fabiobassa

please ignore my previous comment. THE EXPERIMENTAL IMAGE DID BOOTED FROM SD CARD! IT WORKED 

I have forgotten to erase the flash on the first time... After I erased, it booted from the SD Card.

I cannot thank you guys enough!!!! <3 <3 <3  
 

@Vinicius Guastala I agree with @fabiobassa, thanks for the very detailed post of your board and broad description of the behaviour.
I would suggest you to erase the internal flash and try to boot from sdcard with this armbian image. It is an "experimental" image with opensource Trust OS; many recent boards are having issues with proprietary trust os, possibly yours has similar issues, so you could give a shot to this. By the way, the serial log output would be indeed very handy if you have the chance to find the serial port.
 
Beware also that armbian (and multitool) use 115200bps baud rate for the serial, while proprietary software uses 1.5Mbps baud rate!

Hello Guys,

This will be a long post, so I already apologize for that!
 
I am trying to install armbian in the most generic MXQ PRO 5G 4K ever. No joking when I say it’s generic, because I have some proof that this Frankenstein monster is actually a MX9 and a MXQ 4K PRO merged together.
 
Here are some board Details:
MoBo: MXQ-EP-2-V1.0
CPU: Rockchip RK3228A
Wifi: SV6256P
Storage: Samsung KMQ7X000SA – B315 (Is this a ECMP 8GB+8GB or a emmc?)
 
I call it a MXQ Frankenstein, for the following reasons:
According to the info and the picture from this source, the “MX9 4K 5G” has the exactly same MoBo “MXQ-EP-2-V1.0”, but with the SV6152P wifi instead. According to this other forum post, the OP has posted pics from his "TXC2-MXQ-EP-V10” MoBo, which looks basically identical to my “MXQ-EP-2-V1.0”, but it has the SV6152p wifi like the MX9 4K 5G, but with a RK3229 CPU instead. This post was very useful for me because of the Short Pad for Mask Mode for this version is the same as mine. In this other post, we see the same “MXQ-EP-2-V1.0” Mobo, but with with a SanDisk storage chip instead. And in the same post, in the last comment we see another user with a 8GB/128GB variant with the same SV6152p wifi from the above “TXC2-MXQ-EP-V10” So including my version, it seems we have at least 5 different versions of this horrendous Frankenstein device, for the “lowering cost reasons” we already know….
 
Despite many tentatives, I am not able to make the “multitool” (or amrbian directly) to boot, from any method. Tried many times from SD, from USB and even after it is copied directly to the eMMC, all following the guides from the 1st page from this post, but also from other internet sources. Simply I’ve got a black screen output whenever the SD Card with multitool or armbian in inserted, with no leds turned at all.
 
Unfortunately I have not done the backup from my original ROM before I have tried to write armbian directly to the emmc, because I did not know that was possible back then, and now I’m also not able to find my original ROM.
 
I have tried many (10+) different ROMs, flashing from Linux and Windows, but I ending up having the same behavior as booting armbian, with no Video and no LEDs, until I finally came across to the ROM called “MXQ-EP-2-V1.0_SV6152P_OK By: (Zer013)” from this site.
 
With said ROM, I was able at least to get the HDMI video and LED’s blinking, but I got stuck at a boot animation loop forever. For some reason, only when I flash it from Windows using BatchTool or RKDevTools it works.
 
At least I was able to test different Loaders, and with this ROM, I have tested successfully all the loaders below, either flashing by Linux or Windows. (Remember: The device gave video and LEDs, but I still got stucked at ROM’s boot screen):
RK322XMiniLoaderAll_V2.47_spectek_en_ddr2_rd_odt_171209.bin – This was extracted from the above ROM image that give me workin LEDS and HDMI Video rk322x_loader_v1.10.238_256 from a 2020 comment on this thread from a guy trying to overclock his ddr memory. rk322x_loader_v1.10.238_256.bin from first page, from the “Installation (without SD card, board with eMMC)” section I was trying to flash different loaders in hope that some of them would make my armbian to boot from the SD card, but without any luck unfortunately.
 
I have also tried to erase the flash completely to force the SD Card boot, but I have got the same no-screen / no-leds behavior.
 
