rufik

Recently I've bought small box which is kind if "wireless interface" for wired AA: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006001314624.html It works quite nicely with my Ford S-Max but I'm very curious man and got it open (aka teardown). Chips cannot be identified, they lack any marks. But there is DEBUG UART First I connected it into my PC. Removable disk appeared with a few files that keeps my phone's BT address and such information. Nothing really interesting. Then I powered up device when holding the button, it didn't start but went into some "flashing mode" I think - it was identified as USB\VID_1F3A&PID_EFE8 which means sunxi SoC OTG connector in FEL/flashing mode as far as I could google it. So Allwinner inside? At last I soldered pins to UART but I got only "U-Boot(01/24/2024)" and nothing more 😕 It doesn't react to keybord at all. I'm not experienced in "hacking" such ARM things, so maybe someone has any idea how to break booting and get into some console? Any idea what could I do to get into OS?

I'm running octoprint on my OPI PC and I'd like to buy some cheap usb camera for printing time lapses and visual inspection. FHD resolution is sufficient. As far as I can see, octoprint uses mjpg-streamer. Does someone use such camera? Is H3 capable of process FHD videos at 30fps?

No, I haven't. I favour board replacement to gain more horsepower for OMV (which is slow on 1-core right now).

I have zyxel NSA325v2 nas right now, with custom OS (Debian Buster) which is based on single core armv5 cpu. It handles 2 wd red HDDs quite nice, just as RAID 1 volume (mdadm). But when I installed OMV 5 his "horsepower" was...well, nonexistent [emoji2955] Simple file upload via samba takes about 80% of cpu at load ~2.0, downloading at load 1.5 and iperf indicates about 650-700Mbps speed. So I started to wonder - as an user of a few OPIs - if it would be possible to upgrade my NAS in very cheap manner [emoji16] Let's say at $50 max. Does any setup - beside USB-to-SATA card - comes to your mind? Any real SATA sbc at this price is available at all? Or sbc + pci-to-sata card? What's your cheap nas setup?

I was using OPI3 as my home automation server for many months, very stable for me with Armbian. But now I've migrated to more powerful machine and my OPI3 got nothing to do So I'm thinking about connecting it to my TV and use as light linux desktop: web browser mainly. Does anyone use OPI3 2GB RAM like that? Is it powerful enough to handle browsing with 10 tabs for example? Or I should go for some cheap RK3399+4GB RAM (under $50) instead? What's your experience?

So effectively wlan0 down is the same as commenting it out in DT, right?

I do not use wifi at all, so I'd like to disable it completely. It's not configured right now, but I wonder if I could power down whole chip, ex. commenting it out in DT file? Does it save some power or not?

Opi3 here with slow chip (bin=1) (raw=1).

As far as comments are somehow meaningful it's perfectly fine. Consider this example: $ sudo apt list --upgradable Listing... Done armbian-config/bionic,bionic 5.98.191022 all [upgradable from: 5.98.191016] It would be nice to know what has changed in armbian-config package version 5.98.191022 compared to 5.98.191016, if it's worth to upgrade or just dangerous to me (like kernel/uboot). Commit comments are sufficient, I can just go to github repo to investigate it further. I really know that any hands are welcome, I've been tracking project for more than year and still have no time to participate (kids, kids, kids, work, building a house) :/ But maybe...some day...:P

Diff would be really nice and 100% sufficient for me [emoji108]

How to track changes in armbian packages, especially for dev boards like OPI 3? I know there is Changelog in docs site but it's not really up to date... For example apt reports me now that there are new packages to be updated: linux-dtb-dev-sunxi64 linux-image-dev-sunxi64 linux-u-boot-orangepi3-dev. How can I tracka/see changes made in them?

This directive is deprecated now. But I've set realtime=no and this error has gone.

So it seems we (users) can buy this SBC now, thanks a lot [emoji12]

Is anyone using watchdog on OrangePi H3 family? I've tried to set it up on OPI 2 (almost the same as OPI PC but with wifi) and I'm getting some trouble with watchdog service startup: cannot set scheduler (errno = 1 = 'Operation not permitted') May 10 09:29:23 opi2 systemd[1]: Starting watchdog daemon... May 10 09:29:23 opi2 watchdog[12308]: String 'watchdog-device' found as '/dev/watchdog' May 10 09:29:23 opi2 watchdog[12308]: String 'admin' found as 'root' May 10 09:29:23 opi2 watchdog[12310]: starting daemon (5.15): May 10 09:29:23 opi2 watchdog[12310]: int=7s realtime=yes sync=no load=0,0,0 soft=no [cut!] May 10 09:29:23 opi2 watchdog[12310]: watchdog now set to 16 seconds May 10 09:29:23 opi2 watchdog[12310]: hardware watchdog identity: sunxi-wdt May 10 09:29:23 opi2 watchdog[12310]: cannot set scheduler (errno = 1 = 'Operation not permitted') May 10 09:29:23 opi2 systemd[1]: Started watchdog daemon. I'm using latest armbian: Welcome to ARMBIAN 5.85 stable Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS 4.19.38-sunxi It looks like problem with realtime schduling: https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/MyServiceCantGetRealtime and I've tried to add Delegate=cpu option to watchdog.service file but still no-go. Anyone was facing this issue?

I own Chuwi Hi12 tablet based on Atom X5-Z8300 which was a bad guy due to keyboard/overall handling. I've successfully got rid of windows & android from eMMC and installed Ubuntu Server x64 So I decided get rid of some components as touchscreen, speakers, cameras, battery and use it as SBC headless server. Sadly ribbon cables were glued and I damaged one or two of them, so this is one-way trip now I think. But I can't power it on now :/ There is no reaction to power button at all. Does anyone have some experience with such boards? What components are required to be connected in order to boot it up? teardown pics 1 teardown pics 2

Maybe nowayout param should be set to 1? I remember that nowayout=0 on H3 just disables watchdog hardware reset as described here: https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/watchdog/watchdog-api.txt There is some discussion on forum here with H3 CPU, worth to be read.

Anything below 480 MHz just trashes storage performance and almost saves no power. So leave minimal freq as is.

Maybe blacklist touchscreen driver?

https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/watchdog/watchdog-api.txt When the device is closed, the watchdog is disabled, unless the "Magic Close" feature is supported (see below). This is not always such a good idea, since if there is a bug in the watchdog daemon and it crashes the system will not reboot. Because of this, some of the drivers support the configuration option "Disable watchdog shutdown on close", CONFIG_WATCHDOG_NOWAYOUT. If it is set to Y when compiling the kernel, there is no way of disabling the watchdog once it has been started. So, if the watchdog daemon crashes, the system will reboot after the timeout has passed. Watchdog devices also usually support the nowayout module parameter so that this option can be controlled at runtime. So it's required to set it up. Try some quoting. Maybe this should be the last line in armbianenv.txt file? I can't remember exactly but there was some issue about it...

To make watchdog performing hard reset you need to add this param to /boot/armbianEnv.txt : extraarg=sunxi_wdt.nowayout=1 But I can't really recall if some quotation should be used (like extraarg="sunxi_wdt.nowayout=1") or not. Just try it yourself. This argument is required if you want your watchdog to perform hard reset SBC. And of course just install watchdog package using apt-get.

You can easily fork my repo and customize srcipt to your needs I'm going to develop ready-made config files yet (like hass alredy configured with mariadb, mqtt, influx; to be deployed by script) and that's all.

I've put some effort to make installation script for Home Assistant using docker: https://github.com/rufik/armbian-hass Script is self-explanatory, just installs some useful stuff, docker, images (portainer, hass, mqtt, mariadb, etc), prepares containers, etc. It's not finished yet, I'm still working on it, it has some problems (mosquito does not start properly yet), but I'm quite time limited right now. The idea is just to automate all these manuals steps required to bring up whole hass ecosystem...

All you need is just to install watchdog service and set some parameter in armbianenv.txt file - I can't recall it right now, I'll try to search my notes later and post the solution.

And check storage performance with all those settings now. You can run it using armbianmonitor with some switch (can't remember which one). My statement is based on some tkaiser's forum writing, and he's rather proven to not spread bs (he just did such tests AFAIK).

Note that anything lower than 480 MHz will trash your storage performance probably. And power saving is also minimal. Consider using 480 as min freq.