Recommended H2/H3 Board?

[stbtra]

What is a good h2/h3 board to start getting into armbian? I see that there are a few vendors with issues so just wanted to see what is reliable. Wifi + BTLE would be a plus.

Thanks

[chwe]

Good for what? BT and Wifi can also be added with a stick if a board fulfill your needs better than an other. Before someone can give you a meaningful recommendation he should know a little bit more about your use case. 

 

e.g. Headless or not? Footprint matters (can end in heat issues)? Pricerange? 

 

If you just wanna play a little bit around I would go for a board with barrel plug and eMMC (to avoid two major issues when starting with armbian -  shitty SD card and power issues). If you wanna have a media center (e.g. Kodi). IMHO, I wouldn't recommend any H2+/H3 boards.  

 

For example: most of the stuff I do (IoT stuff) works without issues on an orange pi zero without issues (micro USB powered, SD-Card only, 512mb ram), @tkaiser uses it as seeder for armbians torrents with a minimum powerconsumption setup since months (correct me if I'm wrong), others run into trouble with this board (just look through the forum, mostly heat issues).  Before my external USB HDD crashed, I used a OPi PC+ (1GB ram, 8 GB eMMC, barrel plug) with OMV for all of my NAS needs. It's not a perfect suited board for this use case but it did a decent job (now I use a odroid HC1 which performes a way better for this use case). 

 

 

[tkaiser]

4 hours ago, chwe said:

@tkaiser uses it as seeder for armbians torrents with a minimum powerconsumption setup since months (correct me if I'm wrong)

Nope, it's still just like this though I moved from legacy to mainline kernel in the meantime and have the stuff to be seeded on an USB thumb drive to get an idea whether my daily seeding volume (a little bit more than 2 GB per day) was the result of poor random IO of the SD card used before. Seems it's not since it's still just 2.x GB per day.

 

8 hours ago, stbtra said:

What is a good h2/h3 board to start getting into armbian?

 

Impossible to answer since 'use case first'.

[stbtra]

Use case: Wall-powered mostly. I want to use it as a BLE to Wifi bridge primarily, for IoT stuff. It would be good if there was a path to sourcing and manufacturing it in volume.

[arox]

 

Can BLE work on a legacy 3.4 kernel (and with bluez 5.37 ?). Does Armbian support ap6212 with mainline kernel for wifi and BT ?

[martinayotte]

Armbian is supporting AP6212A WiFi only (the Non-A version something is working by manually copying firmware, but not on all boards).

No body did some work for making BlueTooth working, neither Armbian Devs or Mainline folks, it requires at least some DT additions.

 

[guidol]

On 20.10.2017 at 2:27 AM, stbtra said:

What is a good h2/h3 board to start getting into armbian? I see that there are a few vendors with issues so just wanted to see what is reliable. Wifi + BTLE would be a plus.

 

a starting point for a H3 Board with Wifi and Bluetooth and eMMC is the NanoPi Neo Air:
http://www.friendlyarm.com/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=151

 

but without a HDMI-Port it is more for "server"/headless apps
And you should get their heat-sink and the additional antenna

 

[Larry Bank]

Must it be H3? How about H5? For me, the best board for the money is the Orange Pi Zero Plus 2 H5. It's the fastest of the bunch and has on board HDMI and eMMC. If you want to start with the least expensive board and don't need HDMI out, then the Orange Pi Zero is a good choice ($7).

[Mike Hammer]

I recommend the Orange Pi PC and the Orange PI One. I advise against the Orange Pi Lite due to Wi-Fi failures and random crashes.
I set up automatic playback systems in nightclubs. They are connected directly to the USB of the TV and start up when starting the magnetotherms. And the system is shut down by closing the magnetothermic, without mercy.
For this work, I use the Orange Pi One. They are working more than 8 months, 3 units, 6 days a week for an average of 8 hours of reproduction. No failure. Kodi downloaded here

final version of 2016. It is not the latest version of OpenElec but it is not important to play loops of video automatically. Connection HDMI and without audio (because it is not necessary, but the audio works perfectly).

 

http://www.orangepi.org/orangepibbsen/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=1075

On the other hand, I have managed to Armbian based on Ubuntu 16.04 can serve as a mini computer, to download Torrent or Amule, navigate with limitations in Firefox, and quite well in Chromium. There would be no GPU acceleration for video playback and it would be perfect. Youtube doesn't work.
Good stability, whole days without needing to restart, reaching 15 days without problems.
The only thing I have done is to paste them with thermal paste some mini aluminum sheets that I cut from a dissipator of an old broken Nvidia. But those that do not have it work just as well.
The box with openings for ventilation.
Cards used micro SD Samsung, Sony, Lexar, Kingston and Toshiba.
The best way to record the images is to use the gnome-disks. Fast and without errors.
Warn that almost always the first boot of OpenElec and Armbian takes from a few seconds to 15 minutes and the screen remains in black without warning that it is working. It is necessary to leave it in case of doubt more than 10 minutes and to return after a while. The system almost always appears. The following times, a couple of minutes or less to boot.
That is all.

 

The desktop snapshots shows a x64 Ubuntu on i7, doing VNC with Remmia as client and Vino-Server as... server, with samba share foldes activated. Remote control sometimes is laggy and samba conection is slow via wifi, but it works.

[jts]

On 20.10.2017 at 9:44 PM, martinayotte said:

Armbian is supporting AP6212A WiFi only (the Non-A version something is working by manually copying firmware, but not on all boards).

 

Does Nanopi-Neo-air fall under the category of non-working boards, when firmware is manually copied?