If anybody has any ideas on how to go further to install armbian in this board, I would appreciate a lot! I don’t need the wifi for the purpose I intend to use it, so minimal installation is more than enough for me.
 
I’ve been turning it on mostly with just the USB cable in the OTG port, so at least I can check the device status with lsusb in linux. Sometimes I do some tests with the power cable turned on, and I have noticed the same behavior as well. Does it make any different to turn it on by USB or Power Connector?

I’m still not able to find the Serial UART pins, even after I have tried soldering my USB-TTL in different points of the Board as there is no printed info, so this also adds to the overall complexity. Despite my efforts with the multimeter, I was not able to identify them yet. Since I’m afraid to burn another USB-TLS adapter, I’m being cautious and only using the GND and RX pins from the adapter. So far, I have found 2 interesting pins, but they only give me gibberish text, despite trying different baud rates (I have tried them all). Most promissing PIN for now is the pin labeled “K” in the pic below, as it is the one that gives me more output when the device is booting, almost in the same time as a normal system boot… So my “guess” is that the Pink K is the board TX pin…



Attached there are all the photos of the mentioned components from my board.

RK322Xs is 32 bit ARM CPUs and can only running 32 bit OS so not possible installing aarch64 OS on the hardware.
Also it have not enough RAM (normally 1 or 2 G) for running very large docker containers.

@Joshua allen
 
asking for private chat to solve personal issues  is the most unappropriate way to act in a public forum.
 
For several reasons:

1) your problem could be the same problem for other people sharing your issues, so solving for you could be solving for many
2) this is an hobby for us and not job.     Job is paid, hobby is for free.          if you need help for your personal issue you can give an advice asking for paid help
3)this really is the worst approach to an open community of people that friendly and mutual try to help each others
 
that said....
would you share what is your problem, since you already asked for help ( private help..) in another post ?

describe what is working, what not, attach procedures and photos of board , explain your moves and results
 
We will try to give you a helpful  hand.

@toro2077
If I remember well, and you can confirm by yourself scrolling in older posts, thiw wifi will never ever work since there aren't any driver avaible for this ( infamous) chip s9012p

There is still such a problem. When the device reboots, the USB Ethernet adapter does not initialize. You have to pull it out and put it in again. When the device is turned off, there is no such thing.

@Obmor
here it is a module for kernel 6.6.67 and rtl8189es. Put this module in /lib/modules/6.6.41-current-rockchip/kernel/drivers/net/wireless directory, then run sudo depmod -a and reboot.
If everything went ok, you should get 8189es driver loaded after boot; perhaps you may need a firmware to put somewhere in /lib/firmware. In case, the driver should complain about in dmesg that something is missing or wrong, and that may serve as hint to proceed further.
 
 
8189es.ko.gz

@Obmor
the ssv6051 is one of the best supported chip we studied.
but since some conflicts with 8723as/bs/cs  chip it is blacklisted
is strange because armbian-config should solve the question and give you wifi
try again with armbian-config and select ssv6051 or dig into modules blacklist and comment out ssv6051 ko

wil pm you for additional infos on your project since is a thread not concerning this forum

Everything is here: https://github.com/armbian/build/

@fabiobassa
Now I use this one: https://www.ozon.ru/product/ustroystvo-upravleniya-diskretnymi-signalami-usb-gpio-extender-1757581290/
but there are few lines. I ordered this one more : https://aliexpress.ru/item/1005005823954618.html?sku_id=12000034481303368
 

@zzc @galenzhao @Obmor tvboxes have a huge amount of wireless chip on board and supporting all of them is very difficult and time consuming taks which I can't afford anymore; the APxxxx series is usually supported because they are basically broadcom chips and the driver is there, but their functionality also depends upon the board wiring, the firmware, the nvram, etc... as you see there are several pieces in the puzzle and it is not easy to fit them without some effort.
 
The best advice I could give you if you need basic wireless connectivity, is to buy a mediatek-based (mt7601) USB dongle; the next best advice is to buy SBCs with standard or premium support (not CSC) by armbian

@hmmm the board boots properly if the leds are blinking, but you need to run rk322x-config via SSH and select the proper led-config for R29 boards: these boards are known to turn off HDMI unless a specific GPIO is switched on.

