Got my Orange Pi in today, took about three weeks to come in.
Was pretty excited, but my enthusiasm was soon tempered.
There wasn’t much in the box, the device itself wrapped in anti-static bag and a useless insert.
One cool thing was the 3 pins where the serial debug console, is already soldered on. The antenna feels cheaper than what I have seen in the pictures, but it is removable and up-gradable. So it passes.
After opening it up and inspecting it, I went to the website to download the SD image
I discovered there are two download sites
Here is one linked from the menu bar in the home page (under resources)
http://www.orangepi.org/downloadresources/
And another one I found via google
http://www.orangepi.org/downloaded/download.html
The one linked to the home page had the Orange Pi Zero downloads but the one I found via google did not, so I suspect that the google one has been indexed with some old info.
I was hoping there was a version closer to Raspbian, but Debian server would do, but I came accross problem #1
Although there was a page for Debian Server,
The link didn’t work for google, and the Baidu one went to a Chinese site which I didn’t understand.
Also if you note the image above, the filename is v0_9_2 and the Version is 0.9.1
I ended up downloading the ubuntu server version.
Another thing that is bugging me is that a lot of sites say this can do 1080P but I do not see any HDMI ports on this thing.
Also I had to figure out what pins were what for this device and I came across an good site
https://oshlab.com/orange-pi-zero-pinout/
But the pins next to the ethernet is the serial console and here is its pin outs
Here it is connected to the USBTTL
I imaged the an SD Card, by the way, the download is an img.xz compressed file and can be extracted using Zip7.
And it booted, gave a warning though
But turned out to be the wifi, because I had a proper IP address
I logged in as root with the password orangepi
Ran the command
sudo fs_resize to take all of the space.
I was able to both console in at 115200 8N1 as well as SSH once I got the IP address of the device.
I don’t recommend directly logging in as root, but I am just trying it out.
For yucks I tried Raspian Jessie Lite 2017-01-11-raspbian-jessie-lite.
I didn’t do jack, nothing on the console at all.
Tried the Banana Pi as well
Nada.
So the web page is wrong, I suspect cut and paste failure.
But at $10, with wifi, this is pretty cheap.
Finally, I posted this image as a bit of trivia on Facebook
I asked the question
“One device in this picture doesn’t run Linux, which one is it? One device in this picture can run a version of Windows 10, which one is that?”
Answer is the Arduino does not run Linux, although you can add a shield (Rubix) that is Linux, and the Raspberry Pi 3 runs an IoT version of Windows 10.