(almost) bricked Orange Pi PC

[Nick]

I have an Orange Pi PC that I bought from eBay a while ago and it works absolutely fine, has done for a month or so now.

 

I have just bought 5 more from Xunlong's Aliexpress store, they arrived very quickly, however they don't appear to boot...

 

Power rails are fine, 24MHz clock is fine, reset line is fine, fel mode registers with my PC fine, however no UART output, no apparent attempt to boot from the SD card.

 

If  boot it with the SD card in, I get absolutely nothing, if I boot it without the SD card, it gets into FEL mode and I can talk to it with sunxi-fel

nick@nick-desktop:~/sunxi-tools$ sudo ./sunxi-fel ver
AWUSBFEX soc=00001680(H3) 00000001 ver=0001 44 08 scratchpad=00007e00 00000000 00000000

I don't know if that is a recent and or buggy version?

sudo ./sunxi-fel -v uboot ../u-boot-sunxi-with-spl.bin write 0x42000000

Writes Uboot to the SoC and all of a sudden it appears to try and boot, it fails due to missing kernel, boot file and so on, but at least I'm getting something on the UART now.

 

My gut feeling is that the SoC is detecting the SD card (it only goes into FEL mode if the card isn't there) but that for some reason it's not even attempting to boot from it. I'm guessing that there is a setting that hasn't been configured properly at the factory or that the BROM is buggy but I don't know enough to even start debugging at that level.

[Nick]

Ok, so it appears that I may have panicked over nothing, can someone that knows about the boot process confirm that you really don't get any output at all if there isn't a valid SD card inserted?

[tkaiser]

Ok, so it appears that I may have panicked over nothing, can someone that knows about the boot process confirm that you really don't get any output at all if there isn't a valid SD card inserted?

 

Yes, that is the default. And useful, I'm just booting the 1st time Armbian on an Orange Pi PC without SD card through FEL/NFS:

 

[ o.k. ] Starting FEL boot [ orangepih3 ]

[ o.k. ] Using custom boot script [ userpatches/fel-boot.cmd ]

[ o.k. ] Loading files via [ FEL USB ]

100% [================================================]  4812 kB,  662.1 kB/s 

100% [================================================]    36 kB,  622.5 kB/s

100% [================================================]     1 kB,  114.1 kB/s

[ o.k. ] Press <b> to boot again, <q> to finish [ FEL ]

 

Zador did a really great job (as always)! Time between build and boot --> 0 seconds. And now I can start to refactor all the ugly hacks we did the last few weeks to get Armbian up and running on Orange Pi's so quickly:

 

[ o.k. ] Press <b> to boot again, <q> to finish [ FEL ]

b

[ o.k. ] Loading files via [ FEL USB ]

100% [================================================]  4812 kB,  683.7 kB/s 

stat() error on file "/var/git/Armbian/output/cache/sdcard//boot/bin/orangepih3.bin": No such file or directory

[ o.k. ] Press <b> to boot again, <q> to finish [ FEL ]

 

Auto detection cleanups gone wrong

[Nick]

Yes, that is the default. And useful, I'm just booting the 1st time Armbian on an Orange Pi PC without SD card through FEL/NFS:

Useful to a point, it would be nice if it at least said "Hey I'm here, I'm not bricked, just waiting to be told what to do" 

 

Great to hear that you have FEL boot running, that's on my list of things to try, I was just waiting for Zador to get back to me with some info in one of my other threads. 

 

Have Montjoe's ethernet patches been included yet or are you still using a USB->Ethernet dongle?

[zador.blood.stained]

[ o.k. ] Press <b> to boot again, <q> to finish [ FEL ]

b

[ o.k. ] Loading files via [ FEL USB ]

100% [================================================]  4812 kB,  683.7 kB/s 

stat() error on file "/var/git/Armbian/output/cache/sdcard//boot/bin/orangepih3.bin": No such file or directory

[ o.k. ] Press <b> to boot again, <q> to finish [ FEL ]

 

Auto detection cleanups gone wrong

script.bin link is read only before first boot, it's not updated for next boots with same rootfs. I'll fix this later 

[tkaiser]

script.bin link is read only before first boot, it's not updated for next boots with same rootfs. I'll fix this later 

 

I tried it but am too tired already. Thx!

 

Useful to a point, it would be nice if it at least said "Hey I'm here, I'm not bricked, just waiting to be told what to do" 

 

Well, with Allwinner SoCs your best friend is FEL mode

 

Regarding H3, mainline and Ethernet: Still no progress. I tried his patches out a few weeks ago but they didn't apply. So we'll have to wait (and/or use USB adapters with Mainline in the meantime). 

[Nick]

Well, with Allwinner SoCs your best friend is FEL mode

Tonight is the first time that I've used it, though I'm sure it wont be the last 

 

 

Regarding H3, mainline and Ethernet: Still no progress. I tried his patches out a few weeks ago but they didn't apply. So we'll have to wait (and/or use USB adapters with Mainline in the meantime). 

I tried as well and didn't get anywhere, but equally I don't know what I'm doing  so I thought I would ask. It's a shame, but I can cope with using a USB adapter now that I have bought one that actually works 

[zador.blood.stained]

Great to hear that you have FEL boot running, that's on my list of things to try, I was just waiting for Zador to get back to me with some info in one of my other threads. 

FEL boot and NFS boot are slightly different things, first should work out of the box most of the times and has some kind of documentation, second still has some configuration issues.