November 25, 2016

Orange Pi PC

Note in the Orange Pi download link above, the files were last updated over a year ago (October, 2015).

And here is the H3 datasheet.

I bought two Orange Pi PC boards in November of 2016, they have:

Power and such

It receives power via a small diameter (4 x 1.7 mm) barrel connector. The documentation says it requires 5 volts and 2 amps, but many people have said they had trouble until they found a 3 amp power supply. In general, the source of many problems is an inadequate power supply. I have had no problems with a high quality 2 amp supply, but these days cheap supplies apparently have inflated ratings.

It requires a 4mm x 1.7mm DC barrel jack (same as used on Sony PSP). Center positive.

I dig through my junk box and find two Toshiba branded power supplies labelled 5 volts, 2 amps with the correct barrel connector. I am hoping since they are a name brand they will actually be able to deliver a solid 2 amps and that problems reported by others are due to dodgy no-name supplies. After several months using these with absolutely no problems, I am satisfied that these are fine.

Serial Console

I use my same USB to serial gadget that I use for the BBB and Galileo. It is configured for 3.3 volt logic levels (and that appears to be correct). Green goes to Rx and white goes to Tx. I get lucky apparently.

Without an SD card

Only the LED on the ethernet port lights up, no lights on the main board. Apparently this is normal, you only get lights when an SD image is present, i.e. after the ROM bootloader has found something to run and that something has turned on the LED by setting a GPIO bit. There is no true power LED.

There are no messages whatsoever on the serial console from the boot loader. It is easy to see why some people receive these boards and think they are dead.

Try the Fedora 22 Minimal image

Be absolutely sure that your SD card reader device is right. Mine is /dev/sdc. Get it wrong and you wipe out the install on your desktop.

I am using a brand new 8G SanDisk microSDHD UHS-1 card that claims "speeds up to 48Mb/s". 

su
unxz Fedora22_Minimal.img.xz
dd if=Fedora22_Minimal.img of=/dev/sdc bs=16M
87+1 records in
87+1 records out
1461714944 bytes (1.5 GB, 1.4 GiB) copied, 194.844 s, 7.5 MB/s
sync
After this, I pop the SD card into the Orange Pi, connect the serial console cable and finally connect power. A bunch of stuff starts streaming across the screen and before long I have a prompt to login! I login as root with password "orangepi". 
cat /proc/cpuinfo
Processor	: ARMv7 Processor rev 5 (v7l)
processor	: 0
BogoMIPS	: 1920.00

processor	: 1
BogoMIPS	: 1920.00

processor	: 2
BogoMIPS	: 1920.00

processor	: 3
BogoMIPS	: 1920.00

Features	: swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp thumbee neon vfpv3 tls vfpv4 idiva idivt 
CPU implementer	: 0x41
CPU architecture: 7
CPU variant	: 0x0
CPU part	: 0xc07
CPU revision	: 5

cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:        1026960 kB
So, there I am with 4 cores and 1G of ram as advertised. Odd that linux does not report processor speed. Just plugging in a network cable does not get the network going, nor does "service network restart". There is talk that I need to copy in a proper

I have vi, perl, and python. No ruby. No C compiler.

script.bin and uImage

Read about all of this here: These are customizations required for Fedora 22 as well. As one fellow says:
These instructions work correctly for the Fedora 22 image as well. Even if it seems like your operating system is working correctly, you will need to create the correct script.bin and uImage file as directed. In particular, the Fedora 22 image is bad. The Ethernet port doesn't work. Also, you should remove uImage-* and script.bin.* for simplicity.
This is all you need: 
drwxr-xr-x 2 jgotts jgotts 2048 Jun 15 16:20 .
drwxr-x---+ 4 root root 80 Jun 15 16:18 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 jgotts jgotts 36428 Jun 15 16:19 script.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 jgotts jgotts 10916088 Jun 15 16:09 uImage
So I go to this link: I dig around and fetch scriptbin_kernel.tar.gz from this link. I make a directory for it on my desktop machine and untar it. What I am told to do is to copy the following two files: 
script.bin.OPI-PC_720p60
uImage_OPI-2
These will go into the boot partition on the SD card, but renamed to leave off the OPI suffixes.

This is all somewhat mysterious, but note that the boot partition in the running system is mounted as /media/boot and looks like this: 

-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    35704 Oct 13  2015 script.bin.OPI-2_1080p50
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    35704 Oct 13  2015 script.bin.OPI-2_1080p60
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    35704 Oct 13  2015 script.bin.OPI-2_480p
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    35704 Oct 13  2015 script.bin.OPI-2_720p50
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    35704 Oct 13  2015 script.bin.OPI-2_720p60
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    35724 Oct 13  2015 script.bin.OPI-PC_1080p50
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    35724 Oct 13  2015 script.bin.OPI-PC_1080p60
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    35724 Oct 13  2015 script.bin.OPI-PC_480p
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    35724 Oct 13  2015 script.bin.OPI-PC_720p50
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    35724 Oct 13  2015 script.bin.OPI-PC_720p60
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    36768 Oct 13  2015 script.bin.OPI-PLUS_1080p50
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    36768 Oct 13  2015 script.bin.OPI-PLUS_1080p60
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    36768 Oct 13  2015 script.bin.OPI-PLUS_480p
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    36768 Oct 13  2015 script.bin.OPI-PLUS_720p50
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root    36768 Oct 13  2015 script.bin.OPI-PLUS_720p60
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 10915616 Oct 13  2015 uImage
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 10915616 Oct 13  2015 uImage_OPI-2
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 10915384 Oct 13  2015 uImage_OPI-PLUS
Note that although some of these files have the same names as what is in the scriptbin tarball, the sizes (and hence contents) are different.

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's electronics pages / tom@mmto.org