This isn’t entirely a Chia post, although it was inspired as such. You may have seen a teaser post on r/Chia, but if you didn’t, you’ll be okay.

In my time in the Evergreen Miner community, and elsewhere, I’ve had people ask if you can plot Chia on a Raspberry Pi.

I’m pleased to report that it can be done on a 4GB Raspberry Pi 4B, and you can create a Gigahorse compressed C5 plot in about 22.1 hours. For this test I used the 4GB board, booted from a MicroSD card, with an external USB 3.0 to SATA enclosure and a 1.92TB Dell Enterprise SATA SSD.

I wanted to try on my remaining 8GB board, but it is having issues with USB storage, so after a couple of hours of testing, I set it aside and thought about other low cost, low power options.

I tried my Zimaboard 216 single-board x86_64 server, featuring a 2 core Celeron processor, 2GB RAM, 16GB eMMC storage, a PCIe 2.0 x4 slot, two SATA ports with power (for SSDs), two ports USB 3.0, dual Gigabit Ethernet, and a completely silent (fanless) design. Alas, while the plotter “worked” on this system, 2GB was not enough, and the OOM killer process took down the plotter. I have a Zimaboard 832 (the 2021 green edition, good for Chia) but ran out of weekend so I just went with plan C.

Enter the Orange Pi

I’d heard good things from the Evergreen co-founder about the Rockchip 3588, and ordered an Orange Pi 5B with 16GB RAM and 256GB eMMC. I got it over the weekend, hooked it up, discovered that you have to use rkdevtools to install it, but still could not get video or network connectivity with it. It got power, and drove the fan, but no status LEDs, no network LEDs, and no rkdevtools access.

After checking with a friend, I learned that it should not have come loose in a cardboard box.

I put in for an exchange, dropped off the board at my local Whole Foods for return, and got the replacement board Tuesday morning. This time, it was in a sealed anti-static foil bag in a plastic protective case. Much better.

I set about doing the board bring-up. It’s more complicated than a Raspberry Pi, requiring the Rockchip dev tools package, a boot loader, and a specific Orange Pi build of Ubuntu. The well-formatted instructions for Klipper on the 5B from 3DP and Me were very useful for getting things going. You can also get the apparently-official 357 page users guide from Orange Pi’s Google Drive that has the instructions and more. I don’t recommend it if you can avoid it, though (ps: you probably can’t completely avoid it, but maybe don’t start with it).

The software downloads were a bit confusing for me… you have to get an Android image download (even if you’re not installing Android) from another Google Drive, which includes the RKDevTool program for Windows, the “DriverAssitant” bundle including the USB driver for board bringup, and the Miniloader folder with boot loader and configuration. It’s a long way from Raspberry Pi Imager or Rufus. And random Google Drive download sources are sketchy.

Anyway, after waiting two hours for the “download complete” message in RKDevTool that never came, I tried logging in via ssh with root / orangepi and got in. (Page 87 on the manual above, so maybe don’t completely avoid it).

From there I made a few more adjustments:

1. Installed Zerotier VPN and joined it to my network.
2. Executed ‘apt update’ followed by ‘apt upgrade’
3. Set my time zone away from Asia/Shanghai with ‘dpkg-reconfigure tzdata’
4. Verified that I could log in with orangepi, and left the root shell
5. Changed root and orangepi passwords
6. Rebooted to make the updates take effect (and to install my external USB SSD)

There are a lot of Orange Pi 5 series models

Another odd sequence of discoveries is that there are three primary models of the Orange Pi 5, each of which may come with different RAM and eMMC storage. I learned some of the distinctions after digging for my one NVMe drive that was smaller than 2280, and then finding there was no NVMe slot.

Here are the three models, with pricing for the smallest configuration I could find on Amazon. I would really recommend the 16GB models, and max out the storage if you go 5B. But it depends on your use case of course.

Be aware that on the 5 and 5B, the USB 3.0 port shares a dual blue port assembly with a 2.0 port–the 3.0 port is on the top, and the bottom port, despite being blue, is USB 2.0. The 5 Plus has a pair of USB 2.0 (black) ports, and a pair of USB 3.0 (blue) ports.

On the Orange Pi 5 and 5B, the only USB 3.0 Type A port is the top port.

You can use a 5V/~4A USB-C power supply and cable, your own HDMI cable, and run without a case (these are slightly larger than a Raspberry Pi so you can’t reuse those cases), but I decided to drop almost $30 on an add-on starter kit. This kit from GeeekPi includes a clear case with tinted top and bottom, rubber feet for said case, USB-C power supply with inline switch, a fan, heatsinks for the DRAM and CPU, a 64GB MicroSDXC card and USB-A card reader, and a HDMI cable. (The description currently says Micro HDMI cable, but the board has native full size HDMI unlike the Pi4b).

Some machines to compare with the Orange Pi 5 family

After posting my plotting tests on Reddit r/chia, someone asked and clarified a question about the Radxa Rock and ODROID machines. I did some quick research and found some viable alternatives. If you have local supply chain or Amazon Prime limitations, these may get you going faster.

Radxa’s Rock 5 Model A and ODROID M1 are comparable to the Orange Pi 5B I tested.

For an upgrade to the Orange Pi 5B Plus style, Rock PI Model B also gives you NVMe onboard and a single 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet port (vs Orange’s dual ports) and support for a Power over Ethernet hat.

If you really want to go overboard, ODROID’s H3 supports NVMe, two DDR4 SODIMMs up to 64GB, dual 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet, two onboard SATA ports, and eMMC support..

I’ve set up an Amazon wishlist to show the systems I’m looking at. If you feel generous and want to send me something from the list, I’ll be happy to give you credit when I post the testing results. If not, it’s a checklist for me to work through.

Where do we go from here?

I tried to keep this post as chia-free as possible, as it’s relevant to a lot of other use cases. I may not have completely succeeded at that. In any event, I will have a Chia plotting post around single board and small board computers in August, and a few other things in mind.

Have I missed your favorite single board computer? Share it in the comments and I’ll add it to my list.