Reviews, Tutorials, Hardware hacks

The pyA20 gpio library is quite famous when people start to play with gpios , spi or i2c on sunxi boards but mapping needs often adjustments to work on your own board. This situation is not really friendly for 'beginners'. pyGPIO should help to make armbian a little bit more 'IoT friendly'. I didn't touch the 'backbone' of pyA20, so the syntax should be similar to its original (except pinname when using port instead of connector). How can I use this library: Cause all of this boards have (more or less) the same pinheader (sometimes other pins are deployed on the pinheader) pyGPIO tries to unify the mappings, so that code can be shared and deployed …

Edit: User Space IO depracated. Use Java Periphery instead https://github.com/sgjava/java-periphery https://github.com/sgjava/userspaceio After a lot of work and testing I have produced the User Space IO project! It provides Python 3 and Java 8 bindings for Linux user space GPIO, SPI, I2C, PWM and Serial interfaces. This allows cross SBC and cross language development using a common API. I took two best of breed C APIs for Linux user space libgpiod and c-periphery and produced CFFI bindings for Python and JNA bindings for Java. Since all the bindings closely match the C API it's easy to move from language to language. The side effect of using the J…

I was chatting with @tido about ways to help the Armbian community and I came up with the idea of a common C library to access the I2C, SPI and GPIOs of all supported boards. There are of course kernel drivers to communicate with these things, but there are differences between boards that this API could help smooth out. For example, different CPUs (and boards) map the GPIO pins very differently. Projects such as WiringOP and WiringNP try to copy the Raspberry Pi library, but this is also flawed because it's based on the BCM283x GPIO numbering. What I propose is to create a set of simple functions for accessing GPIO pins using the physical pin number as a reference. On all…

I've been troubleshooting a little bug all day long, and think I pretty much found it. vcc3v3_pcie20 specifies gpios = <&gpio0 RK_PC5 GPIO_ACTIVE_HIGH>, but the M.2 power switch on the Orange Pi 5 is on GPIO2_A1. The vendor DTS uses gpio2 pin 1. With the mainline value, pcie2x1l2 never links (Phy link never came up / LTSSM 0x3); changing it to <&gpio2 RK_PA1 GPIO_ACTIVE_HIGH> brings up PCIe Gen.2 x1 link up and the NVMe enumerates. This was reproduced on vendor 6.1.115, current 6.18.x, and edge 7.1.8. Workaround that I'm currently using is a little user overlay: mkdir -p /boot/overlay-user cat > /tmp/pcie-m2-power-…

Hello, this quick tutorial is to introduce an experimental Debian and Ubuntu APT repository to install ffmpeg compiled with v4l2request and v4l2drmprime patches developed by Linux kernel, LIbreELEC and Kodi folks to allow hardware video decoding on stateless decoders like those implemented in Rockchip and Allwinner SoCs for h.264, h.265, vp8 and vp9 codecs. The repository introduces a new ffmpeg package that integrates and substitues the base ffmpeg package and its related packages. Preconditions: Mainline kernel 6.1 or more recent armhf or arm64 architecture Supported distributions: Debian 12 - Bookworm …

This will cause update-grub to add the following a devicetree line to all menu entries. This example is based on Debian Trixie's grub-efi. This example will expect dtb directories (or links) to be in the /boot directory, using the convention that I've seen Armbian use. Here is an example of a /boot directory listing for (pure) Debian Trixie with two kernels: -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 336036 Aug 27 04:10 config-6.12.43+deb13-arm64 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 343394 Sep 6 12:48 config-6.16.3+deb13-arm64 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 42 Sep 20 16:17 dtb -> ../usr/lib/linux-image-6.16.3+deb13-arm64/ lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 43 Sep 20 16:17 dtb-6.12.43+deb13-…

Full root filesystem encryption on an Armbian system (new, fully rewritten, replaces my earlier tutorial on this topic) MMGen (https://github.com/mmgen) This tutorial provides detailed, step-by-step instructions for setting up full root filesystem encryption on an Armbian system. The disk can be unlocked remotely via SSH or the serial console, permitting unattended bootup. An automated script that performs the same steps, saving you much time and effort, can be found at https://github.com/mmgen/mmgen-geek-tools Note that unlike my earlier tutorial all steps are performed within a running Armbian system. The…

Been doing some RK3588 board porting and kept running into the same category of bug — dtc compiles clean, dtbs_check passes, but the board either panics on suspend or a peripheral silently fails to probe. Stuff like: Peripheral on the EE supply wired to something that only stays alive in the AO domain → suspend-resume panic Copy-pasted a GPIO bank with 32 pins, used pin 35 → kernel panic at driver probe SPI clock request exceeds PLL maximum → silent bus hang Two nodes sharing the same GIC SPI interrupt line None of these are schema violations — they require knowing the actual cross-domain constraints of the SoC, which dtc has no idea about. …

this is posted to Gist: https://gist.github.com/ag88/65db5434158683e43d1cc77c337ebdb5 Introduction Rpi-monitor https://github.com/XavierBerger/RPi-Monitor is a very nice app for monitoring sbc (single board computers/ actually bigger computers as well) like RPi on a web. it gives you a quick look at various system metrics cpu load, uptime, temperatures etc and more on a nice web page. and on top, makes nice time series graphs for the same, practically a dashboard. Installing in Armbian 25.8 for Orange Pi Zero 3 Rpi-monitor is normally not found in the common Apt repositories and actually the binary is a little old. I tried…

symptom: > apt update ... Err:8 https://github.armbian.com/configng stable InRelease The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 93D6889F9F0E78D5 ... W: Failed to fetch https://github.armbian.com/configng/dists/stable/InRelease The following signatures couldn't be verified because the public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 93D6889F9F0E78D5 observed in Armbian image for Orange pi zero 3 Armbian_community_25.8.0-trunk.90_Orangepizero3_bookworm_current_6.12.30_minimal.img build date May 28, 2025 fix: - run this as root > su - ^ login as root > wget -O - https://apt.armb…

