Boot issues

VisionFive 2 （English Forum)
1

I bought two VisionFive 2 SBC and one of them boots nicely with the debian image, but I have not been able to get the other one to boot. I have tried two different SD-cards, both of which works fine with the card that boots. I am using the same power source (100 W USB C).

What else can I do to troubleshoot the card that does not boot?

2

In the name of troubleshooting, do the two boards have the DIP switches (they’re near the 40-pin header) set the same?

Does the second board show any signs of life at all? Do you get the red light by the USB-C power connector?

I have no answers…just troubleshooting steps.

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3

Do you have usb2uart adapter available?

I think its a must have with SBCs of RPi form factor hardware.

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4

The advantage of having two boards, as long as both have 3.3 volt TTL GPIO pins - which will be the case if they are the same make and model, is you can use one with 3 wires to connect to the other

                  GND<->GND (pin 6/9/14/20/25/30/39)
UART RX(pin 10 GPIO6)<->UART TX (pin 8 GPIO5)
 UART TX(pin 8 GPIO5)<->UART RX (pin 10 GPIO6)

And then use a program like cu/screen/minicom/ckermit/dterm/picocom/putty/cutecom… for interactive access. Or just tail -f the serial device if you only need the output.

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5

Ah, yeah. Good point. Be careful tho, the pins are weak enough. I had troubles connecting usb2uart and it got destroyed, but I bought a pack of them. Better safe than sorry.

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6

Thanks, yes dip-switches are the same and I get the red led.

7

I’ll try this until I get the uart.

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8

How did this happen? They look and feel like standard male dip headers.

Did you use something else than dupont females to connect them?

9

Nope, I just connected VF2’s one of signal wire to GND of pl2303’s and vice versa. pl2303 fried probably because VF2 forced current into it’s crystal like a dead short of a diode I dunno how lol. Damaged pl2303 was able to receive, but never was able to transmit and ran hot. No 3V3 of both were ever connected (I don’t install 3V3 wire at all in my setups)

image

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10

Follow-up:

I attached an UART and got this:

dwmci_s: Response Timeout.
dwmci_s: Response Timeout.
BOOT fail,Error is 0xffffffff

The next step is that I will try to flash a new bootloader, if possible.

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11

I am guessing the sd card support in the SoC’s built-in rom (which isn’t upgradable) does not like these sd cards.

Support within the firmware/bootloader in SPI should be significantly better.

Now that you have UART access, you’re able to use this method to flash newer boot code to SPI:

edit: I just re-read the OP and realized you’ve got two boards.

I’m suspecting there’s some sort of issue with the bad board’s RAM.

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