When comparing Orange Pi PC vs Tessel 2, the Slant community recommends Orange Pi PC for most people. In the question“What are the best single-board computers?” Orange Pi PC is ranked 14th while Tessel 2 is ranked 36th. The most important reason people chose Orange Pi PC is:
The Orange Pi PC is extremely cheap, especially compared to the SBCs it competes against.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Extremely cheap for what it promises
The Orange Pi PC is extremely cheap, especially compared to the SBCs it competes against.
Pro Supports almost all OSes supported by Raspberry
Orange Pi supports Raspbian, Ubuntu, Android and many more operating systems. It claims to support all OSes supported by Raspberry Pi and it seems to be true most of the time.
Pro Great value for the price
Great little linux box for the price
Pro NodeJS support out of the box
Out of the box it supports Node 4.x LTS and doesn't require any setup to use it.
Pro Co-processor system
Runs Linux and user application code on a 580MHz Mediatek router-on-a-chip, with an asynchronous 48MHz SAMD21 coprocessor for GPIO, ADC, I2C, SPI, PWM and UART programming
Pro Programmable via USB or Wifi
The process for deploying software, whether it's JavaScript, Python or Rust, is exposed the same way for both USB and Wifi connections.
Pro Easy to get started with
The Tessel 2's "Getting Started" experience requires little more than installing Node.js and a single package (the CLI) via npm. Complete walkthroughs for Linux, Mac and Windows are available and up-to-date
Cons
Con Has some thermal throttling issues
The Orange Pi can get pretty hot, up to the point where it needs to shut down cores to keep it from locking up.
Con First Party OS support is practically non-existent
Con no wifi
Con Has problems with slow microSD cards
Anything less than a class 10 TF/microSD card will probably not work with the Orange PI. Since the testing and production of the Orange Pi was rushed massively, as a result it cannot step down to be more compatible with slower SD cards. Although it should be mentioned that this is not that much of a problem since you can get class 10 microSD cards for pretty cheap nowadays.
Con No video connector natively
Must use RPIO equivalent to wire any video.
Con Very little memory
64 megabytes of RAM. This places it more in line with an Arduino style board than a SBC on the level of Raspberry Pi.