This tutorial documents the steps to build a controller that will boot-up / shut-down an Orange Pi or Raspberry Pi in a graceful way so as to minimise the risk of losing data or corrupting files.
I recently purchased an Orange Pi 5 Pro with a 64GB eMMC and a 512GB NVMe SSD, then installed OpenMediaVault (OMV) on it to serve as a small Network-Attached Storage (NAS) device on my home network. Although OMV provides a web-based user interface for managing the NAS and shutting it down in a controlled manner, I wanted an alternative method that would allow me to use Alexa voice commands as well as my own custom interface, created using the Node-RED Dashboard 1.
https://teamwork-int.com/share_my_projects/
Go to the above website and click the folder labelled… H_orange_pi_controller to locate…
● Orange Pi Controller flow (located in the Pi that controls your home network)
● Orange Pi Simulate Tasmota flow (located in the Pi that is plugged into the Athom Switch)
● Orange Pi Shutdown flow (located in the Pi that is plugged into the Athom Switch)
● A copy of this Tutorial
Hi Dave, thanks for this.
While I do not need to shutdown my Pi's on a regular basis this gives me the ideas to shut them down programmatically when I know the power is going to be off. At the moment to shut them down I use MobaXterm to access each individually.
If talking to multiple devices you could use pssh to talk to them all in one go. ( though I think mobaxterm can also do something similar but I’ve not worked that out yet)
Forgot to mention, if you want to send a message to one or more Telegram accounts, then you will need to populate this global variable somewhere in one of your flows as shown below.
let chatIds = [<chatId>, <another_chatId>];
global.set("my_chatIds", chatIds);
return msg;
Thanks for telling us about that Dave
There's a button ("Multiexec") for it which lets you type in all (or some) connected terminals simultaneously.
Here's 2 out of 3 Pies updating
Brilliant. Thank you all for that. 7 Pi's currently updating. However, I think I will still have a-go at Dave's Flow 'cause one button push to shut them all down at once is even easier
Hey Dave,
can you recomend this Orange pi as a NAS? i thought about building a small one with the pi5 for home use, but the orange pi seems also a nice fit.
Thanks!
I was going to purchase a Raspberry Pi 5 then a couple of people on the Forum suggested looking at the Orange Pi 5 as it has a NVMe socket on the back of the board.
I bought an Orange Pi 5 Pro (March 2025) and fitted an eMMC and NVMe and installed OpenMediaVault. Although I've not been using it for very long - it works really well and is VERY fast. It seems to perform most of the tasks my QNAP NAS boxes do.
