Orange (or Raspberry) Pi Controller

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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…
â—Ź Orange Pi Controller flow (located in the Pi that controls your home network)
â—Ź Orange Pi Simulate Tasmota flow (located in the Pi that is plugged into the Athom Switch)
â—Ź Orange Pi Shutdown flow (located in the Pi that is plugged into the Athom Switch)
â—Ź A copy of this Tutorial

tutorial.pdf (1.1 MB)

Note: It took much longer and more effort to write the Tutorial than it did to write the code!!!

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2

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.

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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)

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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.

tues_chatIds

let chatIds = [<chatId>, <another_chatId>];

global.set("my_chatIds", chatIds);

return msg;
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Thanks for telling us about that Dave :grin:
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

image
image1080Ă—623 42 KB

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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

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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!

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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.

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