RTC with DS3231 on Le Potato

[N6MQD]

Hello all.

 

I'm obviously a newbie to this all and have a Libre Le Potato I just purchased.  Put in Armbian Bullseye and got everything configured so my Python script runs on boot and writes the data it records by sending a byte string through the USB port to a device and records the parsed response.

 

All is well there, but I needed to add an RTC to this and I have many DS3231 boards that I've integrated with Arduino boards recently and they all work well.

 

I've soldered the connections to the 3.3V, GND, SDA, and SCK pins and matched those to the GPIO pins 1, 9, 3, and 5 respectively.

 

I've gone into 'armbian-config' and enabled i2cA and updated everything.

 

My problem is that when I run i2cdetect -l I get that there are two entries:

    i2c-1 which is listed as the DesignWare HDMI

    i2c-0 which is listed as Meson I2C adapter

 

When I try to run i2cdetect -y 0 I don't see the RTC module when connected.

 

Obviously something is not right.

 

I'm trying to run 'armbianmonitor -u' but I'm getting odd responses where I get 'no results to fetch' so I don't have a URL for the log file to review.

 

I've ordered 2 other boards and have the same results.  I know the DS3231 boards are good because they work with Arduino boards without an issue.

 

I'm missing something very obvious.  Please help.

 

Oh, kernel is 5.10.102-meson64 #22.02.1

 

This is frustrating and I don't see very clear step-by-step answers that explain what is happening.

Edited April 26, 2022 by N6MQD
Hit ENTER by mistake mid-post

[N6MQD]

I've re-flashed the image again, and tried for a clean setup.  I see the exact same things.  I can't believe that I need a device tree overlay for this, or maybe that is the problem and the RTC is not supported.

 

Please help.

 

armbianmonitor -u is at http://ix.io/3WPV

 

[Da Xue]

@N6MQD

 

 

You have to do the following: 

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/libre-computer-project/libretech-overlays/for-4.13.y/overlays/meson-gxl-s905x-libretech-cc-i2c-ao.dts

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/libre-computer-project/libretech-overlays/for-4.13.y/overlays/meson-gxl-s905x-libretech-cc-ds3231-i2c-ao.dts

sudo armbian-add-overlay meson-gxl-s905x-libretech-cc-i2c-ao.dts

sudo armbian-add-overlay meson-gxl-s905x-libretech-cc-ds3231-i2c-ao.dts

 

Try running `i2cdetect -y 0` first to make sure that the SDA/SCK doesn't need a pull up resistor. If it does, connect 2 4K pull up from 3.3V to SDA and SCK.

 

You know you need a pull up if i2cdetect shows every address or many addresses that aren't on the bus.