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Unique RISC OS System 02 - Raspberry Pi Model B + Orange Pi Zero + Wispy + Fairywren motherboard in a MiniBox ITX Case

RPi Model B, RISC OS 5.28, + Wispy Wifi ! (Orange Pi Zero 512Mb running Openbox on custom Ubuntu 16.04)

All sitting on a Geekroo Fairywren Mini ITX motherboard within a mini-box ITX case with external power supply.

Well it is time to part with my custom built mini ITX RISC OS powered pc.

This is the 2nd of a number of unique RISC OS systems that I am proposing to offer for sale this year to help pay the bills (with a young family) and possibly fund some other RISC OS purchases.

Whilst the focus of this build is a Wifi networked RISC OS machine it is effectively a 2 in 1 computer - running RISC OS on the Raspberry Pi and Linux (Ubuntu) on the Orange Pi.

This is a Raspberry Pi Model B 512Mb running RISC OS 5.28 (based on RISC OS Developments RISC OS Direct Image). It is mounted/installed on a Geekroo Fairywren 1.0 Mini ITX motherboard designed to take the original Raspberry Pi. The Fairywren board was a motherboard designed by the team at Geekroo (in my home town of Adelaide, South Australia) for the Raspberry Pi and was funded by a Kickstarter campaign. The Fairywren includes a number of features including Xbee socket, Arduino support, space for USB powered HDD or SSD drives (occupied by the Orange Pi in this instance), battery backed RTC, ATX 12V power header, Reset and Power LED headers, USB headers, power take off blocks, + more. The Raspberry Pi is connected via the GPIO header pins with this functionality maintained by a block of riser pins on the motherboard. The board also provides a USB powered hub for the RPi with 2 x USB2.0 ports to the backplane and 2 internal risers on the motherboard.

This system also makes use of the Wispy Wifi solution for RISC OS from RISC OS Bits running on an Orange Pi Zero 512Mb. The Orange Pi runs a customised version of Ubuntu 16.04 with the Openbox window manager.

It is all powered by a 12V 10A (120W) external 240V Transformer (with AU plug but easy changed to a UK or US plug 100-240V). The Fairywren is internally powered by a picoPSU-150-XT (150W) 24pin DC-DC ATX PSU.

The Raspberry Pi Model B is based on the Broadcom BCM2835 processor. It is a single core CPU running at 700Mhz with 512Mb RAM and typically sips approx 3.5W power. It has on board 10/100 networking but no Wifi.

The Raspberry Pi runs RISC OS 5.28 (utilising RISC OS Developments RISC OS Direct 2.1 image with additional software installations as detailed below). It uses RISC OS Bits Wispy software to talk to the Orange Pi and thereby making use of the Orange Pi's Wifi connectivity.

The Orange Pi Zero is based on the AllWinner H2 Quad Core Cortex A7 processor. It is paired with 512Mb RAM and also sips power. It has on board 10/100 networking and also includes Wifi. The Orange Pi is powered via USB from the Fairywren board and acts as a networking gateway and server to the RPi via the networking ports of each. Whilst the Raspberry Pi is using the Orange Pi for Wifi connectivity it cannot use wired networking. There is a 10/100 network port and cable included to redirect the RPi's network port to the backplane should Wifi not be used (but that would be a shame given the work to set this up as a Wifi powered RISC OS solution).

The Fairywren board redirects the RPi's GPIO header to a male header on backplate to the Mini box ITX enclosure.

There is a custom ribbon cable included which makes the header pin compatible with GPIO devices (note the original Rpi only had a 26pin header as does this board and the ribbon cable has a female socket on the end so may need physical pins to attached hats / other forms of expansion).

Similarly HDMI output is also redirected from the RPi to the backplane. The RPi's video and audio output jacks are accessible from the backplane. The Orange Pi's small wifi antenna has been replaced and re-directed to a rear mounted aerial.

A cooling fan has been fitted to front of the machine behind the fasica panel. Whilst this machine would probably work fine without assisted cooling (the itx case is well ventilated) and the fan does increase the systems noise noticeably I decided to include it due to high ambient temperatures we can experience here in summer and air flow over hot components is your friend.

Both the RPi and the OrangePi have access to a USB port hidden behind the fascia front panel. The RPi has a 32Gb Verbatim USB drive installed and formatted to Fat32 - it provides additional storage to the SDCard on the RPi. Similarly the Orange Pi can access a USB drive via the spare port but no additional drive is installed.

The RPi has a 32GB SanDisk Ultra micro SD card with RISC OS 5.28 installed. Typically the RISC OS image will take up 2-8Gb of the card with the rest wasted - the card has been resized using the included Partition Manager to make use of the full SD Card giving approx 30GB available for use from RISC OS.

