Hardware — Compute
Orange Pi 5
ReferenceThe Orange Pi 5 is the primary compute platform for Sorter. This page covers hardware selection, memory and storage requirements, and WiFi adapter options.
The Orange Pi 5 is the required compute board for Sorter. SorterOS is built on top of the official Ubuntu image provided by Orange Pi for this board.
Why the Orange Pi 5
The core reason Sorter requires the Orange Pi 5 is its Rockchip RK3588S SoC, which includes a dedicated neural processing unit (NPU). The NPU is what makes real-time piece classification practical:
- Over 30 fps per camera for YOLO-based piece detection
- Over 100 fps total across all three camera feeds simultaneously
No other single-board computer at this price point sustains that inference throughput with the NPU required by the detection pipeline.
Recommended configuration
| Component | Requirement |
|---|---|
| Memory | 8 GB+ |
| Storage | 32 GB+ SD card (faster class preferred) |
The 4 GB variant is not supported — the backend, inference workers, and OS together exceed its available memory.
WiFi
Some Orange Pi 5 variants do not include built-in WiFi. If yours does not, you need one of:
- A Linux-compatible USB WiFi adapter
- An M.2 WiFi module (see below)
M.2 WiFi modules — two different connectors
The Orange Pi family uses two distinct M.2 connector formats depending on the board variant. They are physically incompatible and not interchangeable:
| Board | M.2 interface | Module |
|---|---|---|
| Orange Pi 5 (original) | Standard M.2 PCIe | AP6275P (Wi-Fi 6 + BT5.0) — Amazon |
| Orange Pi 5 Plus | PCIe M.2 E-KEY | R6 module (Wi-Fi 6 + BT5.2, 1201 Mbps) — Amazon |
If you order the wrong module for your board variant it will not physically seat. Double-check which board you have before purchasing.
Note on driver support: The AP6275P module for the original Orange Pi 5 requires drivers included in the official Orange Pi Ubuntu image. It works on SorterOS (which is based on that image) but may not work on other third-party OS images out of the box.
USB hubs
Use a powered USB hub for webcams, Picos, and other attached USB devices. We have seen bus-powered hubs let those devices brown out the Orange Pi 5 under load, which can trigger severe system crashes instead of a clean USB disconnect.
Cooling
If the Orange Pi 5 is pinned hard, especially when running a detection model on the CPU, it can heat up enough to hit thermal emergency shutdown at about 105 C. A small fan is recommended. The intent is to run models on the NPU; if a bug or fallback pushes them onto the CPU, this can happen.