Project: Orange Pi 5 Plus with Nerves

I just took delivery of an Orange Pi 5 Plus that I had completely forgotten I ordered. My gadget acquistion syndrome aside. It seems like a very nice piece of kit.

It seems like it may have a decent ARM TrustZone setup if it all gets published properly. Rockchip seems to have a pretty good record on upstreaming stuff recently. Fingers crossed it can be secure booted and all that.

Pretty board, lots of ports, lots of capabilities: Orange Pi - Orangepi

NVMe 2280 slot. PCIe, 2x Ethernet, 3x HDMI, 4xUSB-A (2 of them 3.x I think), 1 USB-C port separate from USB-C power. Built-in microphone, IR-receiver and a combo 3.5mm audio jack (if I’m understanding things right).

It could be used for a wild variety of things.

Now I 2% want to use it and 98% want to see if I can get it fully set up for Nerves. And I figure that process would be great to document. I’ve made variants of RPi systems work under Nerves. I’m poking at making Nerves run on ARM64 VMs. But I haven’t brought on a new board.

This entails making a custom system. I am not starting from scratch and most people don’t have to when making a new system. You can ideally crib from Buildroot as that is what Nerves builds on top of. Or you can crib from Yocto which requires more patience and learning a separate thing. I don’t know Yocto. I know Buildroot okay at this point and they have the board.

That part of the repo contains various useful bits. But the real gold is the defconfig:
https://github.com/buildroot/buildroot/blob/master/configs/orangepi_5_plus_defconfig
This will be the foundation for our nerves_defconfig.

I don’t know at what pace I will tackle this. Probably a slow one. But this is a start for this project thread. Some videos and photos in the next post.