I received my board today and tried to follow the guide to get started. However, I never get any output on the HDMI port - without or without the TF card inserted, and with any possible setting of the jumpers. I get a red light when I plug the device in. I get flashing lights on the ethernet sockets if I connect them, but nothing else.
Is my board broken or have I missed something? I don’t have USB serial connector to test that way.
I don’t have anything that might help other than my newly-arrived VisionFive 2 board does exactly the same thing. I followed the instructions at:
https://doc-en.rvspace.org/VisionFive2/Quick_Start_Guide/VisionFive2_QSG/getting_started.html
I install the TF card and apply power and I get the red LED and the network port flashing if it’s connected. I never get anything on the HDMI nor do I see if ever pickup an IP from the DHCP server.
Seems not to be booting in any way.
Hello tealag,
do you tried to got any output via USB-serial connection. To see what happend ?
It is good starting point to get a working usbserial connection. Then you can configure user, network and so on.
Best regards
Damian
Hi @dtometzki
As I said above - I don’t have a USB-serial connector. I will have to buy one I guess.
Thanks though.
Do you have any other SoC board with 3.3 v serial port (e.g. Raspberry Pi, …) that you could use instead of a USB to 3.3V TTL Serial UART cable to access the serial port on the VF2 ?
Even some Arduino boards could be configured as an Arduino Serial Bypass, which is effectively ignoring the Arduino chip altogether and using the on-board serial chip to function as a dumb USB to Serial Converter ( e.g. https://gist.github.com/wmhilton/6034455 ). But you would need to verify that the voltage was 3.3 volts for your particular make and model of Arduino to avoid any risk of permanently damaging the VF2.
I was in a similar situation before where I had no display and only the red led was on even though I followed the instructions. I don’t have a USB-serial connector as well. I did some digging and found that the sdcard.img on the VF2 SDK github repo tagged release works for me when flashed into an sd card, though you might need to change the boot mode before it can actually boot. If it works you should see a green led next to the red one that periodically flashes like a heartbeat.
That img should have mtd-utils installed, and also supports ssh, so if you know the ip address of your board you can ssh in as well as scp the relevant files from your PC to update spl and uboot.
Once I did this I was able to get a debian image running, but unfortunately what happened was a mouse cursor would display on my screen with a black background, and then proceeds to get stuck.
I can still ssh in to debian, though I’ve only just started playing around and haven’t figured out what’s wrong yet. Not sure why some people are able to get it working out of the box just like that but not ours. But hey, thats part of the fun!
would you please check your monitor’s EDID by following command?
modetest -M starfive -c
please refer to this post Got errors with cursor freezing in Debian image - #4 by LewisCowles to modify the resolution
You will only get a HDMI signal after booting from the TF card.
Did you try with Debian image version ending on 55?
Are you sure the HDMI cable is properly connected? At first it will go in relatively smoothly, but you need to use some “reasonable” force to get the HDMI cable in properly.
Yes I saw that post as well and just tried it out. It fixed my issue and I’m now getting a working display as well. Seems like I had the same situation as the author of the post where I had used a 4k monitor.
Thanks for your replies, everyone. I haven’t had a chance yet, but I’ll give it another go once we hit 2023 
In my situation, Image-69 doesn’t work (no boot), but Image-55 works.
Oops! I missed this info. Thanks!
Can confirm image-55 boots fine. I’ll look at the other steps here now.
