no life in a13

[drspastic]

ok i just got my a13 and 233
the 233 seems like the supply input is shorted so i put that to the side for a while.

the a13 i connect to a vga monitor, 12v stable supply to board, sd 4gb card with the debian-xfce image dd onto it.
as soon as the power is connected a red led comes on.

thats all that happenes. button presses on pwr on and reset do nothing, vga monitor never comes out of standby.

i checked the sd image burned ok and the vga monitor works in all usual modes, and the power is stable and clean.

whats going on? sure something should appear on my screen, even just POST message.
i gave it plenty of time to boot (15 minutes plus)

have i just got 2 dead units in the post?

[olimex]

my guess is you didn't build your SD card correctly for A13

all boards pass several functional tests before go to stock so it's very unlickely that the boards you got to be with problems

[saand]

hi,
i had a similar issue but found after trying several different images that it worked.

you can tell for sure if your system is booting by connecting a serial cable to the uart.
some info here
https://www.olimex.com/wiki/Serial_connection_to_A13

You can also try the debian image (setup by olimex)
https://www.olimex.com/wiki/Prebuilt_SD_card_images_running_debian#Debian_image
at the moment for your purposes this is a bit better than the debian with xfce image on the same page because to get the xfce version to display VGA i had to copy the script and uImage files from a working VGA image.

Also one thing that caught me out once, after imaging your SD card make sure to plug it into the SD socket and apply power, dont pull the power out for at least 1 minute. it seems to take about 30 seconds or a bit more to display anything and if you remove power part way through boot it corrupts the SD image.
I also found i sometimes had to remove and reinsert the SD card on my board, i only had to do this once or twice and it would work

If you get nothing on your Uart and no VGA come up the you may have an issue with the board. However probably unlikely as i assume olimex test these boards before they ship.

good luck, let me know what fixes your issue. If it turns out to be the script file and uImage i will update the wiki with "working" files

[drspastic]

ok i will try another card and the basic debian image, i really wish i bought the wifi/nand version first so i could get used to these problems. i havnt tried a serial connection yet, i hoped i wouldnt need to. i have a spare max232 level shifter cable that i built last month to program some radios, that should work ok on 3.3v.
i had in my head that these boards would be a bit more plug,n,play as far as the video output goes.


could someone post either a flowchart or better a youtube video of what is supposed to happen when the various olinuxino boards are plugged in, with and without card inserted and with the different monitor configurations. for example, at what point will your standard (from the website) imaged sd card wake a vga screen and give a picture or text.
will i see the typical linux boot screen on a vga monitor, or will i have to look through a serial console from another pc and activate the vga manually?

i think i fixed the 233, i will know in a few minutes. both the boards make typical RF noise when a radio scanner is put near, and reset button gives a classic reset sound of the clock signal coming  back up.

[Cure]

Honestly, don't waste another second struggling with this.  I wasted DAYS then I finally bought the $5 Serial to USB cable and got it running in 10 minutes.  Your time is worth more than $5 so just buy the cable.  If you are in the US/Canada you can order from Digikey.com/Digikey.ca and you will have the part in 24 hours.

Good luck.

[drspastic]

no i dont live in america, i live about a 2 hour drive from the olimex factory.
i will have to dig out my max232 leads from the box in the shed.
i still dont see why the images dont boot... what did your problem turn out to be?
if you fixed it please post a link to an image of your working card so we can all benefit.
ta

[drspastic]

qudos to saand, i now have the a13 running debian nox.
it also required a different brand of card. strange that the 4gb card i was using first would not take to the a13 but booted fine on the imx233. all my cards are major brands so if anyone else is having issues then please do try the debian without x imaged to several different brands of card.

i hope soon we will see some 'user' os images up for grabs that cut out a lot of the dev packages and concentrate on ots functionality. i am thinking; puppy,dsl,slitaz,tinycore....all with optional gui.

i want to start bolting olimex boards into anything with a screen, starting with this old bulgarian valve powered black and white tv thats in my kitchen....retro

[drspastic]

the transcend card really made it! the linaro image boots straight to gui desktop from this..sandisk suck-dont use them.

one thing i have trouble understanding, why is the image 4gig with only small section swap space and no apps to speak of? i thought arm was all about small and fast but so far it reminds me of long gone days as a windows user....no drivers, no apps? i guess i must be spoilt by 5 years of puppy linux...130 meg, full drivers, full apps, full codecs, and happy to run with 64meg ram.

[saand]

Hi Drspastic,
good to hear you have it going, very frustrating when you only have a light come on i know from experience.

the 4gig image was made very kindly by a person and shared on the forum as previously there was only a debian with command line interface.
I am hoping with continued use of this board more image will come up.

The A13 is relatively new and i believe drivers are still being developed for this. However having said that if you compile the kernel yourself there are options to include a lot of different drivers.

regarding ARM they are small and fast compared to microcontrollers, This particular ARM is the fastest i have come across which is suitable for hobbiests (eg not a BGA package). ARM will however never (well maybe never) be faster than the standard intel / AMD processors as the ARMs are designed for fast processing but also low power usage which is why the mobile or tablet market like them also a lot of consumer goods will have ARMs in their electronics.
So generally you will never get better performance from an ARM than you will find with a high end phone or tablet.

regarding the drivers and apps, if you have an internet connection (the wifi version of the board) or the USB to ethernet adaptor you will be able to download and run any program that is in the debian repositories. There are a lot of programs in the linux repositories.

[drspastic]

well im not up to the job of a recompile yet on linaro, it wont see my wifi card... pity its running fast and smooth.
i am going to try the deb nox again now i sorted out what micro sd cards work on it and try installing x from there. much fun!!

[JohnS]

It's not 4GB.  It's been copied from a 4GB card and has free space, doesn't it?

You can re-copy it to a smaller card if you want.

Unless someone else wants puppy, which I guess isn't very likely, you'd have to DIY

John