fabiobassa

@gurzixo

Ciao Michel, welcome in this valley of tears lol lol lol
Well, another lovely board with no SD reader and this makes the whole story a bit complicated , but not impossible to solve.
Ant thank you so much for photos and serial uart log, this really helps

The kernel as you can see is starting and the kernel panic could be for wrong trust_os, wrong dtb, not mounting the root fs ,one only or all 3 causes lol
If you have original firmware you can extract the pieces and in particular dtb with this tool
RK3xxx_firmware_tools_5.23.1_by_SergioPoverony.zip
(google for it ) but I guess you have nothing of different from other boards with ddr3 and emmc

Let's wait @jock for further infos on how to approach at this rare study case but I can say to you for sure that it will boot

You are new so cannot post many posts in the first days , you must wait I believe one day for other post.
And don't forget to click a " like" ( the heart icon) for helping good reputation of authors
Where are you from if I can ask , and have you some skills on linux so it will be in some manner easier?
 
EDIT:

I attached a command line CLI only windows tool to extract pieces from a firmware , try it please
 
imgRePackerRK_106.zip

OHHHH and finally here it goes 

Bravo Alex, but more bravo Jock

@rlukas210

hello and welcome on this 3ad
would you be so kind to provide us some photos of your board , thank you so much !

And you are newbie so you must wait one day for replay ( forum rules    )

Erasing the NAND with rkdeveloptool was not a smart move, as you noticed right now the NAND is not detected anymore.
First of all, be aware that everytime you reboot the box, unplug the power cord and detach the serial connectors from the board if you have them attached: NAND boxes are very sensitive to even the lowest current.
As long as you tried both Armbian and LibreELEC, you should specify what image you did try: forget the mainline kernel images, they won't work with NAND because there is no driver. You must use legacy 4.4 kernel images.
 
From my point of view, as long as you erased the flash (thus removed the original idbloader), you may do something smarter and use the sdcard to understand if legacy kernel Armbian/LE boots from sdcard or not.
If it is not booting, you need to attach a serial adapter and take some logs because something wrong is happening and the kernel is not able to boot.
Note that probably you will need to erase the flash again if you installed a non working idbloader to make the board boot from sdcard without interferences.
 
Instead, if Armbian or LE are booting fine from sdcard, proceeding to restoring the NAND functionality can happen.
 
As @fabiobassa said, photos and signatures of the board as useful to understand if it is a known board or similar. I have an MXQ Pro 4K tv box right here and it looks similar to yours, but the commercial name is worthless since the board inside may be of a different revision with different components.

@dale
since you are able to manage linux and linux command , you can enjoy yourself with a chron command too:
a simple bash script that in the morning at 8:00 ( or when is usefull for you) does a
echo default-on ( ot timer or heartbeat or cpu0 ) >>> /sys/class/leds/here_the_name_of_your_led/trigger  
and the at 20:00 ( or when is usefull for you) does a
echo none ( ATTENTION: none and default on " could be inverted as logical but you will realize it by yourself ;-) ) >>> /sys/class/leds/put_here_your_led_name/trigger  
If you are electronic skilled, too, you can even control something with a simple transistor and a relay attached to that led
 

@dale
 
ty so much for sharing your experiments. This helps  @jock and me to better understand behaviour of some boxes that haven't sd card reader , ddr3 and nand.
The u-boot legacy we realized have some difficult to proper initialize the usb: it's random failure so quite difficult to debug, maybe jock will investigate further or/and rewrite some pieces of code to proper start USB subsystem but this requires it's time. For now we are glad your board is functional

@Seth
ty for sharing the dtb and your experiences, too

@fabiobassa
well, i'm gonna tinker with it a bit more and post any progress. i put files there for others to use as reference just in case they encounter same problems as mine. cheers.
 
