The MangoPi MQ Pro came to my attenion on the Telegram forum, in particular Daniel Maslowski, on 22JUL22, provided a link to a review by "Bret". It appeared to be very similar to the Nezha and LicheeRV systems. It contains a D1 chip and 1GB memory, It seems almost as powerful as the Nezha but at about half the price. I purchased one from AliExpress for £42.89, including VAT and shipping and it arrived 10AUG22.
The system is v1.4, apparently the first production build. It is a noticeable "Sakura Pink" colour and comes with a convenient colour coded header.
It is the same form factor as a RaspberryPi zero so I ordered a cheap (£4) case on Ebay. It fits very well, although you cant change the SD card without removing the case.
Mangopi.org is the home website and it contains some basic information about the hardware. It provides links to Tina and Armbian images. Bret.dk provides a much better introduction so I followed his instructions to download and install the Armbian headless image.
For the first startup I need an HDMI screen plus keyboard. Unfortunately I don't have a mini-HDMI adapter so I had to buy one. Also I couldn't plug my USB-USBC adapter in at the same time as the power so I had to by a pretty little hub, which I am sure will come in very useful as more systems move to USBC
With this in place I can sign in through SSH and I can access the Ubuntu system.The apt command for update/upgrade work fine so I count this as a functional system 😁😀😃
LicheeRV Compatibility
There are indications (not sure where) that MangoPi is compatible with the other Allwinner D1 systems, Nezha and LicheeRV. My idea of compatibility is to put an SD card in and see what happens. Before doing this I needed to solder on the header pins and attach an FTDI cable so I can use a serial interface to see boot messages. There is no documentation on MangoPi pins but the spec says that it is an RPI header so I guessed that the pins required are 6=GND, 8=TXD, 10=RXD. This is indeed the case and booting the Armbian system shows me the early console messages (before HDMI is initialised).
MangoPi uses an RTL8273DS chip for wifi which is the same as used by LicheeRV. So, when I booted from my usual LicheeRV SD card the system came up cleanly (and a lot faster). Wifi is initialised properly and static address/SSH access work fine. This is great, it means I have a Debian system for my MangoPi - without doing any work.
