I saw this page and thought I give it a go. So I bought two OrangePi Zero 2. There's a lot of potential (WiFi) as a dedicated gateway. Currently the price is about US$20 on AliExpress (caveat emptor) There are a few flavors of Linux for it. I've dabbled with Armbian, Ubuntu and Debian
Another upside is that it doesn't draw a lot of current ~0.5A, though I haven't been successful in getting the radio to run (the reason for me being here) This is also a downside as I suspect the power supply needs to be very close to 5V. Thinking it was a power hog like the RPi, I used a 5V-3A supply. This supply operates on the principle that the load will pull down the voltage. There are dire warnings on the orangepi page about using cheap SD cards, but failed to mention that power supplies have to be matched, too.
It has a different CPU than the Orange Pi Zero non-2, the board that is used here.
Use the serial interface to configure the board. You're going to be doing all your configuration in a terminal, anyway, so you don't need a monitor or a keyboard. https://www.instructables.com/Setup-Orange-Pi-Using-Serial-Port/
The big downside is that the SPI interface is not supported. My research indicates that in order to get it to work one must jump through some serious hoops and being low on the learning curve, those hoops are probably out of my reach. https://forum.armbian.com/topic/21688-tips-on-configuring-double-spi-through-two-chipselects-on-orange-pi-zero-2/
The armbian OS has another big downside, WiFi is not supported. Putting a TP-Link nano router configured as a client works, but it's another $30! Why did they even release the OS?
So! Was anyone successful in getting the Orange Pi Zero 2 configured as a gateway?
