News about the ROCK 5B Plus! ;)

#111

And I would be happy to just go through everything as an end-user and document the most critical parts. I got the impression that is was on hold as the UEFI Arch guy advertise @kwankiu, and also @amazingfate , altough none of his two hybrid images have worked properly. Encryption breaks after restart and I input password on the Debian one, saying it cannot find the mapping. And the Ubuntu one gets stuck during live execution when enccrypting through standard user land… And of course also @Spooky. But he is a legend everywhere, and in his own right. Altough Ubuntu browsers tear very often.

But visiting BredOS, without anyone mentioning anything, the Reddit seemed dead, close to 0 docs and the website is basically broken wherever I click. I was guessing “under construction” at first until I saw that it had been a while on the market. I would actually borrow @kwankiu’s config immpl. and instead put all my effort on making a functioning edk2 UEFI impl. with easy enough encryption, and maybe Secure Boot on that. Both UEFI releases from @kwankiu and the other guy has not worked for me. I wonder if maybe the documentartion could have been longer, more up to date, and even involving tips and tricks, with a little bit of biased recommendations. That would be awesome. :slight_smile:

#112

I asked aliexpress sales, after purchasing the 5B passive case with a 5B+ and they told me it wouldn’t fit and cancelled my order for me. I never tried myself, but I trust they wouldn’t have cancelled the order if it actually did fit.

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#113

Cheers, good to know. Would you recommend ordering the main unit from there (or the ITX) version too?

#114

5b+ has different port layout and it will need yet another thermal pad. Old, gree metal case will not work with it for sure, hopefully there will be some refreshed version.

#115

@dominik What is the PCB you shared a photo of, it looks like it is screwed on top of a Rock 5B normal board and it splits its 4-lane PCIe v3 M.2 slot into two 2-lane M.2 slots?

What is the name of the PCB, where can I buy it

#116

Here You can read more about it:


You can just order it on any pcb manufacturer site,
Almost same thing is now offered by odroid.

#117

@dominik That is awesome. Does Odroid sell this extra for Rock 5B, what’s the URL?

Price-wise including shipping how much would it be to order your design from a PCB manufacturer site?

Overall I prefer the Rock 5B over the Rock 5B Plus. So it makes sense to use this card.

#118

Just keep an eye on energy consumption / delivery for the ports.

#119

No, odroid has such adapter for odroid board, but the principle is the same so this one should work on 5B with no problem. @Semi designed his board exclusively for 5B, so it fits perfectly (as in my photo), odroid version will stand out a bit, but this should be not a big problem because You already need different case for it.

Final price to manufacture depends on few things, how many do You need, with or without assembly. You need to change board thickness to 0.8mm (the only special requirement). From time to time there are some promotions and bargains (right now pcbway celebrate 10th anniversary, so You will get $5 discount for 1st order). Just head to jlcpb and pcbway and try to put this to cart, check pricing Yourself. If You can solder it yourself (or have someone to do that, it’s very simple project) then it should be about $15 for 10pcs.

#120

It’s just the second NVME and full size HDMI input which is different as far as case options?

#121

I don’t actually know, I don’t have a regular 5B to comapare with. From the pictures it also looked like the CPU position seems a tiny bit different just afew mm though, but it might have an effect.

#122

Do we have any information on 4GB and 8GB version availability? It seems that all versions in all stores are out of stock already.

#123

Any chance of getting a unit sent to a maintainer who might be able to get the Armbian build for the rock 5b plus? I asked about it in relation to bad HDMI in performance with gstreamer and @amazingfate tried to direct me on how to make a pull request with the required files. But I haven’t got any experience with the build process so I don’t really know what to do… This was my original thread. Rock 5B+ poor HDMI-IN performance with BGR3 color format and colorspace conversion
I really need hardware accelerated RGBA transforms for gstreamer and I don’t think I can get it without the older 5.0 rockpi kernel and ubuntu 22.04 that is supported under Armbian…

#124

Are there plans for a version with eMMC socket? or is there a way to solder one?

#125

i think soldering eMMC would not be prohibitively difficult.
However, you need to source some BGA153 eMMC and some soldering skill…

#126

Soldering eMMC is bad practice in my opinion. I’d like to avoid it if possible

#127

This is not that difficult and You don’t need professional tools. Most of eMMC BGA chips are sold with balls, ready to solder with just bit of flux plus heat gun. Practice on cheap, small emmc and usb pendrive and You will be safe.

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#128

I’m not averse to taking some risk…in this case potentially kissing goodbye to a $200 board plus a $50 emmc. For me, the biggest challenge is not applying some heat, it’s more about positioning the emmc and holding it in place while you apply the heat… The solder balls are very very tightly packed. I can’t see how, without some form of highly accurate jig, to get perfect alignment between the board and the emmc. But, I’ve never done it, so maybe there is some magic.

My approach for the lack of emmc on my 5b+ was to kiss one of the nvme’s goodbye (the reason for buying the board in the first place) and use an nvme slot in place of the emmc…and buy a new board with emmc fitted so I can get what I thought I paid for in the first place (and what was advertised).

My experience with both (boot from nvme and boot from emmc) running cli debian and Openmediavault has been very smooth with great performance and reliability. Both systems ditch the sdcard for boot. Both run reliably with both nvme slots populated.

#129

Actually that’s the beauty of BGA, QFN and other such chip formats, they automatically align. You just place them into the drawn square, and provided that it’s inisde the square, when the solder melts, the surface tension forces them at the right position. The real risk actually is that not all balls are properly melted and that it’s only solder on one half and not the other one. That requires to move it a little bit back and forth to make sure it floats on top of the solder. But I agree it’s super intimidating and it’s better to do a bit of testing first on a dummy board. I managed to do that myself a few times with a few errors at the beginning. I hate doing it but it’s definitely within reach. What I don’t recommend however is to do reballing manually. Even with the plate it’s not easy.

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#130

Then practice on something cheaper :slight_smile:
USB-eMMC pendrive is about $3, 8GB eMMC is yet another $3, both with free shipping on ali for orders above 10$. You will need bga flux (super tiny amount, as little as possible) and something to blow hot air at 200’C (preheat) and 300’C (soldering). This doesnt have to be pro equipment, some use just oven and heat gun for pipes from market. Of course even cheap hot air lets You to control airflow and temperature better, but this is easy after some practice.

as willy said - THERE IS some MAGIC :smiley:
check out any pro youtube video for good closeup shots and You will wind out that bga chips are aligned like small magnets on tin melt point. @willy explained this process,
in short ali emmc chips are ready to solder, it’s really not that hard.

This is real thankless work without good tools, but it’s also possible, tin balls also align on pads with tension. Some prefer to remove everything, clean up and do it with known tin balls, but it’s not required because most of bga chips comes with balls ready to solder. For first work it’s ok to choose easiest path :slight_smile:

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