• Maker boards and the inviting sock drawer ...

    From Adrian Caspersz@3:770/3 to All on Sat Feb 23 00:39:39 2019
    Have heart.

    These things discarded do not deserve to find the end of their
    existence, naked and zapped with static from a nearby nylon sock.

    But ...

    I purchased a very cheap RPi clone and a few days ago had a real devil
    of a time getting it to boot. To justify postage costs from the US
    (charged in high dollars and drop shipped here for nothing, EMS from
    China), I made up the order with other bits of junk still to be looked
    at, and my 30 day warranty ran out of promise while life ticked by.

    So I powered the board up with
    [1] a raspberry Pi compatible 2 Amp PSU,
    [2] a HDMI/ VGA converter dongle
    [3] a 32GB MicroSD card dd'd with a 6GB debian desktop build
    distributed by the board's manufacturer!

    And was rewarded with a red light, and no video.

    Turning to the bare forums, it seems this thing powering converter
    dongles is not its forte. I whacked it into the TV HDMI and found every
    boot either failing with (again) no video, or quickly crashing with
    stack dumps.

    The forums say, ye should try a better power supply. So I did (something
    from BT with an incoming mains RFI filter that almost electrocuted me),
    gave it a limit of 3A and yet again pretty much the same.

    I also verified the sanity of my Samsung 32GB memory card (was it well?,
    was the image copied correctly?, was the card a fake, er nope..). Got depressed, went shopping on Amazon to cheer myself up, bought a 16GB
    Sandisk A1 card and something else.

    And hey, it booted! Well, for one out of ten attempts. What is this crap?

    I gave up, felt more depressed and searched eBay.

    I looked at the inflated cost that I could gain selling the pup (as non-working, for parts only) and made it ready to be put aside for that.
    Some people call that unhappy place, the sock drawer. Mine is a flooded
    rat infected diseased shed of junk but I digress ...


    So I had the other item to play with.

    A $2 USB to TTL converter, the first one on -

    https://www.cpmspectrepi.uk/raspberry_pi/MoinMoinExport/USBtoTtlSerialAdapters.html

    Finding some strength from somewhere, I connected it to the UART0 pins
    of the board and with a helping laptop found some communication of an
    error.

    "BUG: soft lockup - CPU#0 stuck for 22s!"

    Long story short, I found another OS build (Armbian - nice project, understandably not for Pi), and now the thing is booting 10/10.
    Somewhere, a manufacturers own support website needs looking at.

    This is so slightly beyond what some newbies might want to experience
    with such a product, that the Raspberry-Pi as a starter makes much more
    sense.

    Tried and tested :)

    --
    Adrian C

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)
  • From Theo@3:770/3 to Adrian Caspersz on Wed Feb 27 00:43:49 2019
    Adrian Caspersz <email@here.invalid> wrote:
    And hey, it booted! Well, for one out of ten attempts. What is this crap?

    One of these? https://www.techrepublic.com/article/orange-pi-3-review-a-raspberry-pi-rival-thats-a-serious-disappointment/

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)