Hi Yesterday I spend the whole day to install Armbian Desktop (XFCE) on my Pinebook Pro. Why Armbian ? The PBP was delivered with Manjaro Arm on it. Everything worked fine until Manjaro stopped support for the Arm platform. For about one year there is no update on stable and the unstable branch couldn't establish a connection to Wifi. I used Manjaro Arm to install tow-boot to the SPI following this website: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=17529 I downloaded the current Bookworm XFCE edition and wrote that to an SD card. Booting from the SD with tow-boot went fine. I installed armbian on the SD card and used armbian-conf…

Hi all. In this video I show how to use armbian-gamingX86. A script to install Steam, PPSSPP, Retropie and Xonotic on Armbian Jammy/Noble X86. Here link to armbian-gamingX86 : https://github.com/NicoD-SBC/armbian-gamingX86 Here my video about it. Cheers, NicoD

The original discussion thread is this Reposting this below just in case it may be useful ---- how i set it up https://gist.github.com/ag88/de02933ba65500376d1ff48e504b1bf3 --- Imho for WiFi purposes nmcli (network manager cli) is not very different from hostapd, just that hostapd possibly has more configuration options. To setup an access point, there are quite a few pieces of network configuration that needs to be setup: The WiFi AP itself (e.g. using network manager or hostapd) if you are able to connect and verify that in the log, that is probably solved. e.g. journalctl -u NetworkManager o…

Overview (Disclaimer: The following is for techies only that like to dig a bit deeper. And if you're not interested in energy-efficient servers then probably this is just a waste of time ) EDIT: Half a year after this poorly designed SBC has been released just one of the many design flaws has been fixed: Micro USB for DC-IN has been replaced by the barrel jack that was present on the pre-production batches. If you were unfortunate to get a Micro USB equipped M3 please have a look here how to fix this. Apart from that check the Banana forums what to expect regarding software/support first since this is your only source) Sin…

I did that on a NanoPi Neo with the FriendlyARM PCM5102A Hat ( https://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&amp;product_id=169 ) using kernel 4.14.87-sunxi and armbian 5.67 (or later would be only 5.65?) (before that I did use legacy kernel 3.4.x with the PCM510A) and the armbian-BuildSystem plus (THANKS to) informations in threads from @dony71 , @Christos, @Valery Rezvyakov and the the Reference-Threads you could find above ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- BACKUP DTB (on NanoPi Neo) --------------------------------…

Hi all. I've created a tool to install Box86, Box64 and Wine onto Armbian Hirsute 5.13 I've tested it on RK3399. Should work on any device with panfrost drivers enabled. Please let me know on what it works, or if it doesn't. Here is the script. https://github.com/NicoD-SBC/armbian-gaming I also made a video where I show how to use it.

I was working on blog article for our site about usage of Armbian extensions and I would be glad if it could be useful for the community It is on https://github.com/pavlot-scriptec/scriptec-blog/blob/main/customize_armbian_image_using_extensions.md Also I have created extension to enable Waveshare 3.5 TFT displays for RPi (and maybe other platforms). Any feedback is wellcome

Hi all. I've done a lot of tests with different desktop environments on Armbian. I wanted an as light as possible desktop environment so I'd have enough ram left to do video rendering with the NanoPi M4(2GB) I had to try a lot of things to get things working fine. So I wanted to save others that hassle. Setting up Display Manager First we need a Display Manager. NODM is installed by default. I tried lightdm but couldn't get it to work. So I went for LXDM. With NODM installed I had problems, so I also removed NODM. To be sure lxdm is configured right, I also manually configure it. sudo apt install lxdm sudo apt remove nodm sudo dpkg-reconfi…

Hello everyone! Is there anyone who tried to run Docker on armbian? Ok, let's start from the beginning: I am from the Hypriot Team (we made Docker available on ARM) and recently saw some guys successfully playing with Docker on armbian. Meanwhile, we know, that our Docker runs at least on the Cubietrack and Lamobo R1/BananaPi R1 on top of armbian! This is awesome because, you know, IoT is coming, and Docker on ARM helps get a grip on many challenges induced by IoT. However, we were only able to support Docker on Raspberry Pis so far... Imagine if Docker would run on more than just a few ARM boards! Armbian seems an awesome platform to …

Step 1 - Install the Armbian PGP key and update your APT sources Install armbian.gpg to /usr/share/keyrings/armbian.gpg (mode 644) You can use a copy from another one of your SBCs, or... ... you can download and install like below (thanks @BrewNinja for the example) touch /usr/share/keyrings/armbian.gpg chmod 644 /usr/share/keyrings/armbian.gpg wget https://apt.armbian.com/armbian.key -O - | gpg --dearmor >/usr/share/keyrings/armbian.gpg Edit /etc/apt/sources.list Replace all instances of bullseye with bookworm Edit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/armbian.list deb [signed…

Hi everyone, it's been a while since i've posted but I have a new project that i'd like to share and hopefully get feedback and ideas from the community. Ever since the first 2 x gigabit ethernet devices came out, I've been thinking that there were a lot of potentially interesting networking use cases. I happened to be re-configuring pihole on a new opi zero, and I had some hardware issues that caused my connection to be a bit flaky on a website that I "shouldn't" have been using. This gave me the inspiration to create a gateway that intentionally manipulates traffic in such a way that you train good usage habits of websites that can be addictive. …

MPD as installed by Armbian needs this audio_output configuration in /etc/mpd.conf in order to use the volume control of the on-board sound with Armbian mainline kernel 5.x on the BananaPi M1 (and maybe other A20 boards): audio_output { type "alsa" name "BananaPi BuiltIn" device "hw:0,0" mixer_type "hardware" mixer_device "default" mixer_control "Power Amplifier" }

