Rock 3A Unable to Reboot After Initial Boot

ROCK 3 Series 3A
1

Hi everyone,

I’m encountering an issue with my Rock 3A board. It boots up fine the first time I power it on, but if I try to reboot, it fails to start up again.

I’m currently using the Debian Xfce (build 25) image:

I attempted to connect via the serial console on macOS using both picocom and CoolTerm. I’ve installed the PL2303 driver, but the serial output is just unreadable characters, something like:

???x???f?f???怘???枆???`???

Has anyone experienced a similar issue?

2

Hi @nikkonst,
Have you tried to change other storage media when boot the system?

3

I’ve seen this with weak power adapter, first cold boot may be little longer, on fast startup board fails to get enough energy and resets.

Probably wrong baudrate - Rockchip should have 1,5M speed,
Some UART adapter don’t support that speed realiable, the best one so far on my tests was CH343 (it has built in cristal oscillator).

4

Can it be started after short circuiting?