Reviews, Tutorials, Hardware hacks

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…

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…

The above is a so called 'Banana Pi M2 Berry' I bought yesterday and will return today to get my money back (due to 'Irreführende Werbung' / false advertising) showing most probably the use case this device will be bought by clueless people: To connect a SATA 2.5" disk to it since 'native SATA'. Of course this doesn't work as expected since the board's power design is an absolute fail. The manufacturer already knows what a shit show using Micro USB for DC-IN is. I simply used the same average USB cable I used to demonstrate the problem a few years ago with the original Banana Pi. With an average USB cable the disk does not even spin up but only produces ugly n…

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…

As a result of all the work that Armbian developers put into the upgrade to kernel 4.14 for the XU4 board family, now we can enjoy many new features. One of them is the access to the SoC video encoding capabilities. Emby Media Server can take advantage of the Exynos 5422 MFC video engine for transcoding. That means lower CPU usage, lower temperatures, and the possibility of encoding in real time higher resolutions or more simultaneous streams. In my tests, I've been able to transcode one HEVC 1080p and one 480p at the same time, or five 480p (though it will depend on the bitrate of the source material). However, the ffmpeg version shipped with offi…

On some devices (mostly headless) like Pine A64 LTS and other SBCs with Allwinner SoCs is Lima blacklisted by default or not supported by distribution. For getting Lima work, you need to use distribution, which have already Mesa with Lima support (Mesa 20.1+) (or compile latest Mesa from sources, but this is not included in this tutorial). At the moment of writing, it's Ubuntu Focal and Debian Bullseye. I personally prefer Debian more, so in my case, download Debian Bullseye image for your SBC and burn it into the board. After booting into your board, find file named /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-NAMEOFYOURSBC.conf (for me it's blacklist-pinea64-lts.conf…

Hi all. I've made a new noob video on how to install Armbian on an SBC. I also show how I set up my Armbian desktop. And I show how to install Armbian onto another media. https://youtu.be/pnxUctyqx4c Greetings, NicoD

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/

[update 12/2017 at bottom] Possibly late, but I would like to put everything we know in one place for anyone who might think of buying this board. Overview: This is a form factor and (mostly) I/O clone of the Raspberry Pi 3 with a much more powerful quad-core Cortex-A17 Rockchip rk3288. It supports HDMI 2.0, has 2 GB RAM, Gigabit Ethernet, Wifi and BT on board, etc: https://www.asus.com/us/Single-Board-Computer/Tinker-Board/ As numerous other sites have covered all the typical performance metrics and extolled the power and so forth of this board, I'm going to go ahead and give you the less exciting information a…

Today I had the pleasure of benchmarking an ARM64 server. This server has been made available for Armbian to test native ARM64 image building. I knew nothing about the server. Nobody told me any details. So everything was an adventure for me to find out. I got SSH access, so my research began. A lscpu informed me it had 32-cores all clocked at 3.3Ghz. Spoiler nicod@worksonarmbian:~$ lscpu Architecture: aarch64 CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit Byte Order: Little Endian CPU(s): 32 On-line CPU(s) list: 0-31 Thread(s) per core: 1 Core…

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 …

I pushed a template for the NanoPi NEO (2/Air/Core/Plus2) onto my github: https://github.com/Tonymac32/kicad-templates If you want to make add-ons, that's fully labelled and the header positions are as correct as I could get them without official reference. I have made a few boards with it, so can vouch that it will assemble. I'll add more as I have time and money to do so, since I don't want to push any that aren't verified in some manner.