Hello, I apologize in advance if I haven't put the topic in the right section. I want to share my experience with NanoPC-T6 and two NVMe m.2 disk. I use my NanoPC-T6 for a small server. In the beginning I had 2 SSDs and an M.2 to 2 SATA adapter. But I never found the right solution to power both the NanoPC-T6 and the SSDs from 1 place. After some internet searching I was able to find a solution on how to put 2 NVMe drives on my NanoPC-T6 As you know NanoPC-T6 has 1 M.2 M-Key connector with PCIe 3.0 x4 There is also one PCIe which is M.2 E-key connector with PCIe 2.1 x1 With this adapter: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005004762…

Hello im new and im Italian so i hope you will not hate me if i write not perfectly (Who said Google Translate?? No No No) This Guide is for a "client to client" setup of the box, we will internally switch Wifi to Eth, so a working computer can access internet from its eth port even if the router signal source is wireless. Router AP -----> ARM BOX [WIFI internal or usb dongle] ===>> internal eth0 ------> ethernet cable --> client eth port Make sure WiFi in arm box is connected using nmtui command FROM NOW ON <WIFI CARD> is the wifi adapter name es: replace "<WIFI CARD>" with "wlx0013eff301ee" …

Hi all. I made a video about KDE Neon on the Raspberry Pi 5. I love it, I'll be switching from ubuntu-desktop to this. Greetings, NicoD

EDIT: Solution in next post (this started as a question; yeah maybe I should have split it, but whatever). Apologies if this is dumb question. I finally got my hands on some appropriate (64-bit) hardware, and ready to install software now. I have read so many threads (in Kobol Club and elsewhere), Issues (at GitHub as well as Atlassian) and I think this is solved by now (on Armbian) but cannot confirm? Official install instructions (on OpenZFS website) don't really seem applicable to Armbian (kernel headers will be different, etc.). I guess what I am asking is, do I just do something like the following: $ sudo ap…

Building Armbian using Ubuntu (jammy) in a systemd-nspawn container https://gist.github.com/ag88/05245121cce37cb8f029424a20752e35 Special thanks goes to @Gunjan Gupta for the tip on PREFER_DOCKER=no

Sharing is caring. Did finally manage to get this working. So lets make it simple clever. Actually i did this on a 64bit raspian light kernel 6.1 but it must be the same on Armbian 10 jan 24 Sharing the Raspberry Pi's WiFi over the ethernet port sudo apt get update && sudo apt install dnsmasq iptables iptables-persistent dhcpcd5 sudo vim /etc/dhcpcd.conf interface eth0 static ip_address=192.168.4.1/24 ------- sudo mv /etc/dnsmasq.conf /etc/dnsmasq.conf.bk sudo nano /etc/dnsmasq.conf - interface=eth0 dhcp-range=192.168.4.8,192.168.4.250,255.255.255.0,12h server=8.8.8.8 …

Hi, There's been a few guides around on how to get RDP working with Armbian so you can login from your Windows or other PC. Some solutions mentioned in various threads here were: Install tightvncserver instead + x2go bloat (i.e. use VNC) Only login as root - didn't seem to make any difference for me Change some permissions of a log file in your home directory. Well, this is what I did on my Orange PI PC running Buster desktop with Kernel 5.4, as of April 2020. sudo apt install xrdp xorgxrdp sudo systemctl enable xrdp sudo reboot ... and that was it. The missing piece of the puzzel appeared to be the install of …

Hi all. Here my review of the Orange Pi 5 Plus with Armbian Jammy. I show tips for better desktop experience, show how to build your own images, how to run games, and tons of info about the board. Here's the video : For those who rather read, here's my gathered data : https://docs.lane-fu.com/s/5IxGlf4gn Greetings, NicoD

!! DEPRECATED !! Instructions in this thread are oudated and superseded by the new experimental APT repository for hardware video decoding ffmpeg. Please refer to this thread from now on! Hello, recent upgrades to armbian are regarding kernel 5.15. I noticed that many v4l2 fixes and enhancements went into this release, so I decided to compile ffmpeg using LibreELEC patched version and mpv over it. mpv turns out to be statically linked with ffmpeg, so I propose it here for people who is interested in cutting edge kernel and wants to do some tests. This has been tested on Debian Bullseye and Ubuntu Hirsute on following platforms:…

Canon provides source code for cups driver, but with some proprietary binary libs. This libs available only for x86. No way for direct compiling cnijfilter for ARM (and other architectures). But we have qemu! We can transparently run x86 executables on any other host architectures. Easy steps to run cnijfilter on ARM (or any other arch): - Build https://github.com/endlessm/cnijfilter-common for x86 - Copy all needed x86 libs using recursive ldd. And copy it to /usr/lib/bjlib/ - Patch all executables: set interpreter to /usr/lib/bjlib/x86/ld-linux.so.2 and rpath to /usr/lib/bjlib/ - Install these patched packages to ARM system…

Hi all. I made a new video on how to build Armbian images. These days you can use your ARM64 SBC to do this. For Windows users there's WSL2 you can use. Here my video about that. Greetings, NicoD

Access to a console can be mandatory when you SBC doesn't work as expected (e.g Network or HDMI output doesn't work). When SSH/Display access isn't possible access to console via UART is the best way to get a clue where your SBC hangs. This short tutorial should give you an introduction how this works. For some boards, armbian implements an USB gadget mode (a 'fake' serial console over microUSB) describen below. As a reminder an USB-UART bridge is always prefered over USB gadget mode whenever possible (UART get's initialized before the gadget driver and also before HDMI, means even if you don't get a proper output from HDMI or gadget mode console, it is possible that UART…

Hi all. I made a new video about Armbian on the Khadas VIM3. Both standard Armbian and Monka his Widevine and Gaming image. Here it is :

Hi all. Here my review video about the Mixtile Blade 3. An RK3588 ARM SBC with a special connector to make it possible to connect multiple of these boards in a cluster. But it can also be used well as desktop or server device. It has all the bells and whistle's an RK3588 can have like dual 2.5GbE, m-PCIe, NVMe, HDMI-out + 2 x DP on USB-C and HMDI-in, ... Here is my video : Greetings, NicoD

