OPI 4A - Allwinner T527

[ioncube]

Anyone got a working image? Any review of what is working & what is not

[Angel Luis Pérez]

Hi everybody. I have one of these cards (along with many other OPis and RPis) and I was trying to use it for my Home Assistant installation, but OPi's Debian was not correctly complied so it did not work with ZIgbee USB adapters (and with many other things). I tested the Armbian imga someone put here, but I couldn't make it work.

I tried to recompile OPis Debian and to my surprise it complied without any glitch and everything is working. As soon as I can (which may take some time) I'll try to build my own Armbian image. If I succeed I'll bring it here.

This message was just to say that OPi's Debian is working fine when rebuilt from scratch, in case someone needs a working system right now.

 

Best regards.

Angel

[Anzil Ashraf]

HI, Angel would you share your working image of orange pi 4a ? I would like to use something useful untill an armbian image is available

[BigGratz]

@Angel Luis Pérez

Thank you very much for your valuable contribution and for sharing your experience with the community. I came across your post about successfully rebuilding Debian for the Orange Pi 4A, and it sounds like a great solution for those of us struggling with the official images. If it’s not too much trouble, would you mind sharing the image you built? I’d be incredibly grateful for any help you could provide.

Edited April 9 by BigGratz

[ioncube]

@Angel Luis Pérez Can you please upload your debian image. Plus kindly explain which hardware part is not working?

[Angel Luis Pérez]

Sorry everybody, been really busy these days.

 

Where can I upload the image so that all of you can get it?

 

Regards.

 

Angel Luis Perez

 

Edit: I shared it in GDrive. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VClauaXtNZEkqzH8XBSHnJkweS142Ztv/view?usp=drive_link

I didn't change absolutely nothing in the build configuration. I mean, if you want you can just download the source code (it's explained quite clearly in th OPi 4a manual) from OrangePi an just "build". Nothing changed.

 

I hope it works for you. 

 

Please take into account I'm not a developerand I didn't change anything in the code. I mean, don't ask me about the build, because I can't help you :(. I just tested to build Debian and it just works...

Edited Friday at 06:20 PM by Angel Luis Pérez
Link shared

[BigGratz]

Thank you for your response! If it's convenient for you, could you please upload the image to Mega.nz ? Or any file-sharing service.

[Angel Luis Pérez]

@ioncube I'm not sure I understand you. With the OPi source rebuild everything seems to work. With the build sharde by OrangePi in their web there were drivers missing. I.E. the USB Zigbee adapter from SonOff was not being recognised, and I'm afraid that any other device which should use /dev/ttyXXX would not work, because the needed drivers were not in the build.

 

Maybe there are some other drivers missing, I don't know, I just tested with the Zigbee adapter, and it didn't work in Debian nor Ubuntu OPi releases.

 

Regards.

[Daniel Nuñez Villegas]

Does anyone have the i2c working in the orange pi 4a? I tried the debian official image and build my image with the orange pi source code but I can't get it to work, everything works including spi gpio, any help will be appreciated,  also I want to build Armbian for the orange pi 4a

[BigGratz]

Angel Luis Pérez

 

I don't understand, where is Armbian here?

[Angel Luis Pérez]

I never said this was Armbian, sorry. What I said was:

 

  "This message was just to say that OPi's Debian is working fine when rebuilt from scratch, in case someone needs a working system right now."

 

Sorry if I didn't explain clearly.

 

Regards.

Edited Saturday at 06:11 PM by Angel Luis Pérez

[JamesCL]

@Ángel Luis Pérez You don't have to apologize because the type of image was very clear in the post where you reported it... it's just a matter of reading 🙂

[Angel Luis Pérez]

@JamesCL Thanks, English is not my native language, so it's very easy for me to make a mistake. I assume it 🙃

 

On the other hand, @Daniel Nuñez Villegas, if you tell me how can I test I2C I can check my OPi. But from tomorrow I'll be out for a few days, so it will take some time...

 

Regards.

Edited Sunday at 08:57 AM by Angel Luis Pérez

[Anzil Ashraf]

Thank you Angel, For the image.

[Igor]

On 4/12/2025 at 5:31 PM, BigGratz said:

where is Armbian here?

 

The software used by the Orange Pi "team" is, to a very large extent (estimates go as high as 99.9%), based on the work of developers from the Armbian project (and beyond). Their contribution mainly includes adding basic support for new boards, but unfortunately, without further maintenance or long-term support – which practically means that the entire burden of maintenance and support falls on the community.

 

It should be noted that systems such as Orange OS Ubuntu and Debian on ARM architecture are the result of years of work by more than 500 people gathered around the Armbian project. Orange Pi only makes minor adjustments. In the past ten years, we have not seen a single contribution from any member of the Orange Pi team to the development of these key components. Absolutely nothing, while they keep signing under our work (even changed to some degree) ... on top of stealing software support. Which they don't provide in any way.

 

The work of the Orange Pi team (which appears to be just one individual), on top of some old Armbian, can be tracked here:

https://github.com/orangepi-xunlong/orangepi-build/commits/next (they removed other board configs)