How soon until a Linux prebuilt image is available?

Products Support HiKey 960
#21

Hi @ric96

I’m a little surprised that adaptor works with the jumper removed.

The purpose of that jumper is to provide a reference voltage for the FT232. So one of the outer pins is connected to a 5v power rail and the other is connected to a 3v3 power rail. The centre pin can then be attached to either 5v, 3v3 or to some other value (2v5, 1v8, etc). The reference voltage powers the parts of the FT232 that send and receive signals to the base board.

Leaving it unconnected means that the FT232 will be drawing power on from circuits within the chip that are not designed to supply power. I suspect it ends up powering its I/O sections from the LS-UART1 TX pin (which is held at 1V8 when not in use). This is, IMHO, somewhat risky.

There is a 1v8 reference voltage provided by the LS connector (the one I advised you to locate earlier in the thread) and the FT232 is specified to work with a 1v8 reference voltage. If you get reliability problems you should consider connecting the centre pin to this… although I can’t do a proper review since I can’t see any circuit diagram for the adaptor.

Daniel.

#22

yup that perfectly checks out!
see page no. 7 here:

the pin4, VCCIO and i quote the document "+1.8V to +5.25V supply to the UART Interface and CBUS group pins (1…3, 5, 6,
9…14, 22, 23). In USB bus powered designs connect this pin to 3V3OUT pin to
drive out at +3.3V levels, or connect to VCC to drive out at 5V CMOS level. This
pin can also be supplied with an external +1.8V to +2.8V supply in order to drive
outputs at lower levels. It should be noted that in this case this supply should
originate from the same source as the supply to VCC. This means that in bus
powered designs a regulator which is supplied by the +5V on the USB bus should "

and I have confirmed that the middle pin is indeed connected to VCCIO, but should i worry about the point
"…It should be noted that in this case this supply should
originate from the same source as the supply to VCC. This means that in bus
powered designs a regulator which is supplied by the +5V on the USB bus should “”

#23

Well found!

I have to admit that I don’t know. I guess this is to ensure that the 3v3 and 1v8 parts of the FTDI share a common ground. FTDI certainly sell adapters based on FT232 that use an external voltage reference but there might be extra circuitry in them to “solve” this issue in the datasheet (the circuity is molded into the USB plug so there’s not real option to take a peek).

I guess the best I can say here is that, compared to having no voltage reference, it is not more broken to use an “alien” voltage reference!

#24

Order a bunch of 1.8v 1117 LDOs. I’ll put one between vcc and gnd and have a 1.8v reference voltage foi vccio.

#25

1117 1v8 LDO worked a charm 1.8 volts stable at tx… Awesome!!!

#26

For those wanting the 96 boards UART mezzanine but put off by the high shipping price direct from Seeed, I’m pretty sure that this is the same part on Arrow: https://www.arrow.com/en/products/114990282/seeed-technology-limited

Cheaper, and with free shipping!

I’ve ordered two of them so I’ll see next week whether they are the right thing.

#27

do let us know, i’ll order one as well and have it permanently sit on top of LS

#28

Yep, they arrived today and they look like the correct part.

1 Like
#29

Is ethernet (via usb dongle) or wifi working for anyone?

hikey960:~$ uname -a
Linux hikey960 4.9.0-139822-gdfd2f77 #1 SMP PREEMPT Tue May 30 12:00:55 UTC 2017 aarch64 aarch64 aarch64 GNU/Linux

hikey960:~$ lsusb
unable to initialize libusb: -99
#30

For what it’s worth, personally I was also unable to make the wifi work.

I understand that the image is not officially ready yet. Is this perhaps a known issue that someone is looking into?

#31

AFAIK none of the peripherals are receiving power or something close as it is with the usb ports.
Again most of things is being actively worked on. As i understand the primary goal here is to make uefi boot work first,most other things come later.

#32

I agree, it is pre-alpha, the management released the hardware (with advertised Linux support) too early.

I am happy to test the new Linux images as they come out, I hope that one day the Hikey 960 works better than the older Hikey.

So far, both Hikey boards are worse than the Dragonboard 410c.

#33

the newer builds (69) doesn’t seem to have a dt image and have a uefi boot. however simply flashing only boot and system doesn’t work on these build…
pl help.

#34

@fabo , do you have any updates on the availability of the Debian images?

1 Like
#35

I do not see a dt-*.img in the latest. Last modified is 28-Jul-2017. Maybe I am overlooking something?

#36

Were you able to resolve this?

#37

that’s because its based on uefi boot loader. The contents of dt-.img are inside boot.img and do not need to be flashed separately.

1 Like
#38

Once an image has been flashed onto the board, and the switch configuration has been switched back to Auto Power Up, dmesg | tail shows (once I turned of power, changed switch, and started up again)
Product: HI3650
[13204.227946] usb 1-1: Manufacturer: Fastboot2.0
[13204.227948] usb 1-1: SerialNumber: 6900817832000000
[14308.629087] usb 1-1: USB disconnect, device number 20
[14401.985891] usb 1-1: new high-speed USB device number 21 using xhci_hcd
[14402.821123] usb 1-1: New USB device found, idVendor=18d1, idProduct=d00d
[14402.821125] usb 1-1: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[14402.821126] usb 1-1: Product: HI3650
[14402.821128] usb 1-1: Manufacturer: Fastboot2.0
[14402.821129] usb 1-1: SerialNumber: 2131456690000000

Should it still be showing fastboot? Also I do not have any blinking lights.
I have tried all rpb images from here http://snapshots.linaro.org/reference-platform/embedded/morty/hikey960/latest/rpb/ with the same results.

Used following commands in fastboot configuration
sudo fastboot flash boot boot-0.0+AUTOINC+7efa39f363-c906d2a849-r0-hikey960-20170908120712-92.uefi.img
sudo fastboot flash system rpb-console-image-hikey960-20170908120712-92.rootfs.img

1 Like
#39

I followed the instructions in the below post to get the rpb desktop to work and im observing the same symptoms as you. No blinking lights and no hdmi output. Im using the rpb106. were you able to resolve this?

A clear documentation that has been VERIFIED and VALIDATED is needed. There is no central location of detailed steps on how a linux distribution has been used on the 960 with the blinking lights and hdmi support. This document should support linux installation WITH and WITHOUT UART.

The community needs this, not everyone is trying to do android development.

@ric96 @danielt @earldean (you)

#40

To be honest OpenEmbedded is notorious for mismatching user expectations (it is great for building your own appliances but it does not work like a regular GNU/Linux distro does). Anyhow the documentation is a bit spartan w.r.t. hikey960 so I filed https://github.com/96boards/documentation/issues/189 .