Hi, after having a hard time getting the ILI9341 touchscreen working with the NanoPi Neo (Allwinner H3) it seems to work now. To have more GPIOs available for other stuff the touch and display need to share SPI0 I would like to upload it to github because there is basically nothing out of the box available but I'm a total noob with NanoPi, Armbian and overlays so maybe someone could look at it. root@nanopineo:~# uname -a Linux nanopineo 5.15.93-sunxi #23.02.2 SMP Fri Feb 17 00:00:00 UTC 2023 armv7l armv7l armv7l GNU/Linux This is the wiring between ILI9341 and NanoPi Neo: /* 3.3v <--&gt…

Hi, I've been running Octoprint on armbian for several months with good results of a couple of printers with good performance no relevant problems. Installation process is not complex but I decided to build a simple a plug&play meta-distribution like OctoPi for Rpi boards but based on armbian so it can be used potentially in any of the supported boards. I started with the popular Opi Zero as it is really cheap and the four cores of the H2+ processor handle perfectly a 3d printer load and is 3 times cheaper than a typical RPI3B that octoPi requires. You can find it here: https://github.com/ludiazv/octocitrico Built-in features are: …

Hi all. I just made a video where I show how to build your own Armbian images on Windows. It used to be that you needed a virtualMachine running Linux but these days you can use WSL2. Here the video : Greetings, NicoD

My gathered info : RK3588(S) comparison -------------------- RK3588(S) 8nm LP process 4 x A55 @ 1.8Ghz + 4 x A76 @ 2.4Ghz (Not the same for all boards, between 2.2Ghz and 2.4Ghz) Mali-G610 MP4 "Odin" 6TOPs NPU Up to 32GB memory theoretically (haven't seen any 32GB yet) RK3588 RK3588S PCIE3.0 2x2 Lanes PCIe3.0 N/A PCIe2.0/SATA3.0/USB3.0 MUX 3x1 Lane PCIE2.0 2x1 Lane PCIE2.0 3x SATA 3.0 2x SATA 3.0 1x USB3.0 (refer USB section) 1x USB3.0 (refer USB section) Board …

Java UIO provides high performance Java interfaces for Linux Userspace IO. Java UIO was built from the ground up to use modern kernel APIs, libraries and code generation techniques to provide a best of breed cross platform approach. It does not make sense to recreate the wheel like so many other IO libraries. JDK 17 LTS is supported out of the box. I've been committing code to U8g2 that utilizes the same userspace code at the C level and dramatically improved the performance of HW/SW SPI and I2C in the arm-linux port. I also made the arm-linux port thread safe and multi display capable (you can use this in C as well obviously). It made sense to add modularizat…

Hi all. Here my review of the Mekotronics R58-Mini and R58X-4G. These are my favorite RK3588 devices. Easiest to work with on a desk. Been my main-desktop for the last months. I've been using MonkaBlyat his Armbian images. It is stable, fun to work with, has GPU drivers and VPU. But it is using the dirty rockchip kernel. So once armbian can be build for these devices, and mainline has matured these should be the best RK3588 devices for me at home. For on the road I've got the Kadas Edge2Pro. Here's my video. Mekotronics download page : https://www.mekotronics.com/h-msgBoard.html Armbian from MonkaBlyat for R58-Mini : https://m…

If you want to do a complete headless install of Armbian OS on an Orange Pi 5, and connect with Windows Remote Desktop, I put together what has worked for me. I pieced this tutorial together using an Orange Pi 5, installing Armbian 23.02 Jammy Gnome Desktop, and connecting via a Windows 11 PC using Windows Remote Desktop client. Keep in mind, your Orange Pi OS needs to be a full Desktop edition, otherwise, if you're using CLI editions, you will not have a Graphical User Interface installed, which Windows Remote Desktop needs to connect. ArmbianOS Download Link Putty Download Link Start PUTTY and enter your Orange Pi's IP address or host name (orangepi5) …

EDIT: 04.01.2020 - Fixed patches to work with latest armbian sources. (references have changed) Hi everybody, Here is a tutorial to enable the Lemaker 7" Touchscreen on BananaPi Pro with Debian Buster and Mainline-Kernel 5.XX.XX. Kernel: Mainline 5.4.6 / Buster Board: BananaPi Pro WebLinks: • https://forum.armbian.com/topic/1905-enabling-lcd-in-u-boot-kernel-472/ • https://forum.armbian.com/topic/1849-touch-driver-banana-pi/ • http://www.atakansarioglu.com/getting-started-bananapi-linux/ • http://forum.lemaker.org/thread-15482-1-1.html • http://linux-sunxi.org/LCD To make the 7"…

Hi all. I've done an interview with Igor from Armbian. We talked about the new release that's coming this weekend. And about armbian-next, the new updated build framework.

I own a few Android TV boxes that have poor thermal designs that are prone to overheating when under sustained load. This can either cause your device to significantly slow down or shut down entirely. This can be fixed by cutting a hole in the bottom on your TV box above the SoC and sticking a small USB fan on it. In my case I am using a AC Infinity 40mm x 20mm USB Fan that cost me £10. CH340-fan-control is a python script to only activate my TV boxes USB fan when required by using a USB relay module. I'd expect somebody (or several somebodies) have already wrote a similar script for the same device but I failed to find it so here is my effort at fixing this c…

Panfrost Gaming benchmarks with RK3399, Amlogic S922x and RK3588. Testing native supertuxkart, box64 Xonotic and wine32/box86 Viper Racing. RK3399 and AMLS922X done on Armbian Jammy, RK3588 Ubuntu Jammy (22.04)

Hi all. I've just finished making my review video about the Khadas Edge2. No Armbian on it(yet). It is an awesome board, and I'm very happy to have it. I'm still waiting on my Rock5B to arrive, so this helped me overcome this period. But it does have its limits. For some goals it is perfect, some others not so much. Here my video. Greetings, NicoD