 
 

Hi @jock,
Play around with rockchip tv box is always such an interesting thing.
I tried to boot off usb drive with 3 types of image:
1) same with image flashed into NAND (buster legacy) --> Armbian could boot from usb drive
2) focal legacy image --> could not boot armbian just ignored the usb drive and booted right from NAND
3) Multiboot --> could not boot, armbian just ignored the usb drive and booted right from NAND
 

@dale
Glad everything is working . Later personally will investigate vwhy multitool doesn t work as expected 
And don't forget help good reputation of authors with a simple like, thanks !
 
@Seth
What exactly do you want to achieve now?
Maybe I missed something
 
 
 
 
 

@dale
Glad everything is working . Later personally will investigate vwhy multitool doesn t work as expected 
And don't forget help good reputation of authors with a simple like, thanks !
 
@Seth
What exactly do you want to achieve now?
Maybe I missed something
 
 
 
 
 

@hexdump
thanks. i managed to get device tree from android box. nice guide.
 
@jock
i got the dmesg, will upload tomorrow, i need some sleep.
 
@fabiobassa
box is working fine as headless super router at the moment, running soho dhcp, dns server/cache, squid transparent proxy/cache. will slowly try to improve it as i learn more about these little things. i remember, i used to install debian/pfsense on old p3 and p4 boards just to get a reliable mega router/firewall and run squid and squidguard on em. now i can do that at the fraction of the size and power consumption. Just when i thought those boxes couldn't get any wierder.
 
I found an s9012.ko in /lib/modules folder btw.

@Seth

no worries, feel free to ask as many info as we are able to explain
Consider that dtb isn't related only to rockchip so studying, understanding them will help ALSO with rockchip but not only with them ( also with allwinner, amlogic )
The kernels @jock compiled ( both legacy and main) are already optimized for having all out of the box in MOST cases but of course new devilish boxes can appear on market
I am sure your box will work

 

@Seth

what do you mean extract config from original firmware?
behaviour of led are defined in the dtb PLUS kernel : example I have my two leds one is just heartbeat and the other is emmc ( or cpu0 ) activity just because it remembers me a spinning hard drive. This is my PERSONAL approach in the dtb just an example
 
gpio-leds { compatible = "gpio-leds"; pinctrl-names = "default"; pinctrl-0 = <0x75>; blue { gpios = <0x3f 0x7 0x1>; label = "blue"; linux,default-trigger = "timer"; default-state = "off"; }; red { gpios = <0x6e 0x15 0x1>; label = "red"; linux,default-trigger = "cpu0"; default-state = "off"; };
Regarding hdmi it should work out of the box

as @hexdump said the original dtb would be great help

@Seth - it might be good to get the dtb from the box - in case no other way works, this approach so far worked for nearly every android tv box for me: https://github.com/hexdump0815/u-boot-misc/tree/master/misc.h616-legacy/android-device-tree-copy
 
good luck - hexdump

@dale

hello dale, would you try this loader and give us feedback , please
 
RK322XMiniLoaderAll_V2.47_spectek_en_ddr2_rd_odt_171127.bin

Good day @fabiobassa, I feel so dumb now. Re-reading the messages I found this one from @hexdump. Turns out, this was the key to make it work. I stupidly focused in more complex (for me) instructions. 
 
I have succesfully booted the device with Armbian, lacking wifi support. I found out that LibreElec loads the module for rtl8723bs and works fine. So now I'm looking into compiling that module for the kernel. Another thing I noticed is that the kernel "sees" only 1GB of RAM, not 2GB of RAM. But those are things I will try to workout once I manage (if I manage) to compile the kernel succefully .
 
Thanks again for your patience and dedication. If you need any information from my device let me know.
 
Once I get all working I would let you guys know!
 

@Alvaro Fernandez
bom dia Alvaro, yes forum limitation for new users .
@jock and me we suspect of a strange ddrbin ( in the idbloader) that isn't compatible 100% with some ddr . Nota all ddrs just few .
Jock is trying to assemble an image just for you for this RARE case , for your tests, but give him some time, please.

