OrangePi i96 hardware - leds and button

There are two green LEDs on the board. What are they for?
What is the function of the pushbutton … short/long presses seem to have no effect on anything.

The LEDs are just GPIO controlled LEDs. What they do it up to the software image that gets loaded (so maybe nothing).

The push buttons are supposed to be power and reset but I can’t figure out how the reset button works. According to the schematic it pulls down V_RTC through a 22k resister (which unless there is a very weak on chip pull up on this pin would probably not do anything :wink: ).

Thanks Daniel! I thought one of them (the LEDs) might just be power! I’ll have a look at the schematic and see if I can get them do do anything :slight_smile:

There is this somewhat cryptic passage in the manual re: power …

  1. Step 4: Turn off your Orange Pi correctly
    You can use the shutdown button on the interface to safety close the Orange Pi. You
    can also close the system by entering command in the shell:
    sudo halt
    or
    sudo shutdown –h
    It will be safety to turn off the Orange Pi. If directly use the power button to shut
    down the system may damage the file system on TF Card. After the system is closed, the
    power can be cut off by more than 5 seconds’ press. If all the above steps run, then your
    Orange Pi could shut down.

The way I read that was (1) run “halt” from the command line and then when halted (2) press the button for > 5 seconds to turn the power off. I tried that but it’s hard to know if anything happens. Both the LEDs stay on, for example !

To be honest I don’t know I have ever pressed the button (my notes are a bit vague but I probably relied on yanking the power cable after a halt). It is certainly the case that I designed a case that makes it impossible to press the button…

Almost all parts of manual are not just “somehow cryptic”, but “very cryptic”. Seems the button can work this way in case you have lithium batery connected and Android image installed. In other cases this button is useless (see schematic). As for shutdown - every old Unix rider knows what it means. You should run shutdown command before you switch power off. Switching power off breaks system unpredictably so if you are not lucky, this will damage the file system and you will have to format and reinstall flash.

Tonva is correct. The Android image probably watches the “reset button” but the Debian/Ubuntu images just ignore it.

If you want, you can try and trigger an interrupt from this pin, but it’ll be some amount of work. The button is connected to the POWERKEY button on the CPU, which the manual says: “Power-on switch enable signal. Active High.” Beyond that, there isn’t much information. You may have to examine the Android kernel source.