Bricked ROCK Pi 4a 4G?

#1

Hi,

Well, I’m concerned about whether or not I’ve caused some damage to my Rock Pi 4a 4GB board.

After receiving it, I’ve unadvertedly buyed a crap recharger, thinking it was compatible with Quick Charge 3. But, after some use, the green led stopped lighting.

I began working with the official Debian image installed on a micro SD card. Then I’ve decided to burn Armbian on the eMMC memory card I’ve brought with, using Etcher.

I’ve boot only once, when I burned the Armbian official image. Then I decided to create my own image (editing kernel options, filesystem and so on) through the Virtual Machine instruction at the Armbian Wiki.

Initially, the red led was ininterruptedly blinking twice, indicating a power problem, but after a while, no led — green or red — lighted anymore.

The single board computer has less then a month of use — perhaps half a month.

The technician I bring the recharger to told me the problem was on it, on its cable and on the adapter to USB C, which provided less power than the necessary to power the ROCK Pi 4a.

Is there any possibility that I’ve caused any harm to the equipment, leading it to not boot anymore? I’m not sure about this, since it once have already stopped working and, at the next day, it became functional again.

So, I’m in doubt about having bricked the board or having brought a defective one.

Anyway, does anybody knows if AllNet has any devolution/refund/exchange policy for a case like this?

Thank you!
Juliano B. Nequirito

#2

Shouldn’t really matter about the charger as 5 -20v the onboard buck should cope with.
I use a 12V cctv 60watt fixed transformer so that I have a 12v rail.

I would try burning one of the raxda images to the sd card and eMMC again and try booting once more.

If it makes you feel any better I have a working RockPi4b-4gb minus pci-e prob due to shorting the ribbon cable as it was so damn fiddly trying to get in the sd card with a large number of images I was trying.

#3

Well, I don’t know. My concern refers to the absence of lights, not even the red led complaining about the low power. Now there is no light, no response, nothing.

#4

Yeah just checked without an image you should get the rather intense green light.

#5

No SD nor eMMC card, no Ethernet, HDMI, nothing. And NO light. Not the green nor the red. It’s bricked. :tired_face:

I’ll just check with AllChina if they have any policy for devolution or refunding. I’m still not sure on what happened, it’s weird.

Thank you for you help, anyway!

#6

Hi,

Normally the power adapter will not damage the board because we support wide voltage input. Please use a QC adapter and test. If the voltage from the adapter is below 5V(5V from the adapter but there is voltage drop on the cable), the board may not boot, no led on. So it’s likely the board is not bricked.

Please note, the minimal voltage for ROCK Pi 4 is 5.5V suggested by the datasheet. 5V will probably not boot nor light up the green led.

#7

There is one thing I noticed by accident when checking gadget g_ether mode.

If you are not going through the power circuit and connect to a PC the USB will backfeed and power the rockpi4 as I did pull the power and was confused for a couple of secs but yeah 5v USB is enough to keep it going never checked what its like under load.