The success of the Raspberry Pi has led to various and various similar models offering the same but with other hardware and another price. Sometimes it is interesting for a personal project and other times it does not reach the power of the Raspberry Pi models.
This is the case of Orange Pi Zero, a mini SBC board that tries to be a copy of Raspberry Pi Zero, but it doesn't have some of its features like big ram or low price.
Orange Pi Zero measures 52mm x 46mm and weighs 26g. Inside it has an Allwinner quadcore processor, the Mali-400MP2 GPU and 256 MB of ram. It is said that there is a version with 512 MB of ram but we do not know anything about that. Orange Pi Zero has a microsd card slot, a GPIO port, a microhdmi port, two USB ports, an ethernet port and a wireless module. The cost of Orange Pi Zero is $ 7, a very low price and affordable for everyone, even though it is higher than the Pi Zero board.
Orange Pi Zero is not the only Orange Pi small board
In this case we have a more powerful board than the Pi Zero but with a smaller amount of ram memory so when it comes to using it as a mini pc we will have problems, at least when running applications. But if we really want power and we are not going to use a lot of graphics in our project, Orange Pi Zero can be really interesting. In any case there are other alternatives to the famous Pi Zero, including another board from the same Orange Pi family, Orange PiOne.
Personally, I still lean towards the Raspberry Pi Zero, since despite having less power, it does have a large community behind it, something very interesting for the newest Do not you think?