astaroth and barbatos (NanoPi NEO)
Table of Contents
Summary
astaroth and barbatos are each FriendlyElec NanoPi NEO V1.4 boards. They are intended to be small servers possibly running Pi-hole software on Debian.
Notes
TODO
Hardware
| Make | FriendlyElec |
| Year | 2018 |
| Model | NanoPi NEO V1.4 |
| Chassis | NEO Metal Basic |
| Power Supply | 5V Micro USB (2A) |
| Processor | Allwinner H3 |
| Memory | 512MB DDR3 |
| Ports | Micro USB power/OTG |
| USB A 2.0 | |
| RJ-45 LAN | |
| Micro SD | |
| Graphics | Mali400 MP2 GPU |
| Storage | 16GB MicroSD card |
| Int. Peripherals | 3x UART (2 with flow control) |
| SPI | |
| I2C | |
| 2x USB | |
| Audio (I2S, Line In, Line Out, SPDIF) | |
| Infrared receiver | |
| Composite video | |
| Video Engine (mainline is decode-only) | |
| Ext. Peripherals | - |
| Dimensions | |
| Length/Depth | 4.6 cm |
| Width | 5.5 cm |
| Height/Thickness | 3.0 cm |
| Weight | 0.08 kg (2.7 oz) |
Software
| Operating System | Debian, FriendlyWrt |
| Unique applications | Pi-hole |
Links
- FriendlyElec NanoPi Wiki
- [[][]]
Log
Initial Impressions
I ordered the Neo Metal Basic Kit from FriendlyElec. Turnaround was pretty quick from China at about 2.5 weeks.
The devices came assembled, but with a few loose screws so it's worth opening the case and checking the heatsink screws. The heatsink and thermal pad were installed fine.
Testing
I threw the FriendlyWrt image on an SD card. Was able to get it booted, access the serial console, and web interface for openwrt. I ran software upgrades then stress to see it's power usage:
| Idle | stress x4 | |
|---|---|---|
| Current | 0.10 A | 0.42 A |
| Watts | 0.5 W | 2.1 W |
Debian Install
The Debian install seems to need two parts: a bootable image, and the install iso. I grabbed the firmware and partition image from /installer-armhf/current/images/netboot/SD-card-images then concatenated them based on the README there. I used dd to write that onto the SD card, and then copied the netinst ISO to a FAT formatted USB stick.
Using a usb serial adapter attached to the onboard header I connected to the console with
screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200
The install is similar to a regular Debian text install, but with some modified steps. I chose a single partition root (plus /boot), and removed the swap partition. The rest of the install is fairly normal.
Having trouble figuring out how Debian sets the MAC address
I only want to use this as a network device. I saw some mentions of not loading the Mali driver to save power so I tried blacklisting several unused drivers (audio, display, video decoding) as below. This didn't have any noticeable effect on the idle power draw. It did reduce lsmod output from 55 lines to 41. Might be good for a bit faster boot.
blacklist lima blacklist sun4i_tcon blacklist sun8i_codec_analog blacklist sunxi_cedrus blacklist sun8i_mixer