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

[Trigu75]

After some test , I successfully booted station m2 armbian on my hk1 r2 box straight from sdcard after changing the dtb file !!!

testing now

https://www.dropbox.com/s/kdrjs6qefh...E92C.jpeg?dl=0

This is great!!!!!!

this is how to do it , if you want to test and you know what I am explaining

from here I downloaded the image .. I had a small sdcard memory so I used the small version , with no desktop , just to try to boot

https://users.armbian.com/balbes150/rk3566/

it's xz file so you have to extract it with 7zip to get the img file

then using balena or win32diskimager burn the image to the memory card

now you need a dtb for your device to boot

with imagerepacker , get this file

RK3566_DC_R2_HK5235F_11_20210705.1409.img.dump\Ima ge\recovery.img.dump\second.dump\rk-kernel.dtb

in my case I used the one from my device firmware

this file is already compiled for linux , so no need to recompile ,

for the next step you need a ubuntu or linux machine ...

mount the sdcard on your linux , lets call it sdb .... mkdir /mnt/tmp ; mount /dev/sdb2 /mnt/tmp

cp rk-kernel.dtb /mnt/tmp/boot/dtb/rockchip/rk3566-firefly-roc-pc.dtb

that will overwrite the dtb

unmount the sdcard , put it inside your box .. turn on the power ... and test ..

[Trigu75]

And I am stuck again due the lack of sharing ..

sadly. The released armbian images are.on kernel 4.19

legacy 4.4 kernel have mpp service enabled ( for hardware decoding ) , there is no mpp enabled on 4.19

i succeeded to instal Mali-g52 drivers , and video playing is smooth , but cpu usage gets very high due to software decoding, even kodi works great , and hdmi refresh rate changes based on source FPS

but still not usable without mpp service module

I tried to rebuild armbian myself to use kernel 4.4 instead , but all the changes made to,build the m2 image .. are not included on their source ... so I am stuck again

[Trigu75]

Update ... not stuck anymore ..

hardware decoding success using mpv , gstreamer , ffmpeg and chrome lots of customizations done to test ...

looking promising

[chinhhut]

Trigu75 thank you for great sharing. I guess you get all working with the latest version as the link below, right?

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

And is it able to install the armbian to the eMMC of the box? I have X96 X6 box and it seems to be similar to your hk1 box.

Thank you.

[Trigu75]

Kind of , I tried both buster , and focal , got sources from a rockchip user on GitHub , which appear to be updating the code , and some sources from firefly gitlab

Compiled on the device , and played a bit , just to check if it could be done , on some spare time I had ...

Once everything is configured right , this cheap android box actually works great .. and looking at the u-boot , it actually comes with extlinux , Linux , android , sd card , network boot , from factory

serial console do wonders , and shows lots of info

i only had issues with wifi ... need to find the drivers

[chinhhut]

Kind of , I tried both buster , and focal , got sources from a rockchip user on GitHub , which appear to be updating the code , and some sources from firefly gitlab

Compiled on the device , and played a bit , just to check if it could be done , on some spare time I had ...

Once everything is configured right , this cheap android box actually works great .. and looking at the u-boot , it actually comes with extlinux , Linux , android , sd card , network boot , from factory

serial console do wonders , and shows lots of info

I only had issues with wifi ... need to find the drivers

could you share the rk-kernel.dtb file? I've tried extract this file from original firmware but got stuck at imagerepacker.

$ ./imgRePackerRK.exe '/f/Rockchip tools/X96_X6_20210804-1052/X96_X6_20210804-1052.img' imgRepackerRK (version 1.05 windows) Rockchip firmware batch/update images unpacker/packer (c) RedScorpio, Moscow, 2013-2015 [email protected]
==========================[ START ]==========================
--- Firmware unpacking ---
"RKFW" image file detected Batch image header from "F:/Rockchip tools/X96_X6_20210804-1052/X96_X6_20210804-1052.img" was read Image properties: Type RockChip batch image (RKFW) Version 11.0.0 Date 2021.08.04 Time 11:12:22 ChipID 0x33353638 Code(?) 0x01060005 Unsupported ChipID
==========================[ STOP ]==========================

Thank you.

