I already did, if you can see there is also a post from me that says I also tried changing memory max frequency without any luck
Radxa Rock 5B: reboot, what's the reason?
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What convinced me to purchase this product was this video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w85QTDPp-4Q , so I expected to be easy-peasy to setup, and stable to use (in the video there are also some intense benchmarks proving this), so I still think maybe is my board or one of its accessories be faulty.
I’m contacting who sold me this product and mine accessories just because they can replace me faulty parts or I can decide to give back everything and have money back, I don’t expect some specialized tech support, I asked for it also to okdo (which sells and manage radxa products in my part of planet) without any response.
If with a product replacement, I’m not getting this work, I will give up, because it means that this product is not for me.
It is bad to make comparison with boards/systems of other brands, but this was mine experience so far:
- 3 different raspberry pi 4b : flashed the sdcard, worked out of the box and without issues with 3 different OS images and cases
- 1 zimaboard (I needed an x86 one): comes with its own operating system installed, I only extended its storage with a sata ssd, worked of of the box without issues
- 1 beelink minipc, came with windows 11, I installed ubuntu, worked flawlessly
- radxa rock 5b: issues understanding what to buy for a complete solution (nothing is included, neither storage and power supply and there are not official kits), issues about understanding what to install and how, no responses by manufacturer, continuously reboots.
I’m not asking to make an exotic feature or component to work in a specific way, I just want to use my board as an headless server, having it running without sudden reboots I think is the bare minimum.
I really want to understand if this is caused by a faulty board or accessory, or if it is the normal behavior, in second case this is unacceptable for me.
Then you can check the output of the SPL bootloader via UART (if you have written a debug version) to see if your board is booting this SPL.
You can tryout my archlinuxarm image (w.i.p.): It runs a headless server just fine
ftp://ftp.woudstra.mywire.org/images (also http(s) available)
Or even better use my build script buildRKarch found on github to build an image on SD-card.
https://github.com/ericwoud/buildRKarch
When logged on, (192.168.1.7 or uart or monitor+keyboard) you can:
sudo rockchip-toolbox --uboot@spi
To write the uboot+spl I build to spi.
Don’t worry about this, we all do comparisons on each models and features.
Raspberry is much more popular board with large community so many things are just easier there for non advanced users who expect to just flash something and run ready out of box software. Large user base helps to find bugs easier, maintain releases and get reasonable amount of feedback.
On the other hand pi was always basic hardware without too many features and cutting edge specification at quite high price.
x86 is different story.
still bit more expensive, and much easier to maintain because only two big manufacturers responsible for CPUs,
Everything is in docs,
there are many official accessories, tested and working, just browse radxa.com site,
Also it’s not that hard to troubleshoot if You hit some of issues, same thing applies to raspberry, where You can easily get same effect with not dedicated power source,
You need to have minimal knowledge about basics to be able to describe problem.
BTW: with new releases there will be something like BIOS/installer burned on board to start, test, install recommended images. This will not solve any hardware related issue (or lack of power), but may be helpful for people like You.
This does not sound like normal behaviour at all, but you’ll be sure only when you use UART.
For me, troubleshooting Radxa issues is much easier than raspberry pi issues. They have a forum but so many topics with problems are just left without an answer. If you have something specific that doesn’t work, you are often on your own. Here someone at least replies.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has an OS that works but is also not very good and due to this (+ youtube influences) they convinced people to always start with official distros. And those are most often even worse.
If you’re buying a PC, you wouldn’t use a system that the PC manufacturer made (unless it’s Apple), you would install Windows or Linux or whatever. It’s the same with SBCs. First party systems are made just to start using the board, not necessarily for general usage as many things that run on more “standardised” OSes, like vanilla debian for example, won’t run very well on them.
This is very good advice. UART is just standard way to get all messages from boot and diagnose many errors. Unfortunately most expect to plug n monitor and see nice information instead of that. 
thank you for your advices, I discovered that there is not a specific uart cable for radxa, so I’m trying, on same website where I bought mine board to find out something that may work in my case, I’m pointing to this particular site because is the only one that sells okdo/radxa products in my country, and expecially for a cable you may imagine that for example a cable ship from China or USA may cost me 2 or 3 times more and may take also a month to arrive.
So I would like to ask you, if you want, and if you can help me to understand this from documentation https://docs.radxa.com/en/rock5/rock5b/low-level-dev/serial:
The Flowing text uses a serial cable based on CH340.
does it mean that if I choose a model based on CH340, whichever is the brand, it shoud be fine? is it a mistake and they wanted to write “The Following text …” so the rest of the guide is using this cable?
I found on website of my re-seller these two products:
https://it.rs-online.com/web/p/accessori-per-strumenti-di-sviluppo/7511181?gb=s
https://it.rs-online.com/web/p/raspberry-pi-cavi/7676200?gb=s
I know it is in italian but on top there should be attached a pdf with datasheet and I will thank you if you could have a look and tell me something about them or let me understand better what should I search for.
Menwhile, since the re-seller didn’t answer yet, I’m going to do other things you suggested me.
It says there quite clearly that the chip it’s based on is FT232H. Nowhere does it say CH340.
Take a look at the wiki for Rock 4. The wiki is now deprecated but what is written there should be roughly similar to how Rock 5 uart works.
https://wiki.radxa.com/Rockpi4/dev/serial-console#Reduce_serial_port_baudrate
I was reading this that is related to rock5b, is here I read about CH340 and I thought was a good one: https://docs.radxa.com/en/rock5/rock5b/low-level-dev/serial
At a certain point it tells something about kind of cables:
I was asking if in that document, the last phrase means that for the guide they used a CH340, is there when I read about that.
