@Geronimo

you have one of the most problematic board ( I own many of them, but all are working having only some problems on reboot because of wrong miniloadr, see in this discussion ) 
it has rk 3228
ddr2
nand

as you did , me too in the beginning tried to flash some miniloaders, and this is not good because some of the have different 1T / 2T settings. This was an error !!!

so far, actually , you have to do one thing: grab a usb/ttl converter ,(go search for one)  remove sd card, use the 4th pin of sd card counting from right ( count also the 2 small pins of sd card reader switch)

YES !! on that pin there is a serial uart

and give here the early log of the board , including ddr version 

i can give you for sure that that board will work with linux, but you have to stay on kernel 4.4.189 , even if don't expect exceptional benchmarch 

@fabiobassa

Quote

you have one of the most problematic board

Hahaha, I thought as much!

 

On 10/2/2026 at 5:32 AM, fabiobassa said:

so far, actually , you have to do one thing: grab a usb/ttl converter ,(go search for one)  remove sd card, use the 4th pin of sd card counting from right ( count also the 2 small pins of sd card reader switch)

YES !! on that pin there is a serial uart

Yes, I work with microcontrollers so I have a few of those lying around. Man, what a weird place to put the serial at.

Is it these? What would be the pinout?

 

On 10/2/2026 at 5:32 AM, fabiobassa said:

i can give you for sure that that board will work with linux, but you have to stay on kernel 4.4.189 , even if don't expect exceptional benchmarch 

Where could I find armbian images running that version? The only images I could find online run on 4.4.194.

https://armbian.tnahosting.net/archive/rk322x-box/archive/

Hi everyone! I have some issues accessing MaskROM mode on my H20_221_V1.8_230925 board (product name H20 4K Ultra HD Quad Core CPU). This board has already been talked about here in 2024, but mine has 8 gigs of storage and 1 gig of RAM instead of 16 and 2. They had the same display issues as me: no display, but connecting to the board via ssh worked fine. Last time I got the board in MaskROM was to try to put another image of Armbian on it, not the first time I did that to try to fix display issues(i didnt know about the led-conf fix at that point in time), but this time I just installed the same bootloader and the same image multiple times and in very random orders without deleting anything before trying again, did that until the develop tool said that both were written successfully, I think I was sleep deprived as hell or something idk. Now, I tried connecting it to Ethernet, but it does not show up in the DHCP client list like it did before, so I couldnt connect to it by ssh like I have before. Pushing the button behind the AV port, inserting the USB-A to USB-A cable, giving it power and holding the button for like 5 seconds longer didnt get me into MaskROM, tried both ports and different press times. I also tried to short out a 0.5 ohm resistor near the eMCP (on the photo with a red arrow pointing at it) with ground, but it didnt work, absolutely nothing in logs when monitoring the usb connection. However, when I power the board on, the red LED stays off for the time when I hold the wire, and almost immediately upon release, the red LED turns on, just a steady red light. Maybe I can get the CLK signal from somewhere else, I dont even really know wheher what I did does anything tbh... Also I tried putting Multitool on a MicroSD and booting with that, but there was nothing getting displayed(tried pushing the button before powering it, too), nothing from the usb connection. Does anyone have any potential ways to get it into MaskROM or some other way to erase everything from the memory and then flash it with Armbian? Here are the images of the board near the chip(idk if you can see everything you need to, if not then the 2024 post with practically the same board also has photos, those might be better for this). I will try my best to provide additional info if you need it, cuz I really dont know what Im doing :P

Edited October 10Oct 10 by alex_solon

@alex_solon

I give for sure  this is a rockchip rk322x processor , becuase usually hxxyy  identifies Allwinner socs 
i would rather investigate one pin of the resistor arrays to catch the one with ecmp clock 


 

Edited October 11Oct 11 by fabiobassa

Hey @fabiobassa, i actually JUST got into MaskROM mode by shorting every single pin of the two 510 resistor arrays coming from the eMCP to the rk3228a (labeled by the chip manufacturer on the chip) with ground lol, apparently those are all just data pins and the CLK signal too, or at least thats what Gemini said. Took me way like 3-4 days to figure this out... But yeah I guess all thats left to do is to clear the flash and to put a bootloader and an armbian image on it

 

Hello all, recently I have installed latest armbian debian 13 minimal on rk3229. On idle, temperature raising upto 70 and too laggy. Can someone tell me how to fix it. Or suggest any other version which is good for rk3229. I'm very new to Linux and don't have any knowledge on these things. Followed steps in page1 to install directly on emmc. 

Edited October 26Oct 26 by Ravi

@Ravi

yes it is laggy ,but  remember that this is a very very cheap and poor  SOC , an entry entry entry level SOC ,so it depends what use you want to do

server, pbx voip, vpn, , homeassistant, pihole, all headless application are ok

desktop and other things..well.. that is !!!
Don't expect miracles

@fabiobassa 

Does Switching back to bullseys help relieve from this high temperature.? 

@Ravi

those socs also lack a good or appropriate heat dissipation
The dissipator glued on the top  is very small

What purpose are you using the box for ?

If you use for desktop replacement or heavy duty task  I doubt that changing distro version would help

Hi @fabiobassa, sorry if Im being annoying, but did you see my reply? I would really like to dump the log here, but I need to know the pinout to connect the adapter.

@Geronimo
sorry man, I totally missed you replay , pardon me !!!!  

no, you must count INCLUDING the two small so referring to your photo it will be a little bit more ( two pins) on the left

It will be easier to iron sold on the back where pins are xplosed

Remember to spet uart speed at 1500000 ( yes, one million 50000 ) and not canonical 115200 and also remeber that if you put a sd on it you will only see garbage

This works if you boot from internal nand

Edited October 27Oct 27 by fabiobassa