You already have best possible desktop on this hardware. Simple and fast XFCE. Changing desktop environment won't make any vivid difference. 
https://docs.armbian.com/#key-advantages
 
XUbuntu is more or less identical to Armbian Ubuntu with XFCE subtracted for some Canonical proprietary stuff.

LXDE vs. XFCE ... not worth the troubles maintaining yet another desktop. Difference is too small. We only keep XFCE, Gnome, Cinnamon and KDE Neon in good shape. The rest waits for enthusiast https://github.com/armbian/build/tree/main/config/desktop and you can always start with a minimal CLI image and build on top any desktop you want.

@Minoro Hamada Supposing you removed the sdcard from the slot, the only way to tell you what is happening is providing logs from the serial interface. You may have a broken/read only eMMC. Also you did not specify what image, what kernel, what board you have...

@Mr-TNTplease can you send some picture of board ,
 
there are 2 boards with problem first wherer the right LED-Config has to been set with ssh after flash per LAN , the secound has a close bootloader which need a diffirent OPTEE area wich need to be flash seperatly
 
overall normaly when sd-card boot work than  later it should also boot from that , yyou can also flash armbian direct to sdcard and also try to boot from sdcard maybe as short term solution

Hello @Vladimir Trondin, as @fabiobassa already pointed out, there is no driver for ssv6158. Doing some research, it seems that it may use the ssv6x5x driver, but it would require adaptation, plenty of time, plenty of patience and you would not be sure if it will finally work.
 
About the eMMC of your board, it would be handy to get the output of dmesg command, but in the meantime you could do some experimentation with the emmc parameters in rk322x-config withing this page:
 

 
In particular, try to enable emmc-pins and emmc-ddr-ph45 or emmc-ddr-ph180 or emmc-hs200 (these last three are alternative, only one should be enabled) and see if your emmc gets detected after a reboot.
 
Also your board r3229q is not listed within the led-conf options, but I see some similarities with r329q board (led-conf2) MXQPRO_V72 (led-conf6), so you may start trying with those ones, or stick with generic since your wifi is already detected despite being useless.
 

It isn't very big problem, USB dongle Ralink MT7601U works fine.

Looks like problem is related to the newest versions, Armbian_22.02.0-trunk_Rk322x-box_focal_legacy_4.4.194_xfce_desktop.img.xz works fine. But wifi doesn't work (sv6158).

@E O Bernardini From the first page opening post is https://users.armbian.com/jock/rk322x/armbian/stable/ you find the last Jocks builds.

@Parth the soc is slow, it is one of the slowest socs around with a modest amount of memory on board , so don't expect stellar performance.
The image with debian bookworm is a minimal image: small and good for servers.
 
For all the other questions, you can consult the official armbian documentation  https://docs.armbian.com/ and related forums

@fabiobassa
 
my plan here is simple, i wanna use it as a linux box where i can have a 21inch touch screen display running a flutter app. and ofcourse some other nittygritty things like it would be controlling some hardware over usb, would have GSM for network connection and so on. since this is a cheap thing available than a raspberry pi, best to use this for the purpose.

@Parth
Even 3128 is working quite well with linux  just compile kernel with appropriate config and appropriate cpu platform

Regarding the garbage on uart, remember the uart speed is unusual  ( 1500000 NOT 115200 ) until it starts modified uboot that is 115200 so you have to take care of this note

I am the one in this project that discovered the uart pins on mostly of 322x boards and I can give for sure that if garbage comes out is:
wrong pin
wrong speed
lack of ground

On the software - firmware side   can give you answers  @jock  @RaptorSDS and all the friends athat daily work on those boards
 

@hfrts hello!
 
First of all: no documentation from the manufacturs of any kind. Cheap tv boxes come without any kind of documentation: they are dirty cheap hardware with barely working software.
 
The board footprint/silkscreen is indeed the first thing to look for to find the matching led-config: all known boards are listed within the rk322x-config script.
If your board is not listed, then the stock firmware (or its device tree) and photos of the board most of the time are enough to properly match an existing led-config with the board or create a new led-config for a new board.

ah ok , thank you , I'm going to test a usb key wifi