@Seth

Thank you so much for reporting the experience, so you used 0xccccccc for flashing idbloader !!!

Interesting I will do further  investigations. TY

@edouard_k

ty for sharing the original firmware, always interesting dig into them.
 

@Alvaro Fernandez
bom dia Alvaro, yes forum limitation for new users .
@jock and me we suspect of a strange ddrbin ( in the idbloader) that isn't compatible 100% with some ddr . Nota all ddrs just few .
Jock is trying to assemble an image just for you for this RARE case , for your tests, but give him some time, please.

@Seth

Thank you so much for reporting the experience, so you used 0xccccccc for flashing idbloader !!!

Interesting I will do further  investigations. TY

@edouard_k

ty for sharing the original firmware, always interesting dig into them.
 

@fabiobassa @jock
For further infos and helping more people would you be so kind to post some screenshots and a more detailled procedure !?
 
Hi again. so i got the box for about $13.00 online. it was marketed as an MXQ Pro 5G 4G/32G which was totally fake so i opened it and found out that is was just 1G/8G and that it was an RK3228. I tried backing up the firmware with rkdevtool in loader mode and only got about 0x0h to 0x10000h. i tried to write it back and it wouldn't boot anymore. I tried flashing it with armbian and rkdevtool and still no luck then i saw @qiheng's post (thank god he posted pictures) and copied his rkdevtool config and placed the box in maskrom using the pin short method. pinout is here. i just shorted clk to vss/gnd pin. and the flashing worked! Here are the pics of the board, it's marked R28-MXQ-00813, has DDR3 and 8GB flash. I also found the UART pins at the back of the board the 2 pads close to a bunch of capacitors under the cpu, the closest pad to the capacitors is the TX pin and the pad next to it is the RX pin, i just connected the gnd pin to power gnd. Here's the pic, green is tx and white is rx. uboot boots fine but it can't continue booting. i used legacy buster with 4.4 kernel. Orange led is blinking and i got the log below from putty.  Apparently, it can't find boot.env.
 