Hi all. Here my video about the MangoPi MQ-Pro. It's not powerful, not cheap and not great at anything. But it is nice to see it works. Everybody started out as a baby. So it now needs to grow. Spoiler MangoPi MQ-Pro 1GB ------------------ https://bret.dk/armbian-on-the-mangopi-mq-pro/ Armbian Jammy xfce4 5.19 ------------------------ Idle temp 57C Max temp 63C Blender NicoD 8h34m 7z b 573 Armbian Jammy 5.19 headless without display or usb connected with wifi ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Idle temp 47C Max temp 50C Blender NicoD …

Hi al. I've finished my review of the PineBook Pro. I just love this thing. Runs great with Armbian. Here my video. Here all my gathered information: Spoiler Version Frequency NicoD Belnder CLI 7-zip a/c 7-zip s/c 7-zip b/c CPUMiner SBC-Bench ------- --------- ----------------- --------- --------- --------- -------- --------- Armbian Focal Mate 5.10 2Ghz/1.5Ghz 13m29s 8422 1347 2062 10.8 http://ix.io/3qsC Armbian Focal Mate 5.10 1.8Ghz/1.4Ghz 14m20s 7906 1267 …

mainline based u-boot 2021.07 Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy LTS based (upcoming release, could have issues, currently in testing phase) kernel 5.10.y LTS or 5.15.y LTS ZSH with OhMyZSH addon or classic BASH ZFS 2.1.y support Wireguard fan and LCD support boot from SPI / HDD / USB Tested on image (which comes with preinstalled headers, stable kernel): https://redirect.armbian.com/odroidhc4/Jammy_current https://redirect.armbian.com/odroidhc4/Jammy_current.torrent apt update and upgrade Spoiler odroidhc4:igorp:# apt update Get:1 http://ports.ubuntu.com jammy InRelease [270 kB] Hit:2 http://…

I have a Sabrent NT-SS5G Wired 5 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter (USB3) and a network that can do 2.5 and 5 Gbe so thought I'd see if it works with Armbian on a Nanopi M4V2. Using this distro: Armbian_22.05.4_Nanopim4v2_jammy_current_5.15.48_xfce_desktop Baseline using built-in 1 Gigabit ethernet port on Nanopi M4V2 board: iperf3 -t 60 -c faststore (1 stream) [ ID] Interval Transfer Bitrate Retr [ 5] 0.00-60.00 sec 6.63 GBytes 949 Mbits/sec 0 sender [ 5] 0.00-60.00 sec 6.63 GBytes 949 Mbits/sec receiver iperf3 -t 60 -P4 -c faststore (4 s…

Hi all, we have developed a script to create an SD image for Odroid HC4. With this method you can use Armbian without erase Petitboot partition. https://github.com/TheLillo/generate-image-hc4-armbian

I have written a shell script that can make your Armbian installation run on a ZFS root. It has not been tested enough for my liking. Use at your own risk. Before running this script, please make a full backup of all your mission-critical files. URL: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ya3expllg1bqgfg/fructify.20211011.sh.gz To install the script, please run these commands:- # sudo wget https://www.dropbox.com/s/ya3expllg1bqgfg/fructify.20211011.sh.gz -O /usr/local/bin/fructify.sh.gz # sudo gunzip /usr/local/bin/fructify.sh.gz # sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/fructify.sh Oh, and install ZFS on your own OS installation. To…

Hi all. I made a new video where I explain all the basics of working with Armbian xfce4. This for the absolute beginners that come from Windows. But a more advanced user can maybe also learn a few things from it. Here is the video. Greetings, NicoD

Hi all. In my latest video I compare the Odroids HC4 and N2+, RPi400, NanoPi M4 and Radxa Zero with each other. I make a "NicoD opinion benchmark" where I give my thought on what each board is best for. And of course benchmarks... Greetings, NicoD For those interested, here are all my benchmarks of the last weeks. Spoiler Board | SBC-Bench | Distro | Clockspeeds | 7z all cores | 7z small core | 7z big core | CPU-Miner | NicoD-Blender | Max temp Radxa Zero http://ix.io/3PlT Radxa Buster xfce4 5.10 1.8Ghz …

Hi all. I've just finished a new video about Armbian Hirsute XFCE4. I show what's new. Mostly the feel and look are a bit more modern. Here is my video. Some other notes I've got : Memory usage buster < focal < hirsute xfce4 < budgie < cinnamon CPU performance buster < hirsute < focal xfce4 < cinnamon < budgie So Buster xfce uses the least memory. And is also the slowest. Hirsute is quite a bit slower than Focal, and uses more memory. I do find the newer looks worth the price. Here my benchmarks : Fix missing network sudo apt install gvfs-backends Download SBC-Bench wget https://raw.…

Hi all. In my latest video I make an Armbian Build server out of my old x86 PC. And I set up an extra Odroid HC4 as NAS with the old hard drives from my PC. I hope you'll like it, greetings. NicoD

Orange Pi Zero NTP Stratum 1 PPS GPS Server with Armbian OS. Link to the Tutorial - http://schwartzel.eu3.org/ntp-stratum1.html This tutorial uses a 3.3V capable GPS module with PPS output - TOPGNSS GN-701 (u-blox 7) but other similar modules should work. This tutorial is for the Orange Pi Zero, but will probably work for other boards. I couldn't easily do a comprehensive hardware and software tutorial on this forum, so I've published it on my web server and linked from here and attached a PDF. Link to the Tutorial - http://schwartzel.eu3.org/ntp-stratum1.html Tutorial PDF ntp-stratum1.pdf If you spot any typo's or errors please let me…

I first used Kingston endurance SD card with Armbian Buster image. This failed due some incompability with Odroid N2 UHS implementation, but Sandisk extreme SD card worked with same image. After successful boot runned nand-sata-install to ADATA SP 550NS38 SSD connected using VL817 SATA Adaptor (2109:0715). Upgraded the Debian to Bullseye and installed Mesa 21.2.0 packages from experimental repositories, arm64 firefox-esr and armhf Chromium via multiarch to use widevine extracted from ChromeOS images (local err.ee web broadcasts some programs with widevine encryption). This was in the end of august. It mostly worked, but had 3 weird problems that I think to have sol…

