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Orange Pi Zero went to the market

zgoda_j

By zgoda_j
in Allwinner sunxi

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fossxplorer

fossxplorer

Posted
Posted

I hope Steven reads and strongly considers this great suggestion :)

 


 

Edit: Since situation with mainline u-boot/kernel for H5 looks already really promising regarding "NAS use cases" (see details) I suggested another Zero type device to Steven: With H5 and Gigabit Ethernet. The upcoming Zero Plus 2 seems to not have any Ethernet at all but that's all just assumption based on looking at weird commits in a github repo somewhere)

ja7tdo

ja7tdo

Posted
Posted

I have the electrical datasheet which is useless. The chip and firmware is/is based on an ST/Ericsson design. The cw1200 driver in the mainline kernel source is basically the same as the xr819 driver and that driver (the in-kernel one) came from a code dump from ST/Ericsso so there probably isn't anyone that still has the technical documentation for the firmware (because ST/Ericsson no longer exists) and all winner have probably done a bunch of undocumented hacks in the firmware anyhow. 

 

hi,

 

thank you for your reply.

I need datasheet for getting certification of Japanese wifi.

speculations, block diagram is needed.

 

could you send me datasheet directly?

 

ja7tdo@zao.jp

 

best regards,

 

Miura

atharmian

atharmian

Posted
Posted

zhup,

 

There is no need for additional software development here. This $2 shield only exposes existing interfaces.

 

So it is already supported.

tkaiser

tkaiser

Posted
Posted

For me the most important is additional USB port.

 

Enabled by default with legacy images and we also patch DT for mainline kernel so USB should work with any Armbian image you find (mainline kernel guys think that nothing of this stuff available on the various Expansion boards should be enabled by default for reasons I don't understand -- we disagree and enable them of course)

lopau

lopau

Posted
Posted

FCC certification would be on a module or a product containing the chip as far as I know.

 

 

In that case, doesn't the Zero itself need FCC certification? The RPi 3 has a FCC ID

loshia

loshia

Posted
Posted

Hello,

 

Will it be possible to replace stock 2M SPI flash with 8M or 16M  (or just solder fresh one) and hold there stripped-down linux distro. My goal is not to use SD card at all. I am thinking that 8M(16) will be enough for armbian kernel u-boot and put openwrt on top. I see a lot of spi related things happenning lately (large transfers patches and so on). Is it possible to achieve that? I saw a lot of comments that this task is doable in theory. What about in practice?

 

Thank you very much in advance 

zador.blood.stained

zador.blood.stained

Posted
Posted

Will it be possible to replace stock 2M SPI flash with 8M or 16M  (or just solder fresh one) and hold there stripped-down linux distro. My goal is not to use SD card at all. I am thinking that 8M(16) will be enough for armbian kernel u-boot and put openwrt on top. I see a lot of spi related things happenning lately (large transfers patches and so on). If it is currently possible to achieve that?

Well, you could replace the stock flash, but 16M is still relatively small to put anything useful in it (you'll need to trim down the kernel a lot, and yes, I know that OpenWRT can run on devices with 4M storage), and there is no SPI support in u-boot proper yet, so after u-boot is loaded to the memory you can't load anything else from SPI without adding extra patches to the u-boot.

loshia

loshia

Posted
Posted

Thanks zador!

That is perfectly fine. i need LAN CPU and 3 USB all the rest will be ripped out from kernel (all useless suff like devices,wifi,audio,video, pop,pppoe, iptables, IPV6, and whatever you can think of) so i think i can handle that by myself with my knowledge. But i am not sure what do  you mean with " u-boot.......you can't load anything else from SPI without adding extra patches to the u-boot". Do this patches exist? If yes, where i can find them? If no, can you point me to some similar patches so i can try to adopt something. My programming skills are not brilliant and i will give it a try. but i need something for a start.

Thank you very much in advance

Best

lopau

lopau

Posted
Posted

 

Since the board has FCC and CE certifications

 

I don't think the FCC certification is valid. There's no ID to be found.

zador.blood.stained

zador.blood.stained

Posted
Posted

That is perfectly fine. i need LAN CPU and 3 USB all the rest will be ripped out from kernel (all useless suff like devices,wifi,audio,video, pop,pppoe, iptables, IPV6, and whatever you can think of) so i think i can handle that by myself with my knowledge. 

Well, you'll still be looking at 2.5-3MB for the mainline at best, and I don't know how much you can disable in legacy without breaking it.

 

But i am not sure what do  you mean with " u-boot.......you can't load anything else from SPI without adding extra patches to the u-boot". Do this patches exist? If yes, where i can find them? If no, can you point me to some similar patches so i can try to adopt something. My programming skills are not brilliant and i will give it a try. but i need something for a start.

