Banana Pi CM4 and IO board interface

[Lion Wang]

BananaPi BPI-CM4 new design with Amlogic A311D Quad core ARM Cortex-A73 and dual core ARM Cortex-A53 CPU ,ARM G52 MP4(6EE) GPU,NPU for AI at 5.0 TOPS, support Camera and MIPI-CSI interface ,HDMI output,2 Gigabit port . 4G RAM and 16 GB eMMC flash.

 

BPI-CM4 hardware interface:

 

 

BPI-CM4 IO baord interface

 

 

 

[ElectricBrain]

Hi, I've had great success with the BPI-CM4 and its associated IO board thanks to the Armbian Linux release.
I've now placed the BPI-CM4 on the Waveshare MINI-BASE-BOARD-A (Rev. 4) with its FE1.1s USB hub chip. Needless to say this has always been something of an issue for these boards. The kernel commandline settings which used to work on the Pi CM4 in their older kernel don't work for me with the 6.1 kernel, although the chip itself appears to be detected. The net result is no keyboard, which in itself, is not a show stopper since ssh works well for me.

My question is: is it possible to get the FE1.1s running easily?

Any help most welcome and thanks in advance.

PhillB

Using images:
Armbian_23.05.0-trunk_Bananapicm4io_bullseye_edge_6.2.12_gnome_desktop.img.xz
Armbian_23.8.1_Bananapicm4io_bookworm_current_6.1.50.img.xz

Everything works for me except keyboard and mouse. Even Docker!

[c0rnelius]

I don't have that baseboard to run tests on, but my guess would be it needs its own DTS file or at the very least, the current one would need to be edited.

 

This would more than likely be true for a lot of obscure baseboard out there, as stated in the initial commit to mainline.

 

Quote

The current CM4IO baseboard DT should work fine on the Raspberry CM4 baseboard and other derivatives baseboards, but proper DT should be written for other baseboards.

 

The keywords there are "should work fine". 

 

To me, it sounds like something just needs to be tweaked on the USB front.

[sgofferj]

I have run into a similar problem with another board. The problem seems to be that the Waveshare board (as well as the other one) connect their hub IC to the OTG port without connecting a line which puts the OTG  port into host mode. In the Banana Pi forums, a tech posted a DTBO for Ubuntu 20.04 which looks like this (decompiled)

 

dts-v1/;

/ {

        fragment@0 {
                target = <0xffffffff>;

                __overlay__ {
                        controller-type = <0x01>;
                };
        };

        fragment@1 {
                target = <0xffffffff>;

                __overlay__ {
                        otg = <0x00>;
                };
        };

        __fixups__ {
                dwc2_a = "/fragment@0:target:0";
                usb3_phy_v2 = "/fragment@1:target:0";
        };
};

 

I do, however, not have the slightest clue how to translate that to the significantly newer armbian kernel... Maybe @c0rnelius can help with that?

[c0rnelius]