Tested this on clearfog base, banana pi m64, banana pi m2+ ## Building and providing The elastic team doesn't provide deb packages for ARM devices. But together with docker, we're able to build the main executable for it. We will create a build directory which includes anything to install filebeat on a ARM device. So please stay inside the build directory the whole time you are using this tutorial. mkdir build && cd $_ ## Prepare source code First we will download, check and extract the source code of filebeat. Source: https://www.elastic.co/downloads/past-releases/filebeat-7-6-2 wget https://artifacts.elastic.co/dow…

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. 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

I am releasing this patch in the hope of you may find it useful. I have also included a sample dts file. It seems to work in 48mhz quite well with very few SPI errors. (Note that the pieces of the driver has been around for some time but I have never seen it put together without further work. Hopefully this patch would make it readily usable. I have tested it on 5.5.18 and quite happy with it.) 0001-fbtft-fb_ili9488.patch 1_ili9488.dts Sample file is for nanopi neo. Driver also works with 4 inch LCD, MSP4020, MSP4021

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) …

I do some tests on a new display from WaveShare : 5.5inch HDMI AMOLED, 1080x1920 https://www.waveshare.com/product/modules/oleds-lcds/oled/5.5inch-hdmi-amoled.htm On the wiki, it's wrote : To use it on RaspberryPi, you must change the config.txt file for to ajuste hdmi parameters : https://www.waveshare.com/wiki/5.5inch_HDMI_AMOLED max_framebuffer_height=1920 max_usb_current=1 config_hdmi_boost=10 hdmi_group=2 hdmi_force_hotplug=1 hdmi_mode=87 hdmi_timings=1080 1 26 4 50 1920 1 8 2 6 0 0 0 60 0 135580000 3 I do it and that working fine I add this to ajust resolution max_f…

Hi all. I've made a new review video about the Odroid N2. It an amzaing beast of an SBC. But it ain't perfect for everyone. Geetings, NicoD. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dylc0GjeyM8 @balbes150 Tanks for the great image.

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

Hallo, this Mini-Howto describes how to change the behavior of the onboard LEDs during booting. There are many ways to do that. Two ways are shown here, a SysV style using /etc/rc.local and a systemd style using a configuration file in /etc/tmpfiles.d/. The systemd file is earlier interpreted than rc.local. It is tested on Banana Pi M1*/M2/R1 with Debian jessie next (5.0x, 4.4.x). * partly Which LEDs could be accessed? root@bananapim2:~# ls -1 /sys/class/leds/ bpi-m2:blue:usr bpi-m2:green:usr bpi-m2:red:usr * The Banana Pi M1 lists the blue LED but it couldn't be set via /etc/tmpfiles.d/ or /etc/rc.local. Which beh…

In general we seem to get a schematic with some pin labels, not always complete, and certainly inconsistent. (Some like FriendlyElec do an amazing job, Libre Computer provides some spreadsheets, etc) Since Armbian is as much about "making it better" as it is about "making it work", I thought a good project that a lot of people could participate in is a relatively unified GPIO reference: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1dJq7MM1_zA5HtXywDMZ9HMKyPaNgGmkxnuz3wYuk4s8/edit?usp=sharing I don't know that a google sheet is the best system, but it serves to illustrate my idea. Provide a consistent format so there are few que…

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…

This falls somewhere between "how-to", "research", and "development", so I stuck it here. @adafruit is working to target CircuitPython to Armbian devices, something that will be a bit of a task. I've been playing with the code to get it working on my Tritium H3, finally did (some extra sudo-ing was needed), so I'll probably toss in a couple board definitions/help here and there if I can. it had hijacked a C2 thread (not completely, it was at least about using it on the C2), and I thought it best to continue discussion here. @chwe, @sgjava, and @Larry Bank all have various experience with various GPIO tools, their interest may vary. My current observations,…

Hi all. I just finished my review video about the Tanix TX6. Here it is. Greetings, NicoD

https://www.mccdaq.com/DAQ-HAT.aspx I've reached out about whether or not they know if the software works with non-RasPi boards. I'm not dropping $99 to test it personally, if it fails then what? But, looks like a nice setup if mated with a proper board. The other option of course is to build one myself, but then it becomes a question of software, which would take far longer than the hardware itself.

I have orange pi pc with debian. Orange Pi is connected via mobile connection (Wifi AP). Every day I lose more than 500mb data to nothing. What I must disable to normal operations without any update?

Hi there, I have a RockPi 4b running Arabian with Ubuntu bionic. I mainly use the board to contact it online over ssh/vnc/rdp to work in spyder and texmaker. Quite often the connection is slow however. Therefore I am thinking of changing the system such that i can just bring it on the road and connect it using a local network with the usbc cable outlet of the iPad and a USB port on the rockpi. The reason i would like to connect over a cable is speed and not having to use the WiFi so that both devices can still easily connect to a WiFi network for internet access. I have found many solutions where iPads are connected to raspberry pi’s. These solutions all have …

Hi All, I recently bought a cheap 16 character, 2 row LCD display from aliexpress.com for use with my Orange Pi PC. I got it to work without too much pain, but I thought I would document it here for the benefit of others. Some good instructions are already available on the internet, but there are some tweaks required for the Orange PI. Armbian I believe already has the I2C module compiled into the kernel directly. So no Linux Kernal insmod work required, unlike what many Raspberry PI guides seem to imply. Step 1) Buy the things you will need. 1. You obviously need a 1602 LCD module which also comes with the the I2C converter…

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" }

Some of the boards supported by Armbian have an mpcie slot. The only one that I know of that also has a sim slot is the celarfog pro. (Correct me if I missed something) I found this little add on board that supposedly adds a sim card to an mpcie modem. Think it might work on some or which of the boards? I looked at this but I get lost in figuring out how to form the udev rules. Anyone get 4g going on Armbian on any board in the US?

Hi all. I've just finished a new video where I review an Amazon AWS Graviton2 arm64 server. This is a monster with 64 high-performance N1 cores. It isn't clocked that high at 2.5Ghz, but it performs amazing for that clockspeed. Here is my video. Here all the info I've gathered. AWS Server 32-cores 128GB ------------------------- NEOVERSE N1 64-core AWS Graviton2 ARMv8.2 aarch64 Arm’s Neoverse N1 cores -> based on A76 -> almost identical to Arm’s 64-core reference N1 platform -> CPU cores are clocked a bit lower 2.5GHz and only 32MB instead of 64MB of L3 cache Max speed 2500Mhz 8-channel DDR-3200 128GB ram 64 PCIe4 lanes TSMC’s 7…

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 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.

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. 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…

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 …

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…

Here is a list of Tech watch links, feel free to add useful links please. News Single Board Computers and Virtual Private Servers CNXSoft Embedded Systems News Orange Pi facebook group YouTubers MickMake GreatScott EEVblog kicker22004 Brian Greul David Watts Kaspars Dambis

I came across this, the project allows the control of a lot of home-brew hardware as well as commercial products: https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/installation/armbian/

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" …

Hello, everyone. I'm planning to make a "power button" on orange pi zero using GPIO pins. I'm using kernel 4.x Of course, some questions. General idea is: 1) Create the overlay with correct pin number 2) Install acpid 3) It should work. Questions: - What resistor should I use to short pin to ground ? 10K ? May other values work ? (Not sure my "scrap metal" box has exact this value) - How does overlay file look like ? I've seen some variants on the forum, but can some one point to working code ? I'm planning to use PA06 pin, as far as I understand it's a pin 7 on OpiZero 26 pin connector. - I'm already …

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 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…

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 Im trying to use the Pine A64 for a robotics project but I cannot find any information about how to use the pins and peripherals. Im using Armbian Stretch and I have been looking for the information for like three days. Is there any tutorial, library or something to check how to use the pins on the board? I need to use I2C, SPI and I/O pins... Im even considering switching to RPi because of the lack of documentation... Any help is appreciated Thanks!

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.

