I received my board yesterday and installed it (replacing the USB hub board), but my uConsole won’t boot with the board installed. I haven’t made any of the config.txt changes yet - is there something that needs to be done before the card is installed like enabling an overlay to turn on/off some pins? All I get is a quick flash of the LCD backlight, and the power light stays green. It didn’t damage the uConsole at all - my uConsole boots fine when I remove the expansion board again.
(Note that I’m currently on kernel 6.6.51 - I’m going to try a newer kernel in case there’s any changes in the upstream device tree that are relevant. I looked at Rex’s hackergadgets-uconsole-aio-board package but all it seems to do in the device tree is enable the RTC driver.)
Is there a list somewhere of what all the pins are routed to on the expansion board so I can make sure my device tree doesn’t have any conflicts?
The old kernel shouldn’t change anything, but the image you’re on is no longer receiving updates. My new images are all running kernel 6.12.y, you can flash a separate SD card with a new image and just try to boot it with the card installed. If it still won’t boot there might be a bridged connection on the card somewhere.
I’m running NixOS, so I can confirm I’m definitely still receiving updates. (The kernel version is just pinned to 6.6.51 because I need to suck in a new patchset.)
After connecting external HDMI, I discovered it’s hanging in U-Boot, so the kernel version and everything later/userspace is irrelevant. U-Boot says:
Net: eth0: ethernet@7d580000
PCIe BRCM: link down
starting USB...
No USB controllers found
Hit any key to stop autoboot: 0
U-Boot>
I guess I’m not sure what, if any, of that is normal on a uConsole. I’m guessing with the “No USB controllers found” message I’m not going to be able to connect a keyboard to interact with U-Boot.
I guess I’m already off in special-snowflake land since it doesn’t look like your image even uses U-Boot in the boot process.
No it doesn’t but on a separate sd card you can flash bookworm and test it. it should boot with the ext card in without anything done to it. if it works then it’s something with nixos if the card still doesn’t boot then we can look at the ext card.
I second @Rex’s opinion that it is worthwhile testing on any known working image, if only to make sure the screen works before showing the unit some love. Given the error message you have pasted, you may also want to test the keyboard and trackball to ensure USB works, just in case.
If you get U-Boot working I encourage you to do a write-up and either post or hyperlink it on this forum.
Alright, I believe I’ve figured it out. The GPS module is sending something on the UART, and U-Boot is interpreting that as a request to halt the boot. I applied the following patch to uboot to disable its use of the serial port:
I also set CONFIG_BOOTDELAY=-2 just to speed up the boot process since there’s no LCD video while u-boot runs, but I don’t think that’s strictly necessary to work around the bug.
In theory the environment variable change can be applied without rebuilding u-boot by writing it to a file called uboot.env on the first FAT partition, but I couldn’t get that to work. Perhaps there’s something wonky with my partition table.
The fact that there isn’t a working keyboard in the bootloader made this very annoying to debug!
Got my board and antennas a few weeks ago and all seems to work except for GPS. I followed the instructions here but when running sudo minicom -D /dev/ttyAMA0 -b 9600(On a CM5) I get a few lines of junk and then $GPTXT,01,01,01,ANTENNA OPEN*25 I’m using the GPS antenna that came with the kit and have tested a different cable to the external board, but no luck. Is this something that can be caused by incorrect configs or is it a hardware problem?
I haven’t, I didn’t get the 4G module. I’m running basically a new install of rex’s bookworm image (aside from applying the config changes listed in the setup doc)
I guess I am missing something here. I am CM5 and I got what I thought was the latest image and it will not boot. It starts but powers off very shortly into the boot process. The previous image booted fine I just had issues with Meshtastic. SDR worked fine and GPS worked as well. Any guidance would be much appreciated. Images I have tried so far are ClockworkPi-Bookworm-6.12.45.img.xz and ClockworkPi-ParrotSecurity-6.12.45.img.x
Ahh good point. I did indeed, I totally overlooked that. Not sure how I can change the eprom as I put the device in a non bootable state lol. I guess I dug myself a hole.
(The kernel version is just pinned to 6.6.51 because I need to suck in a new patchset.)
