Reviews, Tutorials, Hardware hacks

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…

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…

[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…

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…

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, …

ODROID HC1 Mini Review ODROID XU4 is one of the most powerful boards Armbian supports (due to being a big.LITTLE design with 4 x A15@2GHz and 4 x A7@1.4GHz). Though the SoC is a bit old performance is still impressive, the SoC features 2 independent USB3 ports (on XU3/XU4 one is connected to an USB Gigabit Ethernet chip, the other to an internal USB3 hub providing 2 USB3 receptacles) but in the past many users had troubles with USB3 due to cable/connector problems (the USB3-A receptacle specification/design is a total fail IMO, unfortunately we've still not USB-C everywhere) underpowering problems with Hardkernel's Cloudshell 1 or XU4 powere…

Clearfog PRO with Linux 4.12.4-mvebu Samsung 840 PRO utilization: iozone -e -I -a -s 100M -r 4k -r 16k -r 512k -r 1024k -r 16384k -i 0 -i 1 -i 2 random random kB reclen write rewrite read reread read write 102400 4 62501 101691 98761 94430 34522 93050 102400 16 183325 215091 231439 232948 101667 171875 102400 512 301985 307789 341261 344567 328849 309560 102400 1024 294818 309177 345099 347791 339763 309775 102400 16384 271066 344426 384226 …

We included in Armbian a small utility called h3disp. If called without arguments it displays just a usage information: tk@orangepipc:~$ sudo h3disp [sudo] password for tk: Usage: h3disp [-h/-H] -m [video mode] [-d] [-c [0-2]] ############################################################################ This is a tool to set the display resolution of your Orange Pi by patching script.bin. In case you use an HDMI-to-DVI converter please use the -d switch. The resolution can be set using the -m switch. The following resolutions are currently supported: 480i use "-m 480i" or "-m 0" 576i use "-m 576i" or "-m 1" 480p use "-m 480p" or "-m 2" 576p …

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…

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…

Note: Guide Updated May 2017, as I realise that /dev/input/event3 may not always be the IR receiver device on your armbian installation. Hi All, I recently bought an Orange PI PC and the best thing I ever did was install Armbian straight away (and donate). Now that I have a bit of spare time, I wanted to configure my Orange PI PC to do something ridiculous like play Rick Ashley 'Never going to give you up' upon pressing the 'red button' on some generic Chinese IR remote for an LED light strip I have in my living room. Thanks to Armbian, most of the pieces are in place (such as the SunXI IR package) with the distribution, you just need t…

Anyone ever dealt with OpenMediaVault (OMV) on SBC? Great piece of software but pretty slow, right? One of the many reasons why that happened are outdated crappy kernels and bad settings. I looked at an OMV image for A20 based boards like Banana Pi Pro recently, ended up here http://simplenas.com/download/bananas-simple-system and simply thought: Are you kidding me? Your stable release is based on horribly outdated Debian Wheezy, a kernel 3.4.something and a 2.x OMV release?! What a mess... Igor had an OMV install routine since a long time in his Debian-micro-home-server post-processing script but since an Armbian user evaluated using Armbian's build system to…

Hello everyone, today I would like to show you how to compile CoovaChilli and Freeradius for a Wifi Hotspot with captive portal on an Orange Pi PC (or PC Plus). I'm writing this because I couldn't find anything related to this topic on the internet, so I wrote this not very detailed guide. wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ua3nbw/opihotspot/master/opihotspot_debian.sh chmod +x opihotspot_debian.sh ./opihotspot_debian.sh Russian version https://ua3nbw.ru/all/orangepi-coovachilli-and-freeradius-for-a-wifi-hotspot-with-capt/

Hi All, After I accomplished my IR Red Key Rick Rolling experiment the other day with much success, and from general end-luser use with Armbian, there were two things which irritated me, which are namely due to the default ALSA configuration that comes with stock Debian and that Armbian inherits. These were: Update: 11 September 2017. This guide will not work for newer Armbiam (Debian) installations which comes with Pulseaudio by default. If you really want what this tutorial provides, you will need to uninstall pulseaudio first: sudo apt-get remove pulseaudio 1) You can't have simultaneous applications using an Audio device. So, how ab…

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…

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…

If you follow https://github.com/ejurgensen/forked-daapd you will get a lot of error-messages. Here is guide to install it on your Orange Pi Pc (Debian Jessie), sudo apt-get install build-essential git autotools-dev autoconf libtool gettext gawk gperf \ antlr3 libantlr3c-dev libconfuse-dev libunistring-dev libsqlite3-dev \ libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libavfilter-dev libswscale-dev libavutil-dev \ libasound2-dev libmxml-dev libgcrypt11-dev libavahi-client-dev zlib1g-dev \ libevent-dev for Armbian you need some little extras installed sudo apt-get install libcurl4-gnutls-dev sudo apt-get install libjson0 libjson0-dev sudo apt-get install…

