http://synfare.com/599N105E/hwdocs/rock64/index.html

Here is a link to the layout of the gpio pins on the rock64. If you look at the pi2 bus, pins 2 and 4 are labeled 5V input. Is this a viable option to power the board? I do not want to use the barrel jack because I am putting this board in a larger system that I already have a large 5V power supply for. If it is, do I connect the +5V to the 5V pin and the -5V to any ground pin?

I have set up extlinux.conf (on sd card) such that it will obtain the root filesystem from my USB drive. Everything works OK when I connect the drive to USB 2 port (I get the message during the boot that the drive is spinning up, the kernel waits for that and then the boot proceeds normally). This is a USB 3 drive and, of course, it would be better to connect it to the USB 3 port in rock64. When I do this, the system starts booting but then gets stuck before it says anything about waiting for the drive to spin up. I was randomly playing with the cables back and forth and somehow I managed to get it to boot once from USB 3 but I am not sure what I did exactly.

Has anyone gotten rootfs on USB 3 drive to work correctly when loading the kernel from sdcard? I know that the drive works on USB 3 port (PC) and it has its own power supply, so there should not be any power issues.

Hi, I have recently purchased a Rock64 board and I am quite newbie. 

I want to install an ESP8266 wifi module I have laying in my desk (and I tried before with an Arduino board) but I don't know where to start from.

I'm planning to use use Pi-2 BUS pins 8 and 10 -> GPIO2_A0 (TX) and GPIO2_A1 (RX).

The microchip (and also the rock board) is pretended to be powered by a computer PSU.

I think my ESP is already flashed with updated firmware so the big question is if the rock board will detect my ESP and how would I send AT commands to it.

Thanks in advance.

Please update mpp(libmpp.so) and other vpu files needed so HDR can work in Kodi 18.
Rockchip already added it in Feb 2017, 10 months ago.
https://github.com/rockchip-linux/mpp/co...5a893a647f
Rock64 firmwares still use mpp from 2016.

When I power the board "ROCK64 4GB" with the SD card image "xenial-mate-rock64-0.6.1-141-arm64.img.xz" that download from url "https://github.com/ayufan-rock64/linux-build/releases"

, and all 3 leds light up and remains on, nothing else happens.

It is need to reconnect the power for several times to finally boot successfully

At long last :-)

Thanks to Tl Lim, my clusterboard prototype for SOPine64 modules arrived a couple of days ago and I started to set it up in an old ITX rack mount case. I will try and post some more thoughts and results during the initial bring up and testing.

   

   

The board itself is of mini-ITX formfactor and provides slots for 7 SOPine64 modules networked by the onboard GbE switch. Some interfaces of each module are exposed on the board like two USB ports and a header with UART, SPI, I2C and things like RESET, PWR_ON...

Edit 1: 2017/12/16

My current plan to power the board (5V input only, so maybe 15-20A max) is to use the normal FlexATX PSU I used in the case. The Seasonic SS250-SU is a 250W ATX12V 2.3 unit that provides 17A@5V, 22A@12V and 14A@3,3V. Since the topology of those ATX PSU's doesnt allow for low/no load operation each rail has to be loaded with a minimum load specified in the datasheet. For the SS250-SU this is 3.3V - zero load, 5V - 0.5A, 12V-2A. To not waste the 24W on the 12V I will probably use the DC/DC converter in the pictures and go from 12V to 5V for efficiency reasons...

Next step will probably be to completetly rewire the ATX power cable, fans and front panel connectors with some veroboard to get some controls in and add some features like thermal management, power sequencing and safety... the front panel probably also needs some kind of status display...

Edit 2: 2017/12/17

On the software side I will start using mainline firmware/spl/u-boot right away since the nodes will boot from the SOPine' s on-board SPI flash and pull their working images from the network... have to do some research on the state of those components upstream, but from what I heard everything should be already in place. Getting the SPI images on to the Flash can either be done through FEL mode / USB (WIP) or by booting from a sdcard...

Edit 3: Clusterboard 2.1 schematic

Tl Lim provided me with the latest clusterboard hardware schematics for reference:

  PINE64 CLUSTER BOARD_2_1.pdf (Size: 572.46 KB / Downloads: 2799)

Edit 4: 2017/12/17

I built an Armbian mainline image for a first quick test that boots from sdcard, which seems to work fine, but GbE does not seem to  work stable yet, after some changes to the dts I at least got a link... I then tried with ayufan's last xenial-minimal image (legacy kernel) and that worked fine out of the box...

first boot...
   
two nodes...
   

