Industrial android board - RK3288 (possible EVB)

[Mauricio Scotton]

Hi there!


I've got 2 of these industrial android boards (s2809-mb-v1.8c) and I've been trying to get armbian running on the. For a while but so far no success.
These 2 boards were sold as being tinker boards but I believe that they are EVBs instead.

 

Here are some photos:

https://ibb.co/4wTm20s9
https://ibb.co/Z6PfvZCr
https://ibb.co/HTFWLKTS

 

I have also managed to find a link to the Chinese seller:

https://m.globalsources.com/product/quad-core-board_1195354789f.htm

Debug method: UART2 (because they don't have HDMI only LVDS and EDP ports)

PMIC: RK808

So far trying to run them on the latest armbian 26 and 25 gets stuck at Starting Kernel.

Ive managed to find a version 20 for the miqi board that loads kernel and boots into armbian bullseye but stops before login using a single core only and only 512mb of ram, anything beyond that just never starts the kernel using tinker and tinker-s DTBs.

I have also managed to get a full dump of a current android image that is running correctly on one of the board and extracted: loader, kernel, dtb from the partitions.
Extracting the images was painful cause none of the rk (linux rkdeveloptool, rkdev and rkandroidtool) methods worked.. only through uboot so that was painful to get 16mb parts from some of the images and join them all.


Has anyone ever encountered any of these boards?
Maybe anyone has an idea on how to get them up and running?


Thanks for your help and sorry if this post is under the incorrect forum.

Edited March 18 by Mauricio Scotton
Missing image links and detailed info

[tparys]

At a glance, unless you see your board at https://armbian.com/download, chances are that no one else has gotten that board working. Might be better to post under "Other Families" for unsupported board stuff. @Werner may move later ...

 

Quote

gets stuck at Starting Kernel.

 

Might be crashing. Might be redirecting kernel to a different UART. May be worth checking earlycon and console settings in kernel args? 

 

Quote

but stops before login

 

You can try to pass break=premount or similar arguments to pause boot and allow you to poke around and see what's going on? 

 

 

[Mauricio Scotton]

Hey tparys!

Thank you very much for your reply and apologies for my delay getting back to you.
I haven't had much time to play with this board, but lately I've managed to do some very good progress.
Basically I've got Armbian 20 Bullseye working with kernel 6.19. that was a victory!

Versions that work/don't:
[WORKS] Armbian_20.07_Arm-32_bullseye_current_5.7.7_desktop.img (From a MiQi board)
[NOPE] Armbian_25.11.1_Tinkerboard_bookworm_current_6.12.58-homeassistant.img
[NOPE] Armbian_25.11.1_Tinkerboard_noble_current_6.12.58_minimal.img

[NOPE] Armbian_25.11.1_Tinkerboard_trixie_current_6.12.58_minimal.img

[NOPE] Armbian_26.2.0-trunk.370_Tinkerboard_noble_current_6.18.8_xfce_desktop.img

[NOPE] Armbian_26.2.1_Tinkerboard_trixie_current_6.18.8_minimal.img

Armbians 25 up, some times hangs at Starting Kernel, and majority of the times stops at Loading Ramdisk, all of them tested with most of the DTBs provided

The android that runs on the other working board has a kernel with version 4.4
 

Quote

You can try to pass break=premount or similar arguments to pause boot and allow you to poke around and see what's going on?

Havent test that because I believe it stops earlier than that

I have extracted the DTB from the working Android and got a frankenstein EVB DTS working with some of the features.
So far I've got working:
*4Cores
*2GB Ram
*Wifi (using rtw8723d_fw.bin )
*Status LED

What doesn't work for sure:
-Ethernet
-FE2.1 USB Hub 2.0

Untested:
? LVDS 1/2 Panel
? EDP 1/2 Panel
? Speaker
? MIC
? SIM Card Module (Attached to the FE2.1 Hub, so defo not working)

And maybe some other peripherals that I was not able to test.

I'm still to make the FE2.1 USB Hub work as the 4 only USB physical ports are not working.
Also ETH has an issue on stmmac that returns the reset value. and this was merged recently to the kernel. (I'm trying to build v6.19 from source with my patch, but thats being painful too )
Here is my stmmac patch:

diff --git a/drivers/net/ethernet/stmicro/stmmac/stmmac_main.c b/drivers/net/ethernet/stmicro/stmmac/stmmac_main.c
index 01ede5148163..9f0ee9ea96fa
--- a/drivers/net/ethernet/stmicro/stmmac/stmmac_main.c
+++ b/drivers/net/ethernet/stmicro/stmmac/stmmac_main.c
@@ -3208,8 +3208,7 @@ static int stmmac_init_dma_engine(struct stmmac_priv *priv)

        ret = stmmac_reset(priv);
        if (ret) {
-               netdev_err(priv->dev, "Failed to reset the dma\n");
-               return ret;
+               netdev_warn(priv->dev, "Failed to reset the dma, device will work with reduced throughput\n");
        }

I have also attached my current DTS built on top of the EVB version based on the Android with logs from both.

Once again, thank you very much for your help!


Best Regards,

Mauricio.
 

Armbian 20 Bullseye booting log.txt Android Boot Full log.txt android_check.dts rk3288-evb-rk808-armbian-fixed36.dts