Orange Pi devices official support request

[maggie0002]

Thanks for doing this background, you made a much better case than me.

I wonder though when some of the posts were from that you found requesting those other boards? Orange Pi Zero and Orange Pi One, and Plus 2 are already supported: (Run containers on embedded edge devices - balenaOS). Orange Pi Lite is quite a bit older, and looking at the spec in terms of performance and cost would be superseded by the Orange Pi Zero 2 so not sure how many people would go back to look at those today.

The Orange Pi Zero 2 is 64 bit which also moves it further forward in terms of future proofing and native software support (for example there is no official Node support for 32 bit Balena base images - Balena Documentation).

Orange Pi Zero 2, as you mentioned in your post supersedes the Orange Pi Zero which has been plagued with Wi-Fi issues for the community:

orange pi zero doesnt recover from wifi outaage

Hi @osde8info Thank you for the new information that you sent. I’ve taken this up with our product team. Considering what has been discussed so far, as well as other online discussions, it seems that the WiFi chip on the Orange Pi Zero presents many problems, see e.g. and Since this is outside of our control, it would not be of much use if you’d ship your own device to us, and there’s unfortunately not really something further we can do to assist you in this regard. Balena on this device …

orange pi zero doesnt recover from wifi outaage

No worries, just in case there is nothing evident in the logs, another suggestion would be to try and disable the on-board WLAN on the OPi, since there are reports of it being unstable and instead use an external USB adapter. Failing that, another workaround may be to wire up a watchdog type script to run periodically on the device, checking for network connectivity and manually reconnecting if detected offline.

wifi-connect - wpa_supplicant[848]: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-SCAN-FAILED ret=-95 retry=1

Hi team Balena, I am getting error messages every second in the journalctl logs that say: wpa_supplicant[848]: wlan0: CTRL-EVENT-SCAN-FAILED ret=-95 retry=1. I am running two containers both accessing the dbus, one is the wifi-connect provided by you guys, and the other is an container that just executes a start script and then sleeps forever. The issue appears to be intermittent, when I first booted the device it appeared. When I restarted the device it had gone. I have just restarted the con…

I would add that the Orange Pi Zero 2 also fills a bit of a gap in the market. If you look at its obvious alternative the Raspberry Pi there isn’t an equivalent, the leap from the Raspberry Pi Zero to the Raspberry PI 4 in performance is immense. Really the Raspberry Pi Zero is not a usable board anymore, it lacks the ability to connect to 5ghz wifi networks, is an older ARM version is really underpowered for the market and so forth. The Raspberry pi 1 - 3 is just an lower powered Raspberry pi 4 in terms of form factor, utility etc. And the Raspberry pi 4 is a larger more expensive board. So the Orange Pi Zero 2 really has its own class. Even if a new RPI Zero was released it would likely follow the same class as the previous RPI Zero, which I think is another good rationale for the Orange Pi Zero 2 to be supported.

Personally I intend to make the Orange Pi Zero 2 the primary recommended board for my fleets. I have been using the Orange Pi Zero in that role until now, but as it is buggy at the firmware level I am waiting the OPI Zero 2 support and treating it as a bug fix required for production.

The list could go on, OPI Zero 2 is USB-C powered as opposed to the original OPI Zero, has an aerial which in my tests has boosted wifi-range over the RPI 4, has USB ports unlike the RPI Zero etc. etc.