specwise an Orange Pi Zero 2, which I had bought cheaper also. It even runs Android 10, exactly like the OPi Zero 2, and not newer as one would expect from a more recent product. I guess that's how far H616 got in terms of Android versions, so I shouldn't feel bad we never got an updated build on it, unlike with Debian and Ubuntu
@@bzuidgeest even as raspberry pi is still very scarce...it beats all these craps in everything just for that software support, no matter how weak it is
I'm curious if you'd be interested in reviewing the stm32c0 microcontrollers. Low flash / ram single core arm cortex m0+ with documeted low power modes in exchange for a supposed lower price to compete with 8 bit micros.
As soon as I posted this, Cnx-software article showed Puya, a Chinese manufacturer selling arm cortex micros for cheaper. Looks like I'll be researching both.
just looking to get into the little pi zero 2. I've been messing around with the bigger pi 3b for a while. currently it's sitting on my 3D printer running octo print. I think the little zero 2w is awesome. first project pihole ^_^ but I have a dilemma already. just seen an orange pi 2w on ali express. with the same A53 cpu and usb C charging as the mango but this has 4gb of DDR4. and at the price point of just under £24 including P+P. damn my first pi zero 2w might just have to wait lolz
Hello, I am looking for a single board like this (same form factor, same consumption ?) to create diy security camera (so with 15 or 22 pins connector, with a good video encoder capatibility like h265 4K) and Ideally compatible with some arducam that I already have. I that exist other than raspberry pi ?
at about the 5:30 mark you are booting the debian image but I see orangepi@orangepizero2; is this an orangepi image? The orange pi zero2 is an H616 based board, but it does not have a camera connector; so I wonder if the camera connector on the Mango Pi MQ-Quad will work.
I think you may be forgetting vat. From your links it is £26.61with free postage or £23.23 + p&p £4.07=27.3 so the cheapest is 26.61*1.2 = £31.93 with VAT if you want to compare ex vat, the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W = $17 / 1.2 = 14.166. CPC has Pi Zero 2 listed at £13.16+vat and free postage if spend £20. Although, when you can't buy them at all, maybe pointless comparing prices. When Raspberry Pi get back in stock, isn't all the competition going to have to cut all their prices?
@@stratos7755 Well, I guess it depends on what you are using it for. My pi 2 B running a name server and node red etc. never even seems to use even 500Mb ram. If you need the RAM, wouldn't you go for a Pi 3 or PI 4? I thought it was a pity the $5 pi zero was never really more than a gimmick. (Well, presuming you could buy them.)
Thanks for this great video! Very informative. But I have a question: Have you tried this board with a Pi camera, connected via a pi-zero-type ribbon cable to a Pi camera? Hope you can try that, and post a report!
On the single core version of the device running Armbian NicoD’s SBCs stated that browsers do not work, and he thinks it is a lot of work to get them to work. What about the 4 core versio? Can somebody confirm he can get browsers to work on the device, and if so how?
Has anyone seen any videos testing the hardware video decoding and encoding? I'de like to maybe use this for streaming video but I'm curious if it works with gstreamer out of the box like raspberrypi zero 2 w. All I found was the following quote online "The MQ-Quad is, the company has confirmed, built around the Allwinner H616 system-on-chip - giving it four Arm Cortex-A53 cores running at 1.5GHz and an Arm Mali-G31 MP2 graphics processor running at up to 650MHz, Elsewhere on the chip are AES and SHA acceleration engines, Arm TrustZone support, video decoding hardware for 6k30 or 4k60 H.265 and 4k30 H.264 plus encoding hardware for 4k25 or 1080p60 H.264 video."
It's neat, but Even something like the radxa zero 1GB ram variant could be a competitor to this even. And the radxa zero 2GB ram, 8GB emmc variant is even more compelling. Though i can't see going all out for a top tier 4GB/128GB radxa zero. That's just excessive in every sense.
Just as a pointer, on the graphs you have "faster is better" you instead want "smaller is better", we already know it's speed, may as well just tell us if the bar should be smaller or bigger
I love all the clones... Until I want to use GPIOs... Then it turns out that any more complicated code is a pain to port... SPI/I2C libraries suck and all the problems pile up real quick
That's because the pi is about support and documentation first. Something that none of these replacements have and reviewers like this gloss over. Like reviewing a car without taking about the engine.
It doesn't have the community or the documentation, not even close. Barely functioning images, bare metal libs, etc etc. The pi is not about performance. Everything that makes the pi eco system great is missing here. Stop presenting these as alternatives, they just aren't.
