RockPi 4 balenaos image not booting

Product support
1

I am trying to boot a RockPi 4 B v1.4 using balena-cloud-my-fleet-rockpi-4b-rk3399-2.83.10+rev1-dev-v12.9.3.img.

I have two RockPi SBCs to work with, one that is SD only and one with emmc storage. I have the rockpi connected to monitor using HDMI while booting. When I boot the RockPi blue and green leds stay solid and nothing ever displays on monitor, so I cant tell where it is getting stuck. it does not successfully boot and connect to fleet.

Should this image just work without any tweaking?

Any help would be appreciated.
Thank you,

3

Hi @jcopeland,

Can you tell us what process you use for imaging? Are there any applications installed on the image that you expect output from, or is this just a blank balenaOS image? You mentioned that you have one with SD card storage and one with an eMMC - do they both behave the same way?

Any additional details you can share are appreciated!

Thanks,
Kenna

5

I figured out the issue. I had attempted to burn the image to the sd card and to the emmc chip directly. Thinking it would boot from that.

After watching IoT Happy Hour #45, David mentioned images with flashed suffix.

I tried again by formatting the emmc and burning the image to the sd card, I then installed both and booted and it successfully flashed the image from the sd to the emmc. After rebooting one more time, it successfully connected to my fleet. I think if I want to make an image that boots from the sd card I would need to make a custom build.

6

Hey, glad that helped @jcopeland … you are correct, you’d need to create an SD Card image version by git cloning the balena-RockPi repo, and changing line 36 to balena-image

balena-rockpi/rockpi-4b-rk3399.coffee at master · balena-os/balena-rockpi (github.com)

You would then need to run a build (warning, it could literally take about 12 hours to compile, ha!) using ./balena-yocto-scripts/build/barys -k -d -m rockpi-4b-rk3399

Hope that helps!

8

@jcopeland @dtischler

I’m trying out Balena with the Rock Pi 4. It comes with a soldered 16Gb eMMC module, but how can I make use of it? I booted from the sd card, but ideally would be booting from the emmc, is there a way to do that?

9

Burned image to an micro sd card, inserted into the Rock Pi 4 B+, and it seems it copied the image to eMMC and it’s booting from it now. Unforunatley can’t get it to run from the sdcard which has more storage.