For what I understood:
- CP210X and PL2303X may have speed limitations
- FT232RL may have power issues
CH340 might be ok
Is what I understood correct?
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I’ve been using CH340N as well as FTDI232 flawlessly with rockchip devices at 1.5 Mbps. My Rock 5 ITX is connected via a cheap CH340N (tiny board). My Odroid-M1 is connected via a CP2102N.
BTW, what you’re describing seriously sounds like a hardware issue somewhere:
- defective power supply: please try with another USB-C power adapter (from your laptop, or even one of your RPi4’s)
- possibly defective RAM chip on the board
- possibly bad solder joint under a BGA chip that heats (SoC etc).
Heat alone should not hang your board, it should just throttle. And this SoC should not heat in a significant way by just installing packages. Mine is running with a modest heat sink and builds software fine. However I would really take the power adapter track seriously, because these boards can jump from low power when idle to high power when running, and the power adapter must really follow. If the USB cable is not integrated into the power adapter, then please also try with another cable, as this is often the greatest source of trouble. That’s what makes the RPi4 adapter great BTW, the cable being integrated into it allows the voltage feedback to be taken at the outer connector so that it compensates for losses.
Another thing you can try is to play with minimal/maximal cpufreq. Check the cpufreq policies for CPU 4-7 (A76) and try to fix them to a low frequency (1GHz or so). They should not consume much. If you see that everything runs stable, it will exclude problems in other components. Then force the min and max frequency to cpuinfo_max_freq. If it quickly hangs, it could confirm an issue related to power. If it only takes a long time to hang, it could indicate a heating problem. But I strongly doubt it, again. Maybe you’ve been unlucky and ended up on a defective board (SoC, other components etc). But please verify the power path first. This board is stable. Mine had more than 100 days of uptime before I had a power outage that reset it.
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I have plenty of those UART adapters,
Some of them work on specific ROCK board, and don;t work on different board.
The best result I have with newer version on CH340 chip which is CH343. It has few improvements, waveshare sells those in few variants, to choose from 
It is powered through the usb port, not from the board. If you directly connect this to a usb-port (no hub) then there is more than enough power on a normal usb port.
Thank you all for your responses, in this short and unlucky experience with radxa rock 5b I realized that probably all I want is my money back, I don’t agree that radxa offers something similar/better of raspberry, the main obstacle at the beginning, since there are no official kits is: what I need to buy to have a working solution?
And now I discover I still miss an important component to diagnose my board, UART cable.
I’m not a kind of person who surrenders immediately, in my digital adventures I also used gentoo linux for 4 years, contributing also to its documentation, but with gentoo, even with small/big issues, community and documentation will be there to make me solve it.
If from the reseller I can give all back, I will do it, I think is better for me to search for a device needs less work/time/patience to make it work, sold by amazon, which is better than other niche resellers for niche products, just to let you know, after issue email sent, 13 days ago, I’m still waiting for response.
My point is not that this community lacks something, for what I saw you have a lot of knowledge and will to help, the problem comes with material things: defective hardware, money, accessories, and I realized that I cannot count on resellers/producers in a decent way in this part of the planet.
This would be better also for you, because you will miss a unhappy member of community, and I really hope the information you gave to me may be useful for someone else.
Obviously if they decide to not refund me, I will need to try the uart cable in order to solve this.
Quoted text is not something that I said 
Indeed something is strange about powering UART adapters, they should be powered via usb and they should be off when disconnected from port. But there are some that somehow manage to get some power from RX/TX/GND and they light up power LED (not that bright).
Also there are some wireless UART adapters that You need to power from SBC.
There’s one thing in what you wrote that seems wrong to me.
If you had any hardware troubles with a Raspberry Pi, you would also need a serial console to diagnose it, so UART. And similarly to rock 5b, most people don’t buy them because they don’t expect it to fail, or have no need for a serial console. So this is not specific to Radxa at all.
The lack of console port is not specific to Radxa, I’ve been encouraging FriendlyELEC for years to add one to their devices. That costs around $0.30 and is the only way to recover from a failed kernel upgrade or a non-booting device. What SBC vendors often don’t catch is that on a PC, the BIOS uses the default display+keyboard so it’s always possible to adjust settings and/or device what OS to boot. On SBCs that’s generally not the case so your only luck is a serial console. Given the pain it is to have to open a device, find a compatible UART-USB adapter and try to connect it when you’re facing a problem, I really encourage serious vendors to always add one. SolidRun does it for example, I’ve had one on various boards ranging from ClearFog to LX2K and mcbin.
Really, it’s pretty cheap and avoids staying on a terribly bad experience once in a while. There’s no reason for not adding one all the time (and a physically accessible one, not just the 3-pin terminal inside the enclosure, I’m speaking about an externally accessible USB connector).
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Hi all,
there are some news: luckily my reseller concluded like me that there should be a hardware defect on my board and we agreed that the right thing to do was to replace it.
I accepted this despite my original idea was to simply give it back, this time I’ll try to be more cautious as I can.
I think that, since I have got a new radxa 5b, there are no reasons to continue in this thread.
Completely agree. UART/DEBUG usb-c port should not take too much space and it will help everybody to diagnose most of problems. I hope RADXA E20C debug port is just that:
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Is the new board working?
I still don’t know, I opened another topic to get advices since the beginning in this new adventure. I thought it was not good to continue here, since it is a brand new board and I hope a brand new story I want to start with maximum caution. Even if the previous one was a defective one, I don’t want to make any mistake.
New topic is this: Replaced radxa 5b: little by little