[OPC3 serial questions on bionic or other]

Many thanx Martin Ayotte and Igor and all the others for your advice.

Except for the look into the crystal ball regarding the likelyhood of getting stable all seems as clear as possible to me.

The s-uart works as expected on ttyS2 and Olimex Lime Boards are now in our internal discussion possibly with an usb-wlan-module...

 

[OPC3 serial questions on bionic or other]

On 12/2/2019 at 11:28 PM, martinayotte said:

 

But for S-UART, you can't load overlay using the usual way in /boot/armbianEnv.txt, otherwise, it will get priority over /dev/ttyS0 (UART0) and debug port.

 

That are hopefully my final questions on this topic.

What is the meaning of "get prioritiy over ttyS0 UART0"?
Will it be routed to the 3 pin header und UART0 disconnected?
Or what is meant? Just to fully understand...

[OPC3 serial questions on bionic or other]

On 12/7/2019 at 8:42 AM, Igor said:

Once again. Armbian Ubuntu X and/or Armbian Debian Y are identical in low level functions. They share identical ATF, boot loader and kernel.

 

WLAN is missing, but everything works for some time and all most popular USB based are supported out of the box. On Orangepi3 (and most other more recent boards) you need to wait until things are ironed out and until board support become matured. This will certainly not happen in 2019, while Lime boards already runs stable for years.

 

I got your point on low-level function but ive shown you the difference in LEDstatus-boot handling on the vendor debian/ubuntu images. Which could be important in some way...
 

Regarding wlan the problem is: i've got a requirement on WLAN etc. . List see above. And the idea with the orangepi 3 seems reasonable in the first place, but this maybe an error. Now I know this OPi3 device is wip so i asked about the 6 months above. Now ive learned that the wip-status is not different per distribution but same for all. So if it leaves wip status the drivers and configuration are ok.

So how likely is it to leave wip in 6 months? How long does this usually take? How likely is that it never leaves wip?
 

 

[OPC3 serial questions on bionic or other]

23 hours ago, martinayotte said:

There no need for addtionnal electtronics. There is no difference between UART and S-UART, the "S" prefix only mean there are connected to PL gpio bank.

Sorry, but there is a need on the side of the serial sevice to be attached. For example, the serial devices operate at different voltages. But whats so special about the PL bank to distinguish it from the other banks? I know they are all 32 gpio cpupins/numbers wide and the L stand for the multiplier eleven.

What does the "S-" stand for?

[OPC3 serial questions on bionic or other]

Hello, sorry for the delayed response.

Were using the OrangePi3 for some reason: cheapness and features, i've bought a small bunch of them for developement purposes in China. 

Dear Igor my answer regarding the missing wlan meant the Olimex Lime boards. They seem to lack wlan. The orangepi3s not.

And regarding the buster, bionic etc. issue. We used the distributions delivered by Orange Pi in the first place. I tried first their debian server version which run into some heat issues, after that i red that there are debian issues with the Thermal mangement on the h6 (or h5) so i tried to avoid debian versions. The ubuntu versions worked but they totally lack configuration tools.  And the Leds during the bootup process behave different. the debians went green after successful bootup, the ubuntu stays red.
After some research i found armbian where i choosed the ubuntu version for the same reasons.

The led sequence is also important because we need to signalise the bootup und the successful communication with the two serial devices after bootup. Which is not a problem but i would prefer the ubuntu always-red-version until we take control and talk to the devices.
Thats are the reasons why i'm sticking to bionic.

 

 

 

Dear Martin Mayotte

this is the result  of  dmesg |grep tty after adding your suggested lines to rc.local on my OrangePi3
[    2.079931] printk: console [ttyS0] enabled
[    2.101376] 5000400.serial: ttyS1 at MMIO 0x5000400 (irq = 20, base_baud = 1500000) is a 16550A
[    3.015818] 5000c00.serial: ttyS3 at MMIO 0x5000c00 (irq = 21, base_baud = 1500000) is a 16550A
[   16.846519] 7080000.serial: ttyS2 at MMIO 0x7080000 (irq = 243, base_baud = 1500000) is a 16550A

 

it seems that the S-UART got ttyS2, could this change in future or is it sure that i will always be ttyS2 also on other devices . (if there are no changes in hardware of course)

Somebody told to me that a S-UART is also or mostly called USART and also RUART is this correct?
Or are there some minor differences? Googleing on this is extremely inefficent.

Because of some additional needed electronics its a little bit tricky just to put the interface to the other pins so i have one further question.

Is a S-Uart capable of behaving asyncronous as a normal uart or are there some limitations. I couldnt find documentation on S-UARTS.
I have to use it in the range of 9600 to 115200 bps on a normal serial connection.

Many thanks.

 

 

[OPC3 serial questions on bionic or other]

12 minutes ago, Igor said:

@Michael S

In case you need lots of UART's consider getting Olimex Lime boards.

Thanks for the idea. Hadn't considered them until now. But they seem not to support wlan. But i will surely check them more deeply.

my complete spec is:

8gb emmc, sdcard, lan+wlan, 2 freely useable serial ports, enough Power+RAM for Linux+python+frameworks+webserver etc.

But we go a little off-topic, the Orange Pi 3 device works fine for me except for the ttyS1 which may or may not my fault.
Does it even possibly correlate to the bionic version? Other experiences?

 

Just to make clear. I'm new to the development on this side. I'm asking to get advice and to document problems to be found by others with similar issues. At the moment I'm not able to fix serial problems on the driver or kernel side. And if there could be build a meaningful package without experiance is the question...

 

So as i understood some of the answers: Theres not much difference between buster/stretch and bionic and no one is working on bionic so there will be no future version of it. Is this right? Are there any "official" (quoted by intention) statements regarding this? Who are the people working on the Orange Pi 3 support? Is there a list?

 

To get totally offtopic: What qualifies a package to be mentioned on the primary devices download page and what disqualifies them so they get removed. If i think longer on some of the answers it seems to me that i lack understanding of the armbian processes - but be nice to a beginner...

thanks to all repliers

[OPC3 serial questions on bionic or other]

Hello there,

 

I tried to use on  OPC3 bionic the ttyS1 for communcation with a serial device and didn't get it to work.

ttyS3 works fine. Configuration is done for both.

 

But now I need to communicate with a second and possibly a third serial device.

So I hoped for updates. But now I can't find a download of the bionic version and i have to make decision how to go further on.
Does it make sense to switch to buster or stretch? 

Is bionic only temporarily or finally offline? Whats the reason?
Any idea when there is a chance to get a stable release. Possibly with 6 Months or surely not within 6 months. Which version is more likely to be stable within 6 months.

 

What happend to ttyS2?

 

Does UART1 correlate to ttyS1... etc. 
I enabled, just for testing, the Overlays for UART1, UART2,UART3, which disables the Ethernet interface.

After disabling UART2 Ethernet works fine again. Do they share memory or other resources? Could it be a bug or a feature?
 

Is there a chance to stop kernel messages on ttyS0 completely so this can be used to attach a device?

Sorry for the bunch of questions and many thanks in advance.