rocketpenguin

if you want small device for AP, maybe look into this; it has better wifi. http://linux-sunxi.org/Xunlong_Orange_Pi_Zero_Plus_2

Forget about using OPi0 as host AP. The wireless works but is shit due to hardware limitations and bad support from manufacturer. It will be extremely slow, and with more than 2 or 3 devices connected I'd say it would be completely unusable. Get a better orange pi or some other device with a decent wifi.

Get a 4.10 image from armbian downloads, mount it as loop device, copy the kernel+modules+any related files over to your microSD. As a much better way, find out what the old kernel package was called, and install it. Make sure to freeze your kernel+modules via armbian-config to ensure it doesn't accidentally get updated again.

pyspiflash looks to be ok for my purposes. Thanks for the pointer.

Oh so it's possible to write a fairly simple C program to do that? Maybe I'll look into it. Is this protocol specific to SPI flashes or to SPI devices in general?

dd could "write" to it without error, but upon reading, there were only null bytes. anyway, seems like it's not really worth bothering with for my purposes (storing small amounts of configuration data), but thanks for the input.

Qupzilla is a pretty good browser which is multi-threaded. It's also faster than both Firefox and Chrome, and can run JS bloatware like Google Docs etc. I think it strikes a good balance between features and speed for "normal people".

My Orange Pi Zero (rev 1.4) has a SPI flash module soldered to the underside. I can see the devices /dev/spidev0.0 and /dev/spidev1.0, and I can write to them and read from them (with dd), but the data I read from them is always just null bytes. Obviously then I can't create a filesystem on them. Is it possible to create a small filesystem on the SPI flash to add files? If not, how is it possible to store data on the SPI flash? I'm running Armbian 5.30 with kernel 3.4.113-sun8i.

Somewhere in the 60-70 degree range is to be expected from an unmodified OPi Zero. To reduce the temperature: 1. Add a heatsink of appropriate size. 2. Using the `h3consumption` tool, change the maximum CPU frequency to 912 MHz. This will significantly reduce temperatures because it avoids sending an entire 1.3V to the CPU.