How can you tell if the HiKey 970 is booting up

Products Support HiKey970
#1

I have a brand new Hikey 970 board. I followed the suggested boot up method. I see nothing on the HDMI output (tried every monitor I have and they do support 1080p60. I don’t see a /dev/ttyUSBx if I connect the USB C to a linux machine. I see no activity on any LED, just the power LED is lit. How do I tell if this board is even alive?

Does the network have a default IP address that I can ssh into? Of course as whom?

Also when it says several minutes for the first boot - what is several? Is it 2, 5, 10 or 50 - all being several?

Please help.

ETA: I had read a bunch of stuff saying this might have to do with the type of monitor. So I did the best I could, which is I took the board to the local Best Buy and tested it with every monitor they had on display which included multiple models from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, LG, Samsung and Vizio. Not a one worked (I tested 18 different monitors :grinning:).

I did notice one difference between monitors. In some cases the user LEDs tucked between the two USB Type A ports will blink in differing ways. In other cases there is no activity on those LEDs. That may mean something to someone.

#2

Does the following help:

I suppose no more than 10 minutes (I think Android rebuild some java packages).

#3

Doesn’t Hikey970 have two USB type C connectors? If I remembered that
correctly you did try both, right?

#4

One (J1801) is marked USB type C (This is the one next to the two Type A connectors). The other is marked UART Debug. I’ve only tried the one marked USB Type C. I can try the other. I also loaded an image onto a microSD drive (seems like if that slot is occupied the board will try boot from the SD card). That did nothing either.

#5

That seems to imply that the UART debug port should be used. I’ll try that.

I’ve given it more than that much time, or at least I think I have though waiting for a dead board to do something is like watching paint dry, so who knows. But I did try a Linux image from an SD card and that didn’t do anything either.

#6

Well the problem was solved. Turns out it’s the UART debug port that does put out the console messages (Wish Hikey would document that a bit better).

Also turns out I have a bad board, that had obviously been fiddled with and then returned to the vendor who then “recycled” it (I bought the board from Amazon who ship it on behalf of Smartfly Info). Someone had tried to load a Linux image onto it. During boot the board throws an error when it probes the PCIe and resets and starts trying to boot again. This seems to go on in an infinite loop. Which basically sucks.

#7

Well the problem was solved. Turns out it’s the UART debug port that does put out the console messages (Wish Hikey would document that a bit better).

Also turns out I have a bad board, that had obviously been fiddled with and then returned to the vendor who then “recycled” it (I bought the board from Amazon who ship it on behalf of Smartfly Info). Someone had tried to load a Linux image onto it. During boot the board throws an error when it probes the PCIe and resets and starts trying to boot again. This seems to go on in an infinite loop. Which basically sucks.

#8

I faced similar issues. I used a direct HDMI cable from monitor to the Hikey970 board. Don’t use any converters like VGA to HDMI to the Hikey board. I bought new Monitor which supports direct HDMI cable. This solution helped me. Now I am able to see the Hikey.