Orange Pi has a neat range of microcomputers. The smallest cost less than 10 Euro’s. For that price it is remarkably complete and powerful enough to run a suite of web services. They are easily installed and managed via Yunohost.
The hardware in short, specs copied from the excellent Sunxi-wiki:
| SoC | H2+ |
|---|---|
| DRAM | 256 MiB or 512 MiB DDR3 |
| Power | DC 5V DC-IN via µUSB or pin headers or PoE (optional) |
| Features | |
| Video | CVBS (on pin headers) |
| Audio | microphone, stereo line-out on pin headers |
| Network | 10/100Mbps Ethernet and XR819 Wi-Fi |
| Storage | µSD |
| USB | 1 USB 2.0 Host, 1 USB 2.0 OTG, 2 x USB 2.0 on pin headers |
The 512 MB-option costs almost 25% more than the 256 MB-option, but spending two Euro’s there saves a lot of headaches later on. Depending on experience with the first handful of Zero-boards I might opt for the OPi PC later. An important factor that made me choose the OPi Zero, is that it draws little enougd power to run of regular USB and that it can be converted to run off power over ethernet. I haven’t tried that yet: it only supports passive PoE, and I am not sure my switches work with anything but 802.3af PoE.
Yunohost does not (yet) have images for the OPi zero with H2+ processor. Armbian does have an image, ready made for flashing to uSD.
I am not the only one running Armbian on this board; there are enough people downloading for that specific board to have the image appear on the Armbian front-page
Armbian advices to flash a uSD card using Etcher. Etcher is relatively heavy for the job on hand, but is a comfortable tool. On some of my computers Etcher refuses to find the uSD card because of the layout of the other disks (perhaps related to software RAID or LVM). In that case I use dd with a block size of 1 and a sync afterwards;
dd if=/home/wbk/dl/Armbian_....img of=/dev/sdX bs=1M status=progress
1336+0 records in
1336+0 records out
1400897536 bytes (1.4 GB, 1.3 GiB) copied, 135.054 s, 10.4 MB/s
After flashing, on first boot of Armbian, change the default password from 1234 for root to something useful. On those first boots I do use a serial interface. At first I worried I might hook it up incorrectly and break something (which I did not, but have subsequently done more than once). The one thing I did check carefully (using a multimeter) was the working voltage of the serial interface of the USB2TTL / USB2serial convertor: it has to be 3.3V for the OPi Zero. At 5V something might get fried.
Running a serial connection to a headless board is a lot of fun: it seems your computer’s display (or terminal window) is the devices’ screen. Everything from the first boot messages scrolls by.
Using a serial interface saves looking for the IP of the device to get connected. So you have to think of ordering some of those convertors, but they’ll save some hassle later on.
After the first boot of Armbian, reboot (for seeing everything is OK with your new password).
Yunohost has a curl-able script for installing the Yunohost-base-system on top of Debian:
curl https://install.yunohost.org | bashWhen it is done, run post install:
yunohost tools postinstall
Edit december 2019, from the Yunohost documentation: alternatively, restore a backup instead of postinstalling. Upload the archive to the server and place it in /home/yunohost.backup/archive; instead of postinstall, run:
yunohost backup restore 'backupname'
After that, get a LetsEncrypt-certificate:
yunohost domain cert-install your.domain.tldReading this text probably takes more time than executing those steps. I used 32G uSD cards, at least class 10, preferably with ‘App performance’ label (A1 or higher).