rodolfo

You're trying to solve the wrong problem. OPI ONE/LITE power on nicely when you feed them enough juice if they have been shut down cleanly. Your problem is not starting but shutting down the boards cleanly when there is not sufficient power anymore. You'll obviously need some external logic to trigger controlled shutdown, cut power to the OPI and reattach it based on available minimum battery level to safely run the board and not ruin the battery. Good luck with your project.

Looks fine.

Running OS, browsers and all in RAM only is a valid technology with IPXE-booted X86 kiosks. Some 2G RAM and disabled caching did the trick. To burden our tiny gems with all the sophisticated workarounds is a bit too much. I'd go with @tkaiser and make sure you use suitable storage and take meaningful measures to not let firefox be abused by the usual "web experience"

HDMI to VGA converter is needed. Get one with optional audio output for a few bucks on ebay/ALI.

X over ssh is definitely the way to go. The turbo version of this is x2go. Have a look at http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/1044-remote-desktop-fun-with-armbian/

Thank you for keeping Armbian clean and functional. The CLI version is all that is ever needed. For graphical ( mostly remote ) access I personally prefer lean and fast LXDE over XFCE. The modular approach of Armbian makes it easy to set up whatever one considers a "smooth, high quality desktop". A typical example of flashy useless "technology" is Wayland - no transparent networking means pretty useless for SBCs and embedded projects.

Off topic. Call M$ support, you paid for it.

I've generally found SDcards less reliable than their USB counterparts and the physical handling of USB3 sticks is usually much smoother with PCs and notebooks. This is just a personal preference. For OPI ONE/LITE I put boot stuff on an old SDcard of any class/size and the rootfs on a USB3 stick. A fast flash disk does of course nicely complement a fast SDcard if you need to add low power storage. As I already mentioned, OPI ONE and OPI LITE both with USB flash and wifi run from simple dual-18650 battery pack. HDD and SSD will meet some serious limits there. You are of course perfectly right in pointing out the speed nonsense promoted in benchmark infomercials. An SBC will always be a carefully balanced matched system of storage, computing and I/O. It just happens that the small OPI H3 boards running with stock legacy Armbian show very pleasing balanced performance.

Common USB2 thumb drives ( as most other USB2 peripherals ) are pretty useless, not so the mentioned USB 3 drive. The benchmark numbers were published after actually veryfying ( test loop running iostat for > 1 h ) results. Real storage for real use cases ? Some people might be interested in cheap fast low power storage for their OPI ONE/LITE/PC appliances running on batteries, solar powered devices or simple low volume wireless-NAS, private cloud .....

A simple solution : http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/1925-some-storage-benchmarks-on-sbcs/#entry15314

Here's an interesting benchmark from a low power storage solution for OPI ONE : Command line used: iozone -e -I -a -s 10m -r 4k -r 16k -r512k -i 0 -i 1 -i 2 kB reclen write rewrite read reread read write 10240 4 3946 4287 9421 7887 5294 3984 10240 16 11740 11651 21115 21087 14994 8719 10240 512 24376 24454 35105 35191 32879 24729 Beats ( by half a bit/s ) SDcards in performance, eMMC in price and any SSD or HDD in power consumption. Great for power optimized systems running on battery. Sandisk ULTRA FIT USB3 Flash Drive. Tested with Armbian 5.16, rootfs on /dev/sda1 ( USB flash ). Max. power consumption ( incl. WiFi,flash) during testing was 550mA, board running from battery.

Check power first.

Firefox is as good as it gets on OPI ONE/LITE with stock Armbian. Forget infotainment and the usual octacore gigaterror "web experience". Smart web applications run very nicely on H3. If you need the "web experience" - go buy a gadget designed for it ( Cupertino and Redmond will help you with the yearly upgrade ). Want REALLY FAST browsing for your $10 OPI ONE ? http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/1044-remote-desktop-fun-with-armbian/#entry8049 Fast browsing = fast cpu, fast storage and most importantly - enough bandwidth. You will get that from any cheap virtual cloud server. Install x2go server and access it from x2goclient on your OPI ONE/LITE.

Just download a stock image, burn it and live happily ever after Wrong use case. We are trying to make good things better You could also light a match, put some Ketchup on your forehead and go swimming. This will not solve any problems either but is a lot of fun

When properly powered, the system 100% of the time does not go down. Actually TESTED on stock Armbian with stock settings on a dozen boards. This also has been TESTED and works on all sorts of Raspis as well. I'd strongly advise you to rethink the approach in dealing with SBCs. The world is full of hearsay, FUD and endless repair technology for unproven untested theories. Armbian is for doers and by doing and sharing actual successes we grow.

Just keep it simple. Instead of "optimizing for power cut" just do not cut power. This is done with battery buffering and has been proven to work with OPI ONE/LITE using stock Armbian as per stock Armbian documentations. All the circuitry needed is already included in a pair of the cheapest of power banks you can possibly buy. Add two quality 18650 batteries ( Samsung, Panasonic, Sanyo ... no UltracrapFirecrackers ), solder battery terminals ( +/+ -/- ) of power banks together and you are set. Will it drain the batteries faster than in theoretical lab conditions without any use cases ? You bet it will. Will it keep running when power is cut ? Sure ! Will it dampen quirks of PSU ? Yes - a great added benefit !

Keep it simple. Rented virtual servers are cheap and efficient for peak loads and excellent bandwith at a fraction of the costs for homebrew.

http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/1331-armbian-sd-card-backup/page-2#entry11169 Hope this helps

Thank you for putting the focus on things that actually matter.

If all you need is some buffered power supply ( board not stopping on power cuts ) use two dirt cheap 18650 power banks and connect them on the battery side ( BAT+/BAT+ BAT-/BAT- ). Charge through one circuit and draw power through the other. Adjusting OPI PC for power consumption ( see http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/1614-running-h3-boards-with-minimal-consumption/) helps when running from batteries.

Just disabling GPU/HDMI for headless use works great for OPI ONE/LITE. A customized x2go LXDE-desktop on OPI ONE accessed via WiFi or LAN uses just 85M RAM and "idles" around 900mW (LAN) - 1200mW (WLAN). That's just fine to run the boards from dirt cheap 18650 power bank hacks with passthrough charging.

Put your finger on the chip. If you can still touch it, you are just fine without even using a heatsink. Ever since settings were adjusted to sane values in Armbian, OPI ONE/LITE boards run reliably without heatsink. As already mentioned, a cheap sink with some thermal paste adds a safe margin unless you plan to steam up your board in a closed plastic box.

oops ... sounds like you had some frantic moments. Just relax. 1. Your board basically works ( your tests with other images ) 2. The SDcard works on other boards ( your tests ) 3. Armbian for Orange Pi installed per http://www.armbian.com/documentation works ( tested by other Armbian users ) This leaves us with : - possibly corrupted image ( downloaded image or copy to SDcard ) - power issues ( OPIs are very picky about sufficient and stable power supply - see related forum posts ) Do a fresh download of Armbian for your board, dd it to SDcard and proceed EXACTLY as per http://www.armbian.com/documentation Best of luck and have fun.

Most USB2-based add-ons ( SATA adapters, LAN sticks, flash drives ) have vastly inferior performance compared to the newer USB3 stuff as the bandwidth limitation of USB2 does not really merit faster components. On the other hand USB3-based gear uses faster components and the limitation will be USB2 speed. USB3 Gigabit dongle + USB3 SATA adapter ( or 2x USB3 nano flash drives for low power use ) are combinations working very well with OPI LITE.

http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/1675-reboot-problem/#entry12979