If you want to use the external connector for WiFi you need to move the resistor from the internal antenna to the external one. There are two unoccupied pads nearby.
If MangoiPi's manufacturer offers more support, it's a nice alternative, but they don't do anything about it. I've been using it for a few weeks and it's giving me a headache.
Also nice review thank you
What issues are there?
Nasıl sıkıntılar yaşadınız acaba, biraz açıklayabilir misiniz?
Nice review. It seems the main connectivity difference is not the USB-C, but the misc connector instead of the MIPI-CSI connector. Would like to see this using a camera.
I got one of these a few months ago and found also that the video output was unusable due to artifacts/tearing/corruption when trying to output 4K, so that's worth noting (it is okay at 1080P, but there there was a distracting amount of flicker with the mouse cursor still).
It's also worth noting that this thing runs hot and needs the big passive heatsink enclosure they sell with it to run without throttling. It is unclear whether your tests were done with cooling, but it will perform better with it.
May I also suggest you get an FNB58 USB power meter? They're a relatively inexpensive way to properly log the power level to your PC and have a screen with oscilloscope style graphing as well.
Yes, I think the reviewers need to make this clear that the connector on the end is not a camera connector, at least not for Pi style/Arducam cameras. Of course, Mango Pi silent on this as well.
Thank you for your comment, this stopped me purchasing it
@@richleyden6839I wouldn’t have bought it if I knew
I bought some Orange Pi Zero 2 boards and USB expanders for running Octoprint and Octodash for my 3D printers to free up the Raspberry Pi3 and 4 boards I had been using, I would love to see a comparison between the Mango and the OPiZ2.
Wow smart idea. How is going with Octoprint? I’m using pi4 now.
opi zero 2 and the mango pi use the same h616 chip
@@wenyibing It runs just fine, I had a Pi4 running it previously and I cant notice any differences despite looking for them LOL
Great video. It is so hard to find the pi zero and I only heard about the MQ-Pro. Now I'll probably go with the MQ-Quad in my project. Thanks a lot!
I tested the H616 and all went well until the CPU did get overheated.
The default CPU speed and high quality heatsink did not prevent the Mango Pi get overheated. (70°C)
After less than 2hours the Mango Pi was dead. I tested 4 boards, all are in no time overheated.
This is what I was wondering. I think the CPU is the same as the Banana Pi Zero. That board is absolutely useless due to uncontrollable thermals. Putting a Raspberry Pi heat sink on it does nothing and there’s no header to install a fan. At least, not without soldering in the GPIO pins.
I do have a new heat sink for the Banana Pi Zero that covers the entire board. I’m hoping that will provide enough thermal mass to cool it. But I would be wary of the MQ-QUAD without an appropriate cooling solution available.
70c should be perfectly normal temperatures under load though.
Definitely an upgrade. I see a clear spot to use it as brain to run Klipper for a 3D printer.
Would love to know how the WiFi/Bluetooth support is... But that's a promising alternative to the RPi version.
I have enjoyed seeing the alternatives lately. I a few days ago actually bought a le potato and set it up for klipper. I notice no difference between le potato and the pi4b for my use.(3d printing)
Will check back to your channel to see other alternatives.
Yes, would say that Klipper and Octoprint are primary real use cases for these ... if they are satisfactory.
@@GnuReligion I can confirm le potato is fine, have printed at 300mm³ and 14k accel on a core xy with no noticeable difference between it and the pi4b
Going to test it on one of my modded delta printers soon.
Great video, with a fair comparison between Orange Pi Zero 2
But I will skip this board waiting for better CPU ones!
The biggest advantage of the h616 is the video hardware encoding/decoding
Are you willing to share your general method of setting up these obscure Pi clones? In many cases I end up not being able to make much use out of these products due to the lack of support materials and software.
Hi, Orange pi has a H616 board called OrangePiZero2, which has more peripherals. Actually, OrangePi is the second largest SBC manufacturer after RasPi. Please do checkout their product lines.
Got one in the review queue!
That is meaningless, do the also have the community, do they have the documentation? Do they have fully working images across many different distributions? Bare metal support?
No? Then they are not important.
@@bzuidgeest that is meaningless if you can't even buy one :)
Neat thing with rpi zero was that it was $5.
lol never again, wasted so much money on these alternatives. rockchip, allwinner. great specs. no software support. dont repeat the same mistake as me. nice looking paper weights. the forums are full of people begging manufacturers to provide software support so they can be used, let alone long term support. stick with a well supported board like tha raspberry pi. i laughed at the videos title... "true competitor".. no.