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…

Requirements Fresh enough nighly or manually built image Latest kernel and dtb packages (26.03.2017 or newer) Limitations As stated in other PWM related threads, hardware PWM output is supported only on pin PA5 which is also UART0 ("debug" serial console) RX pin, so enabling PWM will disable this console. Activation Add "pwm" to "overlays" line in /boot/armbianEnv.txt Example: overlays=pwm Reboot is required to apply the changes Armbian overlays documentation: https://docs.armbian.com/User-Guide_Allwinner_overlays/ PWM sysfs interface Official documentation: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux…

It's simple guide, presenting how to setup LCD (ili9431) with integrated touchscreen (tsc2046) on mainline kernel (4.11). It may be not fully "armbian way", since I'm pretty new in armbian In case that somebody is interested, I recently bought couple those displays from here Few basic informations: 1. OrangePiZero has two SPI buses. First one is usually occupied by build in memory. So we can only use bus1 2. tsc2046 chip is fully compatible with ads7846, and we have drivers for it since years now 3. Maximum clock frequency for ads7846 is 3.25Mhz, but don't expect that it will work with that. Reasonable value is something beet…

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) --------------------------------…

Trying to figure out which NOR chip to buy for my ZeroPi is giving me a headache. FriendlyArm has very little info available on what works. The board has an empty spot to solder a NOR chip that I would like to populate. There are so many chips all with different voltages and clock frequencies. The wiki and schematic omit the connection all together so I really have no idea what would work. Can someone point me in the right direction?

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

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…

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

Hello, the Rock64 SBC can receive an add-on board with audio ports and an additional ethernet port. I have used it a lot before, with Debian Stretch. With the armbian image it does not work. The reason is simple, this board must be activated by a script which is missing. Ayufan has added a set of scripts in /usr/local/sbin, but they are not present in this build. They can be found here : https://github.com/ayufan-rock64/linux-package/blob/master/root/usr/local/sbin/enable_dtoverlay Then run the necessary command : enable_dtoverlay eth1 ethernet@ff550000 okay and the card is present in ifconfig. Once given an iP address, it works perfectly. …

Hi all. I've just finished a long video special where I talk about all my SBCs. In the order how I got them. I show the specs of all of them. Say what I like, what's bad about them. What I use them for. What SBC is best for your goal. Here's my video, I hope you enjoy it. Greetings, NicoD. P.S. : Pictures of anyone else their collection? Mine are not all on this pic, no room for them 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-…

!! 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:…

I know the RPi is pretty limited on the GPIO pins. Now my question is how it looks on Le Potato, i.E. is it possible to power a fan directly from the GPIO pins? Powering it from the 3.3 V line seems to work just fine but I fear damaging hardware by trying to connect it to a GPIO instead.

Questions and answers about powering the Orange Pi Zero using the "Power over Ethernet" option. The aim is to answer community questions about Power Over Ethernet options (both official 802.3af/at and unofficial "PoE" solutions) and to improve the wiki page with these answers: http://linux-sunxi.org/Xunlong_Orange_Pi_Zero Helpful links: http://linux-sunxi.org/Xunlong_Orange_Pi_Zero#Powering_the_board https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_over_Ethernet https://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/1762-new-oranges-with-h5-and-h2/page-2#entry19054 Examples of standards-compliant PoE hardware: 802.3af switch: …

Hi all. Here my newest video about old boards that still do their job well. OrangePi+ and OPi+2. My favorite NAS. Here all my gathered data. Spoiler OPi+ OPi+2 ---- ----- Specs specs ----- ----- Allwinner H3 quad-core Cortex-A7 Max 1.37Ghz Mali400MP2 1GB ddr3 2GB ddr3 8GB eMMC 16GB eMMC 10/100 Ethernet Gbit ethernet CSI 4 x USB2 type A…

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…

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 made a new review video about the Orange Pi 3 with Linux. I've used Armbian Stretch for this video. Here is my video. Here you can find all the data I've gathered. Spoiler Orange Pi 3 ----------- OPi Ubuntu Desktop 16.04 ------------------ At first boot partition didn't expand automatically -> Used gparted on another device Doesn't reboot orangepi@OrangePi:~$ 7z b 7-Zip 9.20 Copyright (c) 1999-2010 Igor Pavlov 2010-11-18 p7zip Version 9.20 (locale=C,Utf16=off,HugeFiles=on,4 CPUs) RAM size: 1980 MB, # CPU hardware threads: 4 RAM usage: 850 MB, # Benchmark threads: 4 Dict Compres…

