RockPi3a - No boot

[Alter]

Simply get a green light and nothing out of the UART and no blue light indicating it is booting. I think this board is defective

[Nasca]

Please describe in detail what you did with rock3a.

[Alter]

I think I supplied it with too much amperage. I had the usb to serial hooked up, usb otg, and a 5 volt power supply to usbc - I have a feeling that when I disconnected the usb uart pins the power pin may have hit the pin right next to it (yellow). This is just a hunch but its all I can think of that would cause it to no longer want to boot when supplying power and a known sd card.

[daniel258]

Hi,
I recently purchased rock pi 3 model a. And just yesterday am having the same issue. My sbc was being idle and suddenly it stopped working. Green light is on, no blue light, using the official 4.19 kernel image is not working, reflashing it on different sd cards does not help. The only thing is while it worked, usb devices like external hard drive (with additional power adapter) would disconnect and reconnect. My power supply is rpi 4 official charger, but also having a more powerful laptop power adapter and still the same. I think that there might be something defective in the design of the board itself. Reading through other topics here, this sbc seems to have this issue.

[Alter]

Agree, it makes no sense to me as I also used a rpi USBC power supply. If a rep is on the forums I’m happy to send it in

[daniel258]

just an update from my part. I tested my rock pi with ssd nvme samsung 980, flashed with official 4.19 kernel. Still just green light, nothing else. I think this proves that my rock pi is dead

[thc013]

Well first i wonder wich power pin ?
uart needs only rx ,tx and gnd and are female
outside usb connecters are gnd

well fancy booting of nvme doesnt help to check if a board works .

nvme and or sata boot requires 1 of that 3 below to work

! most of times it is a user mistake !

check wich device you want to boot from spi, emmc or sd

check the wiki wich jumpers has to be placed to boot from spi or emmc or sd

https://wiki.radxa.com/Rock3/hardware/3a

so to boot from sd check point 2.3 and 18 in the wiki

and if you still can’t boot a sd or any other device it still doesnt mean it is defect

so you have to try if bootrom aka mask-rom works
how to do that is explained here

Rock 3a does not enter maskroom mode

Please remove sd card and emmc first, if you wanna boot rock3a to maskroom mode, in v1.31 , you need to short these two pins , [3] then plug the USB Male A to Mail A cable to ROCK 3A OTG port(the upper USB3 port), the other side to PC , and lastly power on the board [4] [Screenshot-3] If you wanna boot rock3a to loader mode , you need to insert sd card or emmc, then the next step is the same as in maskroom mode [6] [3] [4] [Screenshot-5]

if none of the above works you have a possibility it is defective but from the info you both provide it looks more a user mistake .