NanoPi NEO Air (Dead UART0)

[Attila]

I have a NanoPi Neo Air (Allwinner H3 SoC) with onboard wifi and a serial interface. Unfortunately during some late hour hacking I managed to accidentally connect 5V onto its TX pin, I think effectively screwing up its UART0. I can no longer connect to it via a USB to TTL Serial cable.

 

Looking at the NeoPi Nano Air's pinout diagram, it seems to have more UART devices (UART1 and UART2 even) so I wonder whether there's a way to set up armbian to communicate via these during boot?

 

 

Another idea I had was to try to bypass the UART completely and to hook up the board via the wifi. Now, without having any access to a serial console, I need to try getting armbian to connect to a wifi automatically and run an SSH service so that I can control the board.

 

How does one go about this? Do I need to get a bootloader config in place somehow? How do I do it without having another Allwinner H3 device?

 

Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you in advance.

[Igor]

You can log in via microUSB serial. Just plug it to your USB port and a serial device will pop up on your host computer. It's not serial at boot time but you can log in when a system is up. Enabled by default.

Just grab latest images from here: https://dl.armbian.com/nanopiair/archive/

For having a different UART during boot time it might be a little more complex job.

 

[yanzixiang]

On 2018/1/28 at 8:24 PM, Igor said:

You can log in via microUSB serial. Just plug it to your USB port and a serial device will pop up on your host computer. It's not serial at boot time but you can log in when a system is up. Enabled by default.

Just grab latest images from here: https://dl.armbian.com/nanopiair/archive/

For having a different UART during boot time it might be a little more complex job.

 

 

hi, Igor, I want to display the boot log into an TTL screen which is attached to another UART,

can you explain how to do this?

[Igor]

2 minutes ago, yanzixiang said:

hi, Igor, I want to display the boot log into an TTL screen which is attached to another UART,

can you explain how to do this?

Never tried to change to another UART so I don't know if the task is trivial or not. For sure you need to dive into u-boot source for this.

[yanzixiang]

55 minutes ago, Igor said:

Never tried to change to another UART so I don't know if the task is trivial or not. For sure you need to dive into u-boot source for this.

 

hi, Igor, I don't want to deal with u-boot,

I just want to display the kernal logs,

where and how to change the kernel command line  params?

[Igor]

Just now, yanzixiang said:

hi, Igor, I don't want to deal with u-boot,

I just want to display the kernal logs,

where and how to change the kernel command line  params?

This feature is not user configurable. If you don't want to deal with u-boot you can't change this.

[yanzixiang]

8 minutes ago, Igor said:

This feature is not user configurable. If you don't want to deal with u-boot you can't change this.

In the dmesg I can see this

 

root=UUID=d00b548f-42bb-44e4-aa5d-da053db3e25d 
rootfstype=ext4 
rootwait 
console=tty1 
console=ttyS0,115200 
hdmi.audio=EDID:0                                         
disp.screen0_output_mode=1920x1080p60 
panic=10 
consoleblank=0 
loglevel=1 
ubootpart=c5ee5075-01 
ubootsource=mmc   
sunxi_ve_mem_reserve=0 
sunxi_g2d_mem_reserve=0                                         
sunxi_fb_mem_reserve=16 
cgroup_enable=memory 
swapaccount=1

 

all the params are passed to kernal by u-boot ?

[yanzixiang]

47 minutes ago, Igor said:

This feature is not user configurable. If you don't want to deal with u-boot you can't change this.

hi, Igor, this can be done by 4 steps:

1.cd /boot

2.vi boot.cmd and change ttyS0 to ttyS1 and write to file

3. mkimage -C none -A arm -T script -d /boot/boot.cmd /boot/boot.scr

4.reboot

 

waitting for an better way to do this.