Banana Pi R2

[TonyMac32]

Yeah, I kind of signed off when a FriendlyARM document got put up as BPi's, and contradicted the post it was in.  Not to mention this happened minutes after I said we should be open and honest if we want this thing to work out.  I'm very disappointed.  Now, since I don't know the structure of BPi's company, it is possible Lion just copied that from their blog, where the same falsification existed, without realizing.  That's why I didn't jump up and down and rant about it.  

 

As you can see I've done my best to continue a civil conversation.  Perhaps others would care to endeavor to likewise treat us with improved control of their tongues.  Or fingers, as it were.

[JohnnyWednesday]

3 hours ago, chwe said:

To all: Please stop immediately to throw dirt to others. It's worthless and don't make this thread readable.

 

 

I appreciate your short summary of information. This might be useful for everyone starting with this board. Some questions which comes to my mind:

• Can you provide us a recent boot log from your board? (with a link/description to the image you use)
• Did you try to connect a SSD or HDD to the native sata ports on the R2 (long time ago, sinovoipbpi team claimed that it works with a pcie to sata board but i never saw it runnig on the native sata ports on the board, maybe I missed it). 
• Can this power up the R2 be seen as solved? (solved means to me: plug in power and it starts or press max. one button to start it)

• Can you confirm that this works now? I only have in mind that there were some issues about booting from eMMC

The confusion came up when @Lion Wang shared a table with their efforts of the 4.4 kernel. This table describes that AP6212 works fine. @TonyMac32 was confused because obviously there's no AP6212 on this board. The same table can be found on the wiki of friendly arm, where they describe the status of a H3 device. Lion Wang removed it immediately and replaced it with this new list.

  Reveal hidden contents

 

 

 

Yes I can, I'll also provide the output of any commands/tests you want me to run - I'm in the middle of something right now but I'll provide the logs as soon as I have time in the next few days. If required I will also be willing to provide SSH access into the R2 to yourself and anybody you trust subject to your word that you'll treat the gear and my home internet connection with respect.

I have tried a 2.5" 750GB seagate spindle drive in both SATA ports - mounted an NTFS partition, transferred multiple gigs of data both times, placed the drive back into my laptop and then calculated and compared hashes - no problem. A blue LED near the SATA ports flashed on disk activity.

This is certainly not an exhaustive test and I'm afraid I don't have two SATA+power connectors to test two drives simultaneously. I will order another for that purpose.

Yes the power-up is fine - you currently have to hold the power button down for around 10 seconds to boot the board - I may be imagining things but it seemed the length of time needed to hold the button down was shorter when I used a recompiled kernel that was smaller by around 1MB - if I wasn't imagining it then that suggests that u-boot/kernel/whatever is being loaded at this point. The spindle drive spun up during this phase.

I made one attempt to boot from the eMMC and I was unsuccessful - I may have done something wrong so I will try again for you. I am able to create partitions on the eMMC and read/write data just fine however.

I see and understand -it's definitely the MT6625L - I can't speak for the vendor but yes - that was naughty. Somebody probably saw the table, noticed it was a close match for the current status but didn't look closely enough. I doubt that action was looked upon kindly at BPi either and I certainly don't believe that such things are a reflection of the hardware design.

I like the people I've spoken to so far, they're a friendly bunch  manners and respect are very important in China - please understand that they want to help, they really do care and they'd like a good working relationship with the open source community. They are improving matters and they are aware of the problems of the past. I implore people to extend the same courtesy that is given to other vendors - I've read about endless faults and flaws with Orange boards right here on this forum - far more than anything I've seen for a Banana board - yet people that attack BPi happily defend serious flaws elsewhere.

I became convinced that people here were being paid by OPi after a couple of days of reading the hypocrisy - I can't be the only one that thinks this - things seem to be very biased - citing issues that have nothing to do with the hardware - while covering up the flaws of other vendors. This is not good for Armbian - the close association with Sunxi whom bash every banana board in the opening sentence of their wiki - while lauding the professed faults as features on other boards.