Serial baud rate is 115200
DDR Version V1.10 20190926 In ID:0xFFF 600MHz DDR3 Bus Width=32 Col=11 Bank=8 Row=14 CS=1 Die Bus-Width=16 Size=1024MB mach:4 OUT U-Boot SPL 2020.10-armbian (Dec 12 2020 - 01:47:28 +0100) Trying to boot from MMC2 I/TC: I/TC: Non-secure external DT found I/TC: Switching console to device: /serial@11030000 I/TC: OP-TEE version: 3.10.0-40-ga1d5c81f (gcc version 9.2.1 20191025 (GNU Toolc hain for the A-profile Architecture 9.2-2019.12 (arm-9.10))) #6 Wed Sep 16 21:36 :15 UTC 2020 arm I/TC: Primary CPU initializing M/TC: Not protecting region 1: 0x68400000-0x68600000 I/TC: Primary CPU switching to normal world boot U-Boot 2020.10-armbian (Dec 12 2020 - 01:47:28 +0100) Model: Generic Rockchip rk322x TV Box board DRAM: 992 MiB MMC: dwmmc@30000000: 1, dwmmc@30020000: 0 Loading Environment from EXT4... ** File not found /boot/boot.env ** ** Unable to read "/boot/boot.env" from mmc0:1 ** In: serial@11030000 Out: serial@11030000 Err: serial@11030000 Model: Generic Rockchip rk322x TV Box board Net: eth0: ethernet@30200000 starting USB... Bus usb@30040000: USB DWC2 scanning bus usb@30040000 for devices... 1 USB Device(s) found scanning usb for storage devices... 0 Storage Device(s) found stopping USB.. starting USB... Bus usb@30040000: USB DWC2 scanning bus usb@30040000 for devices... 1 USB Device(s) found scanning usb for storage devices... 0 Storage Device(s) found Hit any key to stop autoboot: 0 Card did not respond to voltage select! Device 0: unknown device switch to partitions #0, OK mmc0(part 0) is current device Scanning mmc 0:1... Found U-Boot script /boot/boot.scr 2909 bytes read in 3 ms (946.3 KiB/s) ## Executing script at 60000000 Boot script loaded from mmc 0 214 bytes read in 3 ms (69.3 KiB/s) 5694356 bytes read in 140 ms (38.8 MiB/s) 8771432 bytes read in 206 ms (40.6 MiB/s) 49812 bytes read in 7 ms (6.8 MiB/s) Failed to load '/boot/dtb/overlay/-fixup.scr' ## Loading init Ramdisk from Legacy Image at 64000000 ... Image Name: uInitrd Image Type: ARM Linux RAMDisk Image (gzip compressed) Data Size: 5694292 Bytes = 5.4 MiB Load Address: 00000000 Entry Point: 00000000 Verifying Checksum ... OK ## Flattened Device Tree blob at 61f00000 Booting using the fdt blob at 0x61f00000 Loading Ramdisk to 67e91000, end 683ff354 ... OK Loading Device Tree to 67e1c000, end 67e90fff ... OK Starting kernel ... I/TC: Secondary CPU 1 initializing I/TC: Secondary CPU 1 switching to normal world boot I/TC: Secondary CPU 2 initializing I/TC: Secondary CPU 2 switching to normal world boot I/TC: Secondary CPU 3 initializing I/TC: Secondary CPU 3 switching to normal world boot  
I tried flashing kernel 5.9 minimal buster and i get this:
DDR Version V1.10 20190926 In ID:0xFFF 600MHz DDR3 Bus Width=32 Col=11 Bank=8 Row=14 CS=1 Die Bus-Width=16 Size=1024MB mach:4 OUT U-Boot SPL 2020.10-armbian (Dec 12 2020 - 01:48:33 +0100) Trying to boot from MMC2 I/TC: I/TC: Non-secure external DT found I/TC: Switching console to device: /serial@11030000 I/TC: OP-TEE version: 3.10.0-40-ga1d5c81f (gcc version 9.2.1 20191025 (GNU Toolchain for the A-profile Architecture 9.2-2019.12 (arm-9.10))) #6 Wed Sep 16 21:36:15 UTC 2020 arm I/TC: Primary CPU initializing M/TC: Not protecting region 1: 0x68400000-0x68600000 I/TC: Primary CPU switching to normal world boot U-Boot 2020.10-armbian (Dec 12 2020 - 01:48:33 +0100) Model: Generic Rockchip rk322x TV Box board DRAM: 992 MiB MMC: dwmmc@30000000: 1, dwmmc@30020000: 0 Loading Environment from EXT4... ** File not found /boot/boot.env ** ** Unable to read "/boot/boot.env" from mmc0:1 ** In: serial@11030000 Out: serial@11030000 Err: serial@11030000 Model: Generic Rockchip rk322x TV Box board Net: eth0: ethernet@30200000 starting USB... Bus usb@30040000: USB DWC2 scanning bus usb@30040000 for devices... 1 USB Device(s) found scanning usb for storage devices... 0 Storage Device(s) found stopping USB.. starting USB... Bus usb@30040000: USB DWC2 scanning bus usb@30040000 for devices... 1 USB Device(s) found scanning usb for storage devices... 0 Storage Device(s) found Hit any key to stop autoboot: 0 Card did not respond to voltage select! Device 0: unknown device switch to partitions #0, OK mmc0(part 0) is current device Scanning mmc 0:1... Found U-Boot script /boot/boot.scr 2909 bytes read in 3 ms (946.3 KiB/s) ## Executing script at 60000000 Boot script loaded from mmc 0 243 bytes read in 3 ms (79.1 KiB/s) 6017211 bytes read in 148 ms (38.8 MiB/s) 9681360 bytes read in 226 ms (40.9 MiB/s) 40937 bytes read in 6 ms (6.5 MiB/s) 410 bytes read in 5 ms (80.1 KiB/s) Applying kernel provided DT overlay rk322x-emmc-nand.dtbo 1286 bytes read in 6 ms (209 KiB/s) Applying kernel provided DT overlay rk322x-led-conf1.dtbo 232 bytes read in 6 ms (37.1 KiB/s) Applying kernel provided DT fixup script (rk322x-fixup.scr) ## Executing script at 600f0000 ## Loading init Ramdisk from Legacy Image at 64000000 ... Image Name: uInitrd Image Type: ARM Linux RAMDisk Image (gzip compressed) Data Size: 6017147 Bytes = 5.7 MiB Load Address: 00000000 Entry Point: 00000000 Verifying Checksum ... OK ## Flattened Device Tree blob at 61f00000 Booting using the fdt blob at 0x61f00000 Loading Ramdisk to 67e42000, end 683ff07b ... OK Loading Device Tree to 67dcf000, end 67e41fff ... OK Starting kernel ... I/TC: Secondary CPU 1 initializing I/TC: Secondary CPU 1 switching to normal world boot I/TC: Secondary CPU 2 initializing I/TC: Secondary CPU 2 switching to normal world boot I/TC: Secondary CPU 3 initializing I/TC: Secondary CPU 3 switching to normal world boot Armbian 20.11.3 Buster ttyS2 rk322x-box login: iamgroot Password: Last login: Sat Dec 12 10:39:28 UTC 2020 on ttyS2 _ _________ ____ _ _ __| | _|___ /___ \|___ \__ __ | |__ _____ __ | '__| |/ / |_ \ __) | __) \ \/ /____| '_ \ / _ \ \/ / | | | < ___) / __/ / __/ > <_____| |_) | (_) > < |_| |_|\_\____/_____|_____/_/\_\ |_.__/ \___/_/\_\ Welcome to Armbian 20.11.3 Buster with Linux 5.9.14-rk322x No end-user support: community creations System load: 27% Up time: 0 min Memory usage: 5% of 960M IP: CPU temp: 63°C Usage of /: 8% of 7.0G [ 0 security updates available, 17 updates total: apt upgrade ] Last check: 2020-12-12 10:40 iamgroot@rk322x-box:~$ No wifi or x yet but it's a start. serial seems to freeze sometimes, maybe because of my cloned pl2303 usb ttl. maybe i should get a better usb to uart. after repeated reboots, i managed to run rk322x-config successfully. i don't know what the wifi chip, it's marked S9012 and when i searched for it only transistors came up. lol.

