Desiring to begin to learn about embedded devices, I bought an Orange Pi Zero 2, a small and low-cost computer, an alternative to Raspberry Pi, to create a simple TV Box application using web technologies for its UI; a bit specific, I know.

The first step was to buy the board, cables, SD Card and so on. The board itself, I got on the official store of Orange Pi on Aliexpress. The cables; I already had a USB-C one, and I bought an HDMI to Micro-HDMI cable to connect the board to my monitor. The SD Card I acquire one from Shopee, what I believe what the worst choose because I guess it is not original.

My recommendation is to get everything you need to start your learning from Orange Pi Store because all components are though to the boards, and you will not to have looking for reach compatible separately; each one in its store was though to fit perfectly for Orange Pi boards.

I was advised to use the recommended operational system by the official Orange Pi page; it was what I made. I got the Debian version, flashed it on the Shopee SD Card using the ‘Restore Disk Image’ option from gnome-disks, putted it on the board and power it on!

System booting… great! However, the SD Card trick me. I logged on the Orange Pi root with default password, orangepi, connected to my home Wi-Fi using the nmcli and tried to update the system, and then the world showed to me mistake.

The world showed to me that when you want to save, buying a 500 GB SD Card for R$30, the only thing to hope is to have problems with it. After some bytes written while benchmarking the board, the kernel warn that I could not write anymore. I deserve it.

One thing I thought might be a problem was the temperature, the board got up to 75 °C, but I didn't know if 75 °C is "hot" for that kind of device. Looking online, it seems to be into the operational temperature range, what is between 0 °C and 85 °C.

Now, the next step is to buy a new SD Card, this time from a confident vendor, probably Amazon, to continue my tests and my blogs about that new knowledge path. At least, a lesson was learned: never more buy cheap thing from an unknown source.