[arm-allstar] $29 Pi Alternative ?

[David McGough]

Hi Fred,

Thanks for doing some testing with the H3 boxes.  I should have some 
hardware to test with this week.  It has been "shipped" by Amazon.

You're hitting upon some primary reasons why I've been highly resistant to
changing from the RPi boards---recent RPi's are incredibly mature
products.  They're as reliable as any hardware I've ever used, at any
price point, high-end server hardware included.  However, if the RPi's are
unobtainable, none of this matters, another solution must be found.

Just taking some wild guesses, I suspect the reboot / power cycle issue is 
caused by systemd getting hung up waiting for something.  This is an all 
too common problem (that I'm fed up with!).  I really appreciate the 
classic problems that systemd works to resolve, however, even the most 
recent code can be a real PITA; especially for "hard to reach" embedded 
applications.

Barring actual hardware failure, I suspect the situation where boards
become unbootable is due to the internal eMMC uboot code getting
clobbered. There is probably a way to recover from this, the question is:  
how??  All the consumer grade set top boxes are basically aimed at a
disposable market--if it stops working, toss it.  This being said, there
is probably some type of internal header (JTAG or otherwise) which
provides a solution (which was used during manufacturing to pre-load the 
OS).


73, David K4FXC


On Sun, 11 Sep 2022, Fred Moses wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> So testing a few of those Allwinner H3 boxes with the Sputnik distro 
> this weekend.  And they boot about 95% of the time but a big flag to 
> work on is rebooting halts the machine to where one needs to remove 
> power wait and apply power to boot..  I have one that just will not boot 
> anymore and two more that if you do a reboot you then have to manually 
> remove power and re-apply to restart.
> 
> But it's a start.  Not getting anything on the HDMI port ether so 
> this will be interesting to troubleshoot and work on..
> 
> BTW - David if you have an image to test for the H3 side of things let 
> me know.
> 
> --
> Fredric Moses - W8FSM - WRPA678
>