Those are super cheap maybe a dollar if shipped from Asia and an absolute essential tool for debugging. Get yourself one. http://debug.armbian.de

Hello and thank you for the problem report. What solution did orangepi.org provide for you? As you can see, nobody in the Armbian community was interested to step up and support this board and from what I have heard through the grapevine this is because of the poor support that orangepi.org gives to FOSS projects and communities such as armbian.com. Armbian has already pushed another update for Sunxi64. Maybe you are in luck and the problem is already fixed. If not, we are happy to accept a PR once orangepi.org has published a solution.

@Mohammad Adel here are some links that will help you. Find your Dram settings https://forum.armbian.com/topic/29794-how-to-install-armbian-in-h618/#findComment-218660 Find boot.bin and extract dts. https://forum.armbian.com/topic/29794-how-to-install-armbian-in-h618/#findComment-187672

I find the lack of GRUB via HDMI too problematic, so I put EDK2-UEFI v1.1 in eMMC again. I needed to wipe it completely, just writing the part without partition table normally done for U-Boot kept using the 2025.10 U-boot that was written there. I do not know how that comes. I know EDK2-UEFI v1.1 will divert to SD-card, so I though I use that to test U-Boot again. - blkdiscard SD-card - write U-Boot SPL 2026.01-rc2_armbian-2026.01-rc2-S365a-Pb445-He3cc-V062a-Bbf55-R448a (Dec 03 2025 - 04:31:42 +0000) to it - type reboot After restart and desktop login no HDMI audio. Kernel log showed long series of audio driver related errors - shutdown and pull USB-C powerplug - plug it in again and let it boot - then no audio error and also hear a 'plop' in the monitor that means the audio is enabled/working So it seems something does not reset correctly, so powercycle needed, while HDMI monitor is kept powered and HDMI cable stays connected all the time. What is different now: - kernel 6.18.0-edge-rockchip64 - eMMC contains EDK2-UEFI v1.1 and passes control/boot to SD-card U-Boot But I think it is the powercycle that is the key thing. An interesting new feature of the 2026.01-rc2 U-Boot is that the CPU clock go down to 480 MHz when mainline kernel, was 1GHz. Is not lowering idle power though, is 3 W, is 1.5 W with vendor kernel. Not clear why that is.

Yes, One/some/all of those kernel configs may be needed for analog audio. Start with the activating configs that correlate with the missing kernel modules * snd_soc_sunxi_machine * snd_soc_sunxi_ahub * snd_soc_sunxi_ahub_dam If it still doesn't work, activate all the 2 other linux kernel configs: internalcodec and aaudio