C.1) HA: setup an OrangePi 3B
OrangePi 3b is an amazing cmoplete board with 2, 4 or 8 Gb of RAM and a nice arm64 CPU.
Hardware
You definitely want to purchase an EMMC, 32GB would be plenty of space, because the uSD can be unstable and fail badly after unwanted power interruptions.
You sohuld get 4GB of RAM, since 2GB is the bare minimum and 8GB probably overkill.
I opted to purchase also a mini cooling fan and a transparent enclusure to fit everything inside safely.
Flashing operating system
Home Assistant doesn't provide a build specifically for the OrangePi brand, only for the RaspberryPi and the two are not directly compatible.
Luckly, the Armbian community provides a readily available Armbian build with preloaded the Home Assistant image, go here to download the image.
The direct dowload link is this.
Flash the image with with Balena Etcher on a uSD card.
First boot
Plug the uSD in the OrangePi 3B, connect the OrangePi 3B to a wired LAN cable and power it up.
Check your DHCP to know which IP has been assigned to your Opi3B and ssh into it as user root using password 1234.
Complete first setup, set root password and create an user, then reboot.
run armbian-config and move the installation to the emmc, format as etx4.
Install Home Assistant Supervised
To setup the Home Assistant image backed in the Armbian installation, run the bash script found in the home of the root user.
After the setup, reboot the OrangePi and login to Home Assistant via web UI on port 8123.