Rock 4C+ (V1.41) Armbian OS

#1

Hi
I have several Rock 4C+ V1.41 devices and am trying to use Armbian.

None of them boot with the Armbian image for Rock 4C+. This image will boot with a Rock 4C+ V1.2 so something has changed. The original project was developed on a V1.2 and I’d like to increase the number of devices but only V1.41 is available.

Is there an image which will boot with the V1.41 devices - or is there something I should be doing to make it work? There seems to be little hard information on the difference but it seems some people have it working - can you share the knowledge, please?

I have seen other posts which have had similar problems but no real solution.

The green LED lights but no other activity occurs - no blue LED at all.

I know the board works as it will boot Debian so it feels like something is stopping the process. UART debug is producing random characters.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Max

#2

Hi!
I’m fighting with it for two days already, and I was about to put a post here exactly today, but you got ahead of me! The issue is exactly as you’ve described.
So far, what I’ve tried:

  • I’ve built Armbian with the latest changes armbian build repo - nothing changed
  • I’ve used rk3399-rock-4c-plus.dtb file instead of rk3399-rock-pi-4c-plus.dtb, dunno why there are two, but somewhere on the forum I read that this one without “pi” is the right one - nothing changed
  • official Armbian images - nothing changed
  • Ubuntu and Debian - both booting fine

In my case, the UART debug also produces those random characters, but rather it’s not random, every time when I try to boot it, it looks the same, so I’ve tried with different UART baud rates, but still nothing changed.

#3

If You have something on UART then it’s the matter of right baud rate and parity.
Start with right baud rate which is 1500000 :slight_smile: Then recheck all other parameters from wiki.

At some point Radxa decided to change name of board, basically removing “pi” from all models. So probably both files are the same.

If both of You have UART adapters it would be good to make it functional so You will have clear information what is wrong with boot process.

#4

Yeah, I know, on the 1.2 board everything works well, so unfortunately it’s not only the wrong UART baud rate :frowning: I suspect the board’s faultiness.

#5

I’m new to this forum searching for help with this exact board.

I have been able to run he latest 23.11 Bookworm CLI build ( Rockpi 4 – Armbian) and worked out of the box.

I flashed the image with Etcher on SD Card. Only observation that it outputs display on HDMI port next to audio jack.