Tido

I discussed this problem with plugin author some time ago but he failed to find a solution. Yes, it's terrible.
 
Even when docs will be on the proper level, some people will fail to read them   Further I was thinking about some forum plugin / feature which will pop up some message "Have you read the manual" at posting if user is having less than 3 posts, was registered not long ago and if text "I am new to Linux|Armbian" is found in text
 
 
@lanefu (has RW Github access) @Tido @miked @Kriston @jeanrhum @vlad59 @Gravelrash - all who claimed or promised help around docs. It's your time to shine   
 
Note: latest documentation sources are lib.wiki but that location and structure just become irrelevant. 

There are a few tasks mentioned in this thread:
- Documentation html software and layout (mkdocs output, toc, search etc.)
- Edit Armbian.com to integrate the new docs location. Also link to documentation pdf somewhere.
- Auto generate and process the docs/pdf on github documentation commits (now do this on wiki edits?)
- Tweak pdf generation to look like a professional book.
- Reordering/structuring documentation so both newbs and experts can easily get to what they need (is this a separate task?)
- General documentation rewriting and additions (these are separate tasks)
 
As far as I know, all of these tasks are being worked on.
I'm not currently working on any of them, let me know if I can help!

 
 
I got confused about this too. But it looks like GitHub wiki will be used as the documentation source (markdown), it will still be processed into pretty html and pdf for armbian.com?

OK, let's use Github wiki as a base. I already done some rework. First part is more or less done, now going to script part and fine tuning on the top of it.
 
https://github.com/igorpecovnik/lib/wiki

Few my ideas.
 
 
I think no need for this. I expect lot's of changes now, since we need to add few things and apply better structure to what's already done.
 
Let's see what do we have now:
 
"user faq" - This suppose to be "Getting Started: Everything you need to get Armbian up and running". It's close to that, except some things might be too advanced for novice user.
"enabling HW features" - is little more than this, but not many things present at the moment. Here we could add (move from) most important things: connecting spi / i2c displays, sensors, ... The main question remain "how far" should we go with all this?
"h3_mini_faq" - logbook and user faq only for H3. How to deal with per board stuff? Generally.
"geek faq" - how to deal with tools. We need 2-3 script user review to be done and merged into this documentation (can be claimed for board). Our / coder POW is not the best to write such manual. Basically one must start from scratch, test all functions and write down experiences, written in manual/howto style.
"fel-boot" - features within tools. The same. Someone from outside should review / rewrite the docs.
 
 
Current situation: docs sources are .md and they are rendered to .html within blog and there we can set permanent links per documents. This part is not that bad after all. "Getting started" and "Basic" is the same page just in case someone does not understand it properly. Next doc is "Building" aka "geek manual" and a log book.
 
One idea is, to merge all those sections into one .pdf file "Armbian handbook". First part basic stuff, than few howtos and building howtos, walk trough and perhaps logbook at the end.
 
Not necessarily but we can do that quickly in the future if needed. 
 
One more exposed link on the download page would help, agree. Elsewhere is not critical since the page offers pretty strait links: download, docs, sources and forum. I think main problem is that we don't have proper docs internal organization, few things are doubled, build script needs much more explanation, examples, ... where to put log of changes? We even have separate, more detailed for H3. 

I did a bit of experimentation and have the following suggestions:
 
1. On http://www.armbian.com/change "Getting Started" to "Documentation". Currently all documentation is under "getting started" which isn't an intuitive place to look for advanced stuff.
However since you want a clear "where to start" sign that stands out to new visitors, we could have a prominent "Getting Started: Everything you need to get Armbian up and running" icon/link/banner stickied near the top of the Home page (and maybe Downloads page if people are directly linked there from external sites). It should take you to a documentation page that starts with an outline (with links) of the main steps a complete novice would take.
 
2. If the html docs are going to be mainly mkdocs output with some post-processing, I would try to put the output underneath the Armbian nav bar, using a theme that has the Documentation navigation on a left sidebar to avoid crowding the top. Theme readthedocs does this. It should be possible to use html <embed> to shove the mkdocs webpage into the Armbian web page. Unless someone really wants to tweak the theme and process the output to look perfect, maybe as little as changing the theme's colors will be enough to make it look good.
 
