Last week we looked out how to set up your crypto trading bots on a Raspberry Pi, and now I wanted to cover setting up an Orange Pi Zero W. This is one of my preferred boards to run crypto trading bots on as they remain very cheap, but have a bit more power than a Raspberry Pi Zero. The key difference is that they have a ARM Cortex-A7 Quad-core processor along with 512MB RAM option. And if you live in Asia, then they may be much easier to source than a Raspberry Pi as you order them off aliexpress.

Armbian Terminal Example

In my article about setting up a Raspberry Pi, I outlined that I would aim to make installation easy and work towards creating a true SaturnBox. With this board's extra resources we will be able to run more instances of our trading bots and also GasToken miners simultaneously, along with any other tools, which I think will be a big plus in the future. Also don't forget all these tutorials will work perfectly on a Ubuntu VPS server also, so no need to buy hardware if you don't want to.

Setting up an Orange Pi Zero W for crypto trading bots

For this tutorial, I am assuming you have the Orange Pi Zero W model. I believe it is a great option as it has WiFi support and remains very small. Linux support is also really great thanks to Armbian, however, there definitely is less documentation about the Orange Pi boards themselves compared to Raspberry Pi. Don't worry if you have a different model, any Orange Pi model will work perfectly and the steps will be more or less the same.

Materials

Orange Pi Zero W

microSD card (at least 8GB)

5V Power Supply (Micro USB cable)

Network LAN cable & access to your router's admin panel

As far as I know there is no way to set up the Orange Pi Zero headless, meaning for the first boot you will need to be able to connect it to your router before setting up the WiFi connection.

Note that you will need to be able to flash your microSD card with the Armbian OS so will need to insert it into your computer or have a way to connect it. Most laptops have an SD slot, so you can use an SD adapter - SanDisk normally sells them together with a microSD card.

Armbian Stretch

We will only be interacting with our Orange Pi by command line to set up our crypto trading bots so do not need a desktop OS, we will use Armbian Stretch which is developed for server or very light desktop usage scenario. If you prefer a Ubuntu base over Debian you can choose the Armbian Bionic version, however, I recommend Stretch myself as it is matured and therefore should be more stable.

Download Armbian Stretch from the official download page. And extract the image to a local folder. Install Balena Etcher which we will use to flash your microSD card. Connect the microSD card to your computer, launch Etcher, select the Armbian image file, select the SD card and flash it.

The flashing process may take a few minutes. One thing to remember is when Etcher finishes, it automatically unmounts your SD card.

Connect to your board and set up WiFi

Now it is time to boot up your Orange Pi board and connect to it via ssh , the following steps assume that the following is true:

Your Orange Pi Zero can be connected to your router via a wired ethernet connection.

Your router will automatically allocate IP addresses using DHCP.

And you can connect to your router's admin interface.

If any of these conditions are not possible, then you will need to complete them first as they are required to let you connect to your board the first time.

Booting your Orange Pi Zero for the first time:

Insert your Armbian image SD card into the micro SD slot. Connect your Orange Pi Zero to your router via Ethernet cable. Connect up your 5V power supply to the micro USB connection. Plug in your power supply.

Find your Orange Pi's IP address:

Log into your router's admin interface. Every admin interface is a little different, but it will surely show you what devices are connected to your LAN network somewhere. It may be titled DHCP Active IP Table. You will see your device should be called orangepizero . Record the IP address as you will need it for the next step.

Connecting to your Orange Pi Zero for the first time:

You will now connect via ssh to your board, if you are on Linux or macOS then you can use your terminal. For Windows users, I suggest setting up Ubuntu On Windows as it is much easier to use than an ssh client.

As you now know the IP address of your board on your local network, you will connect via ssh as the root user. Type the following command, amend the IP address accordingly:

When prompted for a password type 1234 and press enter. Note that your keystrokes will not be echoed back to you, this is a UNIX security feature. You will immediately be asked to change the UNIX password, just follow the screen to set a new password. You will be asked to create a new account, this is an account for everyday use. You need to set a username and a password for this account, the rest of the details you can leave blank.

Congratulations! You have logged into your Orange Pi Zero for the first time. Before you forget, be sure to record your new root password and your everyday use account details somewhere secure.

Before running crypto trading bots we want to download and install the latest Armbian updates. Which you do with the following commands:

~ sudo apt-get update ~ sudo apt-get upgrade

The first time you use sudo in a session, you will prompted to enter your password.

You can also set the time zone to match your location, which you can do with the following command:

~ sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

Setting Up WiFi

Lastly we need to set up wifi, this is helpful as then you can place your Orange Pi Zero anywhere within wifi range. We will do this by using the nmtui command.

~ sudo nmtui-connect

This should open up a little command line UI, that will let you find your wifi network and connect to it.

Which crypto trading bots to run on your Orange Pi?

We have a full range of open-source crypto trading bots that you can run on your Orange Pi to automate your trading strategies on Saturn Network. And with our Arbitrage bots being developed, now is the time to learn how to run them without any downtime.

Here is our current list of crypto trading bots and tools, along with full tutorials on how to run them:

Pricewatch Bot - Execute buy or sell orders on Saturn following your trading strategy, a taker bot.

- Execute buy or sell orders on Saturn following your trading strategy, a taker bot. Market Maker Bot - Automatically create buy or sell orders following your strategy, engineered to keep a token's order book healthy.

- Automatically create buy or sell orders following your strategy, engineered to keep a token's order book healthy. GasToken Miner - Tokenize gas on Ethereum or Ethereum Classic by mining GST1 or GST2 tokens.

- Tokenize gas on Ethereum or Ethereum Classic by mining GST1 or GST2 tokens. Airdrop Tool - Easily airdrop your token to hundreds of wallets after a successful bounty campaign.

Just remember to run any of our trading bots or tools, your Pi will need NodeJS installed. You can do that using the following commands:

~ sudo apt-get install build-essential ~ curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_10.x | sudo -E bash - sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

I would also recommend reading my tutorial on using Tmux to manage your processes, as it will provide you with a much better experience and let you create terminals like so:

Some Handy Hints

The official Armbian documentation is really good, be sure to check it out if you run into any issues.

Orange Pi Zero will run quite hot without a heatsink, I recommend putting one on your H2+ chip or custom case with a fan. Especially if your local weather is hot!

You can monitor the temperature, CPU speed and other details with the following command sudo armbianmonitor -m .

. Put your Orange Pi Zero in a nice little case, and yes, you do just stuff the Wifi antenna inside it.

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