A0604 finally running on eMMC

DevTerm
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I quite like my new A0604, but I don’t like microSD cards and especially their speed and stability.
But there are empty eMMC pads on the computing board… so we added an eMMC.

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I am not so good at BGA reballing process, so my bf did it for me. I would not describe the eMMC soldering: many youtube guides will show it better than me. I’d better get eyes on the further things.

We built an Armbian Ubuntu LTS with all the DevTerm patches, and also we changed the .dts to support eMMC as in the Rockchip and Firefly board patch did. A Mate DE was also added (will change it to l3wm soon).
We also lowered the debug UART speed from the standard Rockchip 1.5 Mbaud (it doesn’t work in Mac OS terminal at all without picocom) to the more useful speed 115200.

64 GiB /home, 300 MB/s read speed and the more responsive system is worth it.

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Neat. I’ve been thinking it would be better if they could get some integrated storage on there. If something like that became available for purchase, I’d possibly consider buying one.

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Fantastic mod! I’ve promoted it on Hackster.io - maybe it’ll encourage Clockwork Pi to launch an official variant with pre-installed eMMC module.

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when eMMC is added, is SD still working? (if I remember correctly, CM3 with eMMC don’t support SD)
You can have eMMC and SD used at the same time?
If you insert bootable SD and eMMC is bootable too, what will it boot from?

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Thank you, Gareth, it is very nice to be mentioned in hackster article to me, I wanted it before. I am happy now, thanks :slight_smile:
I hope Clockwork team will provide this extra option too. I’d prefer to use pre-installed eMMC of course.

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6

SD doesn’t work now because I broke this part of devtree unfortunately. Hope we can fix it soon.
Original Clockwork’s system still works from SD, so it is supported by HW, unlike the CM3 behaviour.
Clockwork’s system from SD can’t see eMMC, and our eMMC system can’t see SD now.

SD priority is higher than eMMC so it will boot from SD if you use both bootable SD and eMMC. It is described here: https://www.t-firefly.com/download/Firefly-RK3399/docs/TRM/Rockchip%20RK3399TRM%20V1.3%20Part1.pdf (page 30)

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I have successfully installed a KLMDG8JENB-B041 (128GB) and the system can see both emmc and microsd.

Device tree mod is very simple:

&sdhci {
	bus-width = <8>;
	mmc-hs200-1_8v;
	non-removable;
	status = "okay";
};

&emmc_phy {
	status = "okay";
};
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