Edit: That is, either you could let mkdocs use the whole browser window, which is not ideal because it looks like the documentation is a different site. Or leave mkdocs output as a full webpage and embed it, which I think would be easiest to try. Or process the output a lot so that you combine the Armbian page and the mkdocs output into one generated page, which should be more work but give you more control.

Hmm... quick test using MkDocs and htmldoc (without adjusting anything):
for i in main* ; do NewSite="http://127.0.0.1:8000/$(echo $i | sed 's/\.md/\//')"; Sites="${Sites}${NewSite} "; done htmldoc ${HTMLDOCOptions} --book --numbered --toclevels 3 -f ../armbian-userdoc.pdf ${Sites} Someone familiar with MkDocs could tweak HTML/CSS quickly and adding title page (with logo) and headers/footers in htmldoc is also easy: http://kaiser-edv.de/tmp/HbBtyV/armbian-userdoc.pdf  (different structure levels ruin the 'book/TOC structure')

I can take a look at it.

@tk, guide the user to the manual /wiki before answer it in the forum.
Kind if easy, but u must be follow such a 'rule'
 
Edit Tido:
Kind of easy, but u must follow such a 'rule'
 
 
 
@WP, thanks for edit - bloody cell phone :-)

Noticed following problems:
Links need some work Inline code (`code`) needs another color for highlighting Youtube video block needs to be removed or converted to link Line wraps in code blocks are not perfect Whole document needs index (hope this tool does support that) Page numbers may be good too

@Tido, it is not a question, it is an answer for those who don't have Guvcview working with CMOS camera.
Guvcview works with USB camera only, unless you modify the source or get deb packages when ready.

I like it the way C.H.I.P does it http://docs.getchip.com/chip.html
I cannot remember which markup language they are using ... something with M ?
 
Ah, and it should be possible to export article or pages to PDF.
 
Licence like: Creative Commons

Looks like Markdown to me - same that we use now and that can be used on GitHub based wikis.

I guess bl4ckc00k1e is looking for a very special Paperweight and I think he is on the right track
 
When you got it, you can upload pictures of it holding the paper

On the Testpoints I measured:
1,22 V SoC ?
1,30 V SoC ?
1,50 V DDR3 ?
 
As this RAM gets hotter than DDR3L it can also influence the temperature of the surrounding like air, PCB.
And maybe than also the Bus is powered with 1,50 V and this will hit the SoC in some part of it.

Ah, eventually found it: Quoting Olimex (they started with first H3 board prototypes last year just to realize they were overheating like crazy):
 
 
In our tests the only two boards that use DDR3 instead of DDR3L (as used on every Orange Pi) also overheat like hell. So maybe that's the culprit (the more primitive/unused voltage regulators and PCBs with less heat spreading capabilities adding to the problem).
 
Based on these experiences BPi M2+ and NanoPi M1 aren't the devices of choice when it's about running constantly challenging or even heavy workloads.

red LED on
Power Supply 5,16 Volt (measured on the PCB)
 
here are my results in the picture:
 

I guess bl4ckc00k1e is looking for a very special Paperweight and I think he is on the right track
 