I wonder who's prominent in both the Armbian community and the sunxi community - can you think of anybody? if they're not being paid to vilify Banana then I'll eat my hat. Well I'll buy a hat and then eat it - you can pick the colour.
 
This situation and attitude is untenable - I really like Armbian, I want to work with you, contribute - I really do! but if the bias and fragile logic doesn't stop when it's obvious that concerns have been met? then I'm sorry - I'll have no choice but to fork into a new project - one that supports everything Armbian does - plus all the things they're paid not to. Yes I know it's hard work, yes I know community matters but if such bias becomes known in the world of SBCs? I won't have a problem supporting RPi, Banana - in fact I'll specifically add anything Armbian refuse to support and I and my associates are more than capable if currently less experienced - what outcome do you predict in the long term?

For my part I chose the board that best suited my requirements - which are already met by the R2 and the current state of support. It's quite unique and offers great potential given the two mPCIe (well one plus a through hole pinout that will disable one USB3 port - who doesn't like soldering?  ), GB switch/wan and so forth - yes I know specs <> functionality because the software support is critical - but if the software support is there - is this not a great board?

I'll do all I can and exhaust every option of working with Armbian that I can - that's what I really want.

[garywang]

On 14.8.2017 at 0:49 AM, JohnnyWednesday said:

Hey Armbian aficionados - it's me of 'I can confirm that sound support isn't compiled into the kernel' fame. Please don't rush me all at once, I didn't ask for this fame and glory and I've already turned to hard drugs and fast women.

 

Hi Johnny

 

I'm  a software engineer for maintaining  the source code of BPI-R2 Linux 4.4 .x.  Looks like you have a patch for enabling HDMI audio on R2 board, would you pleae share it with me? I'd like to add it it to github, thanks in advance. 

Many thanks for your attention to your R2 products, you know a few features(wifi, bt and mipi) are not implemented  yet in Linux 4.4.x, but we are working on them with MTK team, hope it will be ready  soon.

Edited August 18, 2017 by Tido
instead of spoiler, cut the quote - please think about others when quoting

[RagnerBG]

On 8/16/2017 at 7:13 AM, Lion Wang said:

1. I respect all the work done by armbian, and they do a lot of work, especially igor. I respect anyone who does anything for the open source community, and all work should be respected.I also want to work closely with armbian at Open source development, but the way must be correct.

2. All of TK's comments, I don't know where I have offended him, and you can see that his comments are full of malice and disgust, so most of them, I can only choose to ignore them.A product, especially an open source product, can't be perfected all at once, and if you try to find a reason to attack, there will be countless ways to attack, but it won't improve anything.We need all of us to do what we can to support ourselves, even if it's a little bit of a word of affirmation.Sometimes, standing and watching, not talking, is also a support.

3. I have been working on LINUX product software and hardware development for 17 years and have learned how to cooperate with the chip original factory.What I do now is try to make the chip plant open source a bit, provide as much information and technology as possible, and slowly promote the development of open source.

4. Regarding R2, I want to really understand the hardware people, understand how much work we have done, and how much effort MTK has made to support this project.That's what's going on.TK can't easily veto everything just because of the subjective judgment of his own knowledge. It's unfair.

5, we must have done many things wrong, which is a process of learning.If this process makes some people uncomfortable, I'm here to say I'm sorry.

6. For TK, he even attacks my English very bad, YES, maybe we can communicate in Chinese, rest assured, here I will not make fun of your poor Chinese.