Hi all. In my latest video I test the new Armbian 22.02 images on RK3399. I use the NanoPi M4. But it should be about the same for other RK3399 devices. Long story short. Jammy xfce 5.16 performs better. And has the better performing browser. Focal xfce 5.15 firefox is not HW-acc. Chromium is, but performs badly. Also bad blender result. Not all cores are used to the max. I've never seen this behaviour. So I would use the Jammy xfce 5.16 image. But I'm still using an older image that work. So I'm not upgrading. Greetings, NicoD

This is not so much a 'Tutorial' as it is an overview (and/or starting point for further research) of some things to consider when setting up a file server, some in general and then some more particular to SBC. In the simplest case, you could attach almost any drive to almost any board, by any number of ways, and you have yourself 'a file server.' However with even a small amount of effort, there are so many better ways to do things nowadays. We have a lot more interesting hardware choices, advanced filesystems, etc. and so those are mostly what I want to talk about. But first, some context. Dedicated distros vs simple directory shari…

Hi all. In this video I show how to install Open Media Vault on your SBC with Armbian Buster. I've used the Odroid HC4, this is the same for any board you'd like to use. Here my video. Greetings. NicoD

Hi all. In this video I test the KDE Plasma desktop on Armbian Jammy. It ain't perfect. It needs some fixes to be workable. I show what to do to install and fix. Here's the video. Greetings.

boa tarde, meu e Alfredo, comprei uma placa MMDVM para montar um hotspot, mas nao consigo encontrar compatiblidade , pois estou usando ARMBIAN OS alguem pode me ajudar.

Hi all. In this topic I will show, how to make work USB sound card with Orange Pi. I did not found similar information, so I decided to put this info into a forum. At the moment, I have working mocp from root user, which able to play mp3 and online radio. I am not sure if all steps are necessary. So if You know a shorter version of this, please post a reply. Lets begin. 1. Insert USB sound card, Boot Orange Pi, and login via SSH. alsamixer not work without arguments ( It may print something like: cannot open mixer: No such file or directory ). But this works: alsamixer -c 1 2. I am not sure if this st…

I am trying to use a Waveshare e-Paper (2.9") with an Orange Pi Zero LTS. To enable the SPI interface, I have added this to /boot/armbianEnv.txt: overlays=spi-add-cs1 spi-spidev param_spidev_spi_bus=1 param_spidev_max_freq=10000000 and installed WiringPI from Github. The e-Paper module is connected to the following GPIO pins: VCC: 3.3V GND: GND DIN: 19(phys)/11(wPi) CLK: 23(phys)/14(wPi) CS: 24(phys)/15(wPi) DC: 22(phys)/13(wPi) RST: 3(phys)/0(wPi) BUSY: 5(phys)/1(wPi) I have checked the connections by using the gpio command line tool to set all 6 ports above to low and to high, and verifying the output with a multimeter. Then I downloaded the e-…

Hi all. I've just made a review video about the RPi400. I tested RPiOS, Manjaro and Armbian. All my gathered info under the video. Benchmarks Board | SBC-Bench | Distro | Clockspeeds | 7z all cores | 7z small core | 7z big core | CPU-Miner | NicoD-Blender | Max temp | C copy backwards NanoPi M4 2GB http://ix.io/3xnJ Armbian Hirsute xfce4 5.13.12 1.4Ghz/1.8Ghz 7760 1267 1857 10.05 14m41s 78C *** 1782.9 MB/s NanoPi M4 2GB http://ix.io/3xv3 Ar…

Hello Everyone This is my first topic here. To help myself in the future I did a guide to adjust armbian configuration and settings. This guide contains topics like: Maintaining the board updated Adjusting personal settings (keyboard, timezone, locale) Setting the sound output (default sound output to HDMI) Disable the desktop environment Setting the numlock to "ON" at start up Dealing with 4k video resolution It was based on my experience dealing with Orangepi PC (H3), but many things could be reused to others boards. I hope this guide may be helpful: https://github.com/lbmendes/armbian-settings/b…

Hi all. In my latest video I test an Armbian image for X86/AMD64. I try it on the Rock Pi X. This also works on any other x86 pc. This is just a preview of what is possible. It is not an official release in any way. Armbian is only supported on ARM single board computer. But hell it is nice to use it on this too. Big thanks to all the Armbian developers. Greetings, NicoD

Hi all. In this episode @lanefu explains what he does for Armbian, what gear he uses, and why. It is a must see video. Enjoy

Hi all. You might have already heard. Armbian is aiming to support the Raspberry Pi4. @rpardini already made well working images for it. In this video I talk about why we would want Armbian for the RPi4, and I show you around in Armbian Jammy 5.13 for the RPi4. We do need to find someone who wants to take the task on him/her to be maintainer for RaspberryPi4 at Armbian. For this you need one spare board that can be used for testing when new release are made. Here some info I gathered. Raspberry Pi 4 cooled with big heatsink on SoC and fan on-top Board | SBC-Bench | Distro …

Finally I got my lcd (some of them) to work with armbian on mainline kernel (5.4) using device tree overlay. It should be working on 4.19 kernel too. I test mine on orange pi zero. The one I am able to get working is ili9341 and st7735 based lcd. I'll add more detail later but for now I'd like to get this out. edit 1 : Adding ssd1306 and nokia 5110 overlay to the repo device tree overlay

I think this qualifies as a hardware hack? Certainly amuses me. Hopefully others enjoy it as well. So never quite got my 3.5 mm audio jack working properly on my M4V2 (though others reportedly did). But did find a way to get audible tones from the PWM fan control by playing with the PWM period, so decided to see if I could get music out of my M4V2 in another way ... What follows is interesting exploration of: Finding interesting ways to repurpose NanoPi M4 Cases Loading MIDI files in python3 Brushing up on music theory Finding some free and appropriate Halloween Music $ sudo install pip3 $ sudo pip3 install MIDI…

