Orange Pi One

It’s time to introduce another board, today I will speak about the Orange Pi One.

The Orange Pi One is a low cost (lower than Raspberry) alternative to the Raspberry Pi or another credit card size board for run Linux with the following hardware specification:

• CPU H3 Quad-core Cortex-A7 H.265/HEVC 4K
• GPU Mali400MP2 GPU @600MHz
• SDRAM 512MB DDR3
• TF card (Max. 64GB) / MMC card slot
• 10/100M Ethernet RJ45
• HDMI output with HDCP
• USB 2.0 Ports
• 40 Pins Header for GPIO

The first step is to download the OS image and write it on a micro SD card, the Armbian distribution is available at https://www.armbian.com/orange-pi-one/.

After the download is finished you can unzip it and write on the memory with the useful dd command. On my MAC I need to do the following steps:

Identify the name of the SD with the command

diskutil list

Unmount the mounted partition (thank automount)

sudo diskutil umountDisk /dev/disk<N>

Copy the content

sudo dd if=<Download path>/<imagename>.img of=/dev/disk<N>

Mount the micro SD in the board and power on the board, you will ask to log in with root credentials (root/1234); the os will ask you to choose a new username and password for future connections (don’t worry this account will be on the sudoers group).

Now you can update the packages with the following commands.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Plus you can install some utils like:

• avahi — for having a zeroconf implementation on the board in order to use the DNS record orangepione.local for the access to the board,
• node and npm — the server side javascript platform (the command “ln -s /usr/bin/nodejs /usr/bin/node” can resolve the problem of the legacy package name)
• various utils like screen, netcat, ncdu and htop

sudo apt-get install avahi-daemon nodejs npm screen netcat ncdu htop

Enjoy