Support of Rock % Model B

Product support
1

Hi, do you think it is possible to use the Rock 5 Model B with the Rock PI 4 B image or are there some changes necessary?
Thank you

3

Hi there,

The rockpi 4b image is built for and tested on a rockpi 4b+ . Therefore I cannot say whether or not Rock 5 model B would work, but I would be sceptical, and say probably not, unfortunately

Is there something about this board that makes it attractive to your use case over the rockpi4b?

5

thanks for your reply,

i tested it and it didn’t work.

We bought the Rock 5 because of the 16 GB RAM, the processor (8 cores) and the good price. As far as I have seen, you can build Balena OS for the board yourself according to this video: IoT Happy Hour #45: Building balenaOS for a Device - YouTube.
I’ll try that in the next few days.

Our goal is for Docker containers to be deployed to this device over the air. My question is if this is well possible with Balena OS?

6

Hello @marco_sarde welcome to the balena community! BTW it’s great that you followed the advise from the video!

Did you check the step-by-step for Customer Board Support? Customer Board Support - Balena Documentation

Let us know if you can make it work we are here to support you!

8

in the video at minute 42:40 there is in reciped-core a folder with the name images. i cloned the GitHub - balena-os/balena-rockpro64 project on my device. there are more layers, like meta-rockchip or balena-rockpro64. i decided to use the meta-rockchip folder and everything was like in the video. but in the folder recipes-core are the following folders and not the image folder: busybox coreutils glibc systemd sysvinit udev. do you know why? or can i create it by myself?
if you need more information please ask me
thank you!

9

update: i tried it with the rockpro64 image script:

we need to set aside some space at the beginning for writing u-boot before our partitions

DEVICE_SPECIFIC_SPACE = “20480”

add the dtb, extlinux.conf and u-boot binaries to rootfs /boot directory

IMAGE_INSTALL:append = "
kernel-devicetree
u-boot-extlinux
u-boot-blobless
"

IMAGE_CMD:balenaos-img:append () {
dd if=${DEPLOY_DIR_IMAGE}/idbloader.img of=${BALENA_RAW_IMG} conv=notrunc bs=512 seek=64
dd if=${DEPLOY_DIR_IMAGE}/u-boot.itb of=${BALENA_RAW_IMG} conv=notrunc bs=512 seek=16384
}

but when i start to build i get this error:

ROCK5B (NEW) : $ MACHINE=rock5b bitbake balena-image

[000000002][LOG]Release honister already supported by device integration layer, will not revert meta-balena-common syntax.
[000000002][LOG]BalenaOS build initialized in directory: build.
[000000002][LOG]Run build for rock5b: MACHINE=rock5b bitbake balena-image -k
[000000002][LOG]This might take a while …
ERROR: OE-core’s config sanity checker detected a potential misconfiguration.
Either fix the cause of this error or at your own risk disable the checker (see sanity.conf).
Following is the list of potential problems / advisories:

Do not use Bitbake as root.

Summary: There was 1 ERROR message shown, returning a non-zero exit code.
[000000003][LOG]Build for rock5b failed. Check failed log in build/tmp/log/cooker/rock5b .

i dont know exacty what the meaning of it is.

11

Thanks @marco_sarde for sharing this. Let me ping internally the balenaOS team to see how they can provide some guidance on this!

Are you working on any public repository? Feel free to share anything else that you do here!