I mean that u-boot has no SPI driver, so even though it can load from SPI flash, it can't access it after that. I remember somebody linked a repository with SPI support, but still you'll have to extract and apply the patch, check if it works fine, define SPI flash and some MTD partitions for it, override default boot sequence (at compile time) or enable environment in SPI support and load the kernel, script.bin/DT from MTD partitions (will be easier and lighter than using UBI/UBIFS) and this is only the start.

loshia

loshia

Posted
Posted

Thanks Zador!

I see.... this is beyond me and needs and expert touch and a lot of time. I have to live with SD card. Can you or someone else recommend me reliable SD card brand except usual suspects Kingston and Scandisk...Something else? 

 

I think i am gonna for NanoPI M1 - 3 usb ports.

Offtopic:

 

Is It possible to hack 4th NanoPI M1 USB from OTG to HOST? I saw some comments regarding other boards ....

simplesi

simplesi

Posted
Posted

 

My 512MB Orange Pi Zero arrived today.

 

Installed Armbian_5.24_Orangepizero_Debian_jessie_3.4.113.img from https://www.armbian.com/orange-pi-zero/

 

All works fine and its been great over ethernet all day.

 

Wifi worked straightaway ....

 

 

Hi Mike

I've just installed this - what are the steps to get WiFi working

Simon

renaudrenaud

renaudrenaud

Posted
Posted

Hello evreyone,

 

Once month ago, for the Christmas holidays, I was back in France. A friend of mine ask me some information about a little amp to drive a speaker – PM8403 was the answer – from a little SBC. He showed me his project and I discovered by this time the Orange Pi Zero.

 

Since many years I am using Logitech Media Server to listen to music. I started with a server computer as everybody, then went to the Raspberry few years ago. In another life I realized some projects with Arduino, and dreamed to write something to get an LCD showing me the artist name and song etc... with a SBC.

 

I live in China and here there is no way to have a Raspberry Zero at European cost ( here it’s around 20$, when a v3 is around 27$).

Because of what my friend showed me, one month ago, back in China January 3 I bought 2 OPZ. It took 3 days to come from Shenzen, it was the 512MB Ram version with the SPI on the board. During the holidays I started to learned python (the basis)... 

 

My friend told me to use Armbian, I discovered the website, the forum, the distro. I’ve learned so much in only one month. I’ve managed to install LMS and squeezelite - audio server and client - and it is so easy (I was afraid of that before), I wrote in Python the application I wanted to use for the I2C LCD, I used the GPIO for this project, and discovered plenty of other things.

 

So I would like to thank you very much for your website, for Armbian and for your huge job.

 

I have plenty of questions, of course, but I try to find my myself before to ask, the hard way…

 

And sorry for my poor English.

 

Congratulations and thank you again.

2
admbrt

admbrt

Posted
Posted

Hi everyone,

I've run through this thread searching for a WiringOP version for mi Orange Pi Zero. The system (Armbian mainline 4.9.4) works perfectly fine and even though i have completely no experience with any Pi system I've managed to start my Orange without any struggle. Problems start when I try to start using GPIOs. After reading this thread I am slightly confused, because I'm not sure if I should just get the https://github.com/zhaolei/WiringOPwersion of WiringOP and find pin declarations and remap the library for my Zero or is there any kind of board detection implemented requiring configuration. I've already built the library and readall shows 40 pins, so there is no autodetection for sure :D.

So do I need to dig through WiringOP or did I do something wrong? I really need GPIO support form my IoT software handling multiple sensors connected via modbus rs485 etc.

 

Btw, thanks for this great system, everything works straight out of the box, I expected far more problems considering the price of the board and almost no orange community in my country.

hmartin

hmartin

Posted
Posted

I see.... this is beyond me and needs and expert touch and a lot of time. I have to live with SD card. Can you or someone else recommend me reliable SD card brand except usual suspects Kingston and Scandisk...Something else? 

 

Wait a bit more. SPI support will come in u-boot eventually.

 

I use Samsung EVO/EVO+ and never have any issues. I don't buy Sandisk anymore since their cards are under capacity.

 

 

So do I need to dig through WiringOP or did I do something wrong? I really need GPIO support form my IoT software handling multiple sensors connected via modbus rs485 etc.

 

For RS-485 won't you need a level shifter anyway? e.g. http://www.robotshop.com/en/sfe-uart-to-rs-485-converter.html

 

Why not just use a USB to RS-485 adapter? China has them for under $5, which is probably less than you will pay for a level shifter + breakout board.

admbrt

admbrt

Posted
Posted

I gave this RS485 as an example of what I need to connect to my board, but I need GPIOs too. Simple input output and I think I'll need SPI and UART too. I don't have hardware specification of my system yet because I don't know what can I do with OPI. So I'd like to play for a while with those GPIO to see what is possible to achieve.

tkaiser

tkaiser

Posted
Posted

Problems start when I try to start using GPIOs. After reading this thread I am slightly confused, because I'm not sure if I should just get the https://github.com/zhaolei/WiringOPwersion of WiringOP and find pin declarations and remap the library for my Zero or is there any kind of board detection implemented requiring configuration. I've already built the library and readall shows 40 pins, so there is no autodetection for sure :D.

