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+--- Thread: Question regarding odd startup behaviour (/showthread.php?tid=17690)
Question regarding odd startup behaviour - Mff - 12-03-2022
I've got a question regarding a cool RockPro64 4GB board I recently acquired (the previous owner ran it once, concluded it was too much hassle compared to a RPI4 and sent it to me. It worked fine at his place before sending it to me);
When powered the only thing it does, regardless of peripherals connected or storage present, is flash the white LED and one of the ethernet LEDs continuously at something around 2-3Hz. I tried many things; different microSD cards, different card readers, different distros. I also tried disabling the SPI flash by grounding the clock pin; also results in the same behavior. When powered during this behavior the 5V GPOI pin is a steady 5V but the 3.3V seems to be "flashing" together with the LEDs as well.
Finally I tried hooking up the UART2 slot to a usb->UART adapter in order to maybe get something out of the board in that way. Nothing was showing on the UART output, but when I looked back at the RockPro64 suddenly the LED flashing pattern had changed. The board was booting up!
It turns out that I can reliably and turn on the board (from a powered but "blink-looping") state by connecting the UART pins to a powered UART USB controller, but nothing else! (rebooting always seems to work fine, so only starting from a turned off state is problematic) Connecting either of the UART pins (8 or 10) to ground or the 3.3V volt supply doesn't start it either.
I updated the firmware via the armbian-config menu, but that doesn't seem to make a difference.
Does anyone have any idea what might be causing this behavior? Is some kind of memory corrupted perhaps? perhaps a somewhat faulty 3.3V circuit? a short? Visually the board seems fine.
Any help in diagnosing this odd behaviour is welcome! Thanks in advance