Rock 5A - Armbian Rockchip Current - Top Board Never Operates - No Display or Fan Control

ROCK 5 Series 5A
1

I have a problem with the Penta SATA Hat Top Board, per post title. I’d suppose this combination to be a standard configuration - I even have the Radxa NAS case and power-supply to support this!

I’m experienced with setting this up on other Radxa/Armbian combos. I have a Top Board working as expected on a Rock Pi 4c with Armbian current, functioning with pwmset, etc.

Host: Radxa ROCK 5A
OS: Armbian 25.11.2 trixie aarch64
Kernel: Linux 6.12.0-current-rockchip-rk3588
Memory: 15.60 GiB

/boot/armbianENV.txt :

verbosity=1
bootlogo=false
console=both
extraargs=cma=256M
overlay_prefix=rockchip-rk3588
fdtfile=rockchip/rk3588s-rock-5a.dtb
rootdev=UUID=8e68c744-b592-4a9b-b425-5e6b52b6aabe
rootfstype=btrfs
overlays= rk3588-i2c8-m2 rockchip-rk3588-pwm0-m0.dtbo rk3588-pwm14-m1
usbstoragequirks=0x2537:0x1066:u,0x2537:0x1068:u

/etc/rockpi-penta.env :

SDA=I2C8_SDA_M4
SCL=I2C8_SCL_M4
OLED_RESET=GPIO1_A5
PWMCHIP=14
BUTTON_CHIP=4
BUTTON_LINE=11
HARDWARE_PWM=1

It SEEMS like I’m missing a necessary overlay. The two relevant overlays loaded are rk3588-pwm0-m0.dtbo` and `rk3588-pwm14-m1 The rockpi-penta.env for Rock 5A sets PWMCHIP value at 14. — but /sys/class/pwm/pwmchip14/ doesn’t exist.

The Rock 5A fails consistently, regardless of PWMCHIP values, 0, 1, or 14, in /etc/rockpi-penta.env.

In troubleshooting I have installed and purged both v0.2.2 and v0.2.3 releases of rockpi-penta .deb, and pulled the development branch from git - all to same effect.

The failure is with a system device path, calling fan.py from main.py. This happens when called from a systemd unit file, and when run directly.

The path is ‘/sys/class/pwm/pwmchip0/pwm0/period’. This doesn’t exist on my installation.

$ sudo systemctl status rockpi-penta.service
○ rockpi-penta.service - Rockpi SATA Hat
     Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/rockpi-penta.service; enabled; preset: enabled)
     Active: inactive (dead) since Tue 2026-01-06 12:09:55 PST; 9s ago
   Duration: 268ms
 Invocation: c5fc79e90511457786e4baa682276102
    Process: 3872 ExecStart=/usr/bin/python3 /usr/bin/rockpi-penta/main.py (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
   Main PID: 3872 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
   Mem peak: 13.4M
        CPU: 238ms

Jan 06 12:09:55 nocloud python3[3872]:     ~~~~~~~~~~~~~^^^^
Jan 06 12:09:55 nocloud python3[3872]:   File "/usr/bin/rockpi-penta/fan.py", line 36, in period_us
Jan 06 12:09:55 nocloud python3[3872]:     self.period(us * 1000)
Jan 06 12:09:55 nocloud python3[3872]:     ~~~~~~~~~~~^^^^^^^^^^^
Jan 06 12:09:55 nocloud python3[3872]:   File "/usr/bin/rockpi-penta/fan.py", line 32, in period
Jan 06 12:09:55 nocloud python3[3872]:     with open(os.path.join(self.filepath, 'period'), 'w') as f:
Jan 06 12:09:55 nocloud python3[3872]:          ~~~~^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Jan 06 12:09:55 nocloud python3[3872]: FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/sys/class/pwm/pwmchip0/pwm0/period'
Jan 06 12:09:55 nocloud python3[3872]: Waring: init pwm error
Jan 06 12:09:55 nocloud systemd[1]: rockpi-penta.service: Deactivated successfully.

My /sys/class/pwm/pwmchip0/ contains the following, with no ‘pwm0’ node:

$ tree /sys/class/pwm/pwmchip0/
/sys/class/pwm/pwmchip0/
├── device -> ../../../fd8b0030.pwm
├── export
├── npwm
├── power
│   ├── autosuspend_delay_ms
│   ├── control
│   ├── runtime_active_time
│   ├── runtime_status
│   └── runtime_suspended_time
├── subsystem -> ../../../../../class/pwm
├── uevent
└── unexport

Many thanks in assistance and guidance.

2

You shouldn’t write the overlay prefix again when specifying the overlays in the line “overlays=”. You also need to make sure the prefix matches the actual filenames.

1 Like
3

Thanks for the hint in straightening out the uboot arguments for loading dtb overlays:
overlays=i2c8-m2 pwm0-m0 pwm14-m0

The good news is I now have /sys/class/pwm/pwmchip1. Unfortunately the tree under pwmchip0 is unchanged, and the new pwmchip1 is identical in hierarchy and nodes.

Does the fanctrl dtbo need to be loaded?

4

But do the filenames match exactly? You had “rockchip” in one name and no rockchip in the others. Maybe you are missing some overlays from the filesystem?

5

I wish this were the case. The dtbo files are all on path /boot/dtb/rockchip/overlay/
The names, minus the prefix specified in armbianEnv.txt are now matches.
Evidence of this is the new pwmchip1 entry under the /sys fs, after making the change.

6

OK, I have the same overlays in the folder. Not sure any more. Maybe you could decompile them and ask an LLM why something doesn’t work, at least until Radxa responds.

1 Like
7

Hahaha! Not a completely terrible idea.
I’ve used GPT5 to figure out the intractable parts of amd64 to arm64 ports before. I got to a complete compile and build.