Orange Pi folks, where to go for decent info to get started?

[WobblyHand]

In a fit of weakness, and probably because I can't find a decent RPI4 anywhere, I bought an Orange Pi 5+. Talk about going in over my head. On paper, it seems pretty slick. I'm trying to get it to run from NVME memory. Apparently, you have to start the OPi from SD first, so I have burned the image on an SD card. The instructions in the user manual aren't that great, although they are voluminous.

The OPi forum seems to have a lot of spam and not a lot of company participation. Is there another place where OPi knowledgeable people hang out? I'm going to burn a Debian image on it. I do know a little Linux, so that's not the major issue. I just don't know a good place to ask questions. (Finally figured out what the initial sign in names and credential are! Going to have to change that pretty quick, that's a big security hole.)

I do know some of you guys have muddled through with an OPi on your 3d printers, which is why I am posting here. Starting to second guess myself a bit. I'm on the fence what I am going to do with it at the moment. First I have to get it running...

 

[WobblyHand]

At least I got it to boot. Once I get the hardware, I will try getting it to work from NVME. Have to write up a list of things to change and methodically go through them. Only real trouble so far, has been I don't know where stuff is in xfce windows. That and fixing the monitor over scan. Monitor is mostly sorted. Still need to set up ssh and stuff. This device will be headless.

 

[EricB]

Any reason you can't use a Raspberry Pi 3?

 

[WobblyHand]

Have one, a 3B, I think, it's pretty slow, although I haven't tried booting from SSD. However, an RPI 4 on SSD over USB3 isn't that frisky either. It's light years better than on SD though. And a 3 of any sort runs rings around a 2. Have a 2 for my print server, and a 2 for a sprinkler controller. Just need something with a little more juice to it.

 

[7milesup]

@WobblyHand Reading through your posts, it appears that you are looking at utilizing Xfce windows as the OS. I just looked at the OPi site, and the Xfce is not listed, but that probably doesn't mean it is not usable.
Have you looked at the official Orange Pi site for downloads? Orange Pi 4 LTS official site.
Also, when I did the imaging to the micro sd card, I used the Raspberry Pi Imager. It does not matter that you are using an Orange Pi.
I would suggest following this page until you get to the "Klipper" install.

@Ken226 is more fluent in getting the appropriate software on the boards, so maybe he will chime in.

Oh, I used Putty for SSH'ing into the Opi, but it makes it easier if you have an extra keyboard, mouse, and monitor.

 

[WobblyHand]

@WobblyHand Reading through your posts, it appears that you are looking at utilizing Xfce windows as the OS. I just looked at the OPi site, and the Xfce is not listed, but that probably doesn't mean it is not usable.
Have you looked at the official Orange Pi site for downloads? Orange Pi 4 LTS official site.
Also, when I did the imaging to the micro sd card, I used the Raspberry Pi Imager. It does not matter that you are using an Orange Pi.
I would suggest following this page until you get to the "Klipper" install.

@Ken226 is more fluent in getting the appropriate software on the boards, so maybe he will chime in.

Oh, I used Putty for SSH'ing into the Opi, but it makes it easier if you have an extra keyboard, mouse, and monitor.

I have an Orange Pi 5+, so the download area is different. I'm trying out Debian Bookworm which is the latest Debian release. Buster, Bullseye, then Bookworm. OPi has it in their download area for the OPi 5+. Guess that's Debian 12? Got it to boot off SD and display on an HDMI screen. The docs, although voluminous, are sparse.

What I'm really looking for is any user community, like HM, that has folks willing to help with OPi stuff. Seems that the manufacturer doesn't really support the software that much, and they over sell the hardware. On paper it's a capable platform, but their forum is unmanaged and riddled with spammers, and I have yet to see any official support answers online. Only saving grace is there's some docs to download. OPi has nowhere near the massive support of RPi. The RPi forum is moderated, and is frequented by RPi employees. I understand their a difference between the two companies, but it's quite a contrast.

I did find a subreddit on OPi, just wondering if there were other places "out there" that could be helpful.

 

[rabler]

Not really helpful, but I was able to snag a RPI 4 8Gb last week at MSRP. They're not staying in stock long, but they are no longer disappearing instantly according to what I've seen on rpilocator.com. Going to set up pihole, a wireshark tap on my internet link, and possibly a ntp server w/ gps with this one. Need to order an USB 4 SSD and a thermal case for it yet.

 

[WobblyHand]

Not really helpful, but I was able to snag a RPI 4 8Gb last week at MSRP. They're not staying in stock long, but they are no longer disappearing instantly according to what I've seen on rpilocator.com. Going to set up pihole, a wireshark tap on my internet link, and possibly a ntp server w/ gps with this one. Need to order an USB 4 SSD and a thermal case for it yet.

