hmm just thinking out loud atm, which usually start gibberish and in the end from a coaster it holds something usable ... Rgd the ROCK2F, I noticed "GPIO pin 2 & 4 " could be used to power up the device, which is possible with different boards too... Now I suppose an USB to TTL ( 3,3 V, TXD, RXD, GND and +5 V. ) wont dot the job in this case to power up the board, but I'm sure there is something available avoiding to solder ... The usb-c port can be used both for data and power, so an USB2LAN (x)Gbit adaptor can be used to make this a cheap wifi2lan bridge :-).

All the while the Raspberry PI OS (version September 2025) has booted out of the box on the board itself. I will check it with with the HAT added too.

OK. I tried it without a backup and I still get an error.

Hi everyone, I'm using the Orange Pi Zero 3 and would really appreciate a lightweight desktop image with just the XFCE desktop, a web browser, and basic tools (like file manager, terminal, etc.) with video acceleration. The current Armbian desktop image works, but it includes a lot of software I don’t need. I’m looking for something more minimal — just enough for light use and a faster experience. Does anyone have (or know how to build) a stripped-down XFCE image for this board? Thanks in advance!

Where did you hear that ? Note that the 'firmware' package is not updating the EEPROM that's present on a Pi4/Pi5 and I had no booting issues updating the raspi-firmware package on RaspiOS.\ Of course you could make a backup if you want to feel safer, but I have no reason to believe there's anything that's going to cause issues if you're going to upgrade the raspi-firmware package.