Today I dig into something that part of me wanted to do for myself. I wanted to take the opportunity of building an IO library for the OrangePi Zero as both a learning experience and to better understand the inner workings. However, in the interest of time, and because I found the OrangePi modified WiringPi library, I think I am going to do the sane thing, and just use WiringPi.
Well, it seems that there are many OrangePi modified versions for OrangePi. The official support only lists OrangePi Mini and OrangePi…well…Pi. No mention of specific support for the Zero. But a quick google solves that. It looks like a dedicated user has already done the work of making the library work with the smaller 26 pin OrangePi Zero header. I raise a glass of cold chocolate milk to all of these users and I one day hope to be able to contribute something so useful.
It’s currently installing, which takes a while because I set the CPU limiters on the Zeros to 120Mhz so that the CPU legitimately doesn’t melt. I wanted the Zero form factor because it’s small, and I analogized small with lower power consumption. The 120Mhz was also a decision for this low power operating goal.
Whoops, I might have done something wrong, the call to ‘gpio readall’ provide a readout of 40 pins. Oh, I see, it displays 40 pins, but only the first 26 are accurate to the Zero. Maybe I haven’t spent enough time with the pinouts of OBCs like the Zero, but the numbering confuses me soooo quickly!
Yay! I got an LED to blink! It is always such a triumphant feeling to demonstrate control, at least to a 1mm LED.