I just received 3 of the Zero Plus boards and am trying to verify they at least basically work. I'm new to Armbian & Orange Pi but have been using Raspbian & Raspberry Pi's for years.
I've downloaded Armbian for the OP Zero (Armbian_5.38_Orangepizero_Debian_stretch_next_4.14.14.img), verified the gpg signature and the sha256 checksum and used Etcher v. 1.4.4 on a 2017 iMac, macOS Sierra, to burn SD cards. After burning, macOS claims "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer." Maybe that's normal for Armbian? diskutil list shows:
/dev/disk8 (external, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: FDisk_partition_scheme *15.9 GB disk8
1: Linux 1.4 GB disk8s1
so the lack of a FAT partition would explain it not being readable. Still, tried to use it to boot the OP Zero's...
Nothing. No indication that it's receiving power, no activity on the ethernet hub it's connected to. Does the OP Zero even have a power LED? I know first boot takes a "long" time, so I left it alone for > 10 minutes. Nothing.
Also, to address some obvious questions:
1) power supply - 2A, 18 inch USB cable. It successfully powers a Raspberry Pi 3B+, which is notorious for it's power usage. Could the OP Zero be worse?
2) ethernet connection - works with RPi
3) SD card - burning a Raspbian image to the same SD card (after formatting) boots on both a 2B and 3B+.
I verified 5.20 volts between pins 1 & 2 of the populated header (CON5) so it sure looks like the power is good.
This seems to work for lots of other folks, so I must be missing something. Perhaps I received 3 defective boards? Unlikely, but possible. Does the OP Zero Plus require a different Debian build than the OP Zero?
What else?
Thanks.
LarryA
