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Knowledge Base

The AB Electronics UK Knowledge Base provides support solutions, tutorials and troubleshooting guides.

Orange Pi computer boards introduction

Created 11/02/2017 | Expansion boards work with the Orange Pi computers using Armbian linux

The Orange Pi range of computer boards are available from http://www.orangepi.org/

We have tested our range of expansion boards on three of their models:

Orange Pi Plus2 http://www.orangepi.org/orangepiplus2/ which has a uses the AllWinner H3 SoC, 2GB DDR3 SDRAM, 16GB flash memory and gigabit Ethernet

Orange Pi One http://www.orangepi.org/orangepione/ which uses the AllWinner H3 SoC, and has 512MB DDR3 SDRAM

Orange Pi PC http://www.orangepi.org/orangepipc/ which uses the AllWinner H3 SoC, and has 1GB DDR3 SDRAM. All I2C boards checked but could not find a way to use the UART pins for the Serial Pi and RS485 Pi boards. 

The boards have a 40 pin gpio connector which can be used with a selection of our expansion boards.

The Orange Pi computers can run a range of operating systems including:

  • Raspbian
  • Armbian
  • Lubuntu
  • Android
  • Fedora
  • OpenSuse
  • ArchLinux
  • OpenWrt
  • Berryboot
  • XBMC

For our own testing we used Armbian from www.armbian.com which has I2C and UART support without additional configuration.

We have tested our Python 2 libraries on the Orange Pi computers, to download our libraries from our GitHub account you first need to install git with:

sudo apt-get install git

Next you need to navigate to the directory you want to download the libraries into and use the following command to clone the files to your local directory:

git clone https://github.com/abelectronicsuk/ABElectronics_Python_Libraries.git

Compatible expansion boards

The following expansion boards have been tested are compatible with the Orange Pi boards listed above when using Armbian Linux and our Python 2 libraries or OWFS for 1 Wire support:

1 Wire Pi Plus https://www.abelectronics.co.uk/p/60/1-Wire-Pi-Plus

1 Wire Pi Zero: https://www.abelectronics.co.uk/p/76/1-Wire-Pi-Zero

ADC Differential Pi: https://www.abelectronics.co.uk/p/65/ADC-Differential-Pi-Raspberry-Pi-Analogue-to-Digital-converter

ADC Pi Plus: https://www.abelectronics.co.uk/p/56/ADC-Pi-Plus-Raspberry-Pi-Analogue-to-Digital-converter

ADC Pi Zero: https://www.abelectronics.co.uk/p/69/ADC-Pi-Zero-Raspberry-Pi-Analogue-to-Digital-converter

IO Pi Plus: https://www.abelectronics.co.uk/p/54/IO-Pi-Plus

IO Pi Zero: https://www.abelectronics.co.uk/p/71/IO-Pi-Zero

RTC Pi Plus: https://www.abelectronics.co.uk/p/52/RTC-Pi-Plus

RTC Pi Zero: https://www.abelectronics.co.uk/p/70/RTC-Pi-Zero

RS 485 Pi: https://www.abelectronics.co.uk/p/77/RS485-Pi

Serial Pi Plus: https://www.abelectronics.co.uk/p/51/Serial-Pi-Plus

Serial Pi Zero: https://www.abelectronics.co.uk/p/75/Serial-Pi-Zero