Required materials ESP32 KOB electronic lock Relay STONE STWI070WT-01 display MFRC522 module Realized function 1. card registration. 2. username and password registration. 3. card swipe to unlock the electronic lock. 4. User name and password to unlock the electronic lock. Connection diagram GUI design Code sharing import mfrc522 import time import _thread from os import uname from machine import Pin, UART #from pyb import UART #import machine suos = Pin(32,Pin.OUT) uart2 = UART(2, baudrate=115200, rx=16,tx=17,timeout=10) ESP32_HSPI_CLOCK = 14 …

Hi all, First afore, allow me to express my gratitude to all developers working on Armbian tirelessly. It is amazing how much I can achieve nowadays on these little Arm-based boxes, either SBC or repurposed Android TV box. This in my first tutorial submitted on Armbian forum, as I would like to contribute something back. I will update this post further when I am getting more familiar w/ Armbian & running LibreOffice on it. =========== Platform running: SOC: Allwinner H6 Device: Tanix TX6 compatible TV box - UPDATE Apr 2022 ( Please check out the Allwinner H6 …

Hi all. I've done a collaboration with @Igor, the creator of Armbian. He shows and talks about the hardware that is used to maintain the project. Servers, boards, other electronics, ... Enjoy! More videos to come.

Recently I tried to use CC1101 Radio-boards to access with spidev0.0; this works after some research: 1. activate spidev in the /boot/armbianEnv.txt (important) 2. in armbian-config hardware activate spidev in the downloaded test routines the speed of the spi is set too high (8000000) 3. set this down to 4000000 In addition: I need the interurpt functions of GDO0 and GDO2 in the next test program. As Interrupts on wiringOP seems to work not on all GPIO-Pins you have to select PAxx for example After the change of the code for this PA21 wPI-Pin 11, it works as expected Michael

Hi all. The Panfrost GPU driver is finally starting to mature for Mali G52 on the Odroid N2/N2+ and Khadas VIM3. It doesn't perform great yet. But this will improve with time. In this video I show how to activate the panfrost driver on Armbian mainline. To activate panfrost : sudo add-apt-repository ppa:oibaf/graphics-drivers sudo apt update sudo apt upgrade sudo reboot Khadas VIM3 support is in the making. This also works on any other mainline image. Greetings.

I had bought the kit because I got attracted by its compact size. I had problems with my old media pc so good opportunity to tackle something new. I thought, my requirements for a media server would be quite low/easy to fulfill: smooth playback of 1080p movies clean multichannel sound access to firefox After testing all avaliable images on the rockpi, it was clear, that actually only LE offers exciting movie enjoyment. I had to realize, that my ideas are quite demanding after all. So it was clear, I had to get the driver from radxa working on LE. Why? well, hardware design of rockpi4 with extension HATs is someho…

Hi, To enable the armbianmonitor to show information on the running system on the serial console, I used to have a custom startup script, called from /etc/rc.local. After some time, I thought it was more neat to have this automatically started (and stopped) for login sessions that are started on serial consoles/terminals. This lead (led?) me to the following systemd unit file: [Unit] Description=armbianmonitor on ttyS2 Requires=serial-getty@ttyS2.service After=serial-getty@ttyS2.service After=getty.target BindsTo=serial-getty@ttyS2.service [Service] Type=idle ExecStartPre=-/bin/sleep 10 ExecStart=/usr/bin/armbianmonitor -m TTYPath=/dev/ttyS2 Standa…

Hi all. @Werner and I have been working on an instruction video on how to install Armbian headless on your SBC. Here it is. Greetings, NicoD

Hi, I startet with conky-grapes from TwisterOS, which I wanted to tweak to show cpu frequency for every core. But that showed, that conky is not able to do consistent text formatting, so I startet to write my own theme. As I like the armbian title font, I asked for the font, but it turned out, that it did not look as good as expected. So I discarded that variant and stayed with the previous selected fonts. Main purpose is to use that monitor in home cinema, therefore I used bigger fonts, which are readable from distance. Feedback is welcome.

Hi all. I again had the pleasure of working with an amazing server. This time the AMD Threadripper 3990X, 64-cores and 128 threads. After last week working on a 32-core ARM server I thought I had seen performance. This is again not comparable with anything before. I again got private SSH access. So I opened 3 terminals. One with HTop, another to check sensors. And the 3th to execute my benchmarks. First thing I saw were the 128-threads. Being used to seeing 6, this was almost unbelievable. Spoiler With light loads it turbo's up to 4.3Ghz. All cores maxed out @ 3Ghz while consuming 400W. Reaching a single core 7zip…

Hi all. I recently bought the Odroid Go Super. It is a great handheld for emulation gaming. But that isn't the main reason why I bought it. It can also run Linux, tho not Armbian. In this video I show how I use Debian Buster from Meveric on the Odroid Go Super and I also review the hardware. Greetings.