When you got it, you can upload pictures of it holding the paper

Since we're now dealing with a few more H3 devices and some vendors also provide OS images and users get confused a small note regarding kernel situation with H3 at the moment and also an update regarding performance relevant settings (by tweaking these intelligently H3 devices might run multiple times faster!).
  Mainline kernel:   The linux-sunxi guys are doing a great job writing all the stuff necessary from scratch and sending it upstream so that H3 and boards are more and more supported by the stock linux kernel available from kernel.org. For us at Armbian the missing Ethernet driver for H3 was the showstopper that prevented us releasing Armbian images with kernel 4.x so far.    In the meantime or since we had to realize how horribly some H3 boards might overheat (BPi M2+ is currently the worst example but it turned out that NanoPi M1 and Beelink X2 behave the same) missing THS support in mainline kernel is another important reason that prevents Armbian releases for H3 boards. We tried to run the boards downclocked to just 816 MHz just to realize recently that BPi M2+ with specific test workloads has to throttle down to 240 MHz (and needs to kill CPU cores so under worst case conditions we could drive the M2+ only with 2 cores at 240 MHz which is a really bad joke -- so we need throttling working with mainline kernel to release Armbian vanilla images to the public)   BSP kernel:   So while we're testing with mainine kernel stuff from time to time all we now have to release to endusers are some variants of Allwinner's Android kernel for H3 devices (called BSP kernel -- BSP is for 'board support package', that's an ugly tarball with an 3.4.39 kernel Allwinner throws at manufacturers who want to create H3 devices).   Allwinner's 1st BSP kernel variant:   Allwinner published 3.4.39 Android kernel sources last year here. All the official OS images for Orange Pis rely on this stuff (still version 3.4.39 and not even a fix for the rootmydevice security issue). This BSP variant also shows somewhat strange throttling settings (not throttling down while still running on all 4 CPU cores but killing CPU cores one after another without bringing them ever back without a reboot). So be prepared that you get horrible performance results with these settings (that explains the horribly low performance scores that are published on phoronix.com for various H3 based Orange Pi boards)   Loboris' kernel:   The aforementioned kernel sources are basically the stuff Boris Lovosevic (loboris) used to provide the first useable OS images for Orange Pis. He did a really great job fixing tons of issues (eg. enabling GBit Ethernet on OPi Plus or 1-Wire, camera support and so on). Unfortunately he was member of team overclocking so with his so called dvfs settings (dynamic voltage frequency scaling) the Oranges were overvolted (to be able to provide overclocking) and showed all sorts of strange symptoms (insanely high temperatures and stability issues). But this wasn't related to kernel functionality, just settings influencing power supply to the SoC/CPU and enabled overclocking.   Yann Dirrson's fork:   When we at Armbian started supporting H3 boards we relied on different kernel sources (ssvb, one member of the linux-sunxi community used Allwinner's original BSP sources, patched Mali support in to create a small OS image being able to test DRAM reliability. Another linux-sunxi guy forked this kernel tree and patched in a few more stuff (also some of loboris' great work) so we started using this fork as our basis.   1st Armbian legacy kernel:   Igor immediately started to patch the horribly outdated 3.4.39 kernel up to the most recent 3.4.y version (3.4.110 back then IIRC) and we threw in a bunch of other patches to improve this and that. Also as the result of still ongoing efforts to maximize performance/throttling settings Armbian shipped with totally different thermal settings which led in the end to pretty good performance of the boards (since we refrained from overvolting and developed sane settings)   Alwinner's 2nd BSP kernel variant:   When FriendlyARM announced their H3 based NanoPi M1 they also released a newer H3 user manual and also a new BSP kernel variant they obviously both got from Allwinner in the meantime. Jernej maintaining the unofficial H3 OpenELEC fork looked immediately through and spotted a lot of changes.    2nd Armbian legacy kernel:   So we (Armbian and jernej/OpenELEC) decided to switch to this newer BSP kernel, Igor cleaned up some stuff and again rebased all patches (up to 3.4.112 IIRC) to the new kernel sources and we adopted all other patches that were still relevant (we could drop a few). This way we could solve the ugly kswapd bug that plagued us before (one CPU core 100% active and eating up memory) and if I understood correctly also some HDMI/display area improved a lot.   Currently only Armbian and Jernej's unofficial OpenELEC fork use this kernel with all our many patches on top (maybe a few hundred security relevant and also a lot of functionality improvements): https://github.com/igorpecovnik/lib/tree/master/patch/kernel/sun8i-default(currently exactly 112 rather large patches that add support for various hardware, new features, many fixes)   The SinoVoip experience:   While all this happened Foxconn/SinoVoip released their BPi M2+ (a close clone of Orange Pi PC/Plus) and decided to rely on loboris' unmaintained and outdated 3.4.39 kernel for whatever reasons. Since BPi M2+ doesn't use the superiour voltage regulator used on the bigger Oranges at least no overvolting/overclocking is possible here. But for yet unknown reasons this board overheats terribly so we at Armbian adjusted our throttling settings very very low so be prepared that with official SinoVoip OS images strange things might happen when you put some load on this board.   Further improvements:   In the meantime we further improved thermal/performance behaviour and patched also the kernel so that when the board recovers from heavy overheating killed CPU cores are brought back when temperatures are normal again. In addition to that we provide way more cpufreq steps to allow finetuning throttling behaviour based on environmental conditions (as example: when you're running your device in a small enclosure more throttling will occur and you will benefit from more cpufreq steps in lower regions around 900-1000 MHz. If you go the other route and add a good heatsink and some airflow through a fan Armbian will provide you with a tool able to unlook higher cpufreq steps later this year on supported boards)   Summary:   Now a short overview about kernel situation combined with thermal/performance settings: Official Orange Pi images from Xunlong: 3.4.39, no rootmydevice fix, tons of security fixes missing, performance issues after medium load due to killed CPU cores Orange Pi images from loboris: 3.4.39, no rootmydevice fix, tons of security fixes missing, thermal/stability problems due to overvolting, missing sane cpufreq steps (not possible to use 1.3GHz for example) Official Banana Pi M2+ images from SinoVoip: 3.4.39, rootmydevice fixed, tons of security fixes missing, performance issues after higher load due to killed CPU cores Official NanoPi M1 images from FriendlyARM: 3.4.39, still no rootmydevice fix, tons of security fixes missing, unknown status regarding thermal/performance settings Armbian/OpenELEC: 3.4.112, rootmydevice fixed within hours (not an issue on OpenELEC), applied all available fixes from 3.4.y LTS release, constantly improving thermal settings (which means: performance)

