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New Oranges with H5 and H2+

Igor

By Igor
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tkaiser

tkaiser

Posted
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That's delightfully insane.

 

A possible use case would be a wall or ceiling blocking Wi-Fi signals efficiently. Given a wall socket is available only on one side, drilling a hole, using a short Cat-7 cable (or real copper Cat-5/6) and two OPi Zero using one 5.2V PSU solves the problem: Wi-Fi repeater splitted into two devices, wlan0 acts as client here and as AP there and on both OPi Zero wlan0 and eth0 build br0.

 

To increase confusion: The very same might work even better with a smaller hole to drill and more theoretical throughput. By using g_ether module (USB Ethernet gadget mode) and using a simple USB-to-Micro-USB cable for both powering and network of the second device. The necessary patch is included in Armbian since June and it's pretty easy to set this stuff up. In this case not eth0 would be used on both sides to interconnect but usb0 instead.

 

And of course it could be even more insane since both methods could be combined. With a single PSU you could power one OPi Zero, connect/power another H3 device through USB (be it another OPi Zero or a NanoPi NEO for example) and also connect/power one more OPi Zero through PoE. And since OPi Zero has both Wi-Fi and Ethernet you can bridge air gaps wherever you want or where it's necessary.

 

The possibility to use both Ethernet and Wi-Fi, el cheapo PoE (both injector or splitter role if distance is short enough!) and to power OPi Zero through Micro USB allows many (new) ways to interconnect (and power at the same time!) a bunch of such devices.

tkaiser

tkaiser

Posted
Posted

 

Any ideas when it's going to be supported by armbian ?

 

When it's ready? See post #49 in this thread what's available: nothing to rely on but just a few optimistic assumptions.

 

Nice details: SPI NOR flash is populated and for European customers board price + shipping remain below the EU VAT exempt threshold.

hojnikb

hojnikb

Posted
Posted

When it's ready? See post #49 in this thread what's available: nothing to rely on but just a few optimistic assumptions.

 

Nice details: SPI NOR flash is populated and for European customers board price + shipping remain below the EU VAT exempt threshold.

 

Makes sense. Obviously you guys have to get the board too and appropriate source code/documentation.

 

Are there even any linux distros that run on H5 ?

Also, there is no mention on the frequency of the arm cores or mali gpu. Any ideas on that ?

tkaiser

tkaiser

Posted
Posted

Are there even any linux distros that run on H5 ?

Also, there is no mention on the frequency of the arm cores or mali gpu. Any ideas on that ?

 

Again #49: http://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/1762-new-oranges-with-h5-and-h2/?p=19008

 

Everything based on assumptions by looking at BSP code snippets (in this case device tree). I would believe H5 is more or less a H3 with same CPU cores as A64. Codename/architecture variant is most probably sun50iw2 (DVB/TS tuner, Gbit Ethernet), it's the same regarding CPU cores as A64 (based on dvfs/cpufreq contents in DT files), it has a better GPU (Mali450, maybe Mali blobs from Hikey board can be used once community gets code ready) and according to rumours a better video engine.

 

To my knowledge we have zero documentation, zero reference implementation (read as: at least an Android running on a H5 device) and just this smelly BSP drop here: https://github.com/BPI-SINOVOIP/BPI-M2U-bsp

 

Even in case A64 and H5 are nearly identical as long as we're speaking about CPU cores only there is an important difference since A64 has PMIC support while H5 not. Stuff like dvfs (voltage regulation, powering specific parts) is done by AXP803 PMU on A64 devices while there's just an I2C interface to the voltage regulator on OPi PC 2 (maybe handled by an axpdummy driver, maybe not).

 

Based on the availability of documentation, code known to work and hardware (zero, zero and zero) it's a bit hard to estimate the amount of time to get this thingie up and running ;)

hojnikb

hojnikb

Posted
Posted

So right now it's a piece of worthless pcb, until some decent images are provided... Typical Xunlong way; hardware now, software later (or never)  :P  :P  :P 

 

Still gonna buy one; until i get it and get around to play with it, i'm sure something will be done  :D  :D  :D 

tkaiser

tkaiser

Posted
Posted

Typical Xunlong way; hardware now, software later (or never) 

 

Well, I'm into this SBC thing since two years and until recently I didn't encounter a single vendor provided OS image that wasn't horrible more or less. The only exception so far are the OS images from FriendlyARM. In other words: this is not specific to Xunlong but a broader problem.

 

But anyway: we got good news in the meantime. An 'SDK' and documentation might soon be available (currently uploading which takes some time thanks to the GFW) and then community can start the work.

jernej

jernej

Posted
Posted

Think I'll wait for the Plus version, hopefully they'll give some eMMC soon.

Flash addition is nice, but I2C is slow..

Flash is actually connected to SPI, which should be way faster than I2C. Also amount of it is enough only for U-Boot. I guess many of developers (me included) will pursue this way.

Christos

Christos

Posted
Posted

Flash is actually connected to SPI, which should be way faster than I2C. Also amount of it is enough only for U-Boot. I guess many of developers (me included) will pursue this way.

Yep, seen schematic too (lol rare for orange to give schematics fast, still wait for the OPiPC+..), mistakenly read somewhere that it is I2C though yes it is SPI, faster obviously but still I prefer eMMC when/if they will get it out.

eli

eli

Posted
Posted

Are there any H5 benchmarks or comparisons out yet to the Orange Pi H3.

i don't know if there's any OS for this board yet.

iv'e already ordered one and i promise to publish one when it'll arrive, hopefully some sort of OS will be available by then.  

Christos

Christos

Posted
Posted

But anyway: we got good news in the meantime. An 'SDK' and documentation might soon be available (currently uploading which takes some time thanks to the GFW) and then community can start the work.

 

Is this something private/NDA or can it be dissiminated?

jernej

jernej

Posted
Posted

SDK is not yet available.

 

BTW, OPi Zero Android image is uploaded to orangepi.org download page, but it seems that it is actually PC Plus image. Anyway, I don't see a point having Android on Zero (no apparent video output, unless if you solder it). Additionaly, it doesn't include wifi driver nor wifi firmware blob.

tkaiser

tkaiser

Posted
Posted

This 'Debian Server' image from Xunlong is not that bad. It's based on longsleep's 'simpleimage' stuff for A64 and problems are more or less related to kernel. So comparable with Pine64 situation 9 months ago but most if not all fixes for A64 seem to fit here too.

 

Known problems:

- voltage regulation doesn't work at all

- Gigabit Ethernet needs some TX/RX delay tweaks

- a lot of kernel fixes required

 

I then merged Xunlong's 'server' image with the roots from our Pine64 desktop image, got the usual desktop but fortunately video playback with mpv failed :). http://sprunge.us/icXY

tkaiser

tkaiser

Posted
Posted

I ordered ORPi H5. When arrive, will see how it will work for my needs. :rolleyes:

 

Just as a reference:

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