Hi, really want to replace my Raspberry Pi 3B with an Orange Pi Zero 2W atop an expansion board with dual ethernet. OpenWrt doesn't seem to have support for this board or soc, so I was wondering what I might need to do get OpenWrt on it. I have a Debian VM setup for building OpenWrt, but I'm not sure any of the configs from make menuconfig are appropriate for this device.
WiFi chip is a CDTech 20U5622, which I cannot tell if it has kernel drivers upstream ("official" Debian image uses unisoc_wifi kernel module iirc). WiFi is secondary to me, though. SoC is an Allwinner H618, and this one in particular is the 4GB version. I keep seeing the term u-boot thrown around, so maybe that's important. Expansion board just needs cdc_ether to run which is trivial to get.
There is pretty good documentation about enabling new device support in OpenWrt. It seems like you're already doing a bunch of the right things -- checking the chipsets and the availability of source code... but this should hopefully help you dig a bit deeper:
Guessing there is a with-W and without-W variant, while the remaining parts is possibly the same hardware, you might want to contact the non-W fraction as well. But I do not know, if they are still actively working on it: OpenWrt for OrangePi Zero2
Sorry that I've been absent since I made the post. I have been getting busy with holiday things, and if I got free time I've been using it on art. I can probably try to return to it in January
In the meantime, from what I remember the images for the slightly different models of OrangePi's don't work with this model. They all use a slightly different SoCs.
The guide I was linked to doesn't have much specific instructions so it was difficult for me to make any ground on what I should actually be doing. The device's firmware is a MicroSD card, so it's a matter of building an image that can boot and run. Maybe I wasn't digging deep enough into it?
The Orange Pi Zero 3 and the Orange Pi Zero 2w both use the H618 both use the same Wifi chipset... Seems apart from the 3 having onboard ethernet, usb-A and a different sized HDMI plug they're the same.
Why don't you try it and see if it works... Would be good to know before mine finally arrives
Unfortunately those OpenWRT images don't boot on my Zero 2W. I have been able to successfully boot and run the Orange Pi Zero 3 DietPi images, though the thermals on my board run very hot, so need to make sure to reduce the cpu max freq in dietPi config or add a big heatsink / fan if you experience lockups (which happen for me ~>70C).
That's a bummer, but if you're going for dietPi , Have you considered Manjaro ARM? There's a good port for the Zero 3, a guy tried it on Zero 2w and reported it works great and haven't found issues yet:
The info in the first post is helpful for building, maybe I’ll try booting their images to see how well it works, but ultimately I want something with less bloat than a full distribution…. OpenWRT, NixOS (which also doesn’t work currently) or DietPi are my preferred, since this will be for a router/hotspot.
My guess is that i'm in a worse situation, i also want to use it as a router , but i want internet access by connecting the Opi 2w to the router via ethernet cable, and the ethernet shield won't work with anything else other than OPi OS anytime soon.
As you don't need internet access by bridging the eth and wlan interfaces, you could strip down the Manjaro to the max and build it yourself .
The Manjaro ARM minimal (290mb) is still more than 100mb larger than DietPi, but its not terribly sized though... you could strip it down even further probably...
This Ethernet shield + usbs works today with dietpi zero3 image, dietpi uses the zero3 device tree (uboot dtb file)… if the zero 2w device tree is configured via /boot/dietpiEnv.txt the shield + usbs don't work (Orange Pi Zero 2W).
Wifi works as a client, but I don't have much luck getting dietPi to act as a hotspot (I was able to get it to do it briefly once when it booted as a client and switched to hotspot, but won't work when booted as a hotspot)
That's amazing, this shield having a 24pin flat cable connected i assumed it wouldn't be an easy integration, due to structural differences, but maybe the connections are still the same. Thank you very much for that valuable information and your efforts within the community, when my 2w arrives i'll give feed back.
In the meanwhile i'll follow that github thread and this one hoping for openwrt or dietpi to be more functional.
There doesn't seem to be any documentation as to what the 24pin cable does other than the wiki saying it will work on Linux 5.4/6.1 with no issues.
For the dual nic board, it's a USB hub connected via pogo-pins that effectively jack into the the middle port. When you get your ribbon expansion board, plug it in it'll probably work as long as the kernel has all the modules for Ethernet controller, etc.
Save your praise for someone deserving, I just FAFO.
you stated that DietPi is overheating, i was informed that there's a need to apply a patch to temp reading sensors otherwise the reads are inflated and no processing throttle occurs.