 

Please read through https://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/2956-559-gpio-support-for-h2h3-boards-with-a-unified-wiringpi-library-in-a-neat-little-package/ and the respective links there. Unfortunately people who like to use these libraries don't seem to contribute.

 

We prepared auto detection but no one is working on that. The good news: as long as we're talking about real GPIO (and not protocols like I2C, SPI and so on) access to the GPIO pins is device agnosting and works through sysfs (same for legacy and vanilla kernel but maybe addressing scheme differs -- just use the custom search from my signature and the respective key words, the pin mappings of nearly all H3 devices and OPi Zero are available in linux-sunxi wiki, same with addressing scheme)

loshia

loshia

Posted
Posted

Wait a bit more. SPI support will come in u-boot eventually.

 

I use Samsung EVO/EVO+ and never have any issues. I don't buy Sandisk anymore since their cards are under capacity.

 

 

 

Thank you Sir!

My samples are on the way and hopefully i will have a new toys to play for my project very soon.

 

Best

renaudrenaud

renaudrenaud

Posted
Posted

Thank you Sir!

My samples are on the way and hopefully i will have a new toys to play for my project very soon.

 

Best

Very soon? Not sure, this is the new year here in China and China is paralyzed until February 3...

1
loshia

loshia

Posted
Posted

Very soon? Not sure, this is the new year here in China and China is paralyzed until February 3...

 

Yeah i know but not in Europe. I kicked my ass and found Nanopi Neo from Germany (conrad.de). I know that it is not Pi Zero but for me it is more than enough for a start. So when China gets back to business i will order what i need  :)

 

Just a side question  (off-topic) if you live in china...

Do you know why friendlyarm is not so popular like orange Pi? I see that aliexpress,  alibaba and taobao  full with oranges, but when i try to find something from friendlyarm there, it is very hard. And most interesting thing that friendlyarm in above three stores is more expensive compered to prices listed at friendlyarm  site. That is complete mystery for me.

msev

msev

Posted
Posted

So its just about the pin mapping, and not about configuring fex's or dts's?

If I redo the pin mapping that library will work?

 

Please read through https://forum.armbian.com/index.php/topic/2956-559-gpio-support-for-h2h3-boards-with-a-unified-wiringpi-library-in-a-neat-little-package/ and the respective links there. Unfortunately people who like to use these libraries don't seem to contribute.

 

We prepared auto detection but no one is working on that. The good news: as long as we're talking about real GPIO (and not protocols like I2C, SPI and so on) access to the GPIO pins is device agnosting and works through sysfs (same for legacy and vanilla kernel but maybe addressing scheme differs -- just use the custom search from my signature and the respective key words, the pin mappings of nearly all H3 devices and OPi Zero are available in linux-sunxi wiki, same with addressing scheme)

 

What about I2C and SPI, what is the procedure there?

msev

msev

Posted
Posted

Martinayotte what about the WiringOP library does it have the same principle? As this one, that just the mapping needs to be changed and I2C enabled for example?

Thanks!

martinayotte

martinayotte

Posted
Posted

I've never used WiringOP, but yes, principles should be similar. As for the python library, I've only change the LED_STATUS pin for PiZero, since it is PA17 instead of PA15.

Although I didn't verify all other H3 pins, I presume it is pretty much the same.

 

For I2C, here is a small python example of I2C GPIO Expander MCP23017 which blinks LEDs :

#!/usr/bin/env python

import sys, time
from pyA20 import i2c

i2c.init("/dev/i2c-0")
i2c.open(0x20)
i2c.write([0x00, 0x00])
i2c.write([0x01, 0x00])
while True:
	i2c.write([0x12, 0x0F])
	time.sleep(0.15)
	i2c.write([0x12, 0xF0])
	time.sleep(0.15)
jkajolin

jkajolin

Posted
Posted

Only the starting pins are correct all the rest are incorrect.
Most of the pins on the zero are on PA registry unlike the "normal" PGXXX

 

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/duxingkei33/orangepi_PC_gpio_pyH3/master/pyA20/gpio/mapping.h

 

 

I've never used WiringOP, but yes, principles should be similar. As for the python library, I've only change the LED_STATUS pin for PiZero, since it is PA17 instead of PA15.

Although I didn't verify all other H3 pins, I presume it is pretty much the same.

 

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