Hi, all! Is it possible to make micro usb otg connection through gpio pins on the orange pi zero? I'm asking because when OPi is located in the box, I need to use external USB type B socket to micro usb cable. So it will be really cool, if I will have opportunity to connect usb otg socket through gpios. Regards.

overlay examples: GPIO keys Mainline Linux OrangePi gpio-keys.dts /dts-v1/; /plugin/; / { compatible = "allwinner,sun4i-a10", "allwinner,sun7i-a20", "allwinner,sun8i-h3", "allwinner,sun50i-a64", "allwinner,sun50i-h5"; fragment@0 { target = <&pio>; __overlay__ { gpio_keys: gpio_keys { pins = "PA7","PA8","PA9","PA10","PA21"; function = "gpio_in"; bias-pull-up; }; }; }; fragment@1 { target-path = "/"; __overlay__ { gpio-keys-user { compatible = "gpio-keys"; pinctrl-names = "default"; pinctrl-0 = <&gpio_keys>; g-keys_up { label = "GPIO KEY_UP"; linux,code = <103>; /* KEY_UP, …

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…

TL;DR: All available H3 boards do not differ that much. But the few differences sometimes really matter! The following is an attempt to compare the different available H3 SBC that are supported by Armbian. The majority of boards is made by Xunlong but in the meantime two more vendors started cloning the Xunlong boards (and also Olimex is preparing H3 boards as OSHW). Both Foxconn/SinoVoip with their Banana Pi M2+ and FriendlyARM with their NanoPi M1 tried really hard to copy everything as exact as possible (the so called pin mappings -- how the many contacts the used H3 SoC is providing are routed to the outside). All the boards share the same 40 pi…

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, anybody knows what size of a heatsink can I put on an Orange Pi Zero? It is in the small cube enclosure (without additional addon board). Maybe a link to eBay or Aliexpress? Thanks!

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…

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 …

Clearfog PRO with R1 in the back After a day of playing, I am running full featured Armbian, Debian Wheezy, built with Armbian script from sources. We had to fix few things in U-boot and upgraded kernel to .82 but generally it was easy to boot the board. Of course SolidRun also provide some basic images. Three(3) phys, USB and PCI is detected in kernel 3.10.82 - I don't have much hardware to plug in so I can't do much tests at this point. There is no CPU governor (yet?), so I assume it's running full speed (1.6Ghz) all the time. There are dip switches on the board to set cpu / dram speed ... ____ _ __ / ___| | ___ __ _ _ __ / _|…

-

Full root filesystem encryption on an Armbian/Orange Pi PC 2 system MMGen (https://github.com/mmgen) WARNING: This tutorial has been obsoleted by Full root filesystem encryption on an Armbian system. In addition, an automated script is available, which can be downloaded here or by cloning the following repository: git clone https://github.com/mmgen/mmgen-geek-tools This tutorial provides detailed, step-by-step instructions for setting up full root filesystem encryption on an Armbian/Orange Pi PC2 system. With minor changes, it can be adapted to other Armbian-supported boards. The disk is unlocked remotely via ssh, permitting unattended …

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

I use the OrangePi Zero. But it is similar to other model. It's very simple: 1) use the mainline 4.11.x kernel 2) enable the uart1 and pps-gpio in /boot/armbianEnv.txt like this : overlays=uart1 pps-gpio param_pps_pin=PA7 3) edit /etc/default/gpsd to use ttyS1 as gps device # Devices gpsd should collect to at boot time. # They need to be read/writeable, either by user gpsd or the group dialout. DEVICES="/dev/ttyS1" # Other options you want to pass to gpsd GPSD_OPTIONS="-G -n " 4) If you use ntpd, edit /etc/ntpd.conf like this: # GPS Serial data reference server 127.127.28.0 minpoll 4 maxpoll 4 prefe…

