My Rock64 died (with a happy ending!)

[rmbusy]

As the Thread Subject says, it died.  It's been happily running for a couple years now, and it looks like it went down night before last.

Now when I say "died", it's not totally dead, it just refuses to boot into Linux.  The console was non-responsive, so I reset it, and it hung during the boot process.  After that, I tried multiple different SD cards, and a couple different USB drives, as well as unplugging everything from the board (Ethernet & USB).  It repeatedly hangs at various points during the boot process every time, never getting through the whole boot process.

I have U-Boot 2017.09-rockchip-ayufan-1062-gbb4886a528 (Jun 19 2019 - 19:41:42 +0000) programmed into the SPI Flash, and even tried reprogramming that.

I wrote this post looking for some hardware diagnostics I could run from U-Boot, since that's the only thing that boots reliably.  I was suspecting either a DRAM failure, or something in the CPU itself.  I searched around with Google, but didn't find anything Rock64 specific in the diagnostics category.

Now for the happy ending.  After a day and a half of trying different things, after typing up this post, I looked at the board again trying to think of anything else to try, when I realized I had not tried a different power supply.  I did a quick search and found another 5V supply, plugged it in, and viola, it booted to the rock64 login prompt!!

What an ordeal.  So for the record, it you see strange behavior, even after a couple years, don't forget to try another power supply.

For the technically curious, the supply I've been using is a 5V/2A switcher style supply.  I measured it's output with a DMM, and with no load, it was 5.7VDC.  When connected to the Rock64, I saw it drop below 4.4VDC while trying to boot.

I checked the power draw of the Rock64 with only a 8GB Sony USB stick plugged into the USB3.0 port and the Ethernet cable connected, and it's sitting at 0.274A booted to the login prompt.  While booting, I never saw it go above 0.6A.

Now to put everything back as it was.  I'm glad this ordeal is over.   

[tllim]

As the Thread Subject says, it died.  It's been happily running for a couple years now, and it looks like it went down night before last.

Now when I say "died", it's not totally dead, it just refuses to boot into Linux.  The console was non-responsive, so I reset it, and it hung during the boot process.  After that, I tried multiple different SD cards, and a couple different USB drives, as well as unplugging everything from the board (Ethernet & USB).  It repeatedly hangs at various points during the boot process every time, never getting through the whole boot process.

I have U-Boot 2017.09-rockchip-ayufan-1062-gbb4886a528 (Jun 19 2019 - 19:41:42 +0000) programmed into the SPI Flash, and even tried reprogramming that.

I wrote this post looking for some hardware diagnostics I could run from U-Boot, since that's the only thing that boots reliably.  I was suspecting either a DRAM failure, or something in the CPU itself.  I searched around with Google, but didn't find anything Rock64 specific in the diagnostics category.

Now for the happy ending.  After a day and a half of trying different things, after typing up this post, I looked at the board again trying to think of anything else to try, when I realized I had not tried a different power supply.  I did a quick search and found another 5V supply, plugged it in, and viola, it booted to the rock64 login prompt!!

What an ordeal.  So for the record, it you see strange behavior, even after a couple years, don't forget to try another power supply.

For the technically curious, the supply I've been using is a 5V/2A switcher style supply.  I measured it's output with a DMM, and with no load, it was 5.7VDC.  When connected to the Rock64, I saw it drop below 4.4VDC while trying to boot.

I checked the power draw of the Rock64 with only a 8GB Sony USB stick plugged into the USB3.0 port and the Ethernet cable connected, and it's sitting at 0.274A booted to the login prompt.  While booting, I never saw it go above 0.6A.

Now to put everything back as it was.  I'm glad this ordeal is over.   

My house's VOIP box behaves same way, the box has been worked in strange way on pass two months and suddenly refuse to work. I thought the box already kaput and then discovered the included power supply slowly provided less power. I switch to new power supply, my VOIP box works happily again and now still serves me well :-)