TL;DR: All available H3 boards do not differ that much. But the few differences sometimes really matter!
 
The following is an attempt to compare the different available H3 SBC that are supported by Armbian. The majority of boards is made by Xunlong but in the meantime two more vendors started cloning the Xunlong boards (and also Olimex is preparing H3 boards as OSHW). Both Foxconn/SinoVoip with their Banana Pi M2+ and FriendlyARM with their NanoPi M1 tried really hard to copy everything as exact as possible (the so called pin mappings -- how the many contacts the used H3 SoC is providing are routed to the outside).
  All the boards share the same 40 pin GPIO header (trying to be compatible to the newer RPi boards) and since all the other pin mappings are also 99 percent identical you can for example boot a NanoPi M1 with an Armbian image for Orange Pi PC without loosing any functionality (except of camera module) and the same applies to BPi M2+ that will boot happily an Armbian image for Orange Pi Plus 2E (except of camera module and WiFi/BT)   In fact all the various H3 boards just differ in a few details:  Amount of DRAM No, Fast or GBit Ethernet Voltage regulator and 'thermal design' (responsible for performance in full load situations) Storage capabilities (pseudo SATA and eMMC or not) Count of available USB ports (with or w/o internal USB hub) Some additional features like camera modules, WiFi/BT and additional/optional connectors (here it's important to check for driver functionality/availability. If there's no driver providing the necessary functionality then these 'additional features' are pretty much useless -- camera connector for example) Why focussing on the H3 SoC for this comparison? Since some of these boards are priced pretty competitive Mainlining support for H3 SoC and these boards is progressing really nicely so we'll be able to run these boards with mainline kernel pretty soon (thanks to the great linux-sunxi community) 2D/3D/video HW acceleration is available with legacy kernels (again thanks to the great linux-sunxi community) The feature set is nice for many use cases (quad core SoC, GBit Ethernet and 4 useable USB ports on some boards make a really nice low cost/power server) It got somewhat confusing regarding the many available Oranges and now also the cloned Banana and NanoPi This is also in preparation of a broader overview of the capabilities of all the boards Armbian currently supports now focussing on the H3 family. So let's get into details:   Amount of DRAM   That's an easy one. The H3 SoC supports up to 2 GB DRAM. The available and announced boards use either 512MB, 1 GB or 2 GB DRAM (low-power DDR3L on the bigger Oranges and DDR3 on OPi One/Lite, BPi M2+ and NanoPi M1). In case you're using Armbian it simply depends on the use case. And also it's necessary to understand that Linux tries to use all your RAM for a reason: Since unused RAM is bad RAM. So don't be surprised that Armbian will eat up all your RAM to cache stuff which improves performance of some tasks but the kernel will immediately release it when other tasks have a demand for it. If still in doubt please enjoy http://www.linuxatemyram.com.   If you want to use your boards with the unofficial H3 OpenELEC fork too please be aware that OpenELEC benefits from at least 1 GB RAM since then the whole filesystem remains in memory and no accesses to a probably slow SD card happen. Prior to jernej/OpenELEC and Armbian resolving the kswapd bug a few weeks ago the 512 MB equipped boards performed rather poor. But now it seems that the unofficial OpenELEC fork runs pretty well also on the boards with less available RAM.   Whether 1 vs. 2 GB RAM make a difference absolutely depends on the use case and no general recommendations can be made.   Since OpenELEC has been mentioned it should be noted that the current implementation of the unofficial OpenELEC port for H3 boards makes use of the cedarx-license-issues-library (no clear license preventing the use if you care about legal issues -- please have a look at http://linux-sunxi.org/Kodi for further details)   Networking:   The H3 SoC contains an Ethernet implementation that is capable of 10/100 MBits/sec Ethernet and also GBit Ethernet. A PHY (that handles the physical interconnection stuff) for Fast Ethernet is already integrated into the H3 SoC but to be able to use GBit Ethernet an external GbE capable PHY is needed (the RTL8211E used on all boards adds approx 1.2$ to the costs of the board in question).   