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NanoPi Neo Air UART0 dead

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I have a NanoPi Neo Air (Allwinner H3 SoC) with onboard wifi and a serial interface. Unfortunately during some late hour hacking I managed to accidentally connect 5V onto its TX pin, I think effectively screwing up its UART0. I can no longer connect to it via a USB to TTL Serial cable (https://www.adafruit.com/product/954)

I think the SoC still seems to be working, I've flashed an ARM linux (Dietpi) to an SD card and when I powered on the Nano Pi Neo Air, it seems to have successfully expanded its filesystem.

With UART0 most probably dead, I wonder whether UART1 and UART2 would still work. Connecting a working USB/TTL serial cable to the board did not produce any output, my guess is that it needs to be enabled for the boot process.

As I don't have another Allwinner H3 board available at the moment (shipping takes weeks for us Europeans to arrive) I wonder if there's a way for me to enable UART1 and UART2 during boot. Did anyone manage to do this?

Also, if you have an idea how to get the board to connect to the wifi during boot (without having access to a console), please let me know. Your help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!
attila wrote:
I have a NanoPi Neo Air (Allwinner H3 SoC) with onboard wifi and a serial interface. Unfortunately during some late hour hacking I managed to accidentally connect 5V onto its TX pin, I think effectively screwing up its UART0. I can no longer connect to it via a USB to TTL Serial cable (https://www.adafruit.com/product/954)

I think the SoC still seems to be working, I've flashed an ARM linux (Dietpi) to an SD card and when I powered on the Nano Pi Neo Air, it seems to have successfully expanded its filesystem.

With UART0 most probably dead, I wonder whether UART1 and UART2 would still work. Connecting a working USB/TTL serial cable to the board did not produce any output, my guess is that it needs to be enabled for the boot process.

As I don't have another Allwinner H3 board available at the moment (shipping takes weeks for us Europeans to arrive) I wonder if there's a way for me to enable UART1 and UART2 during boot. Did anyone manage to do this?

Also, if you have an idea how to get the board to connect to the wifi during boot (without having access to a console), please let me know. Your help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!


With Armbian:
https://dl.armbian.com/nanopiair/archiv ... 4.14.15.7z
https://dl.armbian.com/nanopiair/archiv ... 4.14.15.7z

Bootlog: http://ix.io/EO6

You can log in via microUSB serial. Just plug it to your USB port and a serial device will pop up on your host computer. It's not serial at boot time but you can login when system is up. Enabled by default.

nanopiaironthetable.jpg
nanopiaironthetable.jpg (58.15 KiB) Viewed 16505 times
nanopiair.png
nanopiair.png (22.06 KiB) Viewed 16505 times

ps. Dietpi is only a crippled repack of Armbian.
Thanks Igorp. Now, if I understand it correctly, do I just connect the Nano Pi with a microUSB-USB cable to my Mac? (I suppose it should give it enough horsepower to boot up).

Once it's up, how do I access it? Previously I was using the USB/TTL cable mentioned above which exposes a /dev/cu.usbserial interface on the host machine that I use to connect to the machine via screen using port 115200.

In your example, how am I supposed to access the board? (I don't seem to find a new USB device to appear in the System Profile).

Thank you.
attila wrote:
Thanks Igorp. Now, if I understand it correctly, do I just connect the Nano Pi with a microUSB-USB cable to my Mac? (I suppose it should give it enough horsepower to boot up).

Once it's up, how do I access it? Previously I was using the USB/TTL cable mentioned above which exposes a /dev/cu.usbserial interface on the host machine that I use to connect to the machine via screen using port 115200.

In your example, how am I supposed to access the board? (I don't seem to find a new USB device to appear in the System Profile).

Thank you.


Yes, but I also made a small mistake which prevented this working :( I manually enable USB OTG port while testing (within armbian-config), console popped up and forget about that. Now, this is fixed and the actual download image was tested - images at download were replaced, also for NanoPi DUO with the same problem. I don't know how this looks on MAC (USB3 port is recommended for powering, but USB2 will probably also work), but this way it looks on windows:

Attachments

You can log in via microUSB serial. Just plug it to your USB port and a serial device will pop up on your host computer. It's not serial at boot time but you can log in when a system is up. Enabled by default.
My website
I'm on a windows 8.1 machine and tried this on my NanoPi neo, installed armbrian ok, board clearly boots and the LED is blinking and running fine, but no pop up serial console...


I've never used a board without a monitor before so am quite confused about how to get connected to it to log in and control it via my pc
I have the micro usb and the single usb2 connected to my PC but nothing registers


any tips would be appreciated?
Brian Beuken wrote:
I'm on a windows 8.1 machine and tried this on my NanoPi neo, installed armbrian ok, board clearly boots and the LED is blinking and running fine, but no pop up serial console...


I've never used a board without a monitor before so am quite confused about how to get connected to it to log in and control it via my pc
I have the micro usb and the single usb2 connected to my PC but nothing registers


any tips would be appreciated?


Which image did you use? This is supported only on recent images with a modern kernel (4+)
I got the current latest from armbian

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