OrangePi Prime Armbian

When I installed Armbian on the OPiP half a year ago, the builtin wifi was not supported.  I tried again with the later build, Armbian_5.34.171121_Orangepiprime_Ubuntu_xenial_next_4.13.14_desktop,  Release: Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS, Kernel: "Linux orangepiprime 4.13.14-sunxi64 #246 SMP Mon Nov 20 01:58:09 CET 2017 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux".  The builtin WiFi works out of box.  The WiFi support has been added.

[ 7.303430] r8723bs: module is from the staging directory, the quality is unknown, you have been warned.
[ 7.312103] RTL8723BS: module init start
[ 7.312112] RTL8723BS: rtl8723bs v4.3.5.5_12290.20140916_BTCOEX20140507-4E40
[ 7.312114] RTL8723BS: rtl8723bs BT-Coex version = BTCOEX20140507-4E40
[ 7.381290] RTL8723BS: rtw_ndev_init(wlan0)
[ 7.382437] RTL8723BS: module init ret =0

While the WiFi works fine, but the builtin Bluetooth is not working.  A USB Bluetooth adapter works and can be used to attach Bluetooth keyboard/mouse.

The HDMI display works OK, but does not always configure correctly.

With the addition of the WiFi, the OPiP is very usable, as I can type this blog on it.  I think Armbian is the better distribution than what the vendor provides.  Armbian support for H5 is still experimental.

armbian-config is a useful tool to configure the system, in particular the peripherals, I2C, SPI, etc.

I built KiCad from the source on OPiP like I did on OPi PC.  It took about 8 hours, still a long time, but an improvement over OPi PC.  It was with the max CPU frequency set to 1.37GHz.  Again it is not platform for developing large software.

While OPi Prime is more capable than OPi PC, it is not fast enough to a desktop replacement but likely an overkill for most embedded applications.  I would certainly prefer two OPi PC over one OPi Prime at the same cost.