Jump to content

sirmike

Members
  • Posts

    3
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Recent Profile Visitors

960 profile views
  1. Follow-up on the overscan issue.. more egg on face, RTFM material.. Turns out that HDMI on the LG monitor (LCD TV) I have attached to my OPI-PC can be adjusted to remove overscan from the desktop display.. it just isn't called 'overscan adjustment'.. under the monitor's settings menu there are Picture->Aspect Ratio settings that set the screen behaviour up.. 16:9, 4:3, Just Scan, Set by program, Zoom, Cinema Zoom.. selecting "Just Scan" does the trick.. (only if you're attached via HDMI, the option is greyed out using a VGA attachment..) Now I have a very fine OPI-PC Armbian desktop running inside the bounds of the screen. Once again, a simple fix, that does not involve adapters, Armbian code updates, or buying a new screen.. simple stuff that can only be attributed to read-the-*-manual. Having trouble with overscan,,, and think your monitor doesn't have the feature to fix it? Look harder and you may be going Doh! ..and now it works.
  2. try.. .https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Advanced_Linux_Sound_Architecture and... http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Alsa-sound-6.html for more info on using ALSA..
  3. If you are reading this you've probably discovered that there are a few things about the Orange Pi series of boards that can be frustrating. I know I have been.. I purchased an Orange Pi PC and two Orange Pi Ones anticipating Pi bliss at a fraction of the cost of the Raspberry equivalent. I tried, and tried hard, to load distro after distro of various linux flavors onto micro SD cards with many a blank screen or an aborted boot attempt.. Orange Pi site distros, laboris distros, Armbian distros.. nothing seemed to make a difference. Reading about power supply issues, ornery boot processes, and overscan issues I was really beginning to think this was money poorly spent, after all the boards weren't much use as intert bricks.. too small and light to make for a decent paper weight or door stop.. no practical use at all.. perhaps I could crush them with a lump hammer to derive some satisfaction for fruitless hours spent trying to get these things to work.. Then it dawned on me.. perhaps there was something to the advice I was seeing on the forum.. Out of curiosity I tried a decent USB-lithium battery pack instead of the little 5v wall wart I was using to power my Orange Pi PC and low and behold the thing booted reliably. Go figure.. all this time I was blaming the board when it was really the #$!#!@ underpowered wall-wart causing the issue.. try the OPI-One.. same deal, it booted.. try the next One.. same deal, it booted happily. I then measured the current draw during the boot process and found that the Quad core board was actually a hungry little bugger.. peaking out at almost 600ma at one point in the boot process with no accessories attached.. before settling down to around 240ma at an idle. Lesson learned: Don't cheap out on your power supply for these boards... and you've made it over the first hurdle. Next hurdle.. the damn video is overscanning my LG HDMI monitor.. no adjustment on the monitor to scale the desktop image to fit the screen size, and no easy boot config file like RPi to turn underscanning on in the linux OS. This means I can't see the menus at the top of the screen.. I didn't have this issue with the RPi.. but hey the RPi cost more, has a user base of 6 million users and a dedicated, paid software development team with 4 years under its belt. Put it in perspective.. OPI is a smaller community and it takes time to develop code and work out the kinks in a product.. so a bit of patience is in order. Thank you to the Armbian developers and testers, your efforts are appreciated. So what to do about the overscan issue.. well I happened to have an HDMI to VGA adapter with a 3.5mm audio jack output on the side.. so I added it into the mix, and lo and behold the overscan issue was dimished a great deal..not perfect, but much more usable desktop real estate. Then I tried the MPV media player with Armbian distro to play canned mp4 videos and was favorably impressed with the play quality with the built in Mali hardware graphics acceleration.. easily as good as the RPi and Omxplayer.. perhaps even with better controls in the MPV media player app.. score one for OPI.. things were looking up.. this was along way from the inert brick I owned earlier in the day. So what about the overscan issue.. yes it is annoying, but perhaps over time there will be a software fix developed to make it go away.. patience. What else to do in the mean time? Well it is likely that the OPI in you life is not the only computer you have at your disposal.. so why not VNC into your OPI..? You can set the X-window defaults to a reasonable screen size.. and have your OPI desktop arrive in a window on your other computer.. Googling RPi VNC I found xtightvncviewer and xtightvncserver install instructions.. I installed, and went with a desktop size of 1280x600 for a comfortable fitting window on my RPI desktop.. and soon had a serviceable non-overscanned OPI remote desktop from my RPI.. hooray! No hardware accelerated video through the VNC session.. but a decent desktop experience for most other pursuits. Lesson learned.. OPI software is in it's infancy, and with time and effort spent, and some temporary workarounds.. it will find many uses. If you want closer to perfection out of the box than what OPI has to offer? Pay more and benefit from a more developed product.. however, if you want to work the line a bit - between cost and functionality - perhaps you have more time than money available at the moment - don't dispair at your purchase.. persist a while before you opt for the lump hammer option.. and you may get what you need out of the RPi's clone-family with a bit of effort spent.. Good Luck.
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

Terms of Use - Privacy Policy - Guidelines