Xunlung* Software CO., Limited’s Orange pi* PC Plus is an open-source microcomputer competitor to the Raspberry Pi*. The OrangePi PC Plus is an ARM* v7 platform plenty of power for your applications. Because it uses ARM and Linux*, you can use the OpenVINO™ toolkit for your vision learning applications. This article will walk through setting up an Orange pi PC Plus with the Armbian* community’s Ubuntu* 18.04 (LTS) Bionic to make sure everything is ready for you to build and install the open-source OpenVINO™ toolkit on your Single Board Computer (SBC) of choice.
Preparing Your Board
Make sure that you have all of the hardware you need. At a minimum, you will need the following:
- Orange pi PC Plus
- AT LEAST an 8GB microSD card
- Ethernet Internet Connection OR compatible USB wireless adapter
- Compatible DC Power Adapter
- Keyboard
- HDMI Monitor
- HDMI Cable
- Separate Windows, macOS, or Linux computer to prepare installation image
Before you can begin, you need to install an operating system for your board. This SBC does have an onboard eMMC storage device, but you will still need an SD card to write the proper operating system to the board.
The image that we are using is Armbian’s ARMv7-based Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic image, based on their mainline kernel. This image is covered by the GPLv2 License. It is available at https://www.armbian.com/orange-pi-pc-plus/. Make sure you select the Bionic image.
It should be noted that OpenVINO™ toolkit is only currently officially supported on Ubuntu 16.04 – while the toolkit builds and verifies on 18.04, any issues with using the toolkit with this image are out of the scope of this article.
To write your image to your microSD card, you can use balenaEtcher, the Balena* open source image writer formally known as Etcher. You can download and install it at https://etcher.io. Select your image, make sure that your microSD card is selected,
and hit flash. It should take a few minutes to write the image and verify it.
Insert your flashed microSD card into the slot on the bottom of the device. Connect your monitor to your board with an HDMI cable, plug in your keyboard, connect your Ethernet cable, and provide power through the DC Power jack. After a few seconds,
your device should boot. It will then begin to resize the primary storage partition, and will shut off when finish. Wait a few minutes, then unplug and re-plug the power adapter to reboot the device. After a few more minutes, the device should boot to a terminal prompt.
The device’s default username is root and password is 1234. It is recommended to change this password to something more secure.
Make sure your device’s software is up to date:
apt update && apt upgrade –yIf your device can connect to the internet and update successfully, you are ready to move on.
If you want to write the operating system to the onboard storage, you can use the install script nand-sata-install located in the root user’s home folder to flash the eMMC module.
Next, follow the instructions in the ARM7 Setup Guide (/content/www/us/en/develop/articles/arm-sbc-and-ncs2.html) to get the OpenVINO™ toolkit running on your device.