Open Source Hardware manufacturer Radxa has come up with Radxa Zero, a board with a Zero form factor which may be an alternative for Adafruit’s Raspberry Pi Zero. This new member of the SBC family is based on Amlogic Y series chips which are capable of small dongle applications. Moreover, various features like 4GB LPDDR4 ram, 256G eMMC and WiFi5 are all available on this small-sized board of 66 x 30mm dimensions.
Specifications of Radxa Zero
Radxa’s zero form factor board is based on a Quad Cortex-A53 CPU working on a frequency of 1.8GHz. It uses eMMC 5.1 and a uSD card for storage purposes. Besides, the eMMC is available in 8, 16, 32, 64 and 128GB. Radax Zero has a Mali G31 MP2 GPU and an LPDDR4 RAM. The Arm Mali-G31 GPU is an ultra-efficient GPU that is based on the Mali Bifrost architecture. In addition, the board utilizes onboard Micro HDMI, HDMI 2.1 and 4K@60 HDR for audio/video interfacing.
Other peripherals include 40 General purpose pinouts, ADCs, UART, SPI and PWM. Radxa Zero has two onboard USB ports, one USB 2.0 Type C OTG and the other being a USB 3.0 Type C host. Further, the board deploys H265/VP9 for video coding and decoding purposes. In addition, the Crypto Engine, support an external antenna and one button are the other peripherals available. Radxa Zero communicates wirelessly using WiFi4/BT4 or WiFi5/BT5.
Software Compatible with Radxa Zero
The picture above shows Amlogic SoC families. Radxa Zero is based on S905Y2 which uses 12th generation architecture from Amlogic. Android 9 is provided by Amlogic that is compatible with Radxa Zero 2GB and 4GB versions. Radxa has announced Armbian as the official support OS and it will already be booted on Zero before dispatching to developers. The board is also compatible with TwisterOS, the 32-bit operating system created by Pi Labs and EmuELEC.
Prizes and Models
Radxa Zero is available in four different models and about 100 such models are already manufactured. Radxa has announced larger production of these boards in the coming 4 to 5 weeks. The available models and their prizes are listed below:
- 512MB LPDDR4 with WiFi4/BT4 – 15$
- 1GB LPDDR4 with WiFi4/BT4 – 20$
- 2GB LPDDR4 with 8GB eMMC, WiFi5/BT5 – 30$
- 4GB LPDDR4 with 16GB eMMC, WiFi5/BT5 – 45$
One can read more about this Zero form factor board on Radxa’s official site. The source for all the pictures and technical details is the product page.
Sanskriti Sawant is a student of Electronics and Telecommunication engineering. She is passionate about Computer architecture, VLSI and plans to major in them. She is working on HDL languages and FPGA’s.
