January 8, 2026

NanoPi Neo2 - basic info

This is a cute little boards based on the H5 Allwinner chip. This gives it a 64 bit quad core A53 cpu and 1000 Mhz ethernet.
My boards have 512M of ram.

After making progress with the H5 chip on the Orange Pi PC 2, I got interested in what other H5 based boards might be available and discovered these.

Mine arrived 1-7-2026 after ordering them on Amazon on 12-30-2025. So shipping only took a week, though I was warned it might take a month. I paid $39 each, and purchased 2 boards. Mine have 512M of ram. The boxes indicate that a 1G version is available, but I didn't see any option for that in the Amazon listing.

These have 8G of eMMC, which is nice. They have a quad core A53 cluster.

Basic information

How do we give this thing power?
How do we hook up a serial console?
Is there anything on the 8G eMMC?
Where can we find software to put on an SD card?
What switches, buttons, and LED are there?
See the link above for pins.
There are no buttons or switches.
There is a red power LED (GPIO L10) next to the SD card slot.
There is a green status LED (GPIO A10) next to the micro USB.
(so the power LED is not really a power LED)

This diagram shows the hookup for the serial console:

As for power, they say it needs 5V at 2A, generally supplied through the micro-USB, though there are pins that could be used to supply power.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's electronics pages / tom@mmto.org