@Seth

very very glad to see your board is working, so happy !!!!!

For further infos and helping more people would you be so kind to post some screenshots and a more detailled procedure !?

And don't forget a " like" ( the heart symbol)  for  authors to help them in good forum reputation !!!



 

weeee! i got it booting. orange light blinks. flashed it in maskrom mode. flashed the loader from first post at 0xcccccccc and armbian image at 0x0. it worked. now i need to hunt for uart rx and tx pins. thanks @jock and @fabiobassa. i just hope i don't break the board while searching for uart pins.

@zero48
 
......... night is made for sleeping  for mostly people on the earth, but not for tecnicians ajajajajaj

@zero48
 
......... night is made for sleeping  for mostly people on the earth, but not for tecnicians ajajajajaj

But with the sd-multitool have you at least a try-to-boot ?
Those boards are UNBRICKABLE because the real bootstrap is in the soc itself. I have many with broken nand or emmc that I desoldered and they boot flawlessly from SD of course with right ddrbin U-Boot and the hellish trust-os.
Later if is phisically broken the sdcard reader, well YES it died with honor LOL 
( And.... ... There still is last thing to try but the process is long)

@Maker39
not more than yesterday, in private chat @jock and me we were saying that this 3ad is SUPER because many others users, such as you actively help people.
This is right spirit of a forum