The Orange Pi has a 16Gb Verbatim premium micro SD Card with the Wispy image installed (a custom version of Ubuntu Linux 16.04 with the Openbox window manager).

RISC OS has numerous additional software packages installed and is very usable on this machine. It can connect to the internet (use NetSurf for web browsing, NetRadio to listen to digital radio stations, Sargasso for monitoring RSS news feeds + more) and other machines on a network using the Avalanche VNC viewer but I have not been able to get other networking applications such as LanMan98 and VNC Server to work to date (expect it is to do with he IP address range that it is served with from the Orange Pi and Wispy solution - see limitations on this in issues below).

The Orange Pi also is accessible from within RISC OS using a RDP interface and this enables installed software on Linux to be used in a window on RISC OS- eg web browsers (Chromium, Midori, Dillo, Firefox - note that these are older versions and may not be secure for sensitive use - I did try to update these to more recent versions but something always broke and left the system unusable, expect due the nature of the customised distribution supplied by RISC OS Bits), office applications (Abiword, Gnumeric and Libre Office !), text editors, pdf viewers, file managers, etc. On trusted Wifi networks (ie not public networks) folders can be shared on the network utilising Samba and NFS - the default directory shared is 'downloads' - this is also accessible from RISC OS and enables file sharing with other locally networked machines (Eg Windows machines on same network - I successfully used Win7 and Win10 to access this shared folder - search for the OrangePi's IP address - it will use a Wifi assigned address different to the DHCP addresses it serves to RISC OS - see screen grab included,final image).

Further to this a Remote Desktop Connection from other machines on the network can also access the Linux software (see screengrab example of accessing from Windows 7 - uses same credentials as when accessing from RISC OS).

See some of the attached screengrab images to show functionality, installed software and the hardware of this machine (minor updates have been made here and there since images captured)

The RISC OS install is the standard V2 of the RISC OS Developments RISC OS Direct distribution. It has a number of additional and updated software packages installed - details in files folder 'summary' text file - including:

01. ADDFS Emulator 2.83 (games)
02. Aemulor (rpi) 2.52 -for running older 26 bit software eg Variations, DA picture, Impression Style, etc (does not work with mplayer)
03. Antiword 0.37 - for viewing older MSWord files
04. Avalanche 0.22 (working on wifi networks)
05. BattleChess (ADFFS)
06. Converter 1.12
07. CPU Clock 2.09 - also has a left click time function
08. CPU SetUp 2.14 (Configure)
09. DA's Picture 1.05 (Aemulor) [see graphics folder]
10. Digital CD 3.16 - for playing music files
11. Drawprint 1.53
12. EtherUSB (Dec23)
13. Fireworkz 2.22 - spreadsheet and work processor
14. FreeMem v1.16
15. GhostScript 8.54
16. HID 0.91 drivers for USB devices (mice , keyboard, etc)
17. Impression Style 3.13 (Aemulor) - DTP
18. KinoAmp 0.56 - for playing MP4 movies etc
19. Lanman98 v2.08 (not used/working)
20. Mix Volume 0.03 - desktop volume control (not part of RISC OS default install)
21. MPlayer (VFP) 1.03 (does not work with Aemulor) - needed of NetRadio etc
22. NetRadio 0.52 - for listening to internet radio stations, 2 local community ones from South Australia included (does not work with Aemulor)
23. Netsurf 3.11 - web browser originally developed on RISC OS - December 2023 update
24. Ovation Pro 2.78g - full DTP package (now released as free software from the author David Pilling)
25. PackMan 0.9.7 - package management / software installation
26. Partition Manager 1.02-1 - new excellent software from Jon Abbott - partition management for RISC OS, best used with an external USB card reader
27. Pinboard 2.0.2 - by RISC OS Developments (not part of RISC OS Direct v2 though)
28. Pipedream 4.62.02 - spreadsheet and wordprocessing
29. PlingStore 1.52 - package managament / software installation
30. Print PDF 1.20
31. ProSound 2.00 - sound file editor / mixer
32. Sargasso 2.11 - RSS news feed (with several Acorn/RISC OS/IT sites preloaded)
33. Snapper 1.34 - screengrabber
34. StickyPad v1.09 - on screen sticky notes (I prefer this to the pinboard version)
35. TCPIP 7.04a - from RISC OS Developments (January 2024) that paves the way for future native wifi and also reportedly speeds up internet access and general networking (eg file transfers)
36. TextEffx 1.52
37. Unticonv 2.37
38. Variations 0.41d.46(Aemulor) [see graphics folder]
39. ViewXLS 0.23B - older MSExcel document viewer
40. Wispy Wifi (OrangePi 512Mb)
41. Wolfenstein 3D
42. Xearth (32bit)

