Reviews, Tutorials, Hardware hacks

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

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

Hi all. 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

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…

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'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 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…

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:…

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

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…

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

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 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.

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

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…

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!

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.

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 :

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…

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…

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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

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…

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

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

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

Hi 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

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…

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.

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 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. …

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. …

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-…