Technicavolous

As in this Armbian forum I am regularly diagnosing power issues. I've answered with this info on a few different posts over the years but I wanted this in one place so my students and the Armbian forum could discuss it. You will read over and over the importance of good power, both in the supply, the cables, and the connection. Anything that causes the voltage to drop below each boards threshold will cause problems that seem to have no explanation. The board may run and appear to be 'working' but operations that draw more power may fail and let the processor continue running. You might think a fully functional board has software failures. It's hair pulling, especially for those uneducated in power issues. Without attempting to teach a power class I've come up with some tools that can 'prove' weather the power supply and cables can deliver the power you expect. There's deep math and science to all of it, but what we really need is to be able to 'trust' our power. These tools can help us 'prove' our power is at least staying above the levels we expect. When there are so many variables in a situation we have to eliminate things to narrow down the problem. Since power is frequently the problem and fairly easy to prove, it's smart to start there. But how? We use our tools to test what we need to eliminate. We used to use banks of resistors and separate power and current meters to measure power draw and voltage drop, but these days there are inexpensive tools called DC Electronic Loads that do this for us. I've purchased numerous versions and models, and they've all been good at what they are designed for yet lacking in some other things. A trade off of quality for expense, but good enough really is good enough. Basically they have a transistor and a very low value resistor across the output and your power supply is pulsed with a PWM across that transistor. The width of the pulse determines the current draw on your power supply, effectively 'simulating' power draw from your device while displaying the voltage at the point of the load and the draw current. You simply attach your power supply and increase the load until the voltage drops below the supply's rating. If the voltage stays above its voltage rating at its rated current, it passes. If not, it fails. Almost as simple as that. I usually let the thing run for a while and check for heating, voltage drop over time and shutdown. Sometimes failure comes with heat. If you have a 5v power supply that's rated at 4 amps, and your load reports 4.9v at 4A draw, your supply has failed. The image below shows a successful test of a popular power supply, the Meanwell RD65A., a dual voltage supply rated for 3A at 12v, and 6A at 5v. As you can see in the photos the voltage stays above its rating at the rated current. This particular photo was taken after approximately 40 minutes running at full load, which is highly inadvisable for this kind of power supply. Usually one would never run over 80% load continuously, but hey, this was a burn test. The only thing that failed here was the load, as the fan sensors on these particular models are somewhat flawed and overheat at less than their rating and shut down. Both the load and supply were run to their limits and we 'proved' this is a viable supply for our purposes. Here is an ebay search in the US that has similar inexpensive loads - https://www.ebay.com/sch/sis.html?_id=172461371107&_nkw=Constant+Current+Electronic+Load+9.99A+60W+1-30V+Battery+Capacity+Tester%23S and Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/s?k=DC+Electronic+Load+Tester&ref=nb_sb_noss They can be inexpensive and the fancy high power ones can be quite expensive ... find one that suits your needs. With another voltmeter you can check the drop in your cables. Set up the load to draw what you think is appropriate, note the voltage at the load. Then using the voltmeter measure the voltage at the power supply. Note the difference between the voltage at the supply and the voltage at the load. Viola, there's your drop. Is it good enough to run your board? Most 5v boards complain at 5v. They want above 5v, like 5.1. This is only a basic test, you can go a lot further but this will definitely prove your supply or fail it. If you really get into testing get some inline current measuring tools so you can see what your board is actually drawing. Most voltmeters have inline current meters and many are quite accurate and detailed. Watching the current draw on your board as you perform various operations can tell you if you have a hardware problem; if it draws more than the manufacturer specifies then there may well be a hardware issue. I hope this motivates someone to go farther with testing and proving their power.

You have wiped out your input voltage circuit. To be brutally sincere you've probably destroyed the board. That being said, take a look at the schematics - http://wiki.espressobin.net/tiki-index.php?page=Schematics select your model ... scroll down to page 14 and look at U9 - the regulator ... if all you did was wipe that out, you could replace it. You will need hot air soldering equipment and skills. HOWEVER, it's my experience that when over voltage is applied to a regulator, many times it fails by passing the power rather than blocking it. There is a good chance that 19 volts was applied to many 1.8 and 3.3 v circuits. In that case your board is toast. Mark it up to expensive education ... we've all done it. Most of us have plugged 12v into 5v boards that have no regulation. In that case the board is also toast.

any chance you had samba installed? This is old - but maybe it give you an idea? https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-configure-bind-as-a-private-network-dns-server-on-ubuntu-14-04 This guy had an interesting comment - https://serverfault.com/a/396720 as this was an interesting read - https://serverfault.com/questions/352305/why-can-windows-machines-resolve-local-names-when-linux-cant again all old. Your issue is making me realize I have a lot to learn about dns. With the exception of dns over https it seems to have all been covered a while ago. I'll be a few days to have my espressobin 5 running. Not sure I'll be any help but I'll be watching...

@le51 if you click the 'Reveal Hidden Contents' under one of my posts you will see my sig which has most of the boards I regularly mess with. If there's one on the list you would prefer me to use let me know. I'd like to use the Tinkerboard, PineH64B, C2 and RockPro64. I'm not sure the C2 has a 'normal' Pi2 header. That's not really a problem though as one can individually jump the I2C and SPI lines. I have the PineH64B sitting on the desk but it is currently 'No Official Support.' The RockPro64 has a PCIe(?) slot and I have a soundcard for it so I think it best to start with the Tinkerboard. Current Tinkerboard Download - Bionic Desktop with 5.4 or 4.4 ? I assume 5.4? Starting from a clean install and update, what to do first?

Could this mean as it says that it will ONLY forward? Have you tried 'no' just to eliminate validation? So is this not resolving the IP or the KEY? These fellows were trying to get a forwarder working and had to turn their dnssec-validation 'off' to forward, indicating that if dnssec-validation is set to anything other than off it may look for some kind of key, which the error above appears to be. https://serverfault.com/questions/538397/why-is-my-dns-server-not-forwarding If it turns out that changing dnssec-validation to 'no' works, you might want to look at that message about keys - // If BIND logs error messages about the root key being expired, // you will need to update your keys. See https://www.isc.org/bind-keys I have only recently decided to study DNS please excuse me if I'm stating the obvious or being stupid ;]

You are amazing sir ;] Thank you

Thanks!! We have a few Orange Pi old timers in our group ;] There used to be 'Support Ended' boards listed but I don't see them any more. Is it possible to have a list of EOL boards and maybe their last releases?

I was updating some images and thought the Orange Pi + had been retired ... but there was no Support Ended note. I see a lot of other Plus versions of Orange pi boards listed, but not the plain Orange Pi +. Seems easy to miss ;] A little searching found the Orange Pi + is supported https://www.armbian.com/orange-pi-plus/ Am I just missing the link in Downloads? The only way I've been able to get to the page is by direct url or a duckduckgo search https://duckduckgo.com/?q="orange+pi+plus"+armbian&t=raspberrypi&ia=web

Yes, after I posted it ... nice though, I learned more about the chip from that board. They printed their schematic and it clearly shows it's only attached to the mic in, but there are left and right line in. So another board with the same chip should handle it. I guess it finally got through my head that the boards I have already use the wm8731. I broke out my PineH64B and Tinkerboard each of which I think have the Pi2 bus so the pinout should be compatible. Yes I've read @guidol 's post numerous times. It is just now beginning to sink in, thank you for (again) pointing it out to me. Like I said, I'm solid once I learn something, but this is new to me and will take a bit of pounding to get it through my head. I'm making this post from my PineH64B and snd-soc-wm8731.ko is not there. Guess I'll learn to compile a ko file. The wm5824, wm8782 and wm8904 are listed though I couldn't find any board with those chips in a quick search. If you are willing to do a little hand holding I'll be happy to send you one, PM me your address and I'll have one dropped from Amazon. This project will benefit a bunch of Amateur Radio operators so I'm willing to invest a bit to make it go a little quicker.

It's going to be a while shipping, found this board with same codec - I assume code would be the same with any board that has this codec? EDIT: Sometimes it takes me a bit to 'wake up' ... will try this with a few different boards in the lab this evening with the audio injectors...

WOW I didn't have my notifications on and just saw this ... ordered tonight, will report back when I get it. thanks a bunch!!

I have several HC1s in service very long time running armbian with isp-config installed from armbian-config. (Thank you, Igor, armbian-config rocks!) Very stable and performs excellently. We have one set up as NAS, I believe OMV. It works well but has little load so we never see any stress on it.

I'm back on this ... they ended up using a Pi and these boards - http://www.audioinjector.net/rpi-zero https://fe-pi.com/products/fe-pi-audio-z-v2 But they STILL can't beat the heavy lifting that armbian-config does for us. (thanks!!) Multiple USB audio sticks just didn't do the trick, a physical problem I'll leave out of this conversation. I've looked at other posts where people do things with the device tree overlay. Yeah, that's overlay'ed over my head unless someone holds my hand through it. SO - I'll buy someone the boards and a couple beverages or whatever you would like to get one of these or any gpio audio board working with ANY Armbian supported board. We have lots of Armbian supported hardware here and if you choose one we don't then we'll get one or two. I'm at the point to pay someone to get one going for me. Feel free to send a direct message.

Of the boards supported by Armbian, which do you prefer for multiple audio devices and audio related applications? I need to control two audio streams, in and out each and add information to the streams as appropriate. I would like to use as little external hardware as possible so stereo mic or dual mic input and stereo out would be awesome. I'm a little overwhelmed by the choices, so opinions are definitely welcome here.

Well, take a close look at your hardware - is the emmc installed?? Just because you bought it doesn't mean you got what you paid for. emmc is an OPTION on the espressobin v5 and v7. I have a v5 without emmc and it gives an error if I try to install to emmc. Look under the board - on a v5 with the ethernet ports oriented toward you there should be four chips to the right of center. Is there a place for a fourth one with an outline and no chip? No emmc ...