Now that there are an increasing number of boards running in 64 bit mode (Aarch64) it might happen that you want/need to run a 32 bit application on a 64 bit OS. I suspect that there is more than one way to do this, but here's what I've been using: dpkg --add-architecture armhf apt-get update apt-get install libc6:armhf libstdc++6:armhf Some applications need the following step to run: cd /lib ln -s arm-linux-gnueabihf/ld-2.23.so ld-linux.so.3 There is a downside to this approach - after adding armhf you have to be careful when installing new packages that you get the right version and don't end up installing 32bit packages that you don't need.

Relax - Wireless is solved for OPI ONE There seems to be a lot of confusion and missing information on how to access the dirt cheap OPI ONE wirelessly and the steps necessary to successfully use cheap Realtek USB dongles ( 8188cus, 8188eu ) with Armbian_5.10. This is a short summary of the needed materials and steps to turn your OPI ONE into a wireless client or wireless AP. There are NO custom kernels, custom modules or anything else needed, we are using stock Armbian_5.10 with stock kernel, stock modules and stock software to configure wireless access for select tested and working Realtek wifi dongles. Follow the steps without variati…

The following is the start of a series of tests regarding minimized consumption mode for SBCs. Idea behind is to provide Armbian settings that allow some of the SBC we support to be used as cheap and low-power IoT nodes (or call it 'home automation' or anything else, at least it's about low-power and headless useage) I start with some consumption comparisons with various RPi models below just to get a baseline of numbers and to verify that my consumption monitoring setup is ok. Also you find a lot of numbers on the net that are questionable (measured with inappropriate equipment, comparing OS images with different settings, taking cable resistance not into acco…

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…

What shall moderators do on our forum. Basics: - job should be invisible - spam control and clean up (rare) - approve posts from new users (daily) - Warning: editing topic tittle change it's URL - move topic to appropriate forum (rare) (tick "Leave a link to the new location" - it deletes auto in 30 days) recognise and tag tutorials & researches. Move them into "Research Guides & Tutorials" - merge, pin and lock topics (rare, with caution) - cut and move posts to new topics (rare, with caution) Intermediate: - Warn User for: spamming, inappropriate language, signature v…

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…

With USB camera and Bluetooth headset, mouse and keyboard.

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: …

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…

Another look at another SBC: The Orange Pi PC from Shenzen based Xunlong. The company claims to have done the original ODM work for Banana Pi as Foxconn contractor and started with 2 'Orange Pi' models based on the same A20 SoC shortly thereafter: 'Orange Pi' and 'Orange Pi Mini' -- both supported by Armbian from the beginning. Then they released the 'Orange Pi Plus' based on a newer Allwinner SoC: the H3 (quad-core Cortex-A7 running at 1.2GHz). This SoC is intended for dirt-cheap OTT boxes, is equipped with 4 independent USB 2.0 PHYs and also an integrated 100 Mbits/sec Ethernet PHY (but can still provide GBit Ethernet using an external PHY like RTL8211 as Xunlong i…

Is not important, and is a topic related to desktop environment and I know that armbian is more a server OS than a dektop replacement ... but I'm stuck trying to have all the environment in my mother language, Spanish. I change locale in root user and in the additionally created desktop user, I use dpkg-reconfigure locales locales and also export LANGUAGE=es_ES.UTF-8 but after reboot is again in English. And also when I update and upgrade the system I can see Translation-en logs but never a Translation-es. Is there any chance to do a better localization of the Desktop Environment? Thanks.

The Orange Pi One is the most recent SBC from Xunlong. It's clearly the Orange Pi PC's little sibling. In case you haven't read the PC's review already maybe it's time to do it now since here only important differences will be shown. Since it's based on an Allwinner SoC (system on chip) please keep in mind that you will always find the most comprehensive and up-to-date information in the linux-sunxi wiki: http://linux-sunxi.org/Orange_Pi_One The most important differences between One and PC as follows: Smaller size: the PC used the RPi form factor (85mm x 55mm) while the One is just 69mm x 48mm in size 512MiB instead of 1GiB DRAM (still two DDR3L modules making u…

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 ... ____ _ __ / ___| | ___ __ _ _ __ / _|…

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…

http://forum.odroid.com/viewtopic.php?f=138&t=20972

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