Hello Armbian Community,
As you can see by my post count, I am new to Armbian, but so far have found it to be an amazing resource, and truly appreciate the hard work you all do. Its really impressive, and your knowledge and understanding of SBC’s is incredible.
I am attempting to get Armbian working on a custom A64 device that was originally designed to be used as a Point-of-sale machine, that runs Android. I understand I am venturing into uncharted territory here, and this is absolutely not supported, but it’s a fun project and I am learning a ton. I am asking for help, but realize none may be available.
Here is the hardware I have in hand. It is an A64 board connected to a touchscreen LCD panel, and it seems to be pretty closely related to a Pine64 or BananaPi m64.
Allwinner A64
1gb RAM
4gb eMMC
10/100 Ethernet
WiFi, Bluetooth (AP6212)
15”, 1920x1080 touchscreen
HDMI output
microSD Card slot
12-volt power barrel
Android image based on the Allwinner BSP (u-boot 2014.7, kernel 3.10.65, and a sys_config.fex file)
And here is what I have observed thus far:
Just to begin isolating the hardware and testing what works / what doesn’t work, I ran a series of tests. This board can boot a vanilla Armbian 5.35 Pine64 image, and HDMI output works, ethernet works, and the touchscreen actually works even though the LCD is not lit or utilized. It functions like a giant trackpad thought, and I can move the mouse cursor on the HDMI monitor by running my finger across the unlit touchscreen. eMMC is not recognized by this image, however.
Next, I custom built the (unsupported) BananaPi m64 Armbian image, and with this build I gained eMMC support, but lost ethernet. So, I believe the U-boot configuration differences led to those results.
Attempting a brand new Pinebook Armbian 5.35 image, the board would not boot, I believe due to the difference in DDR3 memory used on that board.
And here is what I *think* might be my path forward, but could use some guidance / assistance on:
I would like to get the LCD panel lit up. I believe this requires a conversion of the sys_config.fex file in to a Device Tree, but am unsure where to place a full device tree file in the Armbian build folder. I believe this also requires some U-boot modification, but am not certain.
I would like to achieve both ethernet and eMMC, so I believe this requires some sort of mashup of the BananaPi m64 U-boot (eMMC working, ethernet killed) along with the Pine64 U-boot config (no eMMC, but ethernet working).
If there is any additional information needed that I forgot to provide, I apologize, just let me know and I’ll do my best to get it. And, as I mentioned, I appreciate the efforts of the Armbian developers and community, and understand I am in unsupported territory here.
Thanks again,
David