I ran some quick iperf3 tests between the nodes and to an external box and got between 800-900Mbit/s , so network hardware seems to be OK... next step is to fix the mainline image as I don't really want to work with legacy kernel here...

I ordered some small 14x14x5mm copper heatsinks and two 80x80mm fans now to get some cooling for the cluster.

So first off, while I'm a "professional computer guy", my expertise is Microsoft stuff, so before getting my raspberry pi 3 I had very little linux experience. The RPI3 has a lot of downloadable images that basically "just work" out of the box, but ROCK64 doesn't have that benefit yet. And with the more powerful hardware on this platform, I have been excited to figure this out... but to get it up and running I've had to learn quickly and do a lot of research. 

After banging my head against things, neglecting the family, angering the demon that is my wife, and having to start over again multiple times... I finally got RetroPie, RetroArch, and EmulationStation working. I figured I'd contrubute to the community with what steps I took, but I offer no support or guarantees. All I know is that now I'm "rock64ing" RP, RA, and ES

I wanted to use the newest linux builds available from ayufan but ran into problems booting (no video), so I ended up going back a few versions. I'm eventually planning to try to find a way to upgrade to the newest build without having to redo everything (if you know how, feel free to let me know, I'm still learning all this).

I started with jessie using the 0.5.10 build from ayufan (jessie-minimal-rock64-0.5.10-118-arm64.img.xz). I was using a computer monitor and an HDMI-DVI converter to configure everything on jessie, but once it got it all working I tried it on my TV and got no display : So I started over using stretch (stretch-minimal-rock64-0.5.10-118-arm64.img.xz). I'll post the details of both in case it helps anyone. And there's always a chance some of the steps I took were not necessary, but it worked out for me.

First off, as a relatively linux noob, here's my notes on some helpful linux commands that I had to learn and use in my trials: 
----------------------
To show version of installed package: apt-show-versions <package>

After a fresh OS install, run these to get everything updated:
  apt-get update
  apt-get upgrade
  apt-get dist-upgrade

To install newer/unstable versions of packages (such as gcc):
  echo "deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free" >> /etc/apt/sources.list.d/unstable.list
  apt-get update
  apt-get install -t unstable gcc-5

To downgrade/install a specific version of packages: sudo apt-get install <package-name>=<package-version-number>

To open compressed log files: zcat logfile.gz

To show all versions available for a package: apt-cache madison <package>

To show what packages depend on a specific package: apt-cache rdepends packagename

To list all installed packages: apt list --installed

To manually mount a USB drive: 
  mkdir /media/usb1 (if it doesn't already exist)
  mount /dev/sda1 /media/usb1

To Unmount a USB Drive: umount /media/usb1

To get CPU detail: lscpu

To get status of services: service --status-all

To restart a service: service <service name> restart

To force-overwrite packages after apt-get error: sudo dpkg -i  --force-overwrite  /var/cache/apt/archives/<package file name>.deb

To download a package files only without installing: aptitude download <package_name> (note: had to install aptitude)

Force network adapter to get DHCP address: dhclient eth0 -v 

To NEVER ALLOW DROP TO COMMAND and auto-start emulation station, add this to the bottom of ~/.profile:
   [[ -z $DISPLAY && $XDG_VTNR -eq 1 ]] && exec emulationstation
 (preferred method is to use retropie setup to tell ES to autorun in config)

To set the timezone: dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

To enable autologin: edit the file /lib/systemd/system/getty@.service and change the line
    ExecStart=-/sbin/agetty --noclear %I $TERM
  to
    ExecStart=-/sbin/agetty --noclear -a rock64 %I $TERM

Ways to build a debian package from source:
  checkinstall (had to add this package manually, but makes ANY INSTALLATION into a debian package and replaces the make command!)
  The next two are picky and require a true debian source package, needs to run from within the debian folder with a special file in it:
   dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc -b (this one seems to work the best)
   dpkg-deb --build <package name> 

 To add a root share after installing samba, add the below to the config /etc/samba/smb.conf (NOTE: retropie setup lets you do it without the console):
    [root]
    comment = root
    path = "/"
    writeable = yes
    guest ok = yes
    create mask = 0644
    directory mask = 0755
    force user = rock64
-------------


Now to the guts of the RP, RA, and ES installs:

For both jessie and stretch you'll need the most recent retropie source from github. Then use this pull request to make the necessary changes to the code to support a rock64 install:
https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Set...2205/files


ON JESSIE:
-----------------
First run the retropie-setup script after you've applied the pull request to source. This alone should allow you to run the retropie setup.

The release of jessie that I used has an older version of GCC and causes build errors when installing retroarch and emulationstation (unknown value 'native' for -march).
To build retroarch you'll need to upgrade GCC, so I added the unstable apt source (per my instructions above) and chose to install version 7.2.
To build emulationstation you'll need to upgrade G++, so I added the unstable apt source (per my instructions above) and chose to install version 7.2.

I attempt to install retroarch and emulationstation and after reviewing the logs find that they fail due to an attempt at overwriting existing libraries (because some are already included in the libmali-rk* packages). After the first failed installations I drop to console and apt-get remove the following:
 libsdl2-dev
 libmali-rk-utgard-2th-r7p0
 libmali-rk-dev
(don't reboot)

I then return to retropie-setup and attempt retroarch and emulationstation installations again. If I run into any failures again, I note the log file it refers to and I drop back to console and review the log and manually force the failing package to overwrite the existing one using the below command and try the install again:
  sudo dpkg -i  --force-overwrite  <full path to DEB file>

Eventually both RA and ES install successfully. But... ES doesn't start due to a segmentation fault. So, REINSTALL both libmali-rk* packages with force-overwrite. For example:
    sudo dpkg -i  --force-overwrite  /var/cache/apt/archives/libmali-rk-utgard-2th-r7p0_1.5-4ayufan12_arm64.deb
----------------------


ON STRETCH:
-----------------------
(for all below steps, whenever something doesn't install due to an overwrite, I use dpkg to force overwrite it, just like previously explained)
Ran all updates, upgrades, and dist-upgrades after the fresh image booted.
The first few times I tried this I ended up with the "unable to initialize SDL" errors and my attempts to fix it made things worse. This time I decided to be proactive and build a few packages first to try and get dependencies in place. I have no idea if this was absolutely necessary. But again, it worked.
   apt-get install xorg-dev
   apt-get build-dep xscreensaver vlc totem
I ignored any package warnings it throws at this point since I was just looking for some dependencies to get installed.
Now run the retropie-setup script after you apply the pull request from github.
Try and install Retroarch and Emulationstation. Any failures, review the listed log file and force overwrite the failing library manually using dpkg like I previously explained.
Eventually both will install, but emulationstation still returns unable to init SDL.
Did some testing and found that the libsdl2-dev package was actually on hold. I figured I'd remove and reinstall the libmali-rk-utgard package...
but it wouldn't let me due to a dependency issue. I installed aptitude to see what it recommended as a solution.
So first I let it install libmali-rk-midgard-4th-r13p0. Then I was able to successfully remove libmali-rk-utgard. 
Then I reinstalled the libmali-rk-utgard package using dpkg with overwrite.
Then I uninstalled and reinstalled libmali-dev.
------------

At this point, whether you're on jessie or stretch, you should be able to start ES and start installing your various emulators. Some will install just fine, and others will fail and you'll have to review logs and tend to the overwrites manually using the same methods we used during the install. I didn't test all the emulators but was able to get a good handful running without issues. Again, I can't make any promises or do much support on this, but I hope it helps some of you get up and rolling. If anyone has additions or runs into other required fixes, please post for the community benefit.

Good luck everyone, and happy rock64ing!

Dear all 

so happy to get yesterday my new Rock64 / 4G. 

Some issue, may some of you use to have the same issue ( Xenial and Debian distrib)

- VPN PPTP doesn t work 
      => copy/paste from my ubuntu rp3 which work
- RDP client (Remmina, freerdp, rdesktop) doesn t work
      => mouse disappear
      => screen refresh makes impossible to work on it
      => work fine on rpi3

thanks in advance

Does anyone know of a way to extend the power and reset buttons on the rock 64? Either a script for the pi2 bus or even resoldering the power button connections would work. I am a little hesitant with second option, since I do not want to damage the board. Any help would be appreciated

Rock64+android
Usb3.0 does not work
Usb 2.0 working.

Somebody can help me?
Thanks