Tag: Orange Pi - James A. Chambers Legendary Technology

Installing Steam on the Orange Pi 5 with Armbian

Published: March 31, 2023 / Last Modified: April 18, 2023 / 45 Comments / Gaming, Hardware, Linux, Orange Pi

Orange Pi 5 running Steam and Stardew Valley

The new RK3588/RK3588S boards have much more power than we’ve typically had available to us in the past on ARM boards. With a whopping 8 CPU cores and a Mali 610 GPU the Orange Pi 5 is capable of running Steam using Box64/Box86. It’s even able to play basic games pretty well (with some tinkering usually).

In this guide I’ll show you how to set up Steam on the Orange Pi 5 and run Stardew Valley on it. You should keep your expectations in line though because there is no native ARM client for Steam. We are using emulation and instruction translation. You will also likely be missing libraries for most games you try which will require some fiddling.

This guide is only for Armbian running the Ubuntu Jammy variant with the Gnome desktop installed only (platinum support status). The Orange Pi official distributions will not have 3D support and I don’t care about whatever other flavor of Linux you are running either. I’m not going to install your preferred flavor of Linux and try to figure out how to do this on there nor am I interested in troubleshooting it. Please don’t ask.

With all of that being said let’s get started!

Migrate Home Assistant to Orange Pi 5

Published: March 3, 2023 / Last Modified: March 31, 2023 / 37 Comments / Hardware, Home Assistant, Orange Pi

I’ve been running my Home Assistant instance on a very old Tinker Board S with a 16GB eMMC. This has been working fine for a month or two but I recently started getting notifications that my Home Assistant instance was out of drive space. Sure enough, even after removing all of my backups there is almost no space left.

I’ve already received reports from my readers about how much better of an experience Home Assistant is running on an Orange Pi 5. Not only is the CPU much more powerful than something like a Raspberry Pi 4 or Tinker Board S but it has a NVMe storage slot. These two things combined make it a great choice for running your Home Assistant instance.

My previous install is a core installation but I’m going to use supervised on the Orange Pi 5. In this guide I’ll show you how I migrated my instance step by step and evaluate the performance improvement at the end. Let’s get started!

Best 2023 Raspberry Pi Alternatives

Published: February 21, 2023 / Last Modified: March 15, 2023 / 33 Comments / Hardware, Libre SBCs, Orange Pi, Radxa SBCs, Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi continues to suffer from supply chain issues. They have promised there are a lot of their very old models that should be coming up for purchase within the next 6 months. I’ve been hearing that for years though to be honest with you.

Fortunately you don’t need to wait. There are more and better alternatives to the Raspberry Pi in 2023 than there have ever been before. In this article I’ll cover the best Raspberry Pi alternatives in 2023.

Let’s get started!

Orange Pi 800 Computer Kit Review

Published: February 14, 2023 / Last Modified: March 15, 2023 / 10 Comments / Benchmarking, Hardware, Orange Pi, Reviews

I’m certainly not the first to review the Orange Pi 800 computer kit. It has been available for a while now. That’s exactly why I wanted to take a look at the Orange Pi 800 as a more mature product today.

In this review we’ll take a look at the packaging, build quality, specifications and test the performance of the Orange Pi 800 and see how well it has matured since it’s initial release.

Let’s begin!

Orange Pi 14 Inch 1080P Portable Monitor Review

Published: February 11, 2023 / Last Modified: March 15, 2023 / 8 Comments / Hardware, Orange Pi, Reviews

I recently ordered many of the official Orange Pi accessories for review with my Orange Pi 800 order (also coming up for review). The first of these accessories to come was the Orange Pi 14″ 1080P portable monitor. This monitor is meant to be extremely portable and have a low footprint.

Today in this review we’ll take a close look at Orange Pi’s monitor offering and test it with several devices. We’ll examine the build quality, functionality and try to determine whether picking one of these up might be worth it for you and what situations they would be most appropriate for.

Let’s get started!

Using E-Key M.2 WiFi Adapters with Orange Pi 5

Published: January 3, 2023 / Last Modified: April 16, 2023 / 11 Comments / Hardware, Linux, Orange Pi, Storage

Orange Pi 5 E-Key to M-Key WiFi Adapter Guide

Orange Pi has not released the WiFi module for the Orange Pi 5 yet which has left some people in a difficult position. While working on this problem I discovered an adapter that claimed to be able to let me use normal E-keyed WiFi adapters (commonly found in laptops and tablets) with the Orange Pi 5 using an adapter.

I received and tested the adapter and I am pleased to report it works perfectly! There are some caveats though such as you need a driver for your WiFi card within your OS (and often firmware as well).

In this guide I’ll show you how to get this working with the Orange Pi 5 using Linux. Let’s get started!

Orange Pi 5 NVMe/SATA SSD Boot Guide

Published: December 27, 2022 / Last Modified: March 31, 2023 / 139 Comments / Hardware, Orange Pi, Storage

The Orange Pi 5 has a nice M.2 NVMe slot but unfortunately most of the official images will not boot if you try to directly image a NVMe drive. Fortunately there is an easy way to get this working that people who frequent the blog will almost certainly have seen before.