For those of you who are interested in using a OPI zero as a small IoT-Server. I have some hints to get it working. It's more or less a lmgtfy How To plus some arduino code to test if it works. Hardware: OrangePi 0 with Armbian 5.25 connected over lan to my router DHT11 Module on a Wemos D1 mini (a small cheap wlan MCU for ~3$ which can be programmed via the Arduino IDE) Installation: First of all we install node-red on the OPI. Instead of rewrite how to do that again I just give you the link who to do that: Node-Red on armbian Second we install Mosquitto as a mqtt broker. If I have it right in mind I followed this instructable (I'm not shure…

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, I don't know where to start, but I am looking to use Velleman VM140 USB IO-board with Armbian Linux. I tried first on NanoPi R1 that I have succesfully installed Armbian Linux. Linux I have installed is Armbian Buster for NanoPi R1. root@nanopi-r1:/etc# uname -r 5.7.15-sunxi I read somewhere there is kernel support for K8061 (the usb chip on the board if I understood correctly, looks to be a pic with USB). dmesg after attaching USB cable to R1: [960949.202099] usb 6-1: new full-speed USB device number 2 using ohci-platform [960949.435136] usb 6-1: New USB device found, idVendor=10cf, idProduct=8061, bcdDevice= 0.00 …

@Larry Bank I happened across these again: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1pcs-White-Backlight-84-48-84x84-LCD-Display-Module-Adapter-PCB-for-Nokia-5110-for-Arduino/32267197519.html They might be used, or they might be quality rejects for actual product, I'm not sure. There are other options from the seller, I haven't gotten any yet so can't speak to the state they're in.

Hi all. I've made a new video about x11vnc. With this you can control your Linux desktop from any other PC/SBC. It even works for videos and games. Only there's no sound. I use lightdm as display manager. If you use another display manager, change the line "After=lightdm.service" with your display manager. Here's my video, To Install sudo apt install x11vnc To create a password file x11vnc -storepasswd The service script : /lib/systemd/system/x11vnc.service [Unit] Description="x11vnc" Requires=display-manager.service After=lightdm.service [Service] ExecStart=/usr/bin/x11vnc -auth guess -loop -forever -safer -shared …

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 …

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

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 …

Hi there. Trying to get SPIDEV working on my good old cubietruck aka cubieboard3 with an allwinner A20. Found some posts here and there dealing with A20 boards. But nothing of that did anything for me so far. Enabled it in armbian-config hardware settings and rebooted. No /dev/spi* at all. No mentioning of "spi" in dmesg. Step 1 gave a line "overlays=spi-spidev" in /boot/armbianEnv.txt. Read somewhere else that there should be another line "param_spidev_spi_bus=0", but that was not created by armbian-config. Added that ...bus=0 line myself and rebooted. Still no spi device and nothing in dmesg /proc/device-tree-model says "cubietec…

I'm not sure what will and won't be a worthy overlay to put directly into Armbian itself with the current script structure, I intend to document the ones I add here, @martinayotte may as well if he's bored. :-P I will be focusing on RPi GPIO compatibles, since those are nice pre-packaged devices in general. I have Tinker, RockPi 4, Le Potato/K2/C2, Tritium H2+/3/5, Rock64, Renegade, and some others. Everything here is a placeholder at the moment. Status Tinker Le Potato Meson64 Renegade Tritium Automation Hat …

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've made a new video where I compare the above boards. I show specs, performance and transfer speeds of everything. Here's the video. Here my gathered data. Benchmarks ---------- Khadas VIM3 | Clock S/C | B/C | Blender | 7z S/C | 7Z B/C | glxgears | CPUMiner | SBCBench | glmark2 Ubuntu Bionic 1.80Ghz 2.21Ghz 13m22s 1582 2322 192FPS 12.90 http://ix.io/1P6F Ubuntu XFCE 1.80Ghz 2.21Ghz 12m43s 1586 2316 355FPS 12.90 http://ix.io/1PhE Armbian Bionic 1.80Ghz 2.11Ghz 11m48s 1610 2244 …

