i96

i96

Documentation and apps for the OrangePi-i96 board. Fixes the GPIO access, helps the WiFi keep a persistent MAC address and the wiki includes notes to help make the board more useable.

To get full access to the GPIO pins, download the gpio_fixup.py file onto your OrangePi-i96. I usually install it into `/usr/local/bin'.

sudo -i                  # change to root
cd /usr/local/bin
wget http://wiki.pbeirne.com/patb/i96/raw/master/gpio_fixup.py

# add a line to /etc/rc.local to execute this at startup
sed -i "/^exit 0$/i\/usr/local/bin/gpio_fixup.py" /etc/rc.local

That little script will run at boot time, and change the gpio pins on the 40 pin connector (pins 23-34) into true GPIO pins, and it'll restore proper operation of the UART2 and SPI2 pins (pins 3,9,8,10,12,14) NOTE: this is OrangePi-i96 specific; do not use on the 2G-iot board

gpio_fixup.sh is the equivalent script written in bash, using devmem2 to access the cpu registers.

devmem2.py is a local version of the program to access the cpu registers. Use it if you can't download devmem2 from the Debian/Ubuntu repositories. devmem2.py uses Python3 and is very slow, and must be run by root or sudo.

blink.py is just an example to show how you might play with the GPIO lines.

The rdawfmac.ko file included here contains the change that allows the WiFi MAC address to persist between reboots. This file (kernel module) can be copied into /lib/modules/3.10.62-rel5.0.2+/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/rdaw80211/rdawlan/ to overwrite the existing file. If you decide to use this version of the module, be sure to create a folder off the root called /data/misc/wifi/ so the module can store its randomized MAC address. NOTE: this module is only useable on the 3.10.62-rel5.0.2 kernel. It works on the OrangePi-2Giot board as well.

The i2c folder contains test programs for the I2C bus on this board. The native Linux i2cdetect from the i2c-tools packages doesn't seem to work very well on this board, so I wrote something similar in Python, it's i2c/i2cscan2.py and requires that you install the 'python-smbus' package; that package doesn't seem to exist yet for Python3, so I have included a local version called smbus.py. I have also included a couple of LCD demo programs, using the I2C version of the 4x20 LCD modules that are easily available. The pip3 library system is helpful in finding libraries to handle various peripherals.

NOTE: if you are going to use the I2C bus on the OrangePi-i96 board, you can access them through /dev/i2c-1 and /dev/i2c-2; the other one /dev/i2c-0 is used to communicate with the modem chip, and for the camera interface. If you are going to use I2C on the OrangePi-2Giot, avoid the /dev/i2c-0 device (40 pin connector, pins 3/5) because it's used for communication between the CPU and the modem chips, and for the camera connector. Also on the 2Giot, the /dev/i2c-2 bus is shared between the 40 pin connector and the LCD connector. Use opio -2 statusx to see the Linux driver name for each pin-group.