We are going to bootstrap the boot process using a SD card and then clone that SD card to our SSD to be used as the root partition. This essentially will let us have our system’s root partition on the SSD (much faster).

Let’s get started!

Orange Pi 5 Review – Powerful, No WiFi

Published: December 13, 2022 / Last Modified: March 31, 2023 / 272 Comments / Hardware, Orange Pi, Reviews

The Orange Pi 5 has finally arrived! I received my pre-order and the board is great. So should you go out and buy it? Probably, but there are some things you should know first that you may not be expecting.

The biggest thing to know is that there is no WiFi/Bluetooth included. If you were planning on using Ethernet anyway this doesn’t have much of an impact. If you do need wireless capabilities we’ll cover what options are available.

In this review we’ll cover what you need to know about the Orange Pi 5 including it’s onboard capabilities, the available RAM options as well as benchmark the board. Let’s get started!

Orange Pi 3 LTS SBC Review

Published: November 22, 2022 / Last Modified: March 15, 2023 / 6 Comments / Benchmarking, Hardware, Orange Pi, Reviews

Orange Pi 3 LTS Single Board Computer Review

The Orange Pi 5 is on the horizon with my order scheduled to arrive around the end of the first week of December. I’ll definitely be covering it as soon as I can get my hands on it. So why would I cover anything to do with the Orange Pi 3 with the Orange Pi 5 launch being weeks away?

The Orange Pi 3 LTS is not a new board but it is an interesting board because it is a long term support variant expected to be produced and supported for much longer than the average board. It is already quite cheap at <~$50 or so at time of writing (which is a great price in this market to begin with) but I expect it to drop more into the $35-$40ish range once the Orange Pi 5 has been out for a little bit. Many Pi alternatives often have very short lifespans in terms of both production and support as most of you who have tried them over the years or more recently will know. Having these long term support assurances can give you a lot of confidence if you are considering boards for a product/project/use case that you expect to stay in place for a long time and want to know there will be secure working updated images available for it. Let's see what it can do!

Orange Pi Zero 2 USB SSD Boot Guide

Published: August 30, 2022 / Last Modified: March 15, 2023 / 24 Comments / Benchmarking, Hardware, Orange Pi, Storage

During my recent coverage of SBCs I’ve been benchmarking them using SSDs. The process for booting from a SSD varies across different boards. I’ve found the documentation for some of these to be lacking / nonexistent and the Orange Pi Zero 2 is one of these.

Today I wanted to benchmark the Orange Pi Zero 2 with the SSD and given the lack of documentation I’m going to document my process for setting it up. The Orange Pi Zero 2 will require a sacrificial SD card to bootstrap the process and has USB 2.0 ports. With those limitations in mind let’s set it up and see how it performs!

Orange Pi i96 Getting Started Guide

Published: August 5, 2022 / Last Modified: March 15, 2023 / 361 Comments / Benchmarking, Hardware, Orange Pi

Recently I reviewed the Orange Pi Zero 2 and thought it was a fantastic board. I really like the amount of polish that the Orange Pi line of products have as it is the closest I have seen to anything approaching a Raspberry Pi experience. We also benchmarked the Orange Pi Zero 2 and determined it’s a very capable board.

I recently got a Orange Pi i96 (thanks munecito!) and this board is very exciting because it was purchased on sale for ~$10! That is insanely cheap. The reason it’s so cheap is because it’s a headless board that doesn’t contain any display-out ports.

If you are going to be using the board headless anyways (I use most of my SBCs headlessly) you may be able to save a fortune with this board. Let’s get started!

Android Installation for Orange Pi Guide

Published: August 3, 2022 / Last Modified: March 15, 2023 / 10 Comments / Google, Hardware, Orange Pi

It’s quite a bit more tricky to install Android on the Orange Pi than Linux (which is as simple as writing the image to the SD card with Etcher).

As long as you know the right software to use and where to get it though it’s not too bad. In this guide I’ll show you how to set up Android on the Orange Pi from start to finish. Let’s begin!

Orange Pi Zero 2 – Review / Benchmark / Tips – ~$35 Price

Published: July 13, 2022 / Last Modified: March 2, 2023 / 7 Comments / Benchmarking, Hardware, Orange Pi, Reviews

Recently for my storage benchmarking site I had a GitHub issue opened about the Orange Pi Zero 2 not being able to complete the storage benchmark successfully. We were able to get the board going after a lot of troubleshooting but it was pretty difficult to troubleshoot as I had never had one of these boards before.

Until now! I recently received my first and only ever hardware donation to the site from munecito who graciously donated one of these boards to help improve the benchmark (it did not only for SBCs but it now supports PCs as well). Thank you munecito!

I was very interested in how this board compares to the Raspberry Pi experience and ecosystem because we are having a massive Raspberry Pi shortage right now and that is exactly what we are going to do. I also have some general tips for getting the most out of the Orange Pi based on our troubleshooting experience. Let’s proceed!