New to A20-Olinuxino and stuck

[rfk]

Hi and good morning!

I am new here - so please bear with me.

After doing proof of concept with the Raspberry Pi, I ordered an A20 Board with Debian SD, LiPo and 4.3 Display - and received it yesterday.

I run a small IT - Business in Austria, part of my work is monitoring and surveillance (well, not that type, we can read in the news nowadays  )
For monitoring, based on nagios / pnp4nagios, some compute power and memory is very welcome !

Of course I wanted to try it immediately - but nope: besides the power LED (and in another attempt, the charging LED) not a single sign of life!


After powering the board, it seems, the TV is recognizing a signal - but after few seconds says again "No signal"

What I did:
- Power supply verified, 12 V, capable of up to 8 Amp
- HDMI connected to a TV set
- UART0 connected (I already have the Adafruit FTDI cable for 3.3V. And yes, I connected Rx to Tx ...)
- USB connected keyboard (and mouse)
- Olimex provided Micro SD with Debian
In another attempt I connected the LiPo - charging LED shows up.

Somewhat clueless, I also connected the Display - nothing (of course, it has to be calibrated - I did follow the forum and the wiki for some months now)

Quickly verified, that power seems to be distributed on the board.

Anything I forgot?

What is the default speed on UART0?
There is no uEnv.txt in the boot partition - is it missing?

Is it DOA ?


Dear Olimex: if it is really DOA, any chance to get a replacement before the hollidays ?


Hints are most welcome!

Regards,

Richard

[JohnS]

Default uart speed tends to be 115200 for Linux on these sorts of boards.

Swap Tx & Rx again if no output LOL

You usually only connect Ground as well, not power, for uart boards.

John

[misterzu]

1st thing if such cases IMHO is to take a clean SD card and fill it with olimex's image: https://www.olimex.com/wiki/A20-OLinuXino-MICRO#Linux
I use http://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/ to write image to sd card on Windows PC with cardreader

[sickmind]

Hello Richard,
Did you manged to run the A20?
I think I've got the exact same issue (A20-OLinuXino-MICRO revison E), my power supply is 12v 1.25amps. Tried both Android and Debian (ultimate) images on 5 (five!) different micro sd cards (on both slots using micro sd to sd adaptor), they all work on my raspberry pi, one of them was brand new Samsung micro sd card. There is a signal on the TV (over HDMI) for about 2 seconds and then it's gone.
I haven't checked what's going on using the UART port(hopefully my USB-Serial-Cable-F from Olimex will arrive tomorow).

[rfk]

First, thanks for the tips - it's up and running.
Reasons:

   
• double checked, if the serial to USB cable is really working - and had to replace it    (sorry for the noise)
• seems, the SD Card I purchased has / had "some issue" (did not follow up after the downloaded image started working immediately - but will check that later)
• for any other issues: follow the WIKI: painless (once the cable is ok  )

Finally: a big thumbs up to Olimex - incredible price / performance !


@ sickmind:

Hello Richard,
Did you manged to run the A20?
I think I've got the exact same issue (A20-OLinuXino-MICRO revison E), my power supply is 12v 1.25amps. Tried both Android and Debian (ultimate) images on 5 (five!) different micro sd cards (on both slots using micro sd to sd adaptor), they all work on my raspberry pi, one of them was brand new Samsung micro sd card. There is a signal on the TV (over HDMI) for about 2 seconds and then it's gone.
I haven't checked what's going on using the UART port(hopefully my USB-Serial-Cable-F from Olimex will arrive tomorow).

I currently have only class 4 SD-Cards (will replace that with class 10 for speed)
Since my main interest is towards a small TFT, until now I did not check for HDMI output. I will check this and let you know.

For the HDMI output you should (via UART0!) run /root/change_display_a20.sh  (as root) and select the appropriate settings for your Monitor!

Definitely try with the serial cable! I usually try this first - it's the debugging port on quite all of these boards and gives you much more control. (it would have been easy - since I had it from my Raspberry equipment)
And yes: the speed is 115200!


-- rfk

[sickmind]

Got the cable and mine is working too! For some unknown (to me) reason, the network interface wasn't enabled by default. That's why the device never appeared online.
HDMI doesn't start even when configured using change_display_a20.sh script, but I don't need it anyway as long as the network works. My SD card is class 10, but even class 2 would work for the purpose I bought this device. Absolutely no writes on the SD card are expected, as only one Java application will run on it 24/7.

[rfk]

@sickmind

Got the cable and mine is working too! For some unknown (to me) reason, the network interface wasn't enabled by default. That's why the device never appeared online.

Simply add

Code Select Expand

auto eth0 to /etc/network/interfaces (but might already know)

HDMI doesn't start even when configured using change_display_a20.sh script, but I don't need it anyway as long as the network works. My SD card is class 10, but even class 2 would work for the purpose I bought this device. Absolutely no writes on the SD card are expected, as only one Java application will run on it 24/7.

I will try that - but probably only during the next days (as you said: no real need for that, but I would like to know and see...)