rick0cm

Hi, I have a couple of the "Transpeed 8K" boxes, and have been able to actually productively use them using the MiniArch distribution. I'm booting of a uSD card and running from the uSD. I can see the 32G emmc that is on the boards, but have left it untouched so far. Question - has anyone successfully overwritten a known working image - like MiniArch - onto the emmc and booted and run off of it? The emmc ought to be alot faster than uSD. I don't want to risk bricking the boxes. There are alot of tiny partitions on the emmc, (see below) and I am kind of paranoid one of them is some sort of required bootloader. Any idea how risky overwriting the emmc is? Thanks.. Rick

Yes, another vote for the vontar minarch image mentioned above. It boots up on my board with the on chip ethernet and wifi working. The miniarch dist is quite a bit more "stripped down" than I am used to. It took a bit of work and adding packages to get my development environment up and running. Its usually not so much work with Armbian or other "normal" distributions. .. perhaps a bit off thread for this Armbian forum..

Thanks for the tips Nick. I'll look at the Miniarch. Soooo many slightly different boards. Ahh, maybe I was hung up on the 1.5M baud uart - I've been playing with several Rockchip boards recently that need 1.5M. My goto serial is tio on Linux.

Well, after taking a break with fighting with this board for a couple months, I just tried to catch up. You may recall I have this board: I downloaded the server image from https://armdev.pixeldrift.net/transpeed/8k618-t, wrote it to a uSD, added the brcmfmac4335 drivers as described previously. For some reason I could not get the serial console running at 1,500,000 bps. Garbled - probably a baud rate mismatch? This worked for me a few months back. Oh well, a text session was usable on hdmi and keyboard, so I continued there. Neither ethernet or wifi was working. - The kernel finds dwmac-sun8i, but it fails to initialize "dwmac-sun8i 5030000.ethernet eth0: stmmac_dvr_remove: removing driver" Debugging beyond this is way over my head. - On wifi, the kernel was erroring out looking for brcmfmac4334-sdio driver files. I thought this board used brcmfmac4335?? I found what I believe are the correct 4334 *.bin, *.txt, and *.clm_blob files, and placed them in /lib/firmware/brcm - based on kernel error messages. But still No Go. I do not see any error messages in the kernel log, but no network device is created. Another dead end for my ability. I tried plugging in a cheap USB to ethernet dongle I had lying around, and IT WORKS! "usbcore: registered new interface driver cdc_ether" It is slow, attached to a USB-2 link (480mbit/sec) but OK for light work. (The switch port says it's attached at 1Gbit - yea sure!) Thanks to Nick A, apritzel, pixdrift & probably others for their work getting this far - alot more stuff is working now than last time I looked, and with the enet dongle, I can actually start playing with the system. I ran out of time today to further explore https://github.com/warpme/miniarch. I did NOT try to install & boot from emmc, although I see the device at mmcblk2. BTW, that is my serial console attached with the loose wires above. The pins are actually labelled GND TX RX on my board. Different from nicrolack's board.