Orange Pi 3B (RK3566) Development Board Unboxing Review and System Installation Guide

Introduction

The Orange Pi 3B is a single-board computer the size of a Raspberry Pi, but with more complete interfaces, including a full-size HDMI port and an M.2 storage slot, starting at 199.

The Orange Pi 3B is equipped with a Rockchip RK3566 quad-core 64-bit Cortex-A55 processor, manufactured using a 22nm process, with a maximum frequency of 1.8GHz, integrated ARM Mali-G52 GPU, high-performance 2D image acceleration module, and an NPU with 0.8Tops AI computing power, available with 2GB, 4GB, or 8GB of RAM, capable of processing displays up to 4K.

The Orange Pi 3B supports various operating systems including Android 11, Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Debian 11, Debian 12, open-source HarmonyOS 4.0 Beta1, and Orange Pi OS (Arch).

The Orange Pi 3B features a rich array of interfaces, including HDMI output, M.2 PCIe 2.0 x1, Gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0, USB 3.0 ports, and a 40-pin expansion header, making it suitable for high-end tablets, edge computing, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, AR/VR, smart security, smart home applications, and covering various AIoT industries.

Official website for Orange Pi 3B: https://url.zeruns.tech/FAutz

Download schematic for Orange Pi 3B: https://url.zeruns.tech/cVOHT Extraction code: qrw6

Download user manual for Orange Pi 3B: https://url.zeruns.tech/0Bg71 Extraction code: t93d

Download RK3566 datasheet: https://url.zeruns.tech/7zXjD

Armbian system installation tutorial for Rock Pi 4C (EMMC module): https://blog.zeruns.tech/archives/631.html

Unboxing

Front of the box

Back of the box

Contents of the box, the Orange Pi 3B development board in an anti-static bag, along with a paper whose title translates to “Regulatory Compliance and Safety Information”.

Front of the development board, with LCD and CAM (MIPI CSI camera) interfaces, a 5V fan interface that can control speed via PWM, an RTC battery interface, a 40-pin IO port, and the black object on it is the WiFi and Bluetooth antenna. The button next to the Type-C port is the power button, the BOOT button is for entering MaskRom mode, and the RESET button is for forced restart.

Back of the development board, with EDP interface, EMMC interface, M.2 interface (SATA3 and PCIe 2.0 x1), TF card interface, and a post that seems to indicate the production date: 2023.08.19.

Side of the development board, with a Gigabit Ethernet port, 1 USB 3.0, and 3 USB 2.0 ports.

From left to right are the Type-C power interface, HDMI 2.0 interface, and 3.5mm headphone interface.

Hardware Specifications

PCB Size	85mm x 56mm x 17mm
Weight	49g

Below are detailed images of various chips and interfaces on the development board:

It seems that most chips on this development board are domestically produced.

The Gigabit Ethernet chip is Yutai Micro’s YT8531C, which is compatible with Realtek’s RTL8211E.

The SPI Flash chip is Wuhan Xinxin’s XM25QU128C, with a capacity of 128Mbit (16MByte), official introduction: https://url.zeruns.tech/Wxphz

The main control chip is Rockchip’s RK3566.

The memory chip is Hynix’s 8GB LPDDR4X, model: H54G68CYRBX248.

The WiFi and Bluetooth combo module is CDTech’s CDW-20U5622, supporting WIFI 5 and BT 5.0, MIMO, with a maximum WiFi bandwidth of 80Mhz, datasheet download: https://url.zeruns.tech/7bm7j

The power management chip is RK809-5.

The DCDC power chip that steps down from 5V to 3.3V is SY8113B/SM8103ADC.

GPIO pin definitions for Orange Pi 3B:

The official requirement is for a 5V 3A power supply. I measured that the actual maximum power consumption of the development board (CPU fully loaded, GPU idle) is around 4.1 watts, with a current of about 0.83A. After entering the system, the CPU idle power is around 1.6 watts. This test was done without connecting any USB devices; if other USB devices are to be connected, a larger power supply will be required.

The highest temperature of the SOC does not exceed 65 degrees (at room temperature of 30 degrees), so it seems that heat sinks are unnecessary.

Price and Purchase Links

The official price of the Orange Pi 3B is as follows (I bought the 8GB version for 299 from the official Taobao store):

Maker price is limited to personal buyers, invoices can only be issued in the name of the purchaser. For corporate purchases, the official price must be paid.

