[Hardware bug] Orange Pi 5 Plus rev 1.3.1 — floating vias kill Type-C (USB3.1) & FAN: investigation and hardware fix

[Deoptim]

I have an Orange Pi 5 Plus 16GB board, revision "1.3.1". I've been using it for about a year with official Armbian, Vendor kernel 6.1. The only issues I noticed were a non-working Type-C port and FAN connector. I thought it was an OS or DTS (Device Tree) bug... But it turned out to be a hardware problem.

It started when I got another Orange Pi 5 Plus 8GB board for repair (needed to resolder the Type-C power connector). Same revision "1.3.1". 

 

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(left is my 16GB board, right is the 8GB board for repair; the PCB solder mask is slightly different in shade of blue — probably different manufacturers or production batches)

 

 

I inspected it under a microscope and found that both boards have floating (unconnected) vias — the ones that should control the FAN transistor, and also the EN-pin for the Type-C (USB3.1) power. 

 

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So these are defective boards from some unknown revision where these vias are simply missing.

On top of that, even if you force-enable the Type-C (USB3.1) EN pin — it still won't work. The reason is that the data lines are connected to TYPEC1 pins on the SoC, not TYPEC0 as shown in the OPI 5 PLUS_V1_3_1_Schematic.pdf

So you need a DTS fix to enable the port via the correct node. The HUSB311 chip is also useless in this case. I don't know what exactly this revision is or why these errors exist.

 

Fix: enabling power on the Type-C port

To get the front Type-C (USB3.1) port working, I soldered the EN pin from the Power Switch — which was going TYPEC5V_PWREN_H Nowhere — to the nearest 3V3 Ethernet power rail. Now the Type-C port gets power after boot.

 

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The second step is to create a DTS overlay to make the port actually work:

File: rk3588-orangepi-5-plus-TypeC-fix-hardware.dts

/dts-v1/;
/plugin/;

/ {
    model = "Orange Pi 5 Plus";
    compatible = "rockchip,rk3588-orangepi-5-plus", "rockchip,rk3588";

    fragment@0 {
        target = <&usbdrd_dwc3_1>;
        __overlay__ {
            dr_mode = "host";
            maximum-speed = "super-speed";
            snps,xhci-trb-ent-quirk;
        };
    };
};

 

To apply the overlay, copy the file to your board and run: 

cd <path to file>
sudo armbian-add-overlay rk3588-orangepi-5-plus-TypeC-fix-hardware.dts

 

Also worth noting: since HUSB311 is missing on this revision, the CC1/CC2 orientation detection doesn't work properly. In practice this means: plug in a USB-C cable one way — the device shows up as USB2.0 (HighSpeed). Flip the cable 180° and replug — it shows up as USB3.0 (SuperSpeed). This happens because only CC1 or CC2 is connected (not both).

 

If you need a PWM fan

 

The PWM signal via for the FAN transistor is also floating on this revision — it goes FAN_CTL_H Nowhere. You can solder to it (either to the end of the nearby SMD resistor or scrape the VIA pad directly) and connect it to any free pin on the 40-pin header. Then update the DTS to assign that pin for fan control instead of the original one.

 

P.S. Sorry for the low quality photos.

 

Source: 4PDA

Edited 1 hour ago by Deoptim