No. I get nothing other than the power LED.
Help With Booting a 5B?
So a 2nd debug cable, Amazon ate it. have to re-order.
Feel for you one of my rock pi 5b same situation. Tried almost everything. Kind worried I got a dud.
Interesting. they just released a new model, but have not really fixed the previous.
I regret buying mine at this point, or at least not returning it day one. i should not have assumed it was just the same PD issue everyone else had.
And, had to reorder the new debug cable, amazon lost it. Now i get to wait⌠againâŚ
With right power adapter, updated bootloader and working uart cable I could set up and configure some Rock5B, I donât expect Your is broken, it should work. Please take a photo of You complete set next time You try to run it. This may be something really simple.
For Rock5A - itâs still good to have such option. 5B is still way better, but I decided to get one and try to replace one of my raspberry to see how that is possible. It should be better than that pi with sd card.
I have tried every power supply recommended i can find. Even bought the OEM one. It cant be that at this point. This includes a 12v barrel, with adapter, ugreen ( the latest attempt ), and a whole host of others. Also, at this point, with a latest Armbian build it will turn blue and sit. Its with OEM images that it gets the power loop.
I have flashed the boot loader so many times to try different combinations of images and power supplies i cant see straight.
The debug cable DOES work, on other boards. But just in case, i did order another as mentioned.
I know that this may be frustrating, but Iâm just far away from claims that board is somehow damaged. I lost so much time with rock 3a board trying to get UART working again after update and I failed (I have two such boards, and one wonât start with UART connected). I think that updating firmware, spi and bootloader is still poorly documented by rockchip, so You never know what version do You have of all components and what can cause issue.
Hopefully You will make it to work. Power problems are usually easiest to solve but still can cause some issues.
The recent ARMBian, releases with 5.10.110 doesnât have HDMI output by default (on 1.42 revision of the board as I have at least), you need to boot, and looking at it useing serial (speed 1500000) , wait a while, add root account etc⌠reboot, and downgrade to 5.10.72 from serial. I made a tuto about it:
I guess i give up. Nothing has made it work. The only thing it does ( at least it claims⌠who knows ) is flashing SPI. Nothing else has.
Been too long to return. I guess i have a fancy somewhat expensive paperweight⌠Oh well.
( my Orange PI5 showed this week, worked perfect out of the box. Of course its an S, but at least it works )
1 Like
I have lost track of all the supplies i tried.
Even the OEM one Radxa says to buy⌠Waited 3 weeks for it even.
Have you get anything on UART?
According to first post it reacts to different systems, it should report something on UART so You can see some error message or bootloop.
No, that has been part of the problem. Nothing via debug to even get a hint at what is going on. ( 2 cables now, just in case. )
The only thing i can do is run the SPI flash process and it âsaysâ it worked, but with no debug i cant even be sure its telling the truth. That and the power light cycle. That is it.
due to the frustration, its been put away. If i happen to see a commit for the OS images that mention a âfixed UBootâ or something ill try it again. But i am pretty sure my board is f-ed so its pointless.
The 1st Rock 5B I bought worked OK until it fell about 1.5 feet. Now that board acts very much like yours ziggy. I am not saying you dropped yours. Rather, I am saying there appears something in the board is extremely fragile. Perhaps a bad solder joint. Maybe a hairline trace or via that broke. Who knows.
Anyway, I bought another one. It too was working OK⌠until it wasnât! I ad tried to do the âapt upgradeâ without having fixed the security key issue first â led to no graphics display. The ttyâs were working. So I was SSHâd into it to see if I could find the mojo to make the graphics come back. After sitting there powered up for over 24 hours, it just shut down. It will not boot. AND I cannot even flash the spi flash or talk to it at all with the rkdevelop tool. Said tool does, however, recognize the MASKROM device when I power up the board.
The orange pis donât have all the features that this rock 5B touts, but maybe it will actually work. I have one coming, presumably (it has been âout for deliveryâ for 5 days now⌠)
I added a 128g m.2 to the OPI5, and a WiFi usb. Ran it for several days straight on a shelf not a blip. Added some stick on heat sinks. ( have a metal frame/heatsink thing coming )
Had a little bit of trouble getting Armbian ( either real, or Orangesâs version ) to install to m.2 from a SD boot using the stock tools, so i just dug out a m.2/usb adapter and flashed it directly. Also did an upgrade to bookworm. Not tried to get GPU drivers to work yet. no hurry. at least it boots and runsâŚ
I do think ill avoid bouncing it on the floor as a test tho 
Not the best test to run on your only working unit. 
FWIW, it slid off of the laptop tray I was using on the couch while I was trying to set the tray on the coffee tableâŚ
Hey Ziggy, not sure if you have looked at this, but I have been using a RPi to monitor the ROCK 5B serial output. The reason I do that is I have no serial port adapter I can use with a PC which will go up to 1.5 Mega-bps. If you use your Orange Pi this way, (connect DIP header pin 6 {gnd} on each together, cross-connect pins 8 and 10 {rx and tx} on the header) you should be able to set up minicom on the Orange Pi to work at that baud rate.
I can try, but i do have regular UART cables. Both rated for over 1.5mb ( and work elsewhere )
I did try one of the recent unofficial Amrbian images from bables, and got uart once, tho gibberish. First time i had seen the board to do anything at all other than SPI flash. Then it all fell apart and it stopped doing even that.
Since i cant comment in the other thread as it was closed, and I would like to give credit when due i will do it here.
While it took a long time, Radxa did finally hear my plea for help. They got in touch with Allnet for me, and we worked out a return.
So its going back next week.
2 Likes
Congratulations. Hopefully your experience with the Rock5b will get better. Good luck