Thanks to the latest Armbian and my own script - I now have a NanoPi Neo (two of them actually) running everything I want - Node-Red, Mosquitto, SQLITE3 etc..... got control of serial ports - marvelous.
I have only one problem - I have no idea despite several experiments - how to get WIFI working on the standard cheap Wifi dongles you get on Ebay. (usually say 802.11n on the black plastic end).
Anyone succeeded with this?
Pete.