November 25, 2025

Orange Pi R1 Plus LTS (RK3328) -- new work (2025)

I have a bootable Debian image on an SD card from 2023. It has Debian 10 (Buster).

Power up

I put the SD card into the slot. Then I connect USB to my adapter for the serial console and set it to run an 1500000 (yes, 1.5 Mbaud) and start picocom. Then I use a USB-C cable to supply power. Away it goes!

You log in as user orangepi with password orangepi. Then to get a root shell, use "sudo bash" giving orangepi again as the sudo password. From there you can set a real root password and bypass all this sudo nonsense.

I connect a network cable to the network connector closest to the USB-C and it works! It uses DHCP to get an address for the MAC of c0:74:2b:ff:b0:00 assigned to that port.
This one is "lan0".

I unplug the cable and plug it into the other connector (the one farthest from USB-C) and it also fires up and works! It has a MAC address of: c0:74:2b:ff:af:ff
This one is "eth0".

These MAC addresses match the values printed on labels glued to the connectors.

Take a look at NAND

The /dev/ director has file mmc* and mtd*. The mmc* are the removable SD card and mtd is the nand chip on the board. MTD stands for "memory technology device" and is used for raw nand and nor flash.
I do this: 
root@orangepir1plus-lts:/home/orangepi# od -x /dev/mtd0
0000000 ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff ffff
*
100000000
So, there is nothing on the nand chip.

The Orange Pi R1+ is more or less the same as the NanoPi R2S. You can get it to boot from NAND, but you will have to rebuild U-boot for that and install the boot info somehow. This guy gives details:

The above are a valuable source of information on the boot setup for the RK3328.

There is a script in /sbin -- /sbin/nand-sata-install that is suggested as a way to copy a bootable system from SD card (mmc) to nand (or sata if you had sata).

Debian packages

This is running Debian 10 "Buster". Support for this ended back in 2024, so packages are no longer available.
I try this: 
su
apt-get update
apt install ruby
I have tried various apt install commands and most fail. Ruby seemed ready to go, but I said no. What I should do is find out how to upgrade debian to 11 or 12, then it should be easy to get packages.
Better yet, I should see if more recent images are available (there are).
Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's electronics pages / tom@mmto.org