Orange Pi 3B on JD.com:https://u.jd.com/niAEAzI
Orange Pi 3B on Taobao:https://s.click.taobao.com/LZdikAu
USB cable (for system burning):https://u.jd.com/niANEeD
M.2 solid-state drive 2230:https://u.jd.com/nzAl1Kd
Samsung TF card 128G:https://u.jd.com/n8ATRX7
Power supply (5V 3A):https://u.jd.com/nqAJNrS
HDMI cable:https://u.jd.com/nQARvKr
USB 3.0 video capture card:https://s.click.taobao.com/1tXhkAu

System Image Burning

There are several ways to burn the system image to the Orange Pi 3B:

Use software like balenaEtcher to directly burn the system image to the TF card using a card reader.
Use RKDevTool software to connect the development board to the computer via a USB cable and enter MaskROM mode, then burn the system image directly to the TF card/M.2 solid-state drive/eMMC.
Use software like balenaEtcher to burn the system image to the TF card, then after entering the system, use the dd command to copy the system to eMMC or M.2 solid-state drive.

To install the Android system, only method 2 can be used. For details, refer to the Orange Pi 3B user manual, which contains various methods for burning the system, and the manual download link is provided above.

Next, I will briefly explain method 1 for burning the Linux image to the TF card, based on the user manual.

First, prepare a TF card with a capacity of 16GB or larger. The transfer speed of the TF card must be at least class10 or above, and it is recommended to use brands like Samsung or SanDisk.
Then use a card reader to insert the TF card into the computer.
Download the desired Linux operating system image file from the Orange Pi official website, unzip it using decompression software, and the file ending with “.img” is the operating system image file, usually larger than 2GB.

Official download link for the system image: https://url.zeruns.tech/0n9M4

Orange Pi OS (Arch) Baidu Cloud download link: https://url.zeruns.tech/1Jeq7 Extraction code: rc6c

Then download the burning software for the Linux image – balenaEtcher, download link: https://url.zeruns.tech/hC0rU

Then you can choose to download the Portable version of balenaEtcher, which does not require installation and can be used by double-clicking.

If you downloaded the installed version of balenaEtcher, please install it before use. If you downloaded the Portable version, you can directly double-click to open it. The balenaEtcher interface after opening is shown in the following image:

The specific steps for using balenaEtcher to burn the Linux image are as follows:

a. First, select the path to the Linux image file you want to burn.

b. Then select the drive letter of the TF card.

c. Finally, click Flash to start burning the Linux image to the TF card.

The interface displayed during the burning process of the Linux image using balenaEtcher is shown in the following image. Additionally, the progress bar turns orange to indicate that the Linux image is being burned to the TF card.

After burning the Linux image, balenaEtcher will automatically verify the burned image to ensure there were no issues during the burning process. The blue progress bar indicates that the image has been successfully burned, and balenaEtcher is verifying the completed image.

Upon successful completion of the burning process, the interface of balenaEtcher will be displayed as shown in the following image. If the green indicator icon is shown, it indicates that the image has been successfully burned. You can then exit balenaEtcher and remove the TF card to insert it into the development board’s TF card slot for use.

12) Insert the TF card into the development board, connect a screen and power supply, and it will automatically start.

The default username and password for the Orange Pi Linux system are:

Username	Password
root	orangepi
orangepi	orangepi

Performance Testing

The following tests were conducted on Linux, and I also tested the Raspberry Pi 4B and Rock Pi 4C for comparison.

The Raspberry Pi 4B is the 4GB version, with a CPU of BCM2711, 4-core A72, and a main frequency of 1.5GHz.

The Rock Pi 4C is also the 4GB version, with a CPU of RK3399, 2-core A72 (1.8GHz) + 4-core A53 (1.4GHz).

The testing scripts used are available here: https://blog.zeruns.tech/archives/533.html

The following tests only measure CPU and memory performance; other metrics like GPU, NPU, and video codec performance were not measured.

Unixbench

The main testing items of Unixbench include: system calls, read/write, processes, graphical tests, 2D, 3D, pipelines, calculations, and C library, providing benchmark performance test data. Here, the latest version UnixBench5.1.3 is used.

Orange Pi 3B	Raspberry Pi 4B	Rock Pi 4C
Single-core	270.8	251.8	477.6
Multi-core	894.1	753.2	1896.0

Memory Speed

For Orange Pi 3B: