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 the following link.

Orange Pi One

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

1. Identify the name of the SD with the command
   
   diskutil list

   1	diskutil list

2. Unmount the mounted partition (thank automount)
   
   sudo diskutil umountDisk /dev/disk<N>

   1	sudo diskutil umountDisk /dev/disk<N>

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

   1	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 sudoers group).

Now you can update the packages with the following commands.

Plus you can install some utils like:

• avahi – for have 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 comand “ln -s /usr/bin/nodejs /usr/bin/node” can resolve the proble of the legacy package name 🙂 )
• variouse utils like screen, netcat, ncdu and htop

Enjoy 🙂