Hello. I just want to say - all this blah, blah, but you missing the point. People are not rude against you just like that, but because of your company actions. This is reputation you've earned. False advertising, incorrect information, hardware issues, this is the problem. TK is maybe sort of sarcastic, but it is for a reason. Most of his comments are not "full of malice and disgust", but full off useful information, for you and your potential customers. It's only better for you if you not ignore them, but take a notes. 17 years software and hardware development and you don't know, it's not all about open source (at lest for your company), but to provide support. If you care about open source support, provide the sources opened and proper documentation, so people can do development for you. But if the hardware vendor don't want to do this, there is nothing wrong in closed source, if it's workable and with proper license. But nor you, nor your vendors do any of this, it's just NO support at all. Let's see MTK now, but with your other partner AllWinner, we see a lot of circus with free interpretation of what "open source" and "GPL" means, reflection mostly on end customer. Things like these are the reason, people with experience with your company, been not so nice. Not your English language (mine is not good too). I personally have experience too. I own one of your products and use it for good, but only at 50% of what was advertised back then and with a lot of hardware and software interventions from my side to make it at least stable at these 50% of usability. How could i be very gentle and buy another product from you? And i could be potential buyer of this new R2, if only things were different this time. But from what we see so far, even in this thread, it's the same - hardware and software, a huge deja-vu. Poor new owners, they don't get it yet, but we do and with this exposure, in this very thread, you don's make things different. You had one good product - the first BPI-1, what's gone wrong since then?

 

I will keep following this topic. It's really fun . And with latest efforts to use this forum for the same false advertising and reclame, make it even more interesting. Only need popcorn.

[tkaiser]

13 hours ago, garywang said:

I'm  a software engineer for maintaining  the source code of BPI-R2 Linux 4.4.x.

 

Welcome here!

 

13 hours ago, garywang said:

Looks like you have a patch for enabling HDMI audio on R2 board, would you pleae share it with me? I'd like to add it it to github, thanks in advance.

 

Interesting. No one here talked about patches or active development. The person you quoted only reported over in your forum that he did a 'make menuconfig' to fix stuff you forgot to enable in your kernel (according to your indtroduction it's the kernel you maintain?). It might be a surprising experience but you can modify the kernel config and enable/disable stuff there. That's what the person did you ask now for patches.

 

3 hours ago, RagnerBG said:

i could be potential buyer of this new R2, if only things were different this time. But from what we see so far, even in this thread, it's the same - hardware and software, a huge deja-vu

 

Things are slightly different this time but we got the chance to realize this just recently since SinoVoip blocked successfully every insights for almost half a year.

 

The R1 is crap in so many areas that it's just a waste of time to list all the issues. So let's try to be positive and look only at what's different now:

 

Software:

• Unlike back then with R1 which received zero support by the SoC vendor (Allwinner) we know in the meantime that MediaTek (who have/had a horribly bad reputation based on their 'closed' behaviour in the past requiring everyone to sign NDAs and to pay insanely high amounts of money to get access to sources) opened up themselves and are becoming part of open source community. This is really great news but also somewhat surprising. MTK partnered with a vendor not able to understand the meaning of 'open' and so SinoVoip was sitting on a closed MT7623 kernel repo and prevented every member of open source communities to participate/improve for almost half a year for exactly no reason ('just wait and see' was everything we got from their official voice 'sinovoip bpi team')
• A couple of MTK engineers are active upstreaming software support for both SoC and the R2 so as already said in post #1 in this thread: 'We also know that MediaTek unlike in the past is currently opening themselves, their vendor kernel for this board is a 4.4.70 currently and they're also busy supporting their own hardware upstream. It might get interesting in 2018'. @sean.wang already explained what might be missing currently with mainline kernel in this thread and I really look forward to MT7623 designs in 2018 when mainline kernel support matured.
• Since MTK is providing mainline kernel support it's just a matter of time until *Wrt/LEDE support will be available (R2 becoming the main development vehicle for MT7623 devices)

Hardware:

 

At the time I could poke SinoVoip's copy&paste monkey censoring their forum and not supporting users to provide a boot log a few weeks ago we also know a bit more about the hardware (it's amazing that their BS collection they call 'technical documentation' still lists so much wrong or contradicting information). Since a few end users now have this hardware in their hands we can expect at least some performance and other numbers soon since for whatever reasons SinoVoip never tested any of their boards wrt performance/usability.