Most H3 boards use the internal Fast Ethernet PHY so wired networking maxes out at ~95 Mbits/sec. Orange Pi Plus, Plus 2, Plus 2E and BPi M2+ provide GBit Ethernet (+600 Mbits/sec with legacy and exactly 462 Mbits/sec with mainline kernel) while Orange Pi Lite saves an Ethernet jack at all. The good news: Even with the Lite you can use wired network adding a cheap RealTek USB3-Ethernet dongle like this which is confirmed to exceed 300 Mbits/sec in a single direction.   The currently available boards have either no WiFi (NanoPi M1, OPi 2 Mini, One and PC), rely on RealTek 8189ETV (OPi 2, Plus, Plus 2), the newer RealTek 8189FTV (OPi Plus 2E, Lite, PC Plus) or a WiFi/BT combination: AP6181 is used on the BPi M2+ but the vendor didn't manage to get BT working at the time of this writing. Currently only jernej's OpenELEC fork and Armbian have a working driver included for the new 8189FTV chip on the fresh Orange boards that seems to perform quite ok and provides client/AP/monitor mode. Can't say that much about that since in my very personal opinion all these 2.4GHz onboard WiFi solutions are simply crap   Voltage regulator and 'thermal design':   This is a very important differentation: All Orange Pi boards use a programmable voltage regulator to adjust the voltage the SoC is fed with. The SY8106A used on every Orange except of One and Lite can be controlled though I2C and adjusts the so called VDD_CPUX voltage in 20mV steps. This is important since 'dynamic voltage frequency scaling' relies on the principle of providing less voltage to the SoC/CPU when it clocks lower. So when the board is idle also the supplied voltage will be reduced resulting in less consumption and also less temperature.   Since H3 is somewhat prone to overheating being able to adjust VDD_CPUX is also important when we're talking about the opposite of being idle. The SY8106A equipped Oranges reduce very fine grained the core voltage when they start to throttle down in case overheating occurs under constant heavy load. As a direct result they will automagically perform better since reducing VDD_CPUX voltage also reduces temperature/consumption so both CPU and GPU cores in H3 due not have to throttle down that much.   Quite the opposite with BPi M2+. For whatever reasons SinoVoip saved put a the same programmable voltage regulator on their board as OPi One, Lite and NanoPi have but does not implement voltage switching so H3 there will always be fed with 1.3V. In addition it seems 'Team BPi' didn't take care of heat dissipation through PCB design (it seems Xunlong added a copper layer to the PCB that helps dramatically spreading the SoC's heat) and so with BPi M2+ (and NanoPi M1 too) you have to be prepared that you need both a heatsink and a fan to let this board perform under full load since otherwise heavy throttling occurs or when you use a kernel that does not implement throttling (4.6/4.7 right now for example) be prepared that H3 gets either destroyed or will crash through overheating if you run something heavy on BPi M2+ or NanoPi M1. We're still investigating whether this crappy thermal behaviour might be related to DRAM also (DDR3 vs. low power DDR3L on the Oranges) It seems this thermal behaviour is not that much related to the DRAM type used but more to PCB design (maybe using large internal ground/vcc planes optimizing heat dissipation on Oranges.   NanoPi M1 and Orange Pi One/Lite use a rather primitive GPIO driven voltage regulator that is able to just switch between 1.1V and 1.3V VDD_CPUX which already helps somewhat with throttling.   A rather demanding benchmark using cpuminer (a bitcoin miner making heavy use of NEON optimizations and assembler instructions) that knows a benchmark mode where it outputs the khash/s rate. On the left OPI+ 2E with the superiour SY8106A voltage regulator switching CPU frequency between 1200 and 1296 MHz. On the right little OPi Lite with the SY8113B voltage generator able to switch between 1.1V and 1.3V and with slightly lower performance since throttling prevents clocking that high. And in the middle as only board with applied heatsink on H3 poor Banana Pi M2+ using the same SY8113B voltage regulator but always feeding the H3 SoC with 1.3V (for whatever reasons!).      Storage capabilities:   The H3 SoC doesn't feature native SATA capabilities so the 2 boards that have a SATA connector (Orange Pi Plus and Plus 2) implement that using an onboard USB-to-SATA bridge. Unfortunately the chip used there -- a Genesys Logic GL830 -- is horribly slow limiting sequential transfer speeds to 15 MB/s write and 30 MB/s read. It also does not support the USB Attached SCSI Protocol (UASP) so when using mainline kernel attached disks an especially SSDs couldn't show their full random I/O performance.   