FriendlyELEC has refreshed its RK3588S single board computer into a 2026 revision called the NanoPi M6V2, trimming SKUs down to a single 8GB LPDDR5 configuration and adding a 4-pin header for dual analog microphone input. The 3.5-inch touchscreen enclosure option from the original is gone, and the Reset button has been relabeled as a general-purpose User button. The Rockchip RK3588S silicon underneath carries over unchanged: four Cortex-A76 cores up to 2.4 GHz, four Cortex-A55 cores at 1.8 GHz, an Arm Mali-G610 MP4 GPU, and a 6 TOPS NPU, with VPU blocks capable of 8Kp60 decode across H.265, AV1, VP9, and H.264.
I/O stays broad for a 90 x 62 mm (3.5 x 2.4 inches) board. HDMI 2.1 reaches 7680x4320 at 60 Hz, alongside two 4-lane MIPI-DSI connectors, two MIPI-CSI camera inputs, one USB 3.0 Type-A and two USB 2.0 Type-A ports, Gigabit Ethernet via an RTL8211F PHY, and a 30-pin 2.54 mm GPIO header exposing SPI, UART, I2C, SPDIF, and PWM lines. Storage covers microSD with SDR104, an eMMC socket up to HS400, and an M.2 M-key slot wired for PCIe 2.1 x1 NVMe. A second M.2 E-key slot accepts optional Wi-Fi/Bluetooth modules, and power arrives over USB-C with PD support across a 6V to 20V input range.
The Linux side leans on a Linux 6.1 BSP with prebuilt images for Alpine Linux 3.23, Debian 12 and 13, Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04, FriendlyWrt 25.12, OpenMediaVault 8.0.6, Proxmox VE 8.2.7, Buildroot with Weston, and Android 14. Mainline-tracking kernels are available through Armbian, which lists the M6 family at Platinum support tier with Ubuntu 26.04 and Debian 13 builds. The codec picture on mainline kernels improved meaningfully earlier in 2026, when Collabora merged drivers for the VDPU381 and VDPU383 decoders into upstream Linux, landing H.264 and H.265 hardware decode for the RK3588 family, explicitly covering RK3588S variants. GStreamer 1.28 already integrates the new V4L2 controls, with preliminary FFmpeg support also underway. VP9 and AV1 hardware decode on RK3588 remain vendor-kernel-only for now, meaning those codecs require the Linux 6.1 BSP images rather than Armbian mainline builds. The 6 TOPS NPU is reachable through Rockchip's open source RKNN toolkit, which covers smaller local LLMs and quantized vision models commonly run on the RK3588 family.
The NanoPi M6V2 sells for $172 (€158) as a bare board on the FriendlyELEC store, with the fanless metal enclosure adding $15 (€14). Optional extras include a 4K MIPI camera module, an RTL8822CE Wi-Fi card, eMMC flash up to 256GB, and a microSD card. Setup notes live on the FriendlyELEC wiki.
