Currently I have a Tinkerboard S and due to lack of USB WiFi support (Tinkerboard only has 2.4ghz, but 5ghz is necessary), I need another OS or SBC. Support for CSI camera is also required. I've installed Armbian on TinkerBoard and read a couple of threads on this forum. It looks like there is no CSI support for the Tinkerboard and there is no CSI camera support coming (couldn't get the camera to work on Armbian).

 

The Rockchip on the Tinkerboard has the advantage of H264 encoding and very useful. There are other SBC boards with dual band and Rockchip (different Rockchip than the Tinkerboard), like the RockPi or the RockPro, but I can't really find out if the CSI camera will work on these SBC's woth Armbian.

 

Can someone tell me if an Armbian version works with a Rockchip SBC and a functional CSI camera?

15 minutes ago, Postie said:

couldn't get the camera to work on Armbian

 

If you don't provide logs nobody knows which system you are using and why you think camera is not working.

Type:

armbianmonitor -u

 

17 minutes ago, Postie said:

but I can't really find out if the CSI camera will work on these SBC's woth Armbian.

We don't generate such information since we don't have dedicated camera support staff / lab. Forum search is the best what is possible atm.

2 hours ago, Postie said:

Can someone tell me if an Armbian version works with a Rockchip SBC and a functional CSI camera?

not an official.. and as long as there's no interest from rockchip to address it there's not much hope that this changes. The threads related to it are those:

 

iirc it could work with some kernel modifications which then would not allow to use dt overlays.. which is on the other hand needed to support multiple cameras.. and it was a rabbit hole to get it booting (I know it, cause I went down this hole and wasted a few evenings and nights on it with constant sd-card swapping just to figure out that this one also doesn't boot until I got a booting one).

 

for RK3399 the situation is slightly different, iirc it should still rely on isp10 (whereas rk3288 moved to isp1 - two different drivers developed by rockchip to access the csi) which should work but I never tested it (actually during development I saw something that rk3399 should also be supported by isp1 but I can be wrong on this).

At least with isp10 they had success..

 

What I forgot to mention was that I am using a Raspberry cam (OV chip). The camera is not recognized when searching dmesg. There is also not a /dev/video0 device present.

 

There is this thread: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/4657-how-do-i-use-the-camera-on-tinkerboard/. I don't have the technical skills to understand kernel configuration and try to compile a new kernel.

 

There is also https://forum.armbian.com/topic/6645-tinkerboard-with-isp1-driver-doesnt-boot-camera-support/ with a comment that it's kernel config issues.

 

https://forum.armbian.com/profile/5623-chwe/content/page/4/?type=forums_topic_post mentions somewhere that the RK3399 development is a mess.

 

What I would like to know, before spending another 80 or 90 bucks on one or two SBC's is if someone knows if (or how) the CSI camera can get to work with Armbian on the mentioned boards.

 

Armbian monitor link: http://ix.io/1Pl3

 

There is a Tinkerboard script I've run, that installs additional software: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/7262-rk3288-media-script-tinkerboard/

But I'm missing the /dev/video device.

probably our posts are more or less written at the same time so you missed it..

 

@JMCC multimediascript is great, and once the camera would work from kernelside.. it provides more or less everything to get it working from userspace side.. But well.. it's the kernelside which doesn't work.

 

26 minutes ago, Postie said:

What I forgot to mention was that I am using a Raspberry cam (OV chip). The camera is not recognized when searching dmesg. There is also not a /dev/video0 device present. 

no wonder, there's no driver trying to probing it..

 

27 minutes ago, Postie said:

I don't have the technical skills to understand kernel configuration and try to compile a new kernel.

Didn't had neither.. You'll grow over time.. just throw enough time to a project and things will progress..

I'm more or less done with the ISP camera for the tinker, I tried, I figured out what causes the issue, it got reported and then ignored:

https://github.com/rockchip-linux/kernel/issues/98#issuecomment-396422765

There's not much more I'm willing to do to get this fixed..

 

37 minutes ago, Postie said:

What I would like to know, before spending another 80 or 90 bucks on one or two SBC's is if someone knows if (or how) the CSI camera can get to work with Armbian on the mentioned boards.

If I would get 5$ per hour for this issue I could probably buy 2 SBCs in this price range. It should be, it is reported (see thread above) but I've not tested it. And friendly arm uses different camera modules, whereas for the RockPi nobody tried it, and I would assume you've to deal with dtb to get it working.

Thank you very much for your reply. I was indeed typing my reply and when posted, saw yours. Too bad it is being ignored. If that's the case, I'll have to search for another SBC with h264 encoding. Or get USB WiFi working for the Tinkerboard. But that's for a different forum.

IIRC, the camera is working just fine in recent versions of TinkerOS. That means they fixed it somehow in the ASUS kernel, and probably upstreamed the patch.  It may be worth giving it another try, I'll put it in my to-do list.

welcome back commander.. it's being quite some time.

 

if.. and that's the if.. they have overlayFS and isp1 working on the same image.. then yes.. I'll give it a shot.. let me check their sources. 

 

Edit: seems to still based on isp10

https://github.com/TinkerBoard/debian_kernel/blob/de5c3c4a543c45dee4b102c879fb52c8604d78a3/arch/arm/configs/miniarm-rk3288_defconfig#L499

 

 

Nevermind, their development branch seems to have it..

https://github.com/TinkerBoard/debian_kernel/blob/c2fc097dfb04bfb5780c58137e94f7c8eab64b19/arch/arm/configs/miniarm-rk3288_defconfig#L547

https://github.com/TinkerBoard/debian_kernel/blob/c2fc097dfb04bfb5780c58137e94f7c8eab64b19/arch/arm/configs/miniarm-rk3288_defconfig#L401

 

hmm now let's see what else is needed..

14 hours ago, JMCC said:

IIRC, the camera is working just fine in recent versions of TinkerOS. That means they fixed it somehow in the ASUS kernel, and probably upstreamed the patch.  It may be worth giving it another try, I'll put it in my to-do list.

Yes, the camera is working perfectly in the latest TinkerOS. I've written a Python tool making use of the gstreamer plugin to record for a certain amount of time and the video is good. There was a major bug in the previous version but it was fixed.

However, TinkerOS doesn't provide support for WiFi USB dongles and I really need that, since the Tinkerboard only has 2.4ghz. The environment I'm using it in has a lot of other 2.4ghz WiFi access points and the 5GHZ band has only a few. Armbian does have support for some USB WiFi dongles but then the camera doesn't work. So at the moment I'm kinda stuck. One OS has a working camera, the other OS has a working USB WiFi. If I could, I would combine these two worlds :-)

 

 

https://github.com/armbian/build/pull/1482

 

Far away from 'supported but basically the camera can work without loosing dt overlays. For the userspace part, once this one get merged you're on your own.. I can't provide more help than that. From a kernelside the cameras work both without crashes, they're patched to match the asus repo and you can switch between both.. Get the right commands and everything else sorted out to make them useful in userspace is a different story, and that's definitively not my story. I already spent too much time for this. 

 

 

On 7/24/2019 at 8:09 PM, chwe said:

hmm now let's see what else is needed..

turned out that a small commit in 2018 made the trick and a bunch of crappy patching.

 

 

Well thank you very much, I appreciate it.