Ok, looks like I just missed the special instructions about the recovery button. ☹️

Apparently, there are more versions of the box. One has two stars on the nameplate and "V 1.4" printed on the PCB. Although WiFi works on version 1.2, if does not work on this version V1.4 has a different Wi-Fi chip: EA6521. dmesg | grep 'SDIO' gives: [ 9.621165] mmc2: new ultra high speed SDR104 SDIO card at address 8800

https://paste.armbian.com/qocicuyote.yaml <-- captured from debug UART Brand new odroid-m1, Samsung Pro Endurance 256GB; and a brand-new/uninitialized Samsung PM9A1 256GB NVMe. It drops me to a shell [presumably the initramfs]. Note: I'm not out of options yet, I can try building my own image with newer current or edge kernels. Edited to add: I think it's booting me to the petitboot env, not even attempting to boot the SD card,

> drop them. > drop it. sorry. Someone is dropping something here I'm not sure if support was ever better or downgraded at one point because it never had it's own page on the site, it's just a mention of a device tree file swap under orange pi 5, which is listed as standard. If it's not different enough to warrant it's own page, it's entirely reasonable to think it is supported as much as the orange pi 5, under which it can be found. The max, plus and pro variants all have their own pages. 🤷‍♂️ I do understand how tooling works, as I've spend enormous amounts of time digging through the repo and modifying it. Mix and matching patches, modules, or loaders from other projects where their stuff works , and armbian's doesnt or visa versa, to get full functionality images across for the 6 different sbcs I've got. Often times certain projects will have things like vpu figured out way before other projects.

@emor acid The build system downloads the original uboot and kernel sources. Then it applies the patches on top. Whatever you edited will be erased. The only way around this is to create a patch with your changes. You could use dtc to compile your dts file into a binary dtb. Then copy it into your sdcard.