Power & Source of Big Ideas

R2S won't boot

Moderators: chensy, FATechsupport

I've been using a R2S board for a while and after rebooting it to apply a new configuration option (port forwarding), the device's power LED started blinking. 2 blinks per second approx. The unit is no longer responding to pings, etc. I tried flashing a new copy of the FriendlyWrt image and I get the same issue. I also tried with the other officially supported image based on Ubuntu and the issue persists: I can't access the unit anymore.
I read that the power LED is connected to GPIO2, but I can't access logs or anything to find out what happened.
Any idea what the 2 blinks code means? Am I going to get any additional information through the serial port?

thanks for your help
The debug serial port is your best place to see what's happening during the bootup.
eric wrote:
I've been using a R2S board for a while and after rebooting it to apply a new configuration option (port forwarding), the device's power LED started blinking. 2 blinks per second approx. The unit is no longer responding to pings, etc. I tried flashing a new copy of the FriendlyWrt image and I get the same issue. I also tried with the other officially supported image based on Ubuntu and the issue persists: I can't access the unit anymore.
I read that the power LED is connected to GPIO2, but I can't access logs or anything to find out what happened.
Any idea what the 2 blinks code means? Am I going to get any additional information through the serial port?

thanks for your help


https://www.armbian.com/nanopi-r2s/

Happy user report:
https://twitter.com/FrankMankel/status/ ... 4065632256
Thanks for the replies.
@igorp, I was able to install armbian, and although the power LED still blinks as it did, I can now access the device through the network! Using armbian-config, I generated a diag file (http://ix.io/2AVD) to see what is going on. Other than a reference to ledtrig-cpu (the blinking pattern I am observing is too constant and repetitive to be CPU activity), I don't see anything that can cause the power LED to blink like that.

The LED wasn't blinking before the problem started, and I have since changed the OS, SD card, and power, so the common denominator is the firmware, I believe. Is there something in the firmware that might have triggered this?

Digging deeper, I noticed that the default triggers for the status LED are:

Code: Select all

none usb-gadget usb-host kbd-scrolllock kbd-numlock kbd-capslock kbd-kanalock kbd-shiftlock kbd-altgrlock kbd-ctrllock kbd-altlock kbd-shiftllock kbd-shiftrlock kbd-ctrlllock kbd-ctrlrlock usbport mmc0 disk-activity disk-read disk-write ide-disk mtd nand-disk [heartbeat] cpu cpu0 cpu1 cpu2 cpu3 activity default-on panic stmmac-0:00:link stmmac-0:00:1Gbps stmmac-0:00:100Mbps stmmac-0:00:10Mbps rfkill-any rfkill-none

I'm not sure which trigger caused the problem, but an easy way to fix this was to issue the following command:

Code: Select all

echo none > /sys/class/leds/status_led/trigger
eric wrote:
Thanks for the replies.
@igorp, I was able to install armbian, and although the power LED still blinks as it did, I can now access the device through the network! Using armbian-config, I generated a diag file (http://ix.io/2AVD) to see what is going on. Other than a reference to ledtrig-cpu (the blinking pattern I am observing is too constant and repetitive to be CPU activity), I don't see anything that can cause the power LED to blink like that.

The LED wasn't blinking before the problem started, and I have since changed the OS, SD card, and power, so the common denominator is the firmware, I believe. Is there something in the firmware that might have triggered this?

Digging deeper, I noticed that the default triggers for the status LED are:

Code: Select all

none usb-gadget usb-host kbd-scrolllock kbd-numlock kbd-capslock kbd-kanalock kbd-shiftlock kbd-altgrlock kbd-ctrllock kbd-altlock kbd-shiftllock kbd-shiftrlock kbd-ctrlllock kbd-ctrlrlock usbport mmc0 disk-activity disk-read disk-write ide-disk mtd nand-disk [heartbeat] cpu cpu0 cpu1 cpu2 cpu3 activity default-on panic stmmac-0:00:link stmmac-0:00:1Gbps stmmac-0:00:100Mbps stmmac-0:00:10Mbps rfkill-any rfkill-none

I'm not sure which trigger caused the problem, but an easy way to fix this was to issue the following command:

Code: Select all

echo none > /sys/class/leds/status_led/trigger


I am not sure there is any problem. "heartbeat" is a default settings and a sign that kernel was loaded up since its set by kernel.
eric wrote:
The LED wasn't blinking before the problem started, and I have since changed the OS, SD card, and power, so the common denominator is the firmware, I believe. Is there something in the firmware that might have triggered this?


Looking at the schematic, the LED is driven by a GPIO pin. If this is ON all the time, it indicates that the GPIO is not configured or that the OS is not configured to control it.

There is no separate power LED on this board. The other 2 are also GPIO controlled and marked as WAN and LAN.

If an OS uses this GPIO pin, it should blink and the rate will depend on the driver configuration. I am not familiar with Armbian so not sure how to controls this pin.
Well, I'm not entirely sure what happened, but the device now works even with the previous OS image: both network ports are functional and everything else is normal. The only thing that changed is that I have removed the yellow casing so the unit is not running too hot anymore... Perhaps this has something to do with all this.
Anyways, one thing that might be useful would be a simple script to make the LED blink if the CPU becomes too hot (cat /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp), as a basic warning.

Thanks again for your help!

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