RockPi 4C -> Don't waste your time

#1

So I got a lemon.

I have persisted with trying to dev on what the advertising said was the Raspi4B killer.

On paper this hardware should be great, but it just isn’t.

Radxa has stopped providing any meaningful bug fixes and their wiki pages are full of typos in what should be copy n paste code for newbies.

The Uboot dpkg code for the 4C has been broken since day1

I can work around this and have but the lack of any further development and the apparent abandonment of this hardware means this unit is now just landfill.

So as a note to anyone who is a novice and anyone who wants to do serious development -> move on and get a Raspi 4B -> the hardware might be not as good, but at least you can properly leverage it because Raspi forks are actively maintained by Pi Foundation and volunteers not just abandoned with no word from the manufacturer.

#2

Do you see any official statement saying “what the advertising said was the Raspi4B killer.”?

“wiki pages are full of typos” -> can you just point it out? wiki is a wiki, it means it’s editable by everyone, why don’t you just correct it?

1 Like
#3

Rather than spending your time leaving silly replies - how about supporting your products?

Seeed have stopped stocking Radxa.

No comment refuting the abandonment of the product so that further lends support to the assertion.

For users who want persist with this lemon, the only legitimate opensource OS that has received any decent update in recent months is TwisterOS and Radxa don’t even mention them because they haven’t updated their site properly in months. Downside is it’s only 32bit so far.

The SLACK server is so heavily customised it isn’t suited for most dev work.

So @jack please pass back to your management the community feels let down and disappointed.

#4

the only legitimate opensource OS that has received any decent update in recent months is TwisterOS

On the contrary, TwisterOS is not open source, Armbian is.

Downside is it’s only 32bit so far.

Wrong again, TwisterOS is 64 bits.

Radxa don’t even mention them.

Did you read the joint announcement from Radxa and TwisterOS team that TwisterOS as the preload OS for 4B+?

If you have issues, just point out exact issue you have.

“The Uboot dpkg code for the 4C has been broken since day1” doesn’t mean anything.

1 Like
#5

Maybe I should have been more clear, Twister is not a uniform platform with 64bit available to all chip types meaning both 64bit and 32bit versions are required from developers in many cases.

This doesn’t address the fact that you have abandoned the 4c.

Have you guys even tried following your own wiki instructions?

#6

Erm,Twister is platform that exist only for rk3399. Which is 64bit chip. From where are you taking 32bit versions? For uniform platform you have Armbian (hello, do you read us? It was already in previous post, but you ignored it)

You do understand, that so far Radxa is the best maintainer for their own hardware? Take for example Firefly or Bananapi or orange pi.
Here Radxa ACTUALLY doing great job of using their resources to add support for sbc in mainline kernel. And you are still calling that abandoned?

Once again, you never mentioned which instructions you have trouble understanding? And, today i will new door for you. Wiki is not maintained solo by radxa. Wiki is community job.

#7

RockPi4C is an amazing ARM64 SBC as a linux desktop machine unsurpassed in price/performance features at just $59 price point. Has a great Armbian mainline support and TwisterOS Armbian runs amazing on it booting from NVMe, eMMC or uSD. @sumorhc, You haven’t been clear enough what exactly are you trying to accomplish here and don’t forget these are development boards that may require some tinkering/tweaking to work as you’d expect. Don’t forget also, Radxa has been making some serious efforts to make it easier for the End user with its latest RockPi4B+ by shipping it with TwisterOS Armbian preinstalled. You come here bashing other people hard work with some inflammatory posting without explaining yourself what is you really need to do. If Rpi4 works wonders for your current requirements, maybe you should stick with it.

1 Like
#8

So fanbois Dante4 and jtremblant do their same schtick they do to everyone who wants Radxa to pull their shit together.

I am an experienced Arm dev who just wants Radxa to pull their heads out of their rear ends and update and collate all of the relevant information into 1 place.

Yay Twister really is awesome - but it isn’t even listed on the official downloads page…

The fact remains that the support is a shitshow. Wiki’s are not a robust environment for support because as you said ANYONE can put up info -> in a lot of cases wrong info and that just leads to more headaches because Radxa doesn’t curate it at all.

What I want is an image which works out of the box for GPIO access and doesn’t need me to reinvent the wheel just to use the hardware which IS excellent.

There has still been no comment regarding the 4c being effectively abandoned - that was skillfully avoided by all parties concerned.

#9

Yeaaah, sure, we already had person claims to be 15 years developer, who were unable to find windows driver on wiki site. Sureeee

Say it to Wikipedia.

You know. Maybe you should go to RasPi if you need out-of-box experience without using brain :slight_smile:

Because you still did not provided any point why you think it’s abandoned

1 Like
#10

Dante -> we clearly aren’t in your rarified smug air, where we can magically make this POS work reliably.

Give it a shot -> try and follow the libmraa instructions https://wiki.radxa.com/Rockpi4/dev/libmraa

The errors aren’t trivial they are many layers deep.

Go on -> give it a go.

#11

For me, can’t initialize spi. And no one for helping. I think it’s a bullshit too.

#12

And now the Armbian stop support to Rockpi4? What do I do?

#13

rockpi4 is currently the most similar development board to Raspberry Pi 4, but there are still some gaps, the stability of wifi connection, the python library of gpio, these are not very mature

#14

Help? If Armbian receives at least some help, miracles can be done. Best effort support is back online with upcoming release since someone will help us helping you:


But this solo will not solve all troubles. Resources for R&D and support remains very limited, scarce and expensive so in case something serious needs to be fixed or answered, community will need to help - in advance. Since Armbian will cover basic and best effort support, anyone can enjoy common work and add their fixes at any time, have access to fast download, daily builds, …

#15

I got a RockPi4B+ a few weeks ago and it works great. If someone never used an SBC before I could see itmight be a bit frustrating to get going, and could lead them to vent in this troll-like manner. But its not hard to get going and it works fine.

2 Likes