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
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
