Dragonboard: My 1st thoughts and experience

Products Support DragonBoard410c
#1

Hello All, Just received my dragonboard yesterday.

I was impressed on how small and thin the board was. I bought this one: https://www.arrow.com/en/products/dragonboard410ciotsdk/arrow-development-tools This one comes with the wall-wart.

It states here (http://www.96boards.org/products/ce/dragonboard410c/downloads/) that Android comes pre-stalled, except this one came with LXDE Linaro 8.2 instead.
The small pamphlet(getting started) #4 states “Plug power supply and Android will start automatically”. #5 states Log into Linux…" When LXDE loaded I had a message with Openbox Syntax error. So, the pamphlet says both Android and linux, I’m I misunderstanding something? or is this a misprint?

I wanted this for Android. Based off the the downloads link above, I find this link http://www.96boards.org/products/ce/dragonboard410c/downloads/ However, From the Wiki (https://github.com/96boards/documentation/wiki/DragonBoard™-410c-Crossroads) there are 2 to choose from there. I did the SD card install method from Qualcomm from the last link. I’m running win7 and the fastboot instructions don’t have instructions for windows. The 2 links above for the SD card install seems to be the same. however, what is the difference between the fastboot for the Qualcomm and the RP?

The SD install method was easy. I changed the boot switches to boot from SD. After installing, I get a popup to remove SD card and press ok. It reboot and and screen was black. I’m not sure if I was impatient or it wasn’t going to boot. I unplugged the unit and switch the boot switch back to 0 and powered the unit and now it was running android.

The Qualcomm build has a phone icon. Why?. In my opinion, this hasn’t been fully optimized for the board.

The “power off” restarts the board.

When scrolling down a webpage with the firefox browser pre installed, seems to get stuck loading the rest of the pages.

Wifi and Bluetooth is working but not fully tested.

I side loaded amazon apps and was able to install WAZE but wasn’t able to install ES File explorer. Waze: I wasn’t outdoors, so GPS wasn’t working. Not sure if I didn’t have maps because of this or there was another issue. I was able to download the APK and side load it. I was able to download and install the Playstore APK but when I opened up it was a black screen and crashed.

#2

Hi QueOnda,

That is the same board/package I have. It is the ‘AWS IoT’ version and does come with Linaro 8.2 preinstalled by design. It is the same exact hardware though only, as you know, it also comes with the AC adapter for only $5 more than the board alone so is a much better bargain if you also need that.

That ‘Openbox’ error you saw seems to be an issue on the ‘newer’ (higher serial # boards) and it is related to a missing XML file. I’ve also noticed some oddities with the SD card being recognized on those boards, but only under Linaro. Android and Windows IoT don’t exhibit the issue with the SD card.

As for the Fastboot install method under Windows, it works the same way provided you have the appropriate Android tools available on your Windows machine. I already had the Android SDK installed on mine and it included the necessary utilities. Then you can just take the script from the Linux Fastboot instructions and modify it for the Windows environment.

The ‘poweroff’ restarting the board is the current expected behaviour, it seems. There is an ongoing thread about that on the forum: http://www.96boards.org/forums/topic/shut-down-not-working/

Wish I could help more with the Android questions you have, but I’ve decided to stick with Linaro for my projects for the time being so haven’t really used Android on the DragonBoard other than to load it while I was trying to figure out that SD card issue.