[arm-allstar] $29 Pi Alternative ?

[Joe Moskalski]

Since I heard of Fred's issue I have tried to duplicate his issue, I
haven't been able to so far on the H3 based TV box. It is still a good find
because it could be a definite issue under certain circumstances. In other
news, I ran my 6 site simulcast system off of a NanoPi NEO for 2 weeks with
no issues.

On Mon, Sep 12, 2022 at 6:18 AM "David McGough via ARM-allstar" <
arm-allstar at hamvoip.org> wrote:

>
> 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
> >
>
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