Reviews, Tutorials, Hardware hacks

A very hackish port exists of this Raspberry PI RGB LED Matrix Library which works for Allwinner H3 devices. This works by bit-banging 14 GPIO pins simultaneously to achieve about a 10Mhz throughput / 100fps refresh rate. Refer to here: https://github.com/mrfaptastic/opi-allwinner-h3-rgb-led-matrix I managed to easily get up and running using an Orange PI. Refer to the README of the github repository.

Hi all, Maybe there are a lot people who got this working but for me was today the day. I buyed a time a go a cheap but fast NVME SSD from Aliexpress. The smallest one a 128GB. I have also a 512GB in my laptop and for the price they are really good. But i needed also a USB-NVME external housing. That is the Ugreen NVME 10GBps to USB adapter. In very short but i will explain more in the future. 1. Flash a MicroSD card with your favourite Armbian to the MicroSD. Update with sudo apt-get update. Also with a SSH session not a problem. 2. Place the USB disk in a USB 3.0 port of the Orange Pi. By the OrangePi 4 it´s the blue one on the…

Hi all. Here my review video of the new Pine H64 model B. I also compare it with the Orange Pi 3, and it's older brother the Rock64. I hope you'll like it. Thank you. Greetings, NicoD

If you use a SIP Voip client on your phone or computer, you can use the sip protocol and scripting to monitor your Armbian board. I'm using Ubuntu Xenial, but other versions should work as well. I have the Linphone client on my phone and I use the free Linphone SIP service. Linphone.org hosts a free SIP service that allows users to make audio or video calls using SIP addresses via the domain sip.linphone.org. You can also send text messages. SIP requires an internet data connection, and my phone is connected via WIFI most of the time except when I'm commuting, so I set up my monitoring chron jobs on the Armbian device to run at times when…

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

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.

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

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

Hi all. I wrote a small guide on enabling pps-gpio by modifying the device tree. With a PPS signal it's possible to setup your board as a Stratum 1 time server for your local network or the NTP pool. I used this method on a Rock64 but it should be applicable on most board. PPS-GPIO on Rock64 with Armbian legacy (4.4.X) kernel Cheers.

I got my hands on a "Set 9" Orange Pi Lite + GC2035 camera a while back and I've finally been able to put together a self-contained object detection device using Tensorflow, without sending any image data outside for processing. Basically, its a python Flask application that captures frames from the camera using a GStreamer pipeline. It runs them through a Tensorflow object detection model and spits out the same frame with extra metadata about objects it found, and renders a box around them. Using all four cores of the H2 it can do about 2-3 fps. The app keeps track of the count of all object types it has seen and exposes the metrics in prometheus format, for easy…

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

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

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

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

I made a hardware setup guide for the Pine64 Clusterboard. It's over on their forums: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=7077 Long and short is that it's a $99 motherboard that can accommodate 7x $30 compute modules.

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

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

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

There is no official sdcard image but the attached script will create a image for the OrangePi Zero/R1. It uses daily generated files from Debian daily-images and considered testing/unstable. SDcard image creation: You will need basic Linux/Debian and dosfs utils. No su/root needed. Run the script to generate sdcard image for writing to sdcard. Optionally, if you want ssh network-console access, add preseed.cfg to same directory as script. See attached preseed.cfg and example-preseed.txt . Basic installation: Once the installer is started, it runs completely in RAM and no longer needs files from the sdcard. You can delete all partitio…

Not much of a tutorial, but it is something that often needs some googling and head scratching. This is how I got my particular modem working, your mileage may vary. Step 1) Get a modem that will work. I got a Huawei E397u LTE/UMTS/GSM modem. It's Cricket branded, but I'm on Google Fi, it will work with my data SIM. Step 2) Plug it in and see that it doesn't work. Step 3a) apt update Step 3b) apt upgrade Step 4) Install usb-modeswitcher Step 4, optional part 2) install modem-manager, modem-manager-gui (for general playing around) Step 5) unplug/replug the USB modem, see that it should magically have a different VID:PID when …

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

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How to install Puppeteer on node.js on Armbian. Tested on OrangePi Zero Plus running Ubuntu Xenial or Bionic. Should work on other boards and other builds. How to install the latest version of node.js. (at the time of writing was 12.7.0). Instructions for installing node.js on Debian and Ubuntu can be found at: https://github.com/nodesource/distributions/blob/master/README.md#deb The instructions at the time of writing were: # Using Ubuntu curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_12.x | sudo -E bash - sudo apt-get install -y nodejs # Using Debian, as root curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_12.x | bash - apt-get ins…

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

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

Hi all. I've made a new video on how to share your mouse and keyboard between multiple SBCs with Armbian. This is the source website where I've gotten my info. There is a lot more info to be found on it then I show in the video. https://itsfoss.com/keyboard-mouse-sharing-between-computers/ Here is my video. Install Barrier sudo apt install snap snapd sudo snap install --edge barrier Run Barrier /snap/bin/barrier Greetings, NicoD

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

I was able to read a DHT22 on PA10 with my Orange Pi Prime using https://github.com/Jeremie-C/OrangePi.GPIO Minimal documentation provided in readme https://github.com/lanefu/DHT22-Python-library-Orange-PI

In this tutorial we build a custom .config for OrangePiOnePlus board, eg: to remove blutooth, WiFi and or USB3.x support since the hardware is not onboard, alternatively you can adjust settings to your needs which is not in the default .config. The section mentions, if file " userpatches/linux-$KERNELFAMILY-$KERNELBRANCH.config " exists, it will be used instead of default one from " config ". This means for the OPiOnePlus : " linux-sunxi64-dev.config " should be created, but please note "dev" is just one of the three options available, which are: " current ", " legacy " and " dev " The default config files are located in : " /armbian/config…

For those who like to monitor temperature. Connect SDA & SCL to pins 3 and 5, connect 3.3V and GND. Connect all address wires of the DS1621 to ground. # sudo apt install i2c-tools # echo ds1621 0x48 >/sys/class/i2c-adapter/i2c-1/new_device# cat /sys/devices/platform/ff140000.i2c/i2c-1/1-0048/hwmon/hwmon0/temp1_input Optional, use lm-sensors: # sudo apt install lm-sensors # sensors Optional, temperature logging: Create a file logtemp.sh with the following contents: #!/bin/bash echo "`date +%Y-%m-%dT%R`;`cat /sys/devices/platform/ff140000.i2c/i2c-1/1-0048/hwmon/hwmon0/temp1_input`" >>/home/USER/temp Add an entry to /etc/crontab:…

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

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