YuzukiTsuru's Yuzuki Chameleon Pops an Allwinner H616 Chip Into a Raspberry Pi Model A Form Factor
With four Arm Cortex-A53 cores running at up to 1.5GHz, this open-hardware SBC boasts impressive connectivity and high-res video.
Pseudonymous maker "YuzukiTsuru," also known as "GloomyGhost," has published an open-hardware design for a single-board computer mimicking the Raspberry Pi Model A layout but with an Allwinner H616 system-on-chip at its heart: the Yuzuki Chameleon.
"Yuzuki Chameleon is a Raspberry Pi A-shaped SBC [Single Board Computer], based on [the] Allwinner H616 chip," YuzukiTsuru explains in a post brought to our attention by CNX Software. "[It can] run Android, Debian Linux, Ubuntu Linux, Armbian, Android TV, and other OS[es]."
Designed around the more compact Raspberry Pi Model A footprint, complete with compatible mounting holes and the familiar 40-pin general-purpose input/output (GPIO) header, the Yuzuki Chameleon features four 64-bit Arm Cortex-A53 cores running at up to 1.5GHz, an Arm Mali-G31 MP2 graphics processor, up to 2GB of RAM, and up to 128GB of eMMC storage.
Elsewhere on the board is a microSD slot for additional storage, an Allwinner XR829 chip with 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0 support, four USB 2.0 Type-C ports with three in host mode and one offering USB On-The-Go (OTG) support, an HDMI output supporting 4k60 displays with H.264 and H.265 decode in hardware, analog video and audio on a 3.5mm jack, and support for an optional 100Base-T Ethernet port.
YuzukiTsuru has opted to make the board's design entire open source, including the schematic, design files, Gerbers for production, and even a 3D-printable case. There's room for an optional heatsink and fan, with a header to power the latter included on the board. At the time of writing, despite images of prototypes, the board was not available to purchase outside China. "I'm sorry I can't sell any hardware [abroad]," YuzukiTsuru explains, "because I couldn't find a suitable partner to build it."
More details are available on the project's GitHub repository, where all the design files and Gerbers can be downloaded under the reciprocal CERN Open Hardware License v2; at the time of writing, however, the only operating system available to download was a port of the OpenWRT-based Tina Linux.