Reviews, Tutorials, Hardware hacks

You may have seen discussions around the forum regarding work being done by @adafruit using circuit python with Armbian, but I wanted to make sure this nice write-up had proper visibility. https://learn.adafruit.com/circuitpython-on-orangepi-linux/initial-setup

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://…

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, 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…

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!

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 …

Hello everybody. I'm little bit confused with this think. Which libraries are good (best) for H5 OPiZeroPlus board .? - WiringPI - ArmbianIO - GPIOzero or ..?? I have small script for timer switch, but it is not stably as well as I can. Button press is not accurate. (some pull-up/down are missing probably) Thanks for answer or suggestion. (PS: I'm not a programmer guru)

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…

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-…

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. 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

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…

Starting to work on lets call it the "dogafu" experiment (don't give a fuck about recommendations). This would combine my threads about powering & bad SD-Cards. Cause I want do something useful and not just crash armbian on a system, from which I know that it would happen, I decided to do not only stupid tasks on my OPi zero. I could just hammering the SD-Card with a webcam and motion until it crashes and write on this thread 'opi 0 with terrible setup crashes after x days'. But, nobody would read this thread cause it's not interesting for anyone. We know that this would happen and for those users who don't know, there's nothing of interest in this thread. Sin…

*** This is educational material only concerning current limits and their effects on things like rise and fall times, and how they can theoretically impact SD cards. The correlation with reality is purely theoretical and has not been empirically proven, the concept is correct but any specific values may be/ probably are off by some factor*** A lot of boards from various vendors inevitably have some difficulties with electrical signalling. You see it in delay values, phase correction in software, etc. The general prevailing theory is almost always "get it close and fix it in software". But, the software team is not always clued in, or the physical reality i…

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-…

With USB camera and Bluetooth headset, mouse and keyboard.

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…

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?

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, 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…

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. 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 …

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…

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…

For now there's one downloadable Armbian Buster image for the M4V2 from pask. Also the patch needed to prepare your own image : https://drive.google.com/open?id=1LaJIywiZnZUkLDZ9HkWrRtc0PyfiYGOL Yon build or download any other M4 image and apply the patch from pask For wifi use this patch from MartinAyotte Download both files https://forum.armbian.com/applications/core/interface/file/attachment.php?id=5386 https://forum.armbian.com/applications/core/interface/file/attachment.php?id=5387 Copy these to /lib/firmware/brcm/ Reboot. That's it. Official Armbian for M4V2 comming soon.

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

Hi all! I've tried Xulong Extension board for Orange Pi Zero and found it useless waste of my money. Almost two months ago I've decided to make my own hacking shield which allows me much more in terms of control and peripherals. I've tested functionality most important to me and I'm pretty happy with result. I2C works, USB power switch works, power measurement works. Project page on GitHub Now I'm in progress making peripherals accessible to the system and user. Userspace tools for python/node/C works and later I will publish tutorial (or more than one) how to make it (because it is not clear to me and take huge amount of…

Hi all. I've just finished reviewing the Khadas VIM3. It's an amazing SBC with unmatched performance. It's got the Amlogic A311D SoC. Comparable with the S922X of the Odroid N2. But the 4x A73 cores are clocked at 2.2Ghz and the 2 x A53 cores to 1.8Ghz. So it performs a lot better. It also comes with an NPU, MIPI-DSI and MIPI-CSI. And can be powered with USB type-c from 5V up to 20V. Here my review video. Here all my gathered information. Khadas VIM3 ----------- Ubuntu server - fan over fins ----------------------------- Blender BMW no fan thermal pad : 59m with copper shim : 58m18s with 5V fan …

Hi All, I am trying to use a 4x4 matrix keypad on Orange pi GPIO ,I am connecting the keypad with 8 GPIO's 4 GPIOs for rows, 4 for coloumns ,the problem I am facing is when I try to test the keypad few keys are read only on repeated attempts or pressing. The following is my code. Is this because of Hardware debouncing?. I don't have much knowledge on debouncing. I suspect there is a delay happening in reading and writing GPIOs , because of user process scheduling can be delayed. I don't think accesing GPIO at faster rate is not possible from user application. Please suggest me the best approach. Please suggest me where I am doing wrong. I appreciate any help…

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-…

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.

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 …

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, 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 …

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…

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.

Hi all. I've finished my review video of the NanoPi M4V2. Here is it. Special thanks to @JMCC @balbes150 @pask and @martinayotte. Cheers all.

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.