Given that common USB-to-SATA bridges used in external USB enclosures show way better sequential performance (35 MB/s in both directions and close to 40 MB/s when using an UASP capable bridge together with mainline kernel) the SATA port on these 2 SBC can not be considered a feature worth a buy.   Every H3 board has a TF card slot (Micro SD card) and some of the boards feature onboard eMMC storage. The H3 can cope with TF cards that are compliant to the SD, SDHC and SDXC standards so rather large cards with more than 64 GB capacity can also be used (be aware that there do not exist that much cards with a capacity larger than 128 GB. Chances are pretty high to get a counterfeit card especially when the price looks too good to be true ). You should also be aware that all H3 boards show the same sequential speed limitations (maxing out at ~23 MB/s) so choosing cards that are rated way faster aren't worth a buy. Better have a look at random I/O performance that is more important in most use cases.   The eMMC used on various boards is pretty fast (sequential speeds maxing out at ~75 MB/s and especially random IO way faster than the fastest tested SD cards which is important for desktop useage and databases for example) so you don't make a mistake choosing any of the eMMC equipped H3 boards (BPi M2+, Orange Pi Plus, Plus 2, Plus 2E or PC Plus). You find detailed test results of current SD/TF cards as well as all the eMMC variants used in these two threads: http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/954-sd-card-performance/ http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/990-testers-wanted-sd-card-performance/ Count of available USB ports:   The H3 SoC features 3 USB2.0 host ports and one USB OTG port. With Armbian we configure the OTG port as a host port that shows pretty similar performance so on some H3 boards (Orange Pi PC, PC Plus and Plus 2E) you can benefit from 4 USB2 ports that do not have to share bandwidth.   Some other boards use an internal USB hub (Orange Pi 2, Plus, Plus 2) so the available USB ports have to share bandwidth in reality. Please keep that in mind when you compare the 4 USB Type A jacks OPi 2, Plus or Plus 2 feature (all being connected to a USB hub so having to share the bandwidth of a single USB 2.0 host port) with the 3 you can count on OPi PC, Plus 2E or NanoPi M1. On the latter boards you get full USB 2.0 bandwidth on each USB receptacle without the need to share bandwidth.   BPi M2+ does also not use an internal USB hub but only exposes 2 USB host ports on type A receptacles and the 3rd host port only without ESC protection via soldering (but since this board shows such a terrible thermal design and is relatively overpriced compared to other H3 boards that doesn't matter that much)   Additional features:   The only board featuring a Bluetooth capable chip from BroadCom is the BPi M2+. Currently the vendor admits that BT is not working so better don't count on this feature to be ever available.   Update: Jernej got BT already working in his OpenELEC fork so it's just a matter of time until it works with Armbian too.   The H3 SoC is able to output/intercept additional signals, eg. analog audio, Composite video (TV out), IrDA that are present on most of the boards. On the Orange Pi One many of those interfaces are only present as solder points (a bit too tiny to be used by the average maker) and on some other boards they are not present at all (BPi M2+ for example has neither composite video nor analog audio) so always check first what you need or want to use.   We have a nice sortable table in linux-sunxi wiki showing most of the important details: http://linux-sunxi.org/Table_of_Allwinner_based_boards   Camera modules:   Xunlong provides a pretty cheap 2MP camera module that should work with every H3 Orange Pi out there (they all have the necessary connector but for OPi One, Lite, PC and PC Plus you have to tell Xunlong that you also need a so called 'expansion board' that they ship free of charge if you add to your order that you need it. Starting with Armbian release 5.15 we also include an improved driver for this camera.   Regarding current state of available camera modules for Oranges, BPi M2+ and NanoPi M1 please look through this thread: http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/1213-ov5640-camera-with-orange-pi/?view=getlastpost

