Orion O6 Debug Party Invitation

#1

Dear Radxa Developers,

We were so excited to announce the Radxa Orion O6 motherboard on the CIX Ecosystem Event in Shanghai on 18th, Dec. With CIX’s generous donation of the CD8180 chips, we are so glad to invite the Radxa developers to join the Orion O6 debug party.

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What you need to join the debug party:

  • a PD 65W power adapter or ATX power supply
  • a USB SPI flash programmer, O6 has a repealable SPI flash header
  • multiple USB to TTL to access the multiple UARTs on the motherboard
  • a NVMe SSD for OS installation
  • familiar with UEFI shell, Linux OS booting etc

The O6 debug party samples package comes with the follow items:

  • an O6 motherboard with 16GB LPDDR5
  • a heatsink with fan
  • an Acrylic shell for motherboard protection
  • a spare SPI flash chip for bios backup
  • an Orion O6 sticker

The packages are expected to be shipped before 20th, Jan.

Radxa team will contact the developers based on our previous experience one by one privately by email or forum PM or on discord. If you are a developer and interested in Orion O6 and was missed by us in the following week, you can post under this thread and explain why you should receive one O6 to develop/hack with.

For other questions about the Orion O6 or the CIX team/company, you can post under this thread, we will reply as much as we can. Some questions will also be sent to CIX for their answers.

Happy Holidays and Happy Hacking

– Tom from Radxa

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Upcoming ARM v9 product with 45 TOPS NPU
#2

SPI programmer requirement suggests lack of firmware upgrade option on working system.

No SPI driver yet?

#3

Or maybe just the need to recover a failed upgrade (or more precisely a successful upgrade of an incorrectly configured boot loader, quite common actually). Usually this is worked around by booting from the micro-SD but possibly here it’s different, maybe the SoC only boots from SPI (like a PC in fact).

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#4

Right. Got too used to have some recovery options.

#5

We can upgrade the BIOS from UEFI shell or with USB fastboot command. But if you develop the UEFI/BIOS, you need to flash the BIOS often and may break it. Then you need to pull out the SPI flash and program with an external programmer.

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#6

Can you recommend a certain brand/model? Visiting https://aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-usb-spi-programmer.html shows a lot of different items…

What is/are the BAUD rate(s)?

#7

I’ve used quite a lot both the BusPirate v3.6 (very slow but it’s a good starter), and the now ubiquitous “CH341A programmer” that you can find in millions of instances on Aliexpress. One of them is commonly sold with the DIL-do-SOP8 adapter and it’s really convenient to use. I do recommend that last one (simple and fast). The only thing is to be careful about the orientation between SPI and I2C chips because it can sometimes be confusing, but till now I’ve only heated chips, never fried them :wink:

Just one example here: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006530290946.html.

Also regarding the UART, I’ve long had good experiences with the CH340 variants (I particularly like the tiny CH340E, we’re finding many cheap 1cm² boards with it that you can buy in packs of 10pcs). They support all common speeds including 1.5 and 2 Mbauds and even ESP8266’'s 76800.

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#8

Maybe can use https://www.flashrom.org/, directly through a Linux generic spi interface device(linux even has drivers for emulating gpio as a spi device) on another SBC

#9

Yeah that’s the point, it works with devices above.

#10

Any news on the availability of technical docs/TRM for CD8180?

#11

Can you please point to the kernel and initial build/instructions?

#12

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According to the slides they will be ready soon.

1 Like
#13

@hipboi is the debug party revision the final revision that you guys know of or is it one with a known HW bug but that’s not so critical that the board can still be used for debug?

#14

Hello, I’m a developer who builds AMR robots using Radxa X4. Recent project published on Hackster featured Radxa X4, interested to publish a project featuring Orion O6 for robotics building https://www.hackster.io/mxlfrbt/build-a-radxa-x4-ros2-car-robot-using-intel-robotics-sdk-2e1778

#15

@hipboi is there going to be a TRM for the SoC? Otherwise the product is way less attractive.

TRM = documentation of the various peripherals with register / programming information.

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#16

You said that UEFI+ACPI will come at some point in future as you went UEFI+DT for now.

I hope that dump of ACPI tables and results of BSA/SBSA/PC-BSA ACS will be available when UEFI+ACPI code drop happen.

Used ACS tests during work on SBSA Reference Platform in QEMU/EDK2/TF-A and those help catching hardware/firmware issues. Some hw ones cannot be easily fixed, some can be hidden by firmware.

Planning to buy 64GB one if reviews convince me to spend money on a board.

#17

Picking up the suggestion here I want to ask about CD8180’s PCIe ‘bifurcation’ capabilities.

As I may have understood correctly it’s not only about the SoC’s possibilities how to ‘spread’ PCIe lanes but also board layout (with RK3588 the four Gen3 lanes could be used in a 4 x x1 config but the clocks must also be considered and as such with Rock 5B only a 2 x x2 config for the M.2 slot is possible, right?)

So speaking about the PCIe x8 and the M.2 x4 slot: is it possible to use them in other configs, e.g. the PCIe slot in a 4 x x2 and the M.2 slot in a 4 x x1 or 2 x x2 setup?

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#18

TRM will released by Q2, 2025. The Cix team is short of engineering resource at the moment since ACPI on arm is not yet matured.

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#19

Beta 1 image release will be UEFI + DT and it will be available on 15th, Jan and Beta 2 image release will be UEFI + ACPI, the timeline is expected before Feb.

I hope that dump of ACPI tables and results of BSA/SBSA/PC-BSA ACS will be available when UEFI+ACPI code drop happen.

The EDK2 source code will be available, so you can just edit it.

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#20

IIRC bifurcation is not possible on this platform.

1 Like