I updated the firmware (uboot and opensbi) and booted off the 69 debian image successfully. Everything is running, but I don’t have an image on my Aorus FI270Q monitor. I assume the 2560x1440 native resolution is the culpit. Anyway, here’s my modeset info:
Connectors:
id encoder status name size (mm) modes encoders
116 115 connected HDMI-A-1 610x350 19 115
modes:
index name refresh (Hz) hdisp hss hse htot vdisp vss vse vtot
#0 1920x1080 120.00 1920 2008 2052 2200 1080 1084 1089 1125 297000 flags: phsync, pvsync; type: driver
#1 1920x1080 119.88 1920 2008 2052 2200 1080 1084 1089 1125 296703 flags: phsync, pvsync; type: driver
#2 1920x1080 60.00 1920 2008 2052 2200 1080 1084 1089 1125 148500 flags: phsync, pvsync; type: driver
#3 1920x1080 59.94 1920 2008 2052 2200 1080 1084 1089 1125 148352 flags: phsync, pvsync; type: driver
#4 1920x1080 50.00 1920 2448 2492 2640 1080 1084 1089 1125 148500 flags: phsync, pvsync; type: driver
#5 1280x720 120.00 1280 1390 1430 1650 720 725 730 750 148500 flags: phsync, pvsync; type: driver
#6 1280x720 119.88 1280 1390 1430 1650 720 725 730 750 148352 flags: phsync, pvsync; type: driver
#7 1280x720 100.00 1280 1720 1760 1980 720 725 730 750 148500 flags: phsync, pvsync; type: driver
#8 1280x720 60.00 1280 1390 1430 1650 720 725 730 750 74250 flags: phsync, pvsync; type: driver
#9 1280x720 59.94 1280 1390 1430 1650 720 725 730 750 74176 flags: phsync, pvsync; type: driver
#10 1280x720 50.00 1280 1720 1760 1980 720 725 730 750 74250 flags: phsync, pvsync; type: driver
#11 1440x576 50.00 1440 1464 1592 1728 576 581 586 625 54000 flags: nhsync, nvsync; type: driver
#12 1440x480 60.00 1440 1472 1596 1716 480 489 495 525 54054 flags: nhsync, nvsync; type: driver
#13 1440x480 59.94 1440 1472 1596 1716 480 489 495 525 54000 flags: nhsync, nvsync; type: driver
#14 720x576 50.00 720 732 796 864 576 581 586 625 27000 flags: nhsync, nvsync; type: driver
#15 720x480 60.00 720 736 798 858 480 489 495 525 27027 flags: nhsync, nvsync; type: driver
#16 720x480 59.94 720 736 798 858 480 489 495 525 27000 flags: nhsync, nvsync; type: driver
#17 640x480 60.00 640 656 752 800 480 490 492 525 25200 flags: nhsync, nvsync; type: driver
#18 640x480 59.94 640 656 752 800 480 490 492 525 25175 flags: nhsync, nvsync; type: driver
props:
1 EDID:
flags: immutable blob
blobs:
value:
00ffffffffffff001c54062701010101
081e0103803d2378ee11e5ae5044ac25
0d5054bfcf00d1c0714f81c081408180
9500b3000101565e00a0a0a029503020
3500544f2100001e000000fd0030901e
de3c000a202020202020000000fc0041
4f5255532046493237510a20000000ff
003230303830423030303639350a0149
0203497153020311121304292f0e0f1d
1e901f3f051461602309170783010000
67030c002000383c67d85dc401788003
681a000001013090ece305e301e40f00
0006e606070162620059e7006aa0a067
5015203500544f2100001e6fc200a0a0
a0555030203500544f2100001a977f80
78703821401c203804544f2100001edf
2 DPMS:
flags: enum
enums: On=0 Standby=1 Suspend=2 Off=3
value: 3
5 link-status:
flags: enum
enums: Good=0 Bad=1
value: 0
6 non-desktop:
flags: immutable range
values: 0 1
value: 0
4 TILE:
flags: immutable blob
blobs:
value:
Im in same boat as others with a no-boot situation with both 65 and 55… reading the instructions on how to update sp/uboot i have a couple of questions as the manual is not the clearest in the world:
for option 1, it says to wait for the command line uboot. Does that only work across serial port or should i see it on HDMI? And i assume no SD card installed.
For option 2, where are these commands run? On the board or a host PC its plugged into? i cant boot so cant do it on the board. I did install mtd-utils on a debian host, but it does not show anything when /proc/mtd is run from the directions. ( and flashcp isn’t part of the mtd-utils package )
Run the commands for the second option from the board using SSH. See my guide here where this worked out: VisionFive 2 up and running instructions
I can try that, however the images i have now dont do squat, even for network. Instead of ‘the image on github’ is there an actual link to this magic image that boots enough to get network? ( to save me a bunch of searching )
thank you. ill give that a shot before i build a tftp server, find my serial port debugger cable, bla bla.
EDIT: still nothing other than a fan and a red light, so i guess its back to finding my debug cable this weekend.