I have two different boards with the H5 chip on board. The bigger one above is an Orange Pi PC2 board. The smaller one on the left is a Nanopi Neo Plus2.
I am doing my work with the Orange Pi PC2 board, and have yet to even power up the Neo. There are several nice things about the Neo. Obviously its small size, but it also has an 8G emmc chip on board. The disadvantages are less ram (512M instead of 1G) and fewer IO connectors.
For the console, I use a little CP2104 USB to UART dongle. It is convenient to "strap it down" on the slab of particle board I use to hold the board itself.
The board in front with the big yellow relay and black button will someday replace the switch I have mounted at the back of the setup, but right now all this board does is to route 5V power.
The momentary switch mounted in the rear serves as a "hard reset". I actually interrupts power to the board. This seems a bit crude but gets the job donw. For whatever reason, Orange Pi didn't see any reason to provide a reset button or even a connector that would allow the user to connect one.
A little micro SD card holds U-boot, which I have configured to do a network boot on reset. So when I reset the board, it will use TFTP to download a new image of whatever code I have built. This is extremely handy. After I make code changes, I type "make" then hit my "reset switch" and it boots and runs the new image.
Tom's electronics pages / tom@mmto.org