Has anyone ever gotten the Radxa Zero 3w working in gadget mode? I bought a Zero 3w about a week ago and have been beating this horse most of the time. I can't get the device to connect via USB. A or C. When I try to connect (radxa.local) it will always go through wifi. If I have wlan0 disabled or even my internet off it just will NOT connect. It clearly is using wifi to connect even if I use the hostname. Maybe this is something simple but I and another engineer I work with have been scratching our heads about it. The obligatory AI search was an endless loop of everything we had already tried. Anybody have any advice?

@hexdump hey mate , do you know if new armbian image still uses an offset of 8192 sector ? i'm trying the workaround you proveded in first page for linux hanging excatly after 60 seconds , but it only worked with multitool.img . with new armbian images it doesn't even boot after applying the trick 🙁 thanks

What type of monitor do you have connected? If you have another monitor, I'd try that. What I find works best is a monitor that is native 1920x1080. I sometimes have issues with monitors that are higher resolution or lower resolution than a standard 1080P display. Otherwise finding the uart pads is the only other advice I have, so that you can see what is going on during the boot.

I was considering rebuilding the initrd image for orange pi 5 as I think there was an issue in what was put on the image file. But now I have an a system settup with 6.1.115 - I should be good.

Thanks for the background information. I installed the orange pi 5 - 6.1.115 release with XFCE desktop. I edited the armbianEnv.txt to set up the pointer to the orange pi pro dtb entry. and booted it up just fine. With this, most things work well, To run the OS on the nvme M.2 drive, you cannot boot up from the nvme m.2 drive. Through some mistake that was made by the designers, you must always boot from an SD card for the initramfs to work enough to find the nvme m.2 drive. I made a copy - of the SD card to a second SD card on a separate system. Used this SD card to restart the Orange Pi 5 pro. Then changed the UUID of the /dev/nvme0n1p1 partition. (tune2fs -U) updated the armbianEnv.txt file on the boot SD card and the nvme0n1p1 drive. and rebooted - Now root is mounted to /dev/nvme0n1p1 partition. I have to leave the SD card in the slot to boot the system. but I am running off the NVME drive - Gen3 x 4 which should run at roughly 800-1000 MB/s on average according to Tom's hardware. That is probably 10x most SD cards transfer rate. Bottom line - I have a working Orange Pi 5 pro running on an NVMe M.2 drive - with the ability to get 10x throughput over using an SD card and up to 8TB of storage . Now it wasn't simple to actually set it up. It took some research and a learning curve. So I am not too happy about the lack of upfront information about getting this to work. But it is working. I had tried too build a real time kernel for this system. I did rebuild a kernel, but when I set the RT config up - I didn't have list of configuration question answers ready - Needed more information. The general idea was to get a fast multicore system with huge storage capacity and use this to run robotic systems. I am missing the real time kernel, I will run some latency tests to check the worst case jitter and look for a config setup. I see that there is now a Raspberry Pi 4 and Raspberry P5 real time kernel on a debian 12 release. I will see if I can get any build information for the real time kernel build. Thanks for the feedback. I will start looking for a different sbc model - among the platinum supported group.