NanoPi NEO Air Open Source Quad-core Cortex-A7 1.2GHz Allwinner H3 Single Board Computer DDR3 WiFi & Bluetooth 4.0 Run Ubuntu Core and U-Boot(512MB RAM+8GB eMMC)

Update: Jan 16, 2023: My original review is below. Since leaving that, WayPonDEV reached out to me to make the situation right. They truly want to do the right thing...and I really appreciate that. Based on my recent interaction, I am updating the rating to 5 stars! ---------------------------- I purchased one of these using Amazon Prime and received it on time. I screwed up while prototyping a power supply circuit and damaged the onboard regulator by supplying too high input voltage. My screw up! So I ordered a second one, again using Amazon Prime. While I was waiting for the new board to arrive, I learned my order was quietly canceled. No email ... nothing. Now I see they are not delivering via Prime and the shipping cost is expensive. Based on the board not tolerating slightly high voltages and the company dropping my replacement order, I don't think I will be continuing with this board/manufacturer.

Neat little board. Half as long as the standard Pi and only a few millimeters thick (without GPIO headers). I was a bit worried about setting it up (with no way to hook up a keyboard, a monitor, or even an Ethernet port), but it went surprisingly smoothly - I just got a DietPi image, booted it up once, mounted the MicroSD in a Linux system, and put the WiFi settings in the appropriate config file. After that, it found my WiFi and I could ssh in. The biggest drawback for me is that the camera interface (24-pin DVP/parallel) is incompatible with standard Pi camera modules, and, as far as I can tell, there's no easy way to bridge the two. So, it won't work as a drop-in replacement for Pi. It won't work with just any all DVP camera module, either ("DVP" is apparently not a universal standard). In fact, apart from a couple of low-end OV2640 and OV5640 based modules, I could not find any. For example, many higher-quality cameras have 30-pin interfaces instead of 24-pin. The alternative (which I am yet to try) is to go through USB (it only has one physical USB port, but it is possible to connect another USB device through GPIO pins, to use a hub to power the board and to connect a USB device at the same time, or to connect the camera to the USB OTG port and to power the board by hooking a 5V/2A source directly to the board.)

I have yet to get this working in any way. I have another NanoPi so I get the process of flashing the OS onto it, but getting an OS I actually need (like DietPi) and then getting the WiFi connected is not obvious. It looks like I may have to connect to the serial pins and do it over a serial terminal, but I don't have the hardware to do that. Because the install flashes a loader binary onto the SD and not the OS there is no boot folder I can access to drop the network configuration files onto. I really want this to work, it is not and small and I've got a circuit board designed to connect it to another system I have if I can get the system working. Though the other NanoPi I have is making it look like GPIO issues are likely once I get past the WiFi connectivity issue. Edit: I did finally get it working, though it required a Linux machine to modify the image to include the WiFi details before first boot. It is a great little board, but it's 24 pins of the Raspberry Pi's 40, the original Raspberry Pi had 26. Now the 24 pins do sort of match, the 5v, 3v3, and GND all match exactly, but pins 7 and 9 on the Raspberry Pi is serial 0, on the NanoPi it's serial 2. GPIO numbering is likewise mismatched so any software that you use would have to be updated for a different pin mapping, and it would have to be updated to use something other than Rasperry Pi's RPi.GPIO library, but I could not get NanoPi's RPi.GPIO_NP library to build. Further most of my support requests went unanswered. Great hardware, but very lacking on support.

Pros: Small, low power, capable. You can buy it. Cons: Setup requires a tiny bit of shell knowledge + simple soldering skills + a USB to UART cable. Not functional out-of-the-box like a RPi. No display. Each of the distributions this runs with do not have a way to setup wifi at install time (or they are not documented) so you need to log in and do that yourself. This means you have to solder pins to the board and use a UART cable to login to a linux shell over serial. If you're not comfortable with this, this might not be the SBC for you. Works great with Klipper btw.