Armbian on Pi Clones

Some time ago, I built a Voron (Trident) from a kit that include the Big Tree Tech Pi Clone (BTT-Pi ) Single Board Computer (SBC). Unfortunately, I managed to brick it whilst I tried to perform an ill-advised in-place upgrade to Debian Trixie. No great loss as the printer has been out of commission for a while (thanks to an unfortunate incident with high speed printing going wrong) and I wanted to upgrade the hot-end StealthBurner to Canbus, as that offers some options to upgrade the probing and will hopefully make things a little more reliable.

This is my path to install Armbian Trixie from scratch, onto the original board, and configure Klipper (with Canbus etc)

First, we need to download the latest minimal Armbian image BTT-CB1 (6.12.58 at time of writing) which is fortunately for us, the same hardware as the BTT-Pi with a slightly different carrier. Using a suitable flash tool (Balena Etcher, Armbian-Installer, etc), we can create the drive and mount it in our host system so we can access the BOOT partition.

With the drive accessible, we can edit armbianEnv.txt to enable serial output by adding the uart overlays and ignore the display mode as we will be running headless. The key part here is enabling the uarts for serial console access.

overlays=uart0 uart1
#disp_mode=1920x1080p60

complete file:

verbosity=1
bootlogo=false
console=both
overlays=uart0 uart1
#disp_mode=1920x1080p60
overlay_prefix=sun50i-h616
fdtfile=sun50i-h616-bigtreetech-cb1-sd.dtb
rootdev=UUID=6791750e-e3f7-4546-94ea-a87be19baf47
rootfstype=ext4
usbstoragequirks=0x2537:0x1066:u,0x2537:0x1068:u

At this point we can setup autoconfigure if we desire.

From here, we can plug the SD Card into the SBC

Initial configuration requires a first login before network configuration will work (assuming there is no autoconfigure setup)

In my case, I connected a USB cable to the USB-C port (console/uart output) and routed the USB port to my Linux VM. From here I could connect with a simple

screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200

And there I was prompted for a login/password. On the Armbian Minimal image, the root password (1234) got me in and I was asked to setup a new root password and first user.

Next up, after configuring a user account, Armbian entered a loop waiting for network. Plugging in a network cable at this point didn’t seem to have any effect, so I cancelled the access and ran armbian-config to setup the wireless adapter to connect to my wifi

sudo armbian-config
  Network -> Basic Network Setup -> wlan1 -> <configure>

For some reason, wlan0 stalled and stopped responding, so I Ctrl-Breaked out of the utility and tried wlan1 which did seem to work.

The host name can be updated

sudo hostnamectl set-hostname <newname>

Once I had a good network, I could run updates as normal

sudo su -
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get full-upgrade
shutdown -r now

As the full upgrade installed a new kernel version, a reboot was required and from that point on, LAN connections seemed to work

If all is going well, you should be able to SSH onto the machine, and if that’s true, now would be a good time to copy your Public key across

ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub user@sbc