For helping people on other forums -- Orange PI FAQ

[lanefu]

Save your words.  Just give them this link

 

Orange PI FAQ

[zador.blood.stained]

I have to disagree with a lot of points on that FAQ since I'm monitoring some other forums and see complaints towards Armbian from a perspective of an inexperienced user.

For people that want to use CSI cameras, C or Python GPIO libraries that have questionable (at best) hardware detection by parsing /proc/cpuinfo or want to run Kodi or Android Armbian won't be an answer. For poor souls that bought an OPi 2G-IOT or its lighter variant Armbian won't be an answer either. For boards that (currently) have rather poor mainline support (OPi Win/Win+) Armbian may have more problems than vendor's images.

Please keep in mind that an average person may not care about security or performance optimizations but may want specific software features that won't work on our images out of the box.

[lanefu]

All really great points, Zador.    Honestly it was meant to be a bit tongue-in-cheek, but I tend view all the non-raspberry development boards as something for more advanced users.   

 

The Raspberry eco-system is just hard to beat for newer users.   I recognize the price is a important consideration for new people as well, which is probably how many start off with allwinner-based stuff

[botfap]

@zador.blood.stained Whats the problem with the OPi 2G in terms of armbian? We have quite a lot of RDA8810 boards in the field which seems to be the board the 2G-IOT is based on. I see a lot of hate towards the OPi 2G on here but Ive never experienced any major problem apart from the rdawfmac driver is a bit unstable if you use wpa_supplicant and its not setup properly.

 

We run them without to many problems on both our own OS stack and a modified Ubuntu 14.04 deployment. We have had some of them running for 4+ months now without major problems. And thanks for your rda8810 patches zador :), they were how I found Armbian.

[zador.blood.stained]

19 minutes ago, botfap said:

@zador.blood.stained Whats the problem with the OPi 2G in terms of armbian?

Lack of community and lack of initial software support + nobody is interested in "real" low-level development and dirty tedious work of cleaning stuff up -> no official Armbian images, and I'm not happy that we wasted time making unofficial ones and added RDA8810 support in the build script.

 

22 minutes ago, botfap said:

I see a lot of hate towards the OPi 2G on here but Ive never experienced any major problem apart from the rdawfmac driver is a bit unstable if you use wpa_supplicant and its not setup properly.

"Hate" is not the right word for this hardware. It's a cheap board with poor software support and some HW design flaws and people expect developers to add support for any board named "Orange Pi" and don't want to hear anything about "evaluation and testing only images", "work in progress" and "unsupported".

I already posted regarding hardware and software issues several times. That what I remember without looking it up:

HW:

• BootROM rejecting SD cards, hard to find a working one
• NAND can't be initialized when booting from SD
• Battery charging is broken (missing MOSFET according to comparing the board schematics with a typical application diagram)

SW:

• Audio driver is broken completely
• No DT means that pinctlr and other GPIO related stuff can't be easily reconfigured
• Lots of Android related dependencies that break the kernel compilation when disabled

 

 

[chwe]

On 12.11.2017 at 11:09 PM, zador.blood.stained said:

Python GPIO libraries that have questionable (at best) hardware detection by parsing /proc/cpuinfo

will be in the future...  (but I've to clean up and do some testings to make sure it works for the inexperienced + writing a "getting started guide" before announcing it public here - just need ~1 week to fix it). 

 

8 hours ago, zador.blood.stained said:

Lack of community and lack of initial software support + nobody is interested in "real" low-level development and dirty tedious work of cleaning stuff up -> no official Armbian images, and I'm not happy that we wasted time making unofficial ones and added RDA8810 support in the build script.

  Why not mark it as .eos instead of .csc (I know it had never "full" support but it would make it clear that "nobody" works on it). It was also the reason I joined armbian... But it's sitting as paperweight somewhere on my desk.  

[botfap]

On 14/11/2017 at 7:57 PM, zador.blood.stained said:

Lack of community and lack of initial software support + nobody is interested in "real" low-level development and dirty tedious work of cleaning stuff up -> no official Armbian images, and I'm not happy that we wasted time making unofficial ones and added RDA8810 support in the build script.

 

"Hate" is not the right word for this hardware. It's a cheap board with poor software support and some HW design flaws and people expect developers to add support for any board named "Orange Pi" and don't want to hear anything about "evaluation and testing only images", "work in progress" and "unsupported".

I already posted regarding hardware and software issues several times. That what I remember without looking it up:

HW:

• BootROM rejecting SD cards, hard to find a working one
• NAND can't be initialized when booting from SD
• Battery charging is broken (missing MOSFET according to comparing the board schematics with a typical application diagram)

SW:

• Audio driver is broken completely
• No DT means that pinctlr and other GPIO related stuff can't be easily reconfigured
• Lots of Android related dependencies that break the kernel compilation when disabled

 

 

Thanks for the detailed update.  I have no experience with orange pi gear but we have had 3 different rda8810 boards come to us this year and they all appear to be identical to the opi 2G-IoT and were all supplied with a very poor sdk and supporting docs. Also we disable audio on the SoC so maybe we have managed to avoid the biggest problem.

 

We found the BootROM to be extremely sensitive to sd cards but fortunately works fine with our standard deployment SanDisk High Endurance 16/32GB and Sandisk Ultra Pro 8/16GB cards. We have NAND init from SD boot (thanks to yours and AIB's work), our deployment puts the kernel, ramdisk and recovery image on NAND and the data/config on sd.

 

Is there still an Arabian build available available for the 2g-iot or has it been scrapped? I wouldn't mind trying it.

 

 

[zador.blood.stained]

3 hours ago, botfap said:

Is there still an Arabian build available available for the 2g-iot or has it been scrapped? I wouldn't mind trying it.

There weren't any images (apart from an old image built not by us that is published on orangepi.org)

[botfap]

31 minutes ago, zador.blood.stained said:

There weren't any images (apart from an old image built not by us that is published on orangepi.org)

Ahh ok thanks. I had a quick look at the opi images but found them to be pretty bad