The Friendlyarm NanoPi NEO Core2 as its name tells is an alternative NanoPi NEO2 that works like a CPU board with male pin-headers. It has the same form factor as the NanoPi NEO2, same pin descriptions and works with all the OS images the NanoPi NEO2 supports. The connectors and ports on the NEO2 are populated to pin-headers on the NEO2 Core. In addition the NEO Core2 can have an optional onboard eMMC flash and ESD protection for connectors and ports. There features are highly preferred by industrial customers.
The NEO2 Core uses a popular Allwinner H5 SoC and has onboard 1G DDR3 RAM. FriendlyElec offers models with three eMMC options: 8GB(default)/16GB/32GB. FriendlyElec migrated FriendlyCore-Xential (based on UbuntuCore) with mainline kernel 4.14 to it. Compared to the NanoPi NEO2 the NanoPi NEO Core2 runs more reliably with much less overheat. It is a good platform for IoT applications, monitoring systems, smart control systems, cluster computing and AI applications.
FriendlyElec develops a Mini Shield for NanoPi NEO Core/Core2 which has the same form factor as the Rpi 3. When a NanoPi NEO Core2 is connected to this Mini Shield the whole assembled module can be well fit into a common Rpi 3's case.