I saw Adafruit had a pile of RPI/keyboard computers for quite a while. I have yet to see an RPI4 there. Was trying RPI locator, but it was pretty hopeless for quite a while. I have pihole running on an RPI3, don't know if a 4 would help it. The RPI's are really hampered by SD IO speeds. If they run off USB3 SSD, they are somewhat passable. I ran that way for a while when my previous laptop dropped dead. Was no Intel/AMD class machine, but at least I could get by. Make sure you get a fan case. My experiences with passive cooling on this machine are not good. I run a service on the RPI which PWM's a very cheap fan according to the cpu temperature. It comes on when over 65C and turns off when 60C. I use a single resistor, a 2N2222A transistor to buffer the IO pin, and a flyback diode for the fan motor. It's quiet, and most of the time it's off. It only comes on when the cpu heats up. I simply use one of the $9.99 stacking plastic cases that comes with a little fan. Have this 5 cent circuit on all three of my RPI4's. One RPI4 is a local git server, another is my "lab computer" which I use for ELS programming work, and a third is my upstairs RPI4 for ELS display development. It's a bit more comfy upstairs, rather than in the basement which isn't conditioned space.

Don't try to use an NVME disk/adapter. RPI4 has issues with them. They often won't boot. Most of the adapters don't play nice, and RPI4 often quits if it detects a momentary power issue. Even isolating the port with a powered USB3 hub doesn't work well. There's something about the negotiation at start up that fails - which pretty much eliminates the possibility of using the NVME drive as the primary and only drive. The foundation has (to my knowledge) not said which, if any, NVME adapter chips will work reliably.

With that as a backdrop, that is why I was attracted to the OPi5+, because it had a built in NVME interface.

 

[rabler]

I saw Adafruit had a pile of RPI/keyboard computers for quite a while. I have yet to see an RPI4 there. Was trying RPI locator, but it was pretty hopeless for quite a while. I have pihole running on an RPI3, don't know if a 4 would help it. The RPI's are really hampered by SD IO speeds. If they run off USB3 SSD, they are somewhat passable. I ran that way for a while when my previous laptop dropped dead. Was no Intel/AMD class machine, but at least I could get by. Make sure you get a fan case. My experiences with passive cooling on this machine are not good. I run a service on the RPI which PWM's a very cheap fan according to the cpu temperature. It comes on when over 65C and turns off when 60C. I use a single resistor, a 2N2222A transistor to buffer the IO pin, and a flyback diode for the fan motor. It's quiet, and most of the time it's off. It only comes on when the cpu heats up. I simply use one of the $9.99 stacking plastic cases that comes with a little fan. Have this 5 cent circuit on all three of my RPI4's. One RPI4 is a local git server, another is my "lab computer" which I use for ELS programming work, and a third is my upstairs RPI4 for ELS display development. It's a bit more comfy upstairs, rather than in the basement which isn't conditioned space.

Don't try to use an NVME disk/adapter. RPI4 has issues with them. They often won't boot. Most of the adapters don't play nice, and RPI4 often quits if it detects a momentary power issue. Even isolating the port with a powered USB3 hub doesn't work well. There's something about the negotiation at start up that fails - which pretty much eliminates the possibility of using the NVME drive as the primary and only drive. The foundation has (to my knowledge) not said which, if any, NVME adapter chips will work reliably.

With that as a backdrop, that is why I was attracted to the OPi5+, because it had a built in NVME interface.

Adafruit had RPI 4s in stock for a while today. Doubtless gone by now. The fan PWM driver makes sense.

I'm using an older RPI 4 for my RPI Pico development environment, with a USB 3.0 SSD. So I'm familiar with the performance and limitations. I'm putting all of those new services (pihole, wireshark, ntp server) on one RPI so using a 4 vs 3 is definitely advantageous. I run a git server on an Asustor NAS, which is basically just their proprietary GUI on a ARM/Linux box.

 

[WobblyHand]

Err, surprisingly, I am now running off nvme disk now. It remains to be seen if this board will be supported that well, but, so far, so good. I'm sure there will be a bunch of surprises along the way, but, it's not too bad so far. Would be nice to know where to buy the little peripheral devices, like a fan (there's a pwm connector for it) or dinky speaker. Connectors are 1.25mm spacing. No data that I can find on the OPi website.

Seems Debian Bookworm uses Wayland. Well that seems to mean using ssh -Y is not allowing me to run synaptic. I get this error after $ sudo synaptic on the OrangePi over ssh :

"X11 connection rejected because of wrong authentication. Failed to initialize GTK.
Probably you're running Synaptic on Wayland, or run Synaptic without root permission."

I can use synaptic, as user, but that's kind of useless. Oh well, main use probably won't be graphical.

But this is not bad, really, running Chromium browser over ssh, ie. redirected from a headless unit (OPi) to my laptop, is surprisingly responsive. Faster than an over clocked RPI4 on SSD. I haven't even tried to tweak the OPi5+ yet. But I can't install and run arduino properly. Getting some kind of error, had to use apt install arduino --fix-missing. I don't think it got everything, I see errors in arduino when it tries to sync with repos. Downloading errors, tag mismatches, to adafruit, ssl errors. Might be because of the huawei repo that this version of debian is coming from... Wrong version, of ssl, or who knows, some export issue... Maybe I can backtrack and install something else. The pleasures of trying something brand new...