Let's start with a weird image first: In the plastic box is an Olimex A20-Lime2, a 2.5" HDD with 2TB and Olimex' largest battery with 6600mAh. Mounted on the top cover (box standing on the side) is a Banana Pi M2+ (to be replaced with NanoPi M1 or OPi One/PC in the future) Why Lime2? Since this board from our friends at Olimex is designed intelligently and provides DC-DC step-up converters on the board providing the ability to power also the connected SATA disk when running from battery (unlike most other A10/A20 boards that do only provide 5V on USB ports in battery mode but not to the disk!). And since A20 is perfectly supported by ma…

hi all, as documented here, i did some minor experiments with small heatsinks on an orange pi one sbc (allwinner H3) among the things i used a small matrix multiplication program which multiplies a 1000x1000 matrix single precision floating point matrix main.cpp the command to build is c++ -O2 -std=gnu++11 -pthread -o mat main.cpp then run ./mat the last documented results on an orange pi one H3 running at 1.2ghz is 2389.49Mflops ~ 2.39Gflops the sources attached is 'optimised', the means of optimization is unrolling of the innermost loop to take advantage of platforms that could do quad sp fp simultaneous execute …

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…

UPDATE: You'll find a preliminary performance overview at the end of the thread. Click here. This is NOT an ODROID N1 review since it's way too early for this and the following will focus on just a very small amount of use cases the board might be used for: server stuff and everything that focuses on network, IO and internal limitations. If you want the hype instead better join Hardkernel's vendor community over there: https://forum.odroid.com/viewforum.php?f=148 All numbers you find below are PRELIMINARY since it's way too early to benchmark this board. This is just the try to get some baseline numbers to better understand for which use cas…

With this commit I added 7-zip benchmark reporting to Armbian now. Will be available after next updates and with next batch of new images. Why not recommending to just do an 'apt install p7zip ; 7zr b'? Since 'fire and forget' benchmarking is always BS. You need some monitoring in parallel to know whether your system was really idle and at which clockspeeds the CPU cores were operating (throttling occuring or not?). Most recent 7-zip contains an own routine to 'pre-heat' the system prior to starting the benchmark (to let cpufreq scaling switch from low clockspeeds to highest ones and e.g. on Intel systems let the system enter TurboBoost modes). Th…

Hello, I'm trying to use Armbian with a Nanopi NEO Core (Allwinner H3) mounted on its Mini Shield. I was able to use the CAN controller MCP2518FD through SPI1 and CS1. Now I need to use, always on the same SPI1, the demo board TPM SLB 9670 TPM2.0 that I have already verified on a Raspberry Pi. I found the tpm_tis_spi Kernel module by compiling Armbian Bionic 5.4.37, but I was unable to locate the DTB overlay needed to set-up the following pins: SPI1 MOSI SPI1 MISO SPI1 CLK SPI1 CS IRQ (from SLB9670's demo board to Nanopi NEO Core) RESET (from Nanopi NEO Core to SLB9670's demo board) Can anyone help me? Thanks i…

Here is a short instruction how to enable S/PDIF digital audio output on NanoPI M1 board running Debian Jessie with legacy kernel. This instruction can be applied to other H3 based boards but connect S/PDIF output hardware to GPIOA17 can be tricky (soldering miniature camera connector pins). Operations can be done over serial console or ssh. Login as root Get a .fex file and open it in editor: bin2fex /boot/script.bin /tmp/script.fex nano /tmp/script.fex Search a csi0 (camera) section an disable it: [csi0] vip_used = 0 Search a S/PDIF section and enable it: [spdif0] spdif_used = 1 Get the name of t…

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…