As everyone knows, Raspberry Pis are quite expensive, especially if you’re only going to use them for creating a dashboard with Real Dash. Recently, I purchased an Orange Pi 3B (RK3566 & 8GB of RAM) SBC for less than $50. Initially, I tried using Ubuntu, but it’s not yet well-optimized and has a lot of bloatware. The official Orange Pi systems are out of the question, with many bugs and random crashes. So, I found on Github (Release Orange Pi 3B · leeboby/raspberry-pi-os-images · GitHub) an unofficial port of Raspbian (Linux developed for Raspberry SBCs), and that’s when things started to improve.
1st step: Download the Raspbian system from Github, then burn the image with Balena Etcher;
2nd step: Perform the first boot, which is quite easy and intuitive, so I won’t dwell on this step. Restart the system;
3rd step: Download RealDash directly from My RealDash, the version is realdash-mrd_2.3.6-1_arm64.deb, now just install the .deb file;
4th Step: After installing, open the terminal and paste the following command: sudo ip link set can0 up type can bitrate 500000 restart-ms 100 (I get this command from Linux version info and install instructions) NOTE: the command “sudo raspi-config 4 Performance Options P2 GPU Memory 256 OK” won’t work because the system is still a port, so it doesn’t have all the options it would have in the official version;
5th Step: To make RealDash start automatically, you’ll need to do this process: open the terminal and type which realdash, this command will provide in which folders it will be. It will probably be /usr/bin/realdash, then type the command sudo nano /etc/xdg/lxsession/LXDE-pi/autostart and press enter, it will go to a menu, go to a blank line and paste the RealDash address, which will probably be /usr/bin/realdash (use @/usr/bin/realdash), now just press CTRL + O to save.
There you go, you now have a custom dashboard with RealDash and very cheaply that works decently.
Final considerations: Some themes may have poor performance, this happens because the drivers are not so optimized, to get the best performance, use an Android system, it will run better if you have a very heavy theme.