Hello, I'm new here and do not quite understand the sub-forums here but hopefully this is the right one. I got an Orange pi ONE running 4.19 RT kernel with Armbian buster. I was testing out the GPIO capabilities of the H3 SoC without any libraries and got only 1.67 Mhz at best(which is ironically the same as WiringPIOP) with some task interrupt issues. #define INP_GPIO(g) *(unsigned int *)(gpio+0x04) &= ~(7 << (((g) % 10) * 3)) //I did not thoroughly check if the mapping is okay #define OUT_GPIO(g){\ *(unsigned int *)(gpio+0x04) &= ~(6 << (((g) % 8) * 4));\ *(unsigned int *)(gpio+0x0…

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…

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.

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" }

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.

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…

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

Hello everybody. I am trying to build an DIY headset from scratch and I originally planning to use some armbian OS for its SBC at its heart of the device (like an orange pi, or something maybe a bit stronger who knows - I happily accept recommendations). For the headset it is necessary to have proper opengl support with hardware rendering capabilities and also good to have video acceleration maybe so I think the legacy kernel fits the purpose best. PROBLEM: I tried to plug in the HDMI display - it does not work. Details: The display is seemingly not working when attached to the HDMI port. I see some led flashing so I think s…

Hello All After a lot of hours and sleepless nights I was able to get this 5" LCD to work with the BPI-M64 module. 1. Correct resolution setup + environment. A. In /Boot/armbianEnv.txt set the following: Make sure to enter overlays= spi-add-cs1 spi-spidev (this is for the touch panel to work) B. for 180 rotation: extraargs=fbcon=rotate:2 drm_kms_helper.edid_firmware=HDMI-A-1:edid/800x480.bin video=HDMI-A-1:800x480-24@60 No rotation: extraargs= drm_kms_helper.edid_firmware=HDMI-A-1:edid/800x480.bin video=HDMI-A-1:800x480-24@60 C. this info came from: https://askubuntu.com/questions/890231…

Hi everyone, I bought this Orange Pi PC with this OV5640 5MP camera module. I've been following the other threads online for directions on getting it to work, and I'm up to the point where there exists a /dev/video0 entry, but I'm unable to use it through avafinger's cap-v4l2 program, opencv, or fswebcam. The best I can get is a black image from it. What I've done so far: Editted the [twi2] and [csi0] sections of my script.fex file, converted it back to script.bin with fex2bin sudo modprobe ov5640 sudo modprobe vfe_v4l2 this is the output of dmesg following boot, and this is the output of v4l2-ctl --all. Here'…

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 …

Hello reader I will report here about my experience to watch Netflix as written in the title. To do so, I got a current LE image from @balbes150 (thank you). You may be asking the same question as I do (did), why using the image from balbes and not the official one from the download page ? It is actually quite simple, balbes integrates the latest Kernel for his LE builds. While on a x86 system the kernel isn't so interesting, it is on ARM systems, because a lot of the development happens 1 or 2 year later of the release of the SoC. I have asked him about the different versions he offers for Le Potato: All versions…

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.…

Here are the instructions to run Htop remotely using a web browser. I often use Htop to monitor the health of my boards and servers (amd64). It is a good tool for the sys admin to monitor the servers in real-time without much resources and it is not very intrusive. Recipe 1 - Clone shellinabox root@cubieboard2:~# git clone https://github.com/shellinabox/shellinabox Cloning into 'shellinabox'... remote: Enumerating objects: 3073, done. remote: Total 3073 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 3073 Receiving objects: 100% (3073/3073), 4.31 MiB | 1.89 MiB/s, done. Resolving deltas: 100% (2418/2418), done. root@cubieboard2:~#…

For those of you who're interested in running a CMS on Armbian I've a small tutorial how to get django CMS working. If you're not interested in the 'story' just want a step by step installation guide, scroll to the end of this post, there you find it. Story: Following their installation guide it fails during creation of a django project with 'djangocms -f -p . mysite'. The error looks something like: Spoiler Traceback (most recent call last): File "/home/opi/django/env/bin/djangocms", line 11, in <module> sys.exit(execute()) File "/home/opi/django/env/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/djangocms_install er/main…

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/

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

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) …

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

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

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.

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

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 …

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 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. 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. 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, 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, …

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

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. 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

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…

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)

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. …

Hi all. I've made a new video about how to build your own Armbian image with the Armbian build script. I also show how to set up virtualbox with a Ubuntu 18.04 image. Here's the video. Greetings, NicoD

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…

Lately, I started writing a few articles on the OrangePi Zero, as I am trying to use it as part of a conference recording tool and to reference what I know about this board on the OrangePi Community docs website. Of course, I have to show my command lines, and their results. I used to post my commands on gist, then use Carbon to generate an image with the commands and their outputs… But that’s quite a lot of boring work… I then discovered asciinema and the recording that can be transformed into a GIF file thanks to asciicast2gif. It worked pretty well under Ubuntu for my previous projects, but it was not really practical to launch it, is…

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 :

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 ---…

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 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 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

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