I heard some of the rock chip boards have good support. I've had good luck with my raxda zero two pro which is 100$ but it's 2.2 times faster wait no that's only in single core. It has 4 2.2 ghz cores. And two 1.8 ghz cores. It's a 6 core monster for it's size and it's quite capable. No, its very capable
If you want the pi zero form factor and 512MB ram does the trick then yes, the pi zero 2(w) is ideal. But if you want more ram then you're gonna have to roll the dice with one of these clones. I suggest going with one that has an Armbian image available
Thank you for these detailed videos dude 🤠
It's an impressive looking alternative spec wise but I really have a hard time looking at those crooked soldered components. I hope it's just esthetics and there are no other quality issues (i.e. garbage grade components) on this board.
Is heat-dissipation a concern with these chips? I only have experience with Raspberry Pi 2, and it definitely could suffer problems there. Stacking the ram could complicate it.
If there wasn’t a pi shortage, I wouldn’t have bought a couple NUCs. I’m running Proxmox and all the VMs my heart desires.
i have the exact same one except the pink version, it was the cheapest 1gb one. but i love it!
So nice to see the Usb c change
Really nice was searching for smth like this
Wow the ram age, amazing. I imagine it will last the life of the board but still.
Some benchmarks of graphics performance would be nice ❤
Do the gpio actually work properly?
Have you seen Radxa Zero? That thing is also a small beast and there are many variants. Its 1.8 ghz quad core, comes with EMMC, DDR4 Ram and many other features you can choose from. The price depend on what model you choose, and you can get yourself a tiny little beast that have insane ammount of features on board. I dont think there is anything this size out there that beat Radxa Zero, but who knows, maybe I'm wrong.
I will take a look, thanks for the heads up!
@@LearnEmbeddedSystems I only found for instance a Kali Linux demo for the Radxa Zero on RUclips with some emulated games. But can we do something other with this device?
Everything I would want? Well, with an AllWinner H616, you can expect the worst when it comes to multimedia, except with Android. I read the same kind of comments and benchmarks before I bought my OrangePi PC2... Catastrophic as a multimedia machine when connected directly to the screen, excellent as a headless Plex server (it has gigabit ethernet). There is still no direct support for the GPU on AllWinner H5 or H6 family in Debian, despite some efforts from Free Electrons. Thus, as long as you don't expect anything solid from the GPU (unless you're using Android), get the cheaper Raspberry Pi 2. It's slower in every aspect (that's only Fast Ethernet), but it works fine for an HTPC or a game console (RetroPie).
Does this board have any video decode hardware?
I think people will like the little extra ram as I belive the Pi2 was limited to 500MB?
Now I'm interested if you can change the soldered ram into a higher capacity
Other than the form factor, which is a RPI Zero 2 ripoff, this is specwise an Orange Pi Zero 2, which I had bought cheaper also. It even runs Android 10, exactly like the OPi Zero 2, and not newer as one would expect from a more recent product. I guess that's how far H616 got in terms of Android versions, so I shouldn't feel bad we never got an updated build on it, unlike with Debian and Ubuntu
How about software support?...like GPIO and all
Crap, that's why the don't mention it in this commercial.
@@bzuidgeest even as raspberry pi is still very scarce...it beats all these craps in everything just for that software support, no matter how weak it is
Dear author, can i ask you specify in video description info about compatible cams? Thanks in advance. 🎉
I'm curious if you'd be interested in reviewing the stm32c0 microcontrollers. Low flash / ram single core arm cortex m0+ with documeted low power modes in exchange for a supposed lower price to compete with 8 bit micros.
As soon as I posted this, Cnx-software article showed Puya, a Chinese manufacturer selling arm cortex micros for cheaper. Looks like I'll be researching both.
I will take a look!
just looking to get into the little pi zero 2. I've been messing around with the bigger pi 3b for a while. currently it's sitting on my 3D printer running octo print. I think the little zero 2w is awesome. first project pihole ^_^ but I have a dilemma already. just seen an orange pi 2w on ali express. with the same A53 cpu and usb C charging as the mango but this has 4gb of DDR4. and at the price point of just under £24 including P+P. damn my first pi zero 2w might just have to wait lolz
good notes --- however I do not have the time to learn a Chinese SBC ... keep up the good work ....
I wonder if Retrorangepi would work on this? 🤔
Have you covered the radxa zero 3e?
Hello did you have see the rca output?
the main question is does 'pikvm' work as expected on this replacement?
