The Watchmaker's Pi
It's Sooooooo Tiny
Attention Conservation Notice:
This would have previously been a ToolTime post. Given the $50 cost and the overall condition of the world, the more of you there are running around with quality defensive gear, the better. If you read, go as far as the Coda; the first outing did not go well.
Orange Pi Zero 3 Review:
Look what appeared in my mailbox yesterday afternoon. This is an Orange Pi Zero 3, sitting on a standard CAC card for scale.
Once the aluminum heat sink top and bottom were attached, I used some zip ties to make a harness for it. The WiFi antenna needed to be anchored to avoid putting stress on the microscopic connector, which I judged might only last an hour on the relatively benign environment of my desktop.
And it promptly fit into the Pi5’s spot on my KVM.
There are a variety of official images.
I had a go at installing to a microSD using Raspberry Pi Imager, no luck there. I finally went to the old standby of dd.
dd if=DietPi_OrangePiZero3-ARMv8-Bookworm.img of=/dev/sdc bs=1M
DietPi booted but I found it really fiddly, it’s meant for the 1GB boards and I’ve got a 4GB, so I didn’t feel the need to tweak every little thing on the system. I was really sad that the Android image didn’t start and I will be coming back to that before too long.
The first thing that worked right was the Orange Pi OS - booted to a graphical desktop. I’ve never used Arch so this is going to be an adventure.
The second thing that worked right was TailScale. There’s an ARM download that contains the tailscale/tailscaled binaries, a /etc/defaults file, and a service file for systemd. Took me all of three minutes to get it running. This means the little Pi is nearly ready to be sent out for that Mikrotik install I have to do.
Conclusion:
The Orange Pi Zero 3’s Allwinner H618 with a passmark of 623 isn’t much when placed next to the Raspberry Pi 5’s BCM2712 with a passmark of 3446. But it’s maybe one fifth the weight of the Pi5s and a quarter their price. This is a win in terms of getting you guys a low cost, lightweight, always with you Linux machine.
Once I’m done messing with it on my desk, it’ll be joining the “going out to fix someone else’s network” wiring harness for my laptop.
Coda:
Using this machine for remote commissioning/troubleshooting is going to take some work.
Sat down with the person getting the Mikrotik.
Little Pi will not power on from a Mac Air USB-C.
It does power on from a Lenovo laptop.
I put a static IP on the ethernet before I left.
If connect by ssh you get one session, timeouts for lost ones are slow.
After one connections, no amount of rebooting will coax it to answer again.
Using USB-C power reveals battery from Lenovo is shot.
Ergo, if it’s going out with me, I’m lugging that 150 gram battery, and maybe this is going to require a different OS to be a stable ethernet connection. Quite a bit of the shine has come off, but it’s just a PITA, it’s not impossible.
Onward and upward …