As I promised in my previous post, I am writing this post to share my experience with the
Orange PI Zero and my toy car. The board is very small, and has almost all you need, except for the HDMI
video output, which I don't need for my project. Therefore, it is perfect for me.
First of all, I have placed a small heat sink ond the SoC, since it can get
quite hot (sometimes around 65°C). Next, I have placed the board on the car chassis and secured it with two
screws. OPI Zero has both Ethernet and WiFi onboard, and even has the built-in antenna.
Since it does not have the HDMI, the only way I could configure it was to use
the serial port. OPI has excellent support for serial console. Next to the Ethernet connector, there are
three pins for Tx, Rx and GND. Thanks to that, I was able to set my WiFi using serial console, and from that
moment on, I could SSH to it via WiFi.
OPI board
The car now looks like this:
GPIO port does not have pins, so you need to solder them yourself. I have soldered seven pins (4 for the motor control, 2 for +5V/GND, and one for the signal which turns on/off headlights). You can see those seven pins on the top right corner of the picture above.
With everything added...
GPIO port does not have pins, so you need to solder them yourself. I have soldered seven pins (4 for the motor control, 2 for +5V/GND, and one for the signal which turns on/off headlights). You can see those seven pins on the top right corner of the picture above.
Next came the software. I want to state that the armbian support for the
Orange PI is perfect. Everything works out of box. When I have configured the WiFi to connect to my home
router, I was able to install all the software via SSH.
First I had to install the GPIO support. I have dowloaded and installed the orangepi_PC_gpio_pyH3 library, made by the duxingkei chow:
https://github.com/duxingkei33/orangepi_PC_gpio_pyH3
This library is similar to the one I have on the Raspberry Pi. Not the same - just similar enough.
The next step was to install the mjpeg streamer. I have installed it,
but it could not run, saying that the libjpeg is missing. The only way I could make it work was to
manually download the libjpeg8_8d1-2_armhf.deb file and to install it from that .deb file.
Next came the new kind of problem: mjpeg streamer crashed with this misleading stupid error message, when I tried to stream from two cameras at the same time:
Unable to start capture: No space left on device...
This does not have anything with the free drive space. It simply says that the
complete bandwidth of the USB controller is consumed by the first web cam and it cannot stream from the
second web cam. It simply cannot work with two Logitech C170 cameras.
I have tried to set the number of quirks for the driver, but it didn't work.
Fortunately, I had one Logitech C210 web cam (lower resolution - lower bandwidth) and that was good enough for the poor USB controller on the OPI Zero: one C170 (forward cam) and one C210 (rear cam).
I have tried to set the number of quirks for the driver, but it didn't work.
Fortunately, I had one Logitech C210 web cam (lower resolution - lower bandwidth) and that was good enough for the poor USB controller on the OPI Zero: one C170 (forward cam) and one C210 (rear cam).
The WiFi antenna is not so powerful as I have hoped, but it indeed works
better than the small Realtek USB dongle which I had previously. The Ralink-based dongle and antenna I have
described on my first post works the best, but I already have the built-in adapter and the antenna, so I
will stick to that one.
That is about it. I am very satisfied with the Orange PI. I have tried both Lite and Zero boards, and they work excellent, considering the price and features. The only drawback of the Zero model is its limited USB bandwidth and the high core temperature. But, I can live with it...