NanoPi Duo Quick Start Guide – Ubuntu, Breadboard, Mini Shield & mSATA SSD

As far as I know NanoPi Duo is the only quad core ARM Linux development board that can fit on a breadboard. We’ve already seen it’s much smaller than Raspberry Pi Zero, and the company offer a mini shield exposing USB ports, Ethernet, a few I/Os, and an mSATA slot in in NanoPi Duo Starter Kit Review – Part 1: Unboxing and Assembly.

I’ve finally played with it this week-end, and will report what I had to do to blink a LED when connected to breadboard, and my experience using the mini shield with  an mSATA SSD, WiFi connectivity, and cooling under load.

Flashing Ubuntu 16.04.2 firmware image to NanoPi Duo

As with many other Allwinner development boards, you should first check if Armbian is available for the board. NanoPi Duo is not supported, but it’s said to work with Orange Pi Zero image minus support for WiFi. Since the latter is rather important if you’re going to use the board standalone, I instead went with FriendlyELEC’s Ubuntu Xenial image (nanopi-duo_ubuntu-core-xenial_4.11.2_20170908.img.zip) shared on the company’s Wiki.

I flashed the (compressed) image with Etcher – available for Windows, Linux, Mac OS, on a 8GB micro SD card (Sandisk Ultra).

Using NanoPi Duo as a Breadboard-friendly Development Board

Once this is done, insert the micro SD into the board, insert it into a breadboard, and connect your circuit (in my case a 5V LED connected to GPIOG11 via a transistor). Most other breadboard-friendly WiFi boards include either a USB to TLL chip allowing to access the board’ serial console over USB (e.g. ESP32 boards), or firmware that setups the board as an access point for initial configuration (e.g. LinkIt Smart 7688 Duo). So you just need to connect power and you’re good to go.

But NanoPi Duo’s board has no serial to USB chip, and the current firmware does not setup an access point by default, so I’ll need to connect a USB to TLL debug board too, as shown above. I then started minicom with 115200 8N1 configuration, and connected the board to one of the USB port of my computer for power, and the boot worked just fine.  See complete boot log for reference:

The system will autologin, and show a welcome boot message similar to what is found in Armbian build.

Let’s check some of the relevant info:

The image is based on Ubuntu 16.04.2 with a recent Linux 4.11.2 although apparently not updated with the latest patchsets found in Linux 4.11.12. The rootfs has been automatically resized at boot time so I have 5.9GB free on the partition, and 497MB RAM is accessible from Linux.

There are some useful pre-loaded modules for WiFi, USB mass storage, and IPv6:

Most people will want to use WiFi in this configuration (breadboard use), and nmtui text user interface is normally recommended, but the UI was really messy in the serial console, so I reverted to use nmcli instead as explained in the Wiki. First let’s list the network devices:

WiFi is disabled, so we’ll enable it and scan nearby routers:

I repeated the last command three times, but my main (2.4 GHz) router was not listed. So let’s attach a u.FL antenna…

… to see if I can get a stronger signal for the already detected access points, and find my main router (CNX-TRANSLATION):

Success! I can now see CNX-TRANSLATION SSID, and CNX-SOFTWARE SSID signal is much stronger. However, I lost sonoff-office (which I did not plan to use).  We can connect to the access point of your choice as follows:

Oops. I did not work out as expected. Listing the access points again:

That’s crazy… All my APs are gone! But after persevering a few more times, I was finally able to connect and get an IP address:

We can now update the system to make sure it has the latest packages:

The board could download all the ~150 packages without issues, so once the connection is up it looks fairly stable. The update will take a while, so you may want to try a few other features of the firmware. For example, the company pre-installed NanoPi-Monitor, a fork of RPi-monitor, which allows you to monitor CPU and memory usage, temperature, up time, etc.. directly from a web browser via http://board_IP:8888.

I was also be able to connect via SSH using either pi/pi or root/fa username and password.

The last step of this section of our tutorial is to control GPIOs. Since the board runs Linux 4.11, we may have hoped the new GPIO subsystem might be implemented, but lsgpio is not installed, and instead the company recommends to use WiringNP, a fork a WiringPi. It’s pre-installed, so we can use it right away to list GPIOs:

I’ve connected the LED to GPIOG11 (mapped to pin 16 in WiringNP), and it’s on by default, so let’s pull it down:

The LED turns off, and we can turn it back on with:

Let’s write blink.c to blink our LED every 500 ms:

We can now build and run it, and the LED will blink as expected:

You need to run blink as root as it is required by wiringPiSetup() function: “wiringPiSetup: Must be root. (Did you forget sudo?)”, but there are workarounds roughly explained in the Wiki. The user key/switch on NanoPi Duo board is connected to “GPIOL3/K1” pin, but is not listed by gpio readall command, so this would have to be looked into.

Other modes such as PWM,  I2C, SPI, UART, PWM should also be supported, but out of the scope of this quick start guide.

Beside “GPIOs”, Ethernet, USB, composite video, and various audio signal are also exposed, so it can make for some very interesting DIY projects.

NanoPi Duo with mini Shield and SSD

I took out the micro SD card, and inserted in my other NanoPi Duo board connected to the mini shield with an mSATA SSD. This time I connected the board through a 5V/2A power supply, and added an Ethernet cable.

Getting started is much easier since we are using Ethernet here. Just find your board IP address in your router’s DHCP client list, or via tools like arp-scan, and connect over SSH with pi user:

We can see the SSD is detected (sda – 59GB):

but not mounted:

So I formatted the drive with EXT-4…

and mounted it in a temporary directory to check it out:

In theory the SSD should have much better performance than the micro SD card, even though it’;s connected through a USB to SATA chip. But let’s no assume anything, and first run iozone on the 8GB micro SD provided by FriendlyELEC:

and repeat the same test on the SSD: