After attaching power, the Green and Red LEDs should light up. This indicates that the board is powered. Nothing will show up on HDMI or CVBS yet.
At no point after attaching power should the Red LED blink or turn off. If this happens, it means that your power supply is inadequate. Please make sure that you are using a 5V power supply capable of supplying at least 1.5A (1500mA). Not having enough power could cause spontaneous reboots or software errors.
The board will try to read the bootloader from the eMMC and then the MicroSD card from sector 64 (32KB). If the correct signed bootloader is detected, the board will begin loading it.
After 30 seconds, Linux should be loaded and the Green LED should begin to heartbeat. You should see video on your HDMI display. Certain types of displays with odd resolutions are not supported at this stage and it might not display anything during this step and the next steps. If the Green LED turns green and nothing shows on your screen, please post your screen brand, model, and EDID here.
The bootloader will attempt to EFI boot from a list of block devices:
eMMC
MicroSD
USB Flash Drive
It looks for an FAT/EFI partition with /boot/bootaa64.efi, loads the file into memory, and executes the it. On our images, bootaa64.efi is GRUB.
I can confirm by testing my 4 libre boards that ⌠if you install the ubuntu image ⌠this is correct and that the red LED will be constant if powered correctly, and the green LED will double flash a heartbeat every second.
However if you install raspbian or the armbian images. the green led will not be illuminated (it is on boot but only for a few seconds then it goes off) and the red led will instead flash the same double heartbeat pattern every second.
This documentation had me very confused so I am just posting this to try and clarify that some images act differently than others with respect to the LEDâs. I apologise in advance if I am mistaken but this is what my testing over the last 3 days has bore out.
Also there is very little info on the small recovery button available, so all i can learn about that is that it is a recovery button and not a reset/power button
Have you tried using the libretech-flash-tool to re-image the bootloader on your Renegades? In a thread I started in November of last year regarding a different topic ( [Vdd_arm: ramp_delay not set kernel messages on Renegade]) it was recommended that I do so on my Renegade pair and it not only fixed my ramp_delay issue but it also set the LEDs to work in the way described in the documentation. Both of mine have been running the Libre Raspbian 11 image since December and the LEDs are RED on when running correctly and green pulsing heartbeat. YMMV of course!
Thanks man!, I didnât even know about that flash tool!. Okay so for clarification, I flashed my images using the raspberry pi imager in all cases where it didnât work properly and the the lights flashed incorrectly. once i switched to balena etcher then things worked. so I think you are correct there!
Do you think using this flash tool will also fix my issues with 2 of my 4 not automatically coming back on after issuing reboot commands? seems unlikely as they all have the same sd cards, same peripherals same power sources & cables etc. I will try it and find out - thanks for pointing that out!
You should probably head to the libretech-flash-tool git site at GitHub - libre-computer-project/libretech-flash-tool and read how it works. This tool doesnât work like the Raspberry Pi imager (which is what I also used for my installations) as it only updates the bootloader on an already imaged SD card.
The process that I used, which worked, was using the Raspberry Pi imager to install Raspbian on my pair of Renegades, shutdown the pair after I set them up (while the LEDs were still acting wrong), placed the SD cards into the card reader of one of my Ubuntu machines where I downloaded the tool to and ran this utility on both SD cards. Then when I put the cards back into the Renegades the LEDs worked correctly and my original problem from November were both fixed.
Regarding your rebooting issue, I canât really speak to that. I have only encountered issues with my Raspberry Piâs where issuing âshutdown -r nowâ resulted in them powering down instead. That was back in buster/Raspbian 10 and it was resolved in bullseye/Raspbian 11, but again that was just on some of my Piâs, not my Renegades.
libretech-flash-tool is not for the purpose of fixing Armbian LEDs. It is to update the bootloader on existing images to the latest. There are some rare MicroSD card compatibility issues we are still investigating on ROC-RK3328-CC.
Do you know if itâs possible to use the libretech-flash-tool on wsl for windows? Or do I need an Ubuntu environment outside of the libre board itself?
Not sure if WSL has access to raw devices and if it shows them under the normal /dev/{mmc,sd} naming. If WSL does not, then libretech-flash-tool will not work.
Iâve been having issues using the libretech-flash-tool for PXE booting my ROC-RK3328-CC. When I use the tool as the instructions state nothing happens on my board after plugging in the board with the MicroSD card in. Nothing on the screen, solid green and red light
You can change the green and red leds by echoing a value to their triggers.
You can see all the valid values when you run the command: # cat /sys/class/leds/librecomputer\:green/trigger
You can change the led by the following command: # echo none > /sys/class/leds/librecomputer\:green/trigger
and replace ânoneâ with any valid value.
No doubt that Armbian is doing this in the boot process.
ROC-RK3328-CCâs bootloader does not support HDMI output yet. But this will be supported as soon as upstream fixes some IOMMU bugs. You have to connect UART. By default, our bootloaders disable networking to both expedite boot time and reduce attack vector so PXE will not be supported out of the box. You have to compile your own bootloader with our libretech-builder-simple.
