What I didn't know was that the official images are widely regarded as total garbage, and that you should completely disregard them. Raspbian was supported by most open source projects, but didn't work on the Orange Pi's esoteric hardware. Every few months I'd stumble across a fun looking open source project using Pis, only to find that the latest official Orange Pi image was still very outdated and unsupported. I struggled with their official operating system builds, and could never really find a use for them. I got my Orange Pi One(s) a few years ago, back when most of the information about it was written in Chinese.

I have no idea how long they'll last, but they're available in stores, Class 10, and large enough to do the job. For this example, I suggest using the second one you receive - it's luckier.įor the micro-SD card, I just buy SanDisk SDSDQUIP-016G cards for ~$10 from WalMart. It costs $15, and if you buy it from the company I bought it from, they'll ship it to you twice and tell you to keep both of them. It's got a quad-core CPU, 512MB of RAM, no WiFi, and a strange proprietary power plug. The Orange Pi One is a little computer that offered a significant CPU advantage over the previous generation Raspberry Pi. I have the latest firmware from the factory, which is good enough for the purposes of this article. It's probably discontinued by now, but it was affordable and serviceable when I was last shopping for a home router. The choice of router is just out of convenience. Installing everything is a fairly easy process that will leave you feeling like a renegade from big data tracking.įor this example, I'm going to use two devices that I already had available: a TP-Link Archer C7 V2 router, and an Orange Pi One micro-computer. When you're done with this article, you'll have an ad-free experience for all the devices on your home network. Pi-Hole is an open source project that claims to be 'a black hole for Internet advertisements', which means it is basically a local DNS with loopbacks for known ad servers.

I decided to outline my steps in case somebody else is wondering how to do it with that exact hardware. I recently integrated Pi-hole into my home network using an Orange Pi One and my TP-Link Archer C7 V2 router.

Raspberry pi zero w pi hole setup