 

R2 does not suffer from R1's Achilles heel (the shitty Micro USB connector to power the board responsible for so many under-voltage drama), maybe we get some information from users soon how powering connected SATA disks work (isn't it amazing that the hardware vendor is not able to answer such simple questions?) so soon we know a bit more what to expect with regard to specific use cases and overall performance.

 

MT7623 platform looks great, we've been asked by a Taiwanese company planning to build an 'open' NAS device already about software support (they also mention MTK being really supportive) and at least I'm really looking forward to more devices based on MT7623. But unfortunately I'm allergic to stupidity/ignorance and stuff like this https://archive.is/tY9gt is all we can get from the respective 'vendor' now. I fail to understand the purpose of 'borrowing' a table from a competitor totally unrelated to your own hardware/software to 'demonstrate' whatever. That's not a mistake you make by accident but that's just bizarre. It's now year 3 in Banana land dealing with stupidity/ignorance for whatever reason (unfortunately zero improvements). And that makes me really sad since I fail to understand why...

[Lion Wang]

5 hours ago, tkaiser said:

The R1 is crap in so many areas that it's just a waste of time to list all the issues. So let's try to be positive and look only at what's different now:

 

Maybe your mom didn't teach you how to respect others.

 

You're just an asshole in the open source community, and you want to take advantage of what you have, and want to get something ??? and you realize that you can't say anything publicly.

 

tkaiser: Now price is available and also USB-to-Ethernet chip (RTL8152B) and amount of DRAM (256MB): https://aliexpress.com/store/product/Orange-Pi-R1-H2-256MB-Quad-Core-Cortex-A7-Open-source-development-board-beyond-Raspberry-Pi/1553371_32827494728.html

 

Still no schematics available but given Xunlong's conservative approach I don't think we need them anyway.

 

haha ,  funny people , Obvious double standards, They must have paid you hush money. I can pay, but it has to be moral.

 

I have great respect for the armbian community, but  you are ashamed of one member of their community

 

 

 

[Ryder.Lee]

23 hours ago, garywang said:

 

Hi Johnny

 

I'm  a software engineer for maintaining  the source code of BPI-R2 Linux 4.4 .x.  Looks like you have a patch for enabling HDMI audio on R2 board, would you pleae share it with me? I'd like to add it it to github, thanks in advance. 

Many thanks for your attention to your R2 products, you know a few features(wifi, bt and mipi) are not implemented  yet in Linux 4.4.x, but we are working on them with MTK team, hope it will be ready  soon.

 

 

Just enable CONFIG_SND_SOC_MT7623_WM8960, then you can use aplay now...

[Igor]

4 hours ago, Lion Wang said:

"Still no schematics available but given Xunlong's conservative approach I don't think we need them anyway."

 
Schematic for this board is not needed since it's most likely not that much different than the previous model. But if there is a completely new design on the table, there is much harder up to practically impossible to go on without proper documentation and board designers help.

 

10 hours ago, tkaiser said:

The R1 is crap

 

There are many topics and the longest issue on Github about R1. There is really no need to repeating things over and over again. It's getting boring and contra-productive. We saved lot's of troubles to people that use single board computers, but we just can't save them all. 

 

Quote

#bad word #curse #swear #faggotry #retardation

Let's stay away from those.

[Tido]

This thread has become in some regard unproductive, and you waste your precious time - and therefore I will close it.
It needs a clean restart. I suggest to the people who work on the R2 or MTK Chip to open new topics here:

Development

https://forum.armbian.com/index.php?/forum/4-development/

Board Bring Up

https://forum.armbian.com/index.php?/forum/22-board-bring-up/

 

and if it makes sense similar like Tony did with the Asus tinker board:

tinker board GPIO

tinker board GPU VPU

..and so on, you got the idea

 

feel free to edit this post if I got something wrong. Thank you.

Edited August 19, 2017 by Tido
edited and Zador message deleted