Custom Allwinner A64 Board, LCD Touchscreen, and Armbian

[DavidT]

 

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

[Tido]

on the images running, have u ever run armbianmonitor - u ?

 

// sent from mobile phone //

[zador.blood.stained]

It would be best to extract the Device Tree from any original image that runs on this device with Ethernet, eMMC and LCD backlight. While Ethernet and eMMC configuration can be easy to adapt from working images, LCD backlight may be difficult to enable without any documentation (i.e. device schematics).

[DavidT]

Thanks for the replies guys!

 

@Tido, I have not run armbianmonitor, so I will check that out.  Thanks for the tip!

 

@zador - I *think* I do have a valid Device Tree, and here is what leads me to believe this:

 

My first plan of attack for this board was to simply download and use the Allwinner BSP located on the Pine64 wiki website.  That turned out to be a nightmare (not really a surprise), but one interesting artifact of that process might be worthwhile.  After unzipping the BSP,  examining the folder/file structure, and replacing one of their pre-defined build targets sys_config.fex file with the one I extracted from Android, I ended up with some newly created leftover files in their output files - not so suspiciously called ".sunxi.dts".   Timestamps of the file match my build time and the file contains all of the items I would expect in a device tree (at least to my untrained eye).

Thanks again for the assistance, I appreciate it greatly!

-David

 

sunxi.dts

sys_config.fex.txt

[thomasgrzybowski]

Interesting that the BananaPi m64 Armbian image gives you eMMC support.  I'm trying to get eMMC working with my Pine64so.  I'm thinking if you can get eMMC working with your board, so can others with their Pine64so's - or vis-a-versa.

[DavidT]

Yes, the Armbian Config "Install to eMMC" worked as well.  I can even boot directly from eMMC, which is really nice.