Rant about Renegade ROC-RK3328-CC

General
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My Experience with the Renegade ROC-RK3328-CC

So, I ordered a Renegade ROC-RK3328-CC in January this year (2025) to get into home-servers and tinker around a bit.

I did expect that I would have to inform myself and that not everything would just work. But I didn’t expect for literally just about nothing to work.
I first tried downloading the officially supported distros without success. Specifically, I first tried

  1. Debian
  2. Ubuntu
  3. Raspbian
  4. LibreELEC

and found out that none of them worked.

Then I found out that the board apparently uses u-boot and that there is a Libre Computer Flash Tool, with which I could apparently flash the correct bootloader onto the sd-card.
So I tried again, this time I used the Libre Computer Flash Tool first and then flashed each of the aforementioned distro images, to no avail.
Then I tried it the (I believe correct) other way around, flashing the distros image first and then using the Libre Computer Flash Tool, which also did not work.

That’s when I gave up on the project for about half a month, before I, again, set out to get it working. This time I just focused on trying to get one distro working, which I decided should be LibreELEC.

After searching through the depths of the internet, I found the site of some awesome Russian, who apparently patches u-boot for many boards himself and uploads them to a Russian equivalent site like mega.nz or Google Drive.
Sadly, I didn’t save the link to the website and don’t remember the name of the person and also don’t know, how I found it, as I found the link on a Russian blog site.
That u-boot patch actually worked! at least for LibreELEC it did. But since LibreELEC is not really the distro for my use case, I set out to get either Raspbian or Debian or any normal distro working, again, without success.

That’s when I gave up the second time. This time for probably two months, if not longer.

Then I got the great Idea to try installing NixOS, because I thought, as I already have it running on my Laptop, it shouldn’t be too hard to find a working image.
Well, I was wrong. I tried so many different ways to install it, but just didn’t get it working. See my other post on this hub, where I go over everything I tried.

Then, I took another break until today, where I tried the other officially supported distros. See this post here.

It might be entirely possible, that I am the idiot, that just does something categorically wrong, but I also did not find any info on what I should have done differently.

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Have you read the Troubleshooting General Boot Issues?

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Raspberry Pi Imager is available for NixOS. I use it exclusively for Renegade OS installs and it hasn’t failed me yet (I’ve gradually replaced all but one RPi with Renegades).

For Device set it to “No filtering”. Then hit “Choose OS”, scroll all the way down and pick “Use custom”. Finally, pick the SD card you’re using. When you hit “NEXT” it will give you some options that can load various items with the image e.g. set up SSH, provide a hostname, etc. Some of these may work with Renegade and some may not; for instance I usually create a user and password there in advance but the firstboot process of both Debian and Raspbian will ask you to create one anyway (can’t remember if the other images behaved the same). None of those should cause problems with booting up, regardless.

Libre boards are VERY picky with SD cards so keep that in mind as well. I basically have 3 SanDisk cards that I rotate out and use to image the emmc cards I get for each board so they don’t see actual use as an OS “drive”.

Not gonna lie, I’ve had issues with Renegade boards in the past, but the one thing I’ve had work 100% of the time is the RPi Imager.

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Yes, I have and as far as I can see, everything should be according to the instructions. I am using a SanDisk Ultra with 128GB, a sufficient power supply and today, I used RPI-imager and dd to, once again, flash each image to the sd-card. I got the same results, as before.

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Thanks for the reply.
Do you maybe have a link to the specific sd-cards/card you use? Because I believe, the one I use a SanDisk 128GB Ultra microSDXC should work. At least it does work for the Armbian 25.2.2 IoT image.

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Am I misunderstanding something? Do I have to do something with the onboard u-boot button or something?
Could it be faulty hardware? I remember the packaging being in pretty bad shape, the board was still in the antistatic bag, but the rest of the packaging was torn pretty much to pieces, when I received it.

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Try to check with another display connected. Also per the Troubleshooting Guide, an UART cable lets you know the exact problem since it provides direct logs from the board boot sequence.

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Thanks for the reply.
I tried with 2 different acer displays and sadly don’t have another monitor with HDMI.
I just ordered a UART cable. It should arrive the day after tomorrow. I will post the output then.

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Per the troubleshooting guide and the numerous issues on this hub:

  1. Power supply not sufficient
  2. MicroSD card flashing incorrect
  3. HDMI Compatibility (one of the software releases had an issue with certain displays that caused failure to boot if plugged in too early or plugged in at boot, you can test by plugging in HDMI about 15 seconds after applying power)
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Sorry for the late response, projects stacking up and competing with work.

I do in fact use SanDisk cards but I rarely use anything bigger than 32GB; those are the class-10 Ultras. They’re HC instead of XC which should be nothing more than a size difference but I can tell you from personal experience that some SD-card-utilizing hardware absolutely will complain with a card it feels is too big, just because. I don’t think it’s strictly a matter of capacity either since the 128GB emmc card is (mostly) a write-once affair.

You probably already know this but in the bears-repeating department, they have to be 100% formatted correctly, not just parted saying “Welp we put a new partition table on it but the kernel doesn’t see it yet so you’ll have to take our word for it”. Also…just because the terminal or GUI window says it’s finished copying to the SD card doesn’t always mean that it is. Adding “conv=fsync” is supposed to alleviate that however.