Start of experiment: September 2025

Post last updated: October 2025

Check the live status of my Orange Pi Zero here!

I love the Orange Pi Zero. It’s tiny, uses very little power and it’s just neat! It’s also the subject of the very first post on my blog, which makes it a bit special.

Unfortunately I haven’t really found a good use case for it, given that its performance is quite limited and the CPU is a 32-bit ARM CPU with 4 relatively weak cores, which rules out using it as a Docker container host due to the architectural limitations. I’ve currently set it up as an additional online backup endpoint, tacking a 4 TB hard drive to it and letting restic handle the rest.

The board also has a few quirks at the moment that I’ve worked around. For example, rebooting seems to be broken, and it’s unlikely to get fixed any time soon. I resolved it by simply not rebooting it1, at least not on a regular schedule, anyway. I’m hoping that any short-term power outages at home will take care of the need to reboot it.

It also runs quite hot in its stock Armbian configuration, which I worked around by running powertop --auto-tune on startup as that forces the CPU to always run at its slowest clock speed (480 MHz). Without it, I found that this board can run its CPU at 105°C, and it does have a thermal shutdown feature.

This board has been featured in a few previous posts as well, and even then it was quite underpowered:

Now that I have it set up, will it be able to survive to year 2038 and beyond? Only time will tell.

Which issue will we run into first? Plausible options based on my previous experience:

  • the cheap 8GB SD card craps out
  • component on the board dies from heat-related issues
  • the backup hard drive dies
    • mounted with nofail option, so should not prevent booting
  • the USB power supply dies
  • board loses Armbian support completely (currently under community maintenance status)

The board is currently running the latest version of Armbian, and I might occasionally refresh its version from time to time.

If you like Armbian, then please support them! They’re doing great work with keeping all sorts of SBC-s up and running with usable versions of Debian and Ubuntu Linux.

  1. the first time in my career that the solution ended up being “have you tried not turning it off and on again?” ↩︎