When comparing Orange Pi PC vs BeagleBone Black, 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 BeagleBone Black is ranked 22nd. 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 Extendable hardware
There are 92 expansion pins, with 46-pin female connectors on both sides of the board with other 6 serial pins to be used for debugging.
Pro On board storage
Has on board integrated storage of 4GB. It can also have an SD card in addition to the integrated storage and can boot from either of them.
Pro Programmable Real Time Units with GPIO control
Real-time coprocessors allow for embedded systems control and bit-banging communication
Pro Analog Inputs
There are 7 1.8V analog inputs.
Pro Responsive, helpful online community
Pro Easy of use
It hosts a web service over USB so it is super simple to get started with plenty of source code and examples available.
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 Only one USB available for peripherals
There's only one USB port available for peripherals, which is a bit annoying considering how two USB ports is a minimum to have a keyboard and a mouse hooked up without having to use a powered USB hub.
Con Lack of a proper OpenGL driver
It sounds like the driver is possible, but the information is spread out over forums and GitHub.