Hello, I am looking for a single board like this (same form factor, same consumption ?) to create diy security camera (so with 15 or 22 pins connector, with a good video encoder capatibility like h265 4K) and Ideally compatible with some arducam that I already have.
I that exist other than raspberry pi ?
at about the 5:30 mark you are booting the debian image but I see orangepi@orangepizero2; is this an orangepi image? The orange pi zero2 is an H616 based board, but it does not have a camera connector; so I wonder if the camera connector on the Mango Pi MQ-Quad will work.
I think you may be forgetting vat.
From your links it is £26.61with free postage or £23.23 + p&p £4.07=27.3 so the cheapest is 26.61*1.2 = £31.93 with VAT
if you want to compare ex vat, the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W = $17 / 1.2 = 14.166.
CPC has Pi Zero 2 listed at £13.16+vat and free postage if spend £20.
Although, when you can't buy them at all, maybe pointless comparing prices.
When Raspberry Pi get back in stock, isn't all the competition going to have to cut all their prices?
Big donwside of the pi 0 is that it still has only 500mb of ram. So I would go for this 1gb board most of the time.
@@stratos7755 Well, I guess it depends on what you are using it for. My pi 2 B running a name server and node red etc. never even seems to use even 500Mb ram. If you need the RAM, wouldn't you go for a Pi 3 or PI 4? I thought it was a pity the $5 pi zero was never really more than a gimmick.
(Well, presuming you could buy them.)
How to install on such boards 16-32 gb Ram chip? It is possible in theory?
Thanks for this great video! Very informative. But I have a question:
Have you tried this board with a Pi camera, connected via a pi-zero-type ribbon cable to a Pi camera?
Hope you can try that, and post a report!
On the single core version of the device running Armbian NicoD’s SBCs stated that browsers do not work, and he thinks it is a lot of work to get them to work. What about the 4 core versio? Can somebody confirm he can get browsers to work on the device, and if so how?
any word on h264 support/codec performance?
would all the pi zero 2 hats work with this board?
Has anyone seen any videos testing the hardware video decoding and encoding? I'de like to maybe use this for streaming video but I'm curious if it works with gstreamer out of the box like raspberrypi zero 2 w. All I found was the following quote online "The MQ-Quad is, the company has confirmed, built around the Allwinner H616 system-on-chip - giving it four Arm Cortex-A53 cores running at 1.5GHz and an Arm Mali-G31 MP2 graphics processor running at up to 650MHz, Elsewhere on the chip are AES and SHA acceleration engines, Arm TrustZone support, video decoding hardware for 6k30 or 4k60 H.265 and 4k30 H.264 plus encoding hardware for 4k25 or 1080p60 H.264 video."
Does anybody of you experiences with GPIO pins at MangoPi MQ-QUAD? It not working for me now.
let me guess they forgot to add the usable video support with 3D and video codecs.
OK, got it to boot, it seems hesitant at times.
is it klipper compatible?
It's neat, but Even something like the radxa zero 1GB ram variant could be a competitor to this even. And the radxa zero 2GB ram, 8GB emmc variant is even more compelling.
Though i can't see going all out for a top tier 4GB/128GB radxa zero. That's just excessive in every sense.
Does anybody know if the power input USB can be used in gadget mode, like the Pi Zero and Pi 4?
Just as a pointer, on the graphs you have "faster is better" you instead want "smaller is better", we already know it's speed, may as well just tell us if the bar should be smaller or bigger
Worth a tenner ..i am looking at £31 on there site ...... go review a used tampon
I can't get mine to boot;
What are the board temperatures like when under load?
hot
odroid n2l review pls
no one can beat Raspberry pi zero W in comparison with the price range.
But RAM 500MB is small limiting projects
I love all the clones... Until I want to use GPIOs... Then it turns out that any more complicated code is a pain to port... SPI/I2C libraries suck and all the problems pile up real quick
That's because the pi is about support and documentation first. Something that none of these replacements have and reviewers like this gloss over. Like reviewing a car without taking about the engine.
When gpu on this is little board more powerful than my new android phone 😂
Your charts..."faster is better" - uhm yes ? bit confusing.
Orangepi zero2
38 USD right now, a bit too much for this hardware.
And we need fullsize hdmi)
we have bukoPI
Oh look, mini HDMI... next.
Breaking Bad Season 5: Episode 7
faster is better
It doesn't have the community or the documentation, not even close. Barely functioning images, bare metal libs, etc etc. The pi is not about performance. Everything that makes the pi eco system great is missing here.
Stop presenting these as alternatives, they just aren't.
Wasted money.