Dear Armbian community, although I'm using Armbian a lot, I never had to submit anything to this forum (fortunately, because it works so well :-)), On my PC I've experienced lags on heavy IO operations. After a short dig into available information, I found a useful Cloudflare article on Kernel queues together with dm-crypt. A good & short summary on possible actions for users can be found here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dm-crypt/Specialties#Disable_workqueue_for_increased_solid_state_drive_(SSD)_performance Enabling the no-read-workqueue & no-write-workqueue options helped a lot! …

Hi all. I've finished my review video about the NVIDIA Jetson Nano. I kept it simple, more videos to come on gameplay and neural network self learning. Here's the review video. I like it a lot. Does Blender great, and works well as light desktop. Loving the graphics drivers and hoping soon the other SBC's can have simular good drivers. It is close to being my favorite. If only the cpu had more power... Here my gathered data. Spoiler Check power mode : sudo nvpmodel -q Set 5W mode : sudo nvpmodel -m1 Set 10W mode : sudo nvpmodel -m0 config file : sudo nano /etc/nvpmodel.conf 5W Mode cl…

You all know the problem: You have a spare SBC (with USB3) laying around catching dust, a spare SSD or other hard drive and for whatever reason some (terabyte?) space in whatever cloud on the planet and have no idea what to do with it. Well here is what I came up with to solve this struggle https://zuckerbude.org/cloud-nas-with-local-cache/

This little and inexpensive ($35) board is fully compatible to discontinued NanoPi M3. From a software point of view both boards are identical (though Wi-Fi is missing on the Fire3) and as such identical OS images can be used for both boards. The good news: compared to the last time I looked at the M3 kernel support has improved a lot. Back then we had to run a smelly 3.4.39 (32-bit only) while we can now run mainline on it. I gave it a try using our Armbian Stretch nightly running with 4.14.40 (full armbianmonitor -u output) and did a couple of tests. The Samsung/Nexell S5P6818 SoC consists of 8 A53 cores running at up to 1.4GHz with default settings (can be …

So, I was doing some reading on how to control PWM fans under Linux. The lm-sensors package has a fancontrol script, but pwmconfig doesn't recognize the PWM devices on my NanoPi M4V2. There's also this repository which has a pwm-fan service, which might be the same one that Friendly Desktop uses (referenced in this post). But then I found this rather interesting link from the Kobol guys: https://wiki.kobol.io/helios4/pwm/. Apparently the Linux kernel has built-in thermal control and user space scripting isn't even required, just editing the Device Tree. But as we have easy user overlays for the RK3399, let's go ... tparys@m4v2:~$ sudo ar…

TL;DR *Works* with a minor amendment to the DTS overlay pin reference. $ uname -a Linux nanopineo 5.10.13-sunxi #trunk SMP Mon Feb 8 21:56:43 CET 2021 armv7l armv7l armv7l GNU/Linux $ dmesg | grep Machine [ 0.000000] OF: fdt: Machine model: FriendlyARM NanoPi NEO # Baked current kernel. Configuration ... CIR module appears to NOT be enabled by default for NanoPI NEO. $ grep -iE "^CONFIG_IR_.*(CIR|SUN)" /boot/config-5.10.13-sunxi CONFIG_IR_GPIO_CIR=m CONFIG_IR_SUNXI=m # Connected Vishay TSOP4838 IR Receiver to 3V3 (via 100R, with C100nF to GND), GND, OUT -> PL11 # +----------+ # 1 --- OUT ---! /--\ ! # 2 --- GND ---! | | ! # 3 ---…

First of all, credits goes to https://4pda.ru/forum/lofiversion/index.php?t750921-2560.html Device that I used for this guide: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/3-5-Inch-TFT-LCD-Moudle-For-Raspberry-Pi-2-Model-B-RPI-B-raspberry-pi/32707058182.html Pinout: http://www.waveshare.com/3.5inch-rpi-lcd-a.htm (Yes, the device is a waveshare knockoff) How to place the device? For Orange pi lite/one it is reversed. For the rest, it should be normal. Refer to https://forum.armbian.com/index.php?/topic/724-quick-review-of-orange-pi-one/ for more info. There are two sections to this guide. Legacy / Mainline Legacy Kernel [You can …

Station M1 is based on a firefly board quite similar to roc-rk3328-cc. However, the M1 has a different layout with all ports on the left or on the right, and it is enclosed in a metal case used also as a heat sink. The device tree is also different (rk3328-roc-pc instead of rk3328-roc-cc) and by default a smooth android 10 system is installed on emmc. Additionally, the powering of this board is ensured by a 5V USB-C port instead of a micro-usb for the roc-cc. You can find official pictures and specifications here. My M1 has 2GB ram and 16GB emmc but variants with 4GB ram and more emmc storage can be bought. Currently, an armbian CSC image can be downloaded (bu…

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Hi all, sbc-bench is now on Github: https://github.com/ThomasKaiser/sbc-bench I'll link from the README there to this thread for further discussion about the tool and proper benchmark methodology.

Panfrost instructions Armbian !!!! I made a script that does all this, check a few posts later for the script !!!!! This tutorial explains how to build an Armbian image with panfrost. And what else you need to make it work. These are early drivers. Many things don't work yet. Only OpenGL 2.1 works now. You need to build an image with kernel 5.2 or later. For this you need an x86 pc with Ubuntu 18.04 or a virtual Ubuntu 18.04 x86 image. First install git, then clone the build folder from Armbian, and enter the build directory. apt-get -y -qq install git git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/armbian/build cd bu…

Hi all. I've just finished a new video where I show how to build Armbian images on your ARM SBC. Here is the video. All have a jolly good Christmas or other holiday or normal day.

Is OPI ONE a toy or a toy ? Yes and yes and a fun one too ! The following experiment shows the OPI ONE in use as a Virtual Desktop Server AND Virtual Desktop Client. Setup as Virtual Desktop Server ( remotely access headless OPI ONE desktop ) OPI ONE : install xrdp and tightvncserver <clients> : install and configure remote desktop ( rdesktop on linux, aRDP on android - not yet tested on OS-X or WIN ) Setup as Virtual Desktop Client ( OPI ONE securely accesses a remote linux desktop ) OPI ONE : install x2goclient <server> : install x2goserver on linux server ( physical or virtual ) of choice…

Hey guys i recently read Reviews of Novusun CNC from this guide and found quiet good therefore think to share with you guys. Many of us might need top-notch external CNC controller and Novusun is a good option. I loved EC500 MACH3 Ethernet port 6 axis Motion Controller as it can support 16 optical-isolated digital output ports along with 18 optical-isolated digital input ports. It has a 24-36v dc power input for its IO power supply offering efficient anti-interference ability. Also, the latest EMC design makes it easy to work with the CNC motion controller.