ROCK 3A v1.3 Maskroom OK, NO Boot, NO UART tested power, UART and SD on another board

[jaysonsantos]

I have a ROCK 3A that reaches Maskrom/recovery but will not boot any Radxa or Armbian SD image and produces no useful UART output. UART is configured per Radxa docs at 1500000 8N1 on the debug header, and the exact same adapter/host/settings work on another ROCK 3A. There is no eMMC and no NVMe installed. I also tried resetting/loading SPI via Maskrom using rkdeveloptool db rk356x_spl_loader_ddr1056_v1.12.109_no_check_todly.bin, then loading Radxa’s rock-3a-spi-image-gef9f6b1caad.img. Radxa’s ROCK 3A loader directory contains the matching SPI artifacts, including rock-3a-spi-image-gef9f6b1caad.img, rock-3a-idbloader-gef9f6b1caad.img, and rock-3a-u-boot-gef9f6b1caad.itb, along with RK356x SPL loader binaries. Looking for guidance on whether this points to SPI/SPL/DDR init or a board hardware fault.

[Werner]

7 hours ago, jaysonsantos said:

produces no useful UART output.

elaborate. 

If there is only garbage output your usb uart adapter may not be able to handle this speed. Example would be CP2102 which outputs garbage instead of gracefully failing when "overclocked".

[jaysonsantos]

3 hours ago, Werner said:

If there is only garbage output your usb uart adapter may not be able to handle this speed. Example would be CP2102 which outputs garbage instead of gracefully failing when "overclocked".

 

it only show 0xc8 if i have the wrong baudrate, otherwise nothing is shown on picocom's output.

when i plug the poe hat, which has a fan (loaded by an overlay) it turns on, which would mean that it was loaded, right? but, i get no serial/hdmi output, no network uplink and only the green led is on.
the same setup on another board works

[Werner]

Perhaps a hardware defect? At least that would be my guess from what it sounds.

[jaysonsantos]

@Werner thanks for the answers.

It had a good 4 years run RIP

I will try and check the capacitors on the weekend to check if something shorted there

[eselarm]

My ROCK3A has a jumper option to disable SPI clock, so whole SPI will be bypassed and only SD-card works then. I power with fixed 12V (USB-C pigtail). I do not know now what version the board/PCB is. AFAIR from Radxa docs other versions have no such jumper. Maybe you already tried/know all this. Maybe wipe the SPI via rkdevelop. W.r.t. Rockchip SBC's (various brands) I am a bit confused what boot-device prefence/priority is. From schematics I saw it depends on a resistor value, but many boards in the world and endless resistor values possible.