As expected. Just read through these threads, then open the window and try to throw this piece of 'great hardware' as far away as you can
http://forum.banana-pi.org/t/ap6212-low-performance/1655 http://forum.banana-pi.org/t/how-to-use-bpi-m3-wifi-extebd-antenna-slot/1283

We included in Armbian a small utility called h3disp. If called without arguments it displays just a usage information:
tk@orangepipc:~$ sudo h3disp  [sudo] password for tk:  Usage: h3disp [-h/-H] -m [video mode] [-d] [-c [0-2]] ############################################################################  This is a tool to set the display resolution of your Orange  Pi by patching script.bin.  In case you use an HDMI-to-DVI converter please use the -d switch.  The resolution can be set using the -m switch. The following resolutions  are currently supported:     480i use "-m 480i" or "-m 0"     576i use "-m 576i" or "-m 1"     480p use "-m 480p" or "-m 2"     576p use "-m 576p" or "-m 3"     720p50 use "-m 720p50" or "-m 4"     720p60 use "-m 720p60" or "-m 5"     1080i50 use "-m 1080i50" or "-m 6"     1080i60 use "-m 1080i60" or "-m 7"     1080p24 use "-m 1080p24" or "-m 8"     1080p50 use "-m 1080p50" or "-m 9"     1080p60 use "-m 1080p60" or "-m 10"  Two examples:     'h3disp -m 1080p60 -d' (1920x1080@60Hz DVI)     'h3disp -m 720i' (1280x720@30Hz HDMI)  You can also specify the colour-range for your HDMI-display with the -c switch.  The following values for -c are currently supported:     0 -- RGB range 16-255 (Default, use "-c 0")     1 -- RGB range 0-255 (Full range, use "-c 1")     2 -- RGB range 16-235 (Limited video, "-c 2") ############################################################################ This tool tries to patch script.bin (adjusts the display settings there) and requires a reboot afterwards. While it is not useable with vanilla kernel (script.bin doesn't play any role there and a display driver is also still not ready) it might be also useful for H3 users that rely on other OS images (Debian/Ubuntu based from Xunlong or from loboris). Our h3disp tries also to patch script.bin there with your settings so it should be useful for non Armbian users too 
 
BTW: It could also be used with Debian based Linux OS images for A83T/H8 (Cubietruck Plus, pcDuino8 Uno or Banana Pi M3) but unfortunately these vendors fail to provide OS images that use a patched u-boot version that could deal with script.bin. At least 'Team BPi' got it finally after being told since months where/how to copy&paste this stuff but since they only update their sources and provide no updates for their OS images, Banana Pi M3 customers are still lost
 
In case you're an Android user you'll have to go the extra mile since the Android OS image for H3 Orange Pi's doesn't support script.bin. You could apply the changes h3disp offers to one of our provided fex files but have then to overwrite a few sectors on your SD card to get this stuff working (by choosing our fex files you could also 'patch' the Android image to run better on the Orange Pi One or get all USB ports and Ethernet on the other models and improve realiability and decrease SoC temperature)

[Ended]   Be active, creative, helpful and you can get a powerful board in return. First give away batch is starting 11.6.2016  
It's not often that you can work on a software project that actually brings joy and helps people. Armbian is one of those project. It is a system that helps one build a kernel or boot images for several ARM development boards. 
 
