Hi
I’m running Armbian buster kernel 5.10.16.
There is a strange behaviour of the hdmi output. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. Sometimes, I have to turn off/on the monitor to get an output, sometimes that doesn’t help. Sometimes reboot helps.
Any ideas what might be wrong???
Cheers,
Laci
Hi, I’ve faced exactly the same symptoms with my Rock Pi 4c v1.2, Armbian Debian Buster 21.02.2 / 5.10.16-rockchip64 (as explained in the mDP -thread already). It is very annoying that the HDMI-connector apparently works “randomly”, is very sensible to its positioning, and how you happen to bend and set the cable close to the tv/display and the sbc. Further, the connection with regular micro hdmi-cables feels very loose which may rise some questions whether the mcro connector is the wisest choice for these…
Now, I’ve been lucky enough to get this board booting from its nvme and getting a pretty clear hdmi-picture practically every time when I switch on the thing. It’s been working for some days for now, so maybe I can assume that it has reached its permanent state. and the entalphy is steady…
Yes, I did some soldering practices with the board’s hdmi-connector earlier, but taking the size of the components and those tiny pins you’ve to carefully solder and not to make unintentional shorting, it’s better to keep fingers off. I was just lucky enough not to do any additional damages, and for sure this did not help with the hdmi-signals. But what helped, I think now, was removing all additional hdmi-splitters, and to have the shortest hdmi cable available while playing with my Rock Pi. Whenever I had a hdmi-splitter connected, the same display was shared by both Orange and Rock Pis, my Rocki Pi’s hdmi signal hardly ever reached the display. So switching the hdmi-splitters’ port to port, or on -off, never ended in my Rock Pi’s hdmi broadcasting. On the other hand my Orange Pi 4 was always “on”, so either playing with the splitter did not harm it, or plugging - un plugging the cable, no problems. Somewhat foolproof, the Orange Pi was always there whether splitters or adapters were connected or not. This I can not say about my Rock Pi. So the remedy was to have a plain HDMI-cable without any adaptors or add-on splitters. I had 2 diffrent splitters, one named “HAMA” and the other one was a “no - name” from a local Biltema ( hw shop selling “this and that”). Both were such that my Rock pi does not get along with them very well, it may work or may not, so better to use just a plain cable sbc-> screen without additional ingredients. These two boards are nearly similar so maybe different hdmi-behaviour is just a question of hdmi-settings, I don’t know.
Thanks for your long answer, I‘ll check if the connector might be loose, but I doubt it, since turning the monitor off and on sometimes gives me an output. But who knows. The cable might be an issue. I don’t use a splitter, but maybe the cable is too long…it’s 1.5m iirc.
Cheers,Laci