Success , Armbian from station m2 on rk3566 android boxes !11

[chinhhut]

I can boot the box into the armbian image even there is no HDMI output now. I can see the IP address of the box which associated with its MAC but unable to ssh or ping. If I turn off the power, that IP address will be gone so control via ssh is impossible.
Could you tell me how to control via UART?

Thank you.

[Trigu75]

you need to find the uart pins on your board , solder 3 cables , one for gnd , one tx , one rx , and use a USB to serial device that supports 1500000 bps

then you can try putty on windows , or screen on linux to the com / tty using 1500000 as speed (usually com3 in windows , and /dev/ttyUSB0 on linux)

[Trigu75]

I don't know which image you used , did you try the buster / focal? HDMI works there and you get boot log on screen ...

[Trigu75]

maybe this will answer your question

this is the whole boot from plugin in to login gui

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKD8or8CAOs

[chinhhut]

I don't know which image you used , did you try the buster / focal? HDMI works there and you get boot log on screen ...

wow !! that's great to hear HDMI work with rk3566 box now. I've tried the image Armbian_21.11.0-trunk_Station-m2_hirsute_edge_5.15.0.img.xz.
I will try Armbian_21.11.0-trunk_Station-m2_buster_legacy_4.19.193.img.xz again tonight.

thank you.

[chinhhut]

Trigu75 I've tried the buster desktop again but still there is no HDMI console. Do you have any other suggestions to try?

[chinhhut]

Trigu75 what is exactly image have you tried successfully with HDMI?
Thank you.

[Trigu75]

I don’t know which device are you using , or if the dtb file is the right one

you Should not use my dtb if you are not using the same device as mine



all the images there have hdmi enabled , just not the ones with the experimental kernel

and without serial console connected , you cannot know why is not loading .... I can’t tell you what the problem is without seeing a lot

[chinhhut]

I don’t know which device are you using , or if the dtb file is the right one

you Should not use my dtb if you are not using the same device as mine

all the images there have hdmi enabled , just not the ones with the experimental kernel

and without serial console connected , you cannot know why is not loading .... I can’t tell you what the problem is without seeing a lot

we use the dtb which dumped from my Android box (X96 X6 4G/32G) using rkrepacktool. I've tried most of the images and no one show the log via HDMI cable.
this is my dtb:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/vbtry1hg5snw4p8/x96-x6-rk-kernel.dtb?dl=0

and the link of my android 11 img (X6):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/11jWaVN-akphhbz88bYa5w4P1HCw1UJT_/edit

please give me any suggestions if any.

Thank you.

[Trigu75]

As I wrote ... unless you solder some wires to the unit pins , and check console , I can’t help

[chinhhut]

Trigu75 I'd like to make the summary of the steps what I did:

Here are the steps what I did:

1. Download the stock firmware from this link:

https://androidtvbox.eu/x96-x6-firmware-for-tv-box-with-rk3566-soc-20210707/

https://drive.google.com/file/d/11jWaVN-akphhbz88bYa5w4P1HCw1UJT_/edit

2. Using. RKDevTool and RkRepacker to extract the recovery.img and the rk-kernel.dtb



3. Download and tried some M2 images from this repo:

https://users.armbian.com/balbes150/....19.193.img.xz

https://users.armbian.com/balbes150/....19.193.img.xz



4. Flash these image to sd card by balena etcher



5. Attach the sd card to the ubuntu machine and mount the sd card as the internal storage



6. Copy the rk-kernel.dtb file from step 2 and to the /boot/dtb/rockchip/ folder of the image



7. Update the extlinux.conf file to load this new dtb



8. attach the sd card to the X96 box, connect LAN cable & HDMI cable to the box, using toothpick to bring the box to the reset mode and plug the power



9. The X96 box boots in armbian mode but there is no console via HDMI.



10. After several minutues of booting, there is IP address of the box on the router but unable to ssh.

[Trigu75]

Trigu75 I'd like to make the summary of the steps what I did:




8. attach the sd card to the X96 box, connect LAN cable & HDMI cable to the box, using toothpick to bring the box to the reset mode and plug the power

who said anything about pushing any button , or about bring the box to reset mode ... or where in my youtube video did you see me pushing anything ?

all I did is , flash the image to SD , edit the extlinux.conf file to load my DTB , insert the SD card , and plugin the device to power

Just solder wires to the UART pins , and connect to your computer with USB to UART , and open a serial console ... that is your primary console

I don't think you are booting at all the SDCARD .... but getting to some internal recovery (because you are pushing the reset button , because you decided it needs to be done , for some reason)

[dieselnutjob]

maybe this will answer your question

this is the whole boot from plugin in to login gui

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKD8or8CAOs

Hello.

I have been trying your techniques on a Pine64 Quartz64. My objective is to get a console via an FTDI usb to serial adapter.

Here is my first attempt, just to try and boot.

The result of this is that Linux boots (though I don't know if it finishes) but I have no console and so I can't interact with it. This is connected with a CH340G chipset USB adapter that works with Manjaro BSP on the Quartz64. The FTDI USBtoSerial is also plugged into the board.

https://pscan.uk/stuff/fail-noconsole.txt

You can see near the bottom "[ 2.712262] usb 4-1: FTDI USB Serial Device converter now attached to ttyUSB0"
Next, I add "console=ttyUSB0"

But now this seems to cause trouble

"[ 3.159716] ttyS2 set divisor fail, quot:1 != dll,dlh:0"

In fact any changes that I try to make to the console settings in extlinux.conf seem to result in this error.

Here is the complete output

https://pscan.uk/stuff/fail-usbtty0.txt

Can you help me to understand or fix this please?

[Trigu75]

Fail.console.txt , you are using a dtb file for a different board , and it gets stuck trying to initialize the pci-e port ( on firefly boards) , you need your device DTB

I don’t understand what are you trying to do .... the FTDI is supposed to be plugged in on your computer , and the FTDi tx , rx , and ground to the pine UART pins

[dieselnutjob]

Fail.console.txt , you are using a dtb file for a different board , and it gets stuck trying to initialize the pci-e port ( on firefly boards) , you need your device DTB

I don’t understand what are you trying to do .... the FTDI is supposed to be plugged in on your computer , and the FTDi tx , rx , and ground to the pine UART pins

Two points:-

1. I have rk3566-quartz64-a.dtb which I extracted from the Manjaro build. I copied this file over the rk3566-firefly-roc-pc.dtb file. The file name is rk3566-firefly-roc-pc.dtb but the contents are rk3566-quartz64-a.dtb

2. I have two separate console connections:-

Console A: This is an FTDI serial connection connection plugged into the USB port of the RK3566 board. The cable actually has two FTDI chips. It goes RK3566/USB->FTDIchip>serial->nullmodem->serial>FTDIchip2>Laptop/USB.

Console A is the one that I actually want to use.

However it doesn't work. In order to debug it I have a second console:-

Console B: This is CH340G connected like this RK3566 UART2_TX_M0_DEBUG, UART2_RX_M0_DEBUG

The logs that I put on my website are from Console B.

Maybe if we could get Console B to work (with UART2) then I could get the FTDI chip to work later.