[chinhhut]

Trigu75 I can extract the rk-kernel.dtb now but got another stuck when trying to mount sd card to Linux (ubuntu 18.04).

lsblk -o NAME,FSTYPE,LABEL,SIZE,MOUNTPOINT


NAME FSTYPE LABEL SIZE MOUNTPOINT

sda 10G

├─sda1 1M

├─sda2 ext4 1G /boot

└─sda3 LVM2_member 9G

└─ubuntu--vg-ubuntu--lv ext4 9G /

sdb 15G

sr0 1024M


root@chinh:/# mkdir /mnt/tmp

root@chinh:/mnt# mount /dev/sdb /mnt/tmp/

mount: /mnt/tmp: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/sdb, missing codepage or helper program, or other error.

There is a strange point that after flashing the armbian img file to the SD card, there is no Boot partition as normal. When plugin the flashed SD card to PC again, only the message "the sd card is not recognized" and asking to initialize again etc.

Could you suggest any solutions?

Thank you.

[Trigu75]

this my device DTB (hk1 rbox r2)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/fs89xm9i5qisqmr/rk-kernel.dtb?dl=0

on armbian images , there is no separate /boot partition , it's all in the "/" partition , you need to mount it on linux , add your DTB file to /boot/extlinux/rockchip/ directory , and edit the extlinux.conf file to load that dtb

based on your output , it appears you didn't flash the image , you should see 2 paritions , sdb1 and sdb2 , mount sdb2 , copy , change the files ... and that's it

[chinhhut]

this my device DTB (hk1 rbox r2)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/fs89xm9i5qisqmr/rk-kernel.dtb?dl=0

on armbian images , there is no separate /boot partition , it's all in the "/" partition , you need to mount it on linux , add your DTB file to /boot/extlinux/rockchip/ directory , and edit the extlinux.conf file to load that dtb

based on your output , it appears you didn't flash the image , you should see 2 paritions , sdb1 and sdb2 , mount sdb2 , copy , change the files ... and that's it

I just flashed the Armbian_21.11.0-trunk_Station-m2_hirsute_edge_5.15.0.img.xz to the sd card via Balena etcher and mount the sd card to ubuntu 18 again successfully. I can see only sdb1.

mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/tmp

Then I can copy the rk-kernel.dtb according to your guide by the command below:

cp rk-kernel.dtb /mnt/tmp/boot/dtb/rockchip/rk3566-firefly-roc-pc.dtb

Later on, I put the sd card to the box, connect HDMI and plug the power but there is no any boot message.

Have you found any console log while the box is booting yet?

Thank you.

[Trigu75]

in this case ... I think you are booting an image with no HDMI output , meaning you need serial , and high version kernel ... I guess experimental

balbes150 Advanced member 2021-9-15 16:30:33

I added a new version of images 20210915-edge with 5.15.0-rc1 kernel. Please note, this version does not have an HDMI output, control is performed via SSH or UART. The wired network works, both LAN1 and LAN2 interfaces work on P2, M2 - LAN1.

https://bbs.stationpc.com/thread-211-2-1.html

Start from normal , get the buster legacy kernel desktop ...

and check stationpc forum for the armbian post as it usually says what works on each versions that are getting uploaded there ..

[chinhhut]

in this case ... I think you are booting an image with no HDMI output , meaning you need serial , and high version kernel ... I guess experimental

Thank you for sharing great information. I will try to connect via ssh.

by the way, have you tried to install the boot to the eMMC yet?

[Trigu75]

no , I don't want to mess with the emmc until I'm able to boot android from SD card ... the problem , I guess this needs to be set before building the android image .. and I didn't try to build android

I asked mo123 to build and image with my dtb .. to see if it loads .. but nothing from that area .....

I did a full backup to SD , and tried to boot from SD ... it booted but still used partitions from emmc , I guess it's configured on kernel partition

and played abit from uboot prompt (through serial) to see if I could boot from network and so

[chinhhut]

in this case ... I think you are booting an image with no HDMI output , meaning you need serial , and high version kernel ... I guess experimental

Start from normal , get the buster legacy kernel desktop ...

and check stationpc forum for the armbian post as it usually says what works on each versions that are getting uploaded there ..

btw, do you need to push the reset button during power on the box to start booting from sd card?

[Trigu75]

no ...
, on my box , uboot came configured to try to boot from SD card , then EMMC , then network , all I had to do is turn on with SD card in it ..

if SD card is good ... it starts from there .. SD card not good , boots the android on EMMC ...

in mi case it starts as soon as I plug in the device ...

[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.