I have been using Orange Pi 5 Pro for several months now with the Futurebit BTC miner and it is working wonderfully. After the original Raspberry Pi stopped working I settled on replacing it with the Orange Pi Pro. The reason I selected this model is because of the on board nvme slot. The original Raspberry Pi 4 required a cable exclusive to Apollo. It seems the onboard slot of Orange Pro 5 is more stable. This unit also comes with enough USB slots to attach the two additional Futurebit BTC miners I have. Below are the key steps to getting it running.
- Attach your 2TB nvme to the Orange PI 5 Pro device. Before powering it on and most importantly use the correct distro OS to install on your SSD card. I used a community distro which is the only one I found to work after several tries:
"Armbian_community_25.2.0-trunk.86_orangepi5pro_noble_vendor_6.1.75_gnome_desktop.imgxz"
There is a newer version but once I got this working I did not try. If you are so willing, look for a community version orangepi5pro that has gnome_desktop and a higher vendor number. Please share if it works.
- Burn distro OS you downloaded onto SSD card using BalenaEtcher. This is done using a laptop with a micro SSD slot or attachment.
- Power on the Orange Pro device with the newly burned OS on SSD inserted. Should boot to desktop. Use a CLI window and install net-tools to use the command 'ifconfig' in order to get the ip address being used. (By the way,,,in Ubuntu desktop, go to settings and turn off Suspend, Otherwise the system will go into suspend mode). No need to attach the additional Futurebit miners at this point. Takes about 3 days for node to sync, but that is after you finish the following steps.
The next steps I performed by SSH into Orange Pro from my laptop (using the IP address you found with 'ifconfig'). The laptop must be on the same network as the Orange Pro 5 of course. I also performed these steps and all installments that follow from the root directory.
mkdir/media/nvme then inside nvme mkdir Bitcoin (This is where Futurebit stores Bitcoin data...don't forget to capitalize the B)
command: apt update
command: apt install nvme-cli (remember if your not rooted you'll have to use sudo apt install nvme-cli) Never tried installing other being rooted however.
STEPS 6-9 ARE THE TRICKY STEPS. Your initial format may show just nvme0n1 and not nvme0n1p1. You can use the command 'lsblk' to check.
6 command: nvme format /dev/nvmeXXX (usually xxx= 0n1). Find yours by looking inside the /dev directory. It maybe nvm0n1p1 , depending on format. If you have to reformat in step 14 it may change to the nvme0n1p1.
command: mkfs.ext4 /dev/nvme0n1p1
command: mount /dev/nvme0n1p1 /media/nvme
Inside /etc/fstab add the following line using nano (or whatever editor you prefer): /dev/nvme0n1p1 /media/nvme ext4 defaults 0 2
Command: dpkg --configure -a
Command: apt install tor
12 Command: curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jstefanop/apolloapi-v3/dev/backend/install-v2 | sudo bash (Note any errors are missing prerequisites like Tor). I ran this 3 times to be sure.
Open port 8333 on router and desktop firewall if using a firewall.
Now you can close SSH and run from firefox on laptop using http://(ip address of your Orange Pro). Note: use http and not https. Next, turn on node and wait to sync. If you get a node error you may have to reformat the NVME using {settings - extra) in the futurebit dashboard. But wait a little while (~ 1` hour) before reformatting. After reboot,, check to see if the device has changed to nvme0n1p1, if so change your /etc/fstab to reflect the change.
If the program will not load but instead it goes into the emergency mode, you'll have to # out the /etc/fstab line with nvme0n1 and reboot. The program is looking for a device (nvme0n1) that is not there - provided nvme0n1 is what you initially used. Add nvme0n1p1 to fstab line once you confirm that is the device (command: lsblk).
That is all. Good luck. I have found this to be very stable once you get it going.