The NanoPi NEO Core as its name tells is an alternative NanoPi NEO that works like a CPU board with male pin-headers. It has the same form factor as the NanoPi NEO, same pin descriptions and works with all the OS images the NanoPi NEO supports. The connectors and ports on the NEO are populated to pin-headers on the NEO Core. In addition the NEO Core can have an optional onboard eMMC flash which is preferred by industrial customers.
The NEO Core uses a popular Allwinner H3 SoC and has onboard 256M/512M DDR3 RAM. FriendlyElec offers models with three eMMC options: 8GB/16GB/32GB and one that doesn’t have eMMC at all. FriendlyElec migrated FriendlyCore-Xential (based on UbuntuCore) with mainline kirnel 4.14 to it. Compared to the NanoPi NEO the NanoPi NEO Core has optimized power circuit design and runs more reliably with much less overheat. NEO Core’s CPU temperature didn’t exceed 30 degrees in Celsius in our tests in regular situations.
FriendlyElec develops a Mini Shield for NanoPi NEO Core/Core2 which has the same form factor as the Rpi3. When a NanoPi NEO Core is connected to this Mini Shield the whole assembled module can be well fit into a common Rpi 3's case.
