November 25, 2016

Orange Pi PC 2

I bought one of these in November of 2016, it is very much like the Orange Pi PC, but with the Allwinner H5 chip instead of the H3 chip. This is very much "bleeding edge", with units shipping only this month. I download the Ubuntu server image (540M). (In particular, Ubuntu_Server_Xenial_PC2_V0_9_0.img.xz). 
unxz Ubuntu_Server_Xenial_PC2_V0_9_0.img.xz
su
umount /dev/sdc1
dd if=Ubuntu_Server_Xenial_PC2_V0_9_0.img of=/dev/sdc bs=16M
138+1 records in
138+1 records out
2329935872 bytes (2.3 GB, 2.2 GiB) copied, 305.79 s, 7.6 MB/s
sync
This image unzips to a 2.3G image. I put it on an 8G SanDisk "ultra" microSDHC USH-1 card that says it is rated to 48 Mb/s. This card worked for the Orange Pi PC just fine. After the copy I unplug and replug. Two partitions get automounted. One is "BOOT" and the other is "rootfs". This all looks like it should.

It works!

I really did think I had a dead board, but it simply was not doing ANYTHING until it was presented with an SD card that it liked (I had even tried the SD card with Fedora for the Orange Pi PC, but that was no good -- the PC2 just sat there). With the Ubuntu image it boots quickly. First a red and green light are both lit on the board, then just the red light. No lights on the network connector.

Login as root with password "orangepi". 

uname -a
Linux Orangepi 3.10.65 #55 SMP PREEMPT Fri Nov 18 16:17:28 CST 2016 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux

cat /proc/cpuinfo
Processor	: AArch64 Processor rev 4 (aarch64)
processor	: 0
processor	: 1
processor	: 2
processor	: 3
Features	: fp asimd aes pmull sha1 sha2 crc32 
CPU implementer	: 0x41
CPU architecture: AArch64
CPU variant	: 0x0
CPU part	: 0xd03
CPU revision	: 4

Hardware	: sun50iw2
Serial		: 44005035c120103e078c

cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal:        1003192 kB
MemFree:          899496 kB
Plugging in a network cable gets lots of activity, but it does not do a proper DHCP. The processor is barely warm, but it isn't actually doing anything.

Interestingly, this distribution has vim and perl, but not C, python, or ruby.

Boot with network cable attached

We get to the prompt quickly: 
Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS Orangepi ttyS0
Orangepi login: 

ifconfig -a
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 96:62:08:fb:22:a8  
          inet addr:192.168.0.68  Bcast:192.168.0.255  Mask:255.255.255.0
          inet6 addr: fe80::9462:8ff:fefb:228a/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:9866 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:5220 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:14771280 (14.7 MB)  TX bytes:360695 (360.6 KB)
          Interrupt:114
Well, how about that -- it does do DHCP on boot if a cable is connected. It is running an ssh server, but rejects remote root logins. It does allow login via ssh by user "orangepi" with password "orangepi".
Let's see if we can install gcc: 
apt-get update
apt-get install gcc
apt-get install ruby

root@Orangepi:/home/orangepi# ruby -v
ruby 2.3.1p112 (2016-04-26) [aarch64-linux-gnu]

root@Orangepi:/home/orangepi# gcc --version
gcc (Ubuntu/Linaro 5.4.0-6ubuntu1~16.04.4) 5.4.0 20160609
That works great! Fast, simple, and easy.

I use "shutdown now" to shut down the machine. This leaves the green LED on and displays this as the final message: 

waiting ir or power key wakeup

Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's electronics pages / [email protected]