43. Doom [see diversions folder]

44. Pacmania [see diversions folder - needs ADDFS running]

45. Canon Fodder [see diversions folder - needs ADDFS running]

There is even a MPEG video of a presentation from the infamous Sophie Wilson from 2009 [see media folder]

There are some faults / issues with the system :

- The Wispy Wifi solution is very senstive and prone to failure if any settings are changed or tweaked especially networking settings on the RISC OS Side. I tried several times to reset the networking hostname but with the integral nature of the Wispy software it would always fail. Similarly changing the IP address range that Wispy serves to RISC OS would break the setup - I'm sure it technically can be done but i couldn't get it to work. Hence stuck with the default IP address settings as shipped with wispy (ie 192.168.2.x range)

- My advice is therefore not to adjust anything network related. Apart from making the wifi connection from within the Wispy settings dialogue (sharing of folders from Wispy using Samba / NFS also seems to work OK - just make sure files are not projected or you will get errors trying to open them on networked machines)

- If you do change something and it breaks Wispy you will likely have to re-image the SDCard in the OrangePi (I had to do this numerous times) - a backup image of the card is included and has been created with Rufus on Windows.

- I have broken Wispy on the RISC OS side sometimes too but this usually is a Boot / Configure setting - copying from a backup copy of the Boot file structure backover the in use Boot Structure usually restored function - BackUp files are included on the 32GB USB drive for RISC OS (made using the supplied and installed Syncdiscs application). There is also a backup of he SDCard image for RISC OS supplied.

- Whilst I can get avalanche to work and therefore can VNC into another machine on the network from RISC OS, I am unable to go the other way ie use VNC into the RISC OS desktop, Similarly have not been able to get Lanman98 to access shared folders on other machines (ie Windows machines) - I am sure this is due to the specific set up of the Wispy system and range of IP address served from behind the wifi gateway of the Orange Pi. Shared folders on Wispy can be seen on RISC OS as well as other machines on the network (make sure to set RISC OS access to public for the files though)

- Share FS does not work with Wispy (this is a limitation of the Wispy implementation)

- The Wifi sometimes does not start up with the machine (greyed out logo on iconbar) and will need the machine to be power cycled (turn off , wait, turn on again)

- The Wifi occassionally drops off (greyed out logo on iconbar), I have had this happen after listening to NetRadio for several hours, solution is to power cycle the machine.

- due to the nature of its co-operative multitasking and limitation of only using 1 core on any system, occasionally RISC OS may fault when something changes and the system can hang - a soft reset will sometimes work but other times a power cycle is required. This is not peculiar to this machine, it is peculiar to RISC OS itself.

- there are 2 exposed USB ports on the backplane. I use 1 each for a mouse and keyboard. You may want to use 1 for USB drives etc in which case a USB hub will be needed to keep the mouse and keyboard connected. I have had success with decent quality powered external USB hubs but some hubs won't work reliably in this manner with RISC OS, especially if un-powered.

This a 1 of a kind system - I have not seen one of these anywhere before. There were some 250 odd original backers of the Fairywren motherboard kickstarter campaign and they quite likely sold a number of additional boards after this. Whilst they all would have had RPIs installed on them I am not aware of another system based on this board that runs RISC OS.

Listing is for the ITX mini-box system including external power supply only.

No peripherals are included (ie keyboard, mouse, monitor)

It is Sold As Is as an extremely rare example of vintage computer technology.

Photo(s) of actual item(s).

Item photo(s) form part of the listing description.

Summary of photos/screengrabs in order:
Photos 01 to 12 (including main photo) show the hardware

Photos 13 to 19 show RISC OS apps and screens

Photos 20 to 21 show Wispy Setup and RDP apps on Linux

(had quite a few photos but had to limit them to Ebay's 24 allowance).

Sale price includes GST @10%.

Payment by Ebay payment system only (ie Paypal etc)

Product is second hand refurbished (although uses a lot of new parts) and as such is sold AS IS.

It comes with no warranty implied or given.

Item will be well packaged to arrive safely at your end.

All goods are shipped via Australia Post.
Goods are shipped on Fridays.
Payment must be received prior to shipping (ie if payment is not received and cleared by Thursday of the current week then your goods will not be shipped until the following Friday).

Sorry pickup is NOT available.

We are currently clearing out some old inventory stock items (including some more Acorn / RISC OS gear to come) - keep an eye out on our other auction items over the next few months.