It's in common interest that we improve level of support and to relieve most active people. Our crew needs an upgrade:
we need more coders, kernel hackers, UX designers to find and solve problems. If you are one of them, join our forum, join project at Github. we need properly built, packed and supported desktop with major functions: video acceleration/fbturbo, libump, mali, etc. we need to put together much better documentation. We need to fine tune MkDocs documentation tools For those who are willing to claim a task or help others to understand "how do I do this in Armbian" we prepared a dozen of boards as a small reward. It's a Xunlong Orange PI+ 2E, which design was improved based on requests from our community. It's H3 based quad core with 2G RAM, 16G eMMC, Gigabit LAN, WIFI and 3x USB.     There might be just enough boards for everyone who are willing to do some public service work. Claim your projects at this topic and each weekend we will discuss and select up to 15 people who will get the board, starting with 11.6., ... until we run out of boards. One will be notified by email and expect an answer within 48 hours, if not, board goes to somebody else.   Boards were donated and will be sent directly from Xunlong Co., Shenzhen, China.     1st batch is going to: Kriston, lanefu, vlad59, martinayotte, jeanrhum, Gravelrash, xcasex, naibmra, Xer0, madilabs, wha, @lex, WereCatf   naibmra - Bulgaria - kernel testing, try hooking to kernelci.org, docs - mid July wha - USA - 50unattended-upgrades, issue #337 - June Kriston - USA - documentation rework - July, August Xer0 - Germany - media build - July, August lanefu - USA - issue tracking improvements between forum and github - 22 June, July madilabs - Martinique - Packaging for desktop video acceleration - June xcasex - Sweden - desktop packaging - July, August jeanrhum - France - documentation and debian packaging - July martinayotte - Canada - maintain/fix DTS entries for some devices such I2C/SPI/W1 - ASAP vlad59 - France - Nanopi M1 testing and documentation Gravelrash - UK - Prepare HOWTO's & package "armbian-gc2035-fswebcam package" - June   2nd batch is going to: dimag0g, R2D2_C3PO, miked, 0x0, sysitos, jmcneill    dimag0g - France -  Packaging of OpenGL wrapper library - end of July R2D2_C3PO - Germany - Improved SD-Card partitioning - end of August miked - Canada - build system recension - end of August 0x0 - Russian Federation - Redesign site and documentation WIP + add some changes to graphics in distro. - end of July sysitos - Germany - replace/rework ramlog for systemd - end of August jmcneill - Canada - (Armbian is helping porting Freebsd)    Users were notified and were requested to provide: project name, due date and their shipping address

Unix/MacOS tools to write images to SD cards:
the usual dd dc3dd & dcfldd are improved forks of dd dcfldd has also a nice "on the fly" hashing mechanism (so to avoid complex md5 or sha*) but it has many options so it is a bit complicated to use (see).
 
I am often using dc3dd on Debian like systems because you can see realtime the % of the processing and you may leave dc3dd to manage buffering & doing the hashing on the fly:
sudo apt-get install dc3dd sudo dc3dd if=Image.bin of=/dev/sdX sudo dc3dd verb=on hash=md5 if=Image.bin of=/dev/sdX hof=sdX_output.md5 Prior to dc3dd, I was using "pv" (but "pv" has some delayed display because it is linked to the piped "dd")
pv -baret Image.bin | sudo dd of=/dev/sdX bs=10M also make sure all the buffers are written to the SD card
sudo sync

This will be my last answer for now since you seem to ignore answers anyway.
 
Please check your so called 'very high-quality SDCards' immediately and read through the 'SD card performance' thread I already recommended to you over there: http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/1302-running-apt-get-dist-upgrade-installs-the-new-kernel-but-takes-the-orange-pi-pc-a-really-long-time/
 
Regarding led behaviour it's that easy. All the OS images over at orangepi forums use Allwinner's oudated u-boot 2011.09 (where the led will be powered on immediately) while we use mainline u-boot where the led gets activated later (the time span already increased a lot since most recent mainline u-boot version scans all USB busses for peripherals).
 
Anyway: if Armbian boots slow then your SD card is most probably the culprit. And no, after doing some very extensive testing I don't believe in any marketing claims any more. Counterfeit cards exist, most SD cards used are slow as hell when it's about random IO. Again: Read from here on: http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/954-sd-card-performance/

TK, Bazinga! well, TKKT is like TBBT

Oh yes you did the 8/10 thingy, but this site doesn't looks like fun to read, neither understandable to me.
 
 
I have asked now google for: usb 480mbits lie 
 
Now I understand :-)
Well I understand, that it sucks with USB2.0
 
Uhhh, at the end something for you TK:
Hinweis: In einer früheren Version dieses Hotline-Tipps stand, dass Highspeed-USB eine 8-Bit-10-Bit-Kodierung verwendet, doch das stimmt nicht.
USB 3.0 Superspeed hingegen arbeitet tatsächlich mit 8b10b-Scrambling.
 
Bazinga
thank you for enlighten me