NanoPi R5C - Writing to EMMC

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

I'm waiting for a NanoPi R5C. The unit I ordered has32GB EMMC built-in. I typically use the offline Openwrt builder to add my own confgs and pacakages. I plan on not using the pre-installed version from the manufacturer.

I was thinking the easiest way to write OpenWRT to emmc would be:

  • Write OpenWRT to sdcard.
  • Copy the finished image to the card in a separate directory
  • Once booted use dd to write the image to emmc.

I also saw in a youtube video that the manufacture has a "write to emmc" option in Luci the pre-installed version. Is it safe to use that feature to write a custom build to emmc?

2

I wrote FriendlyWRT to an SDCard then used the built in flash to eMMC feature to load OpenWRT to the eMMC. It just worked for me with an image built by someone on GitHub ( this was before there were even snapshot builds for it.)

3

I received my RC5 yesterday. I decided to write a custom I built in offline builder to EMMC (snapshot). I used the FriendlyWRT EMMC tool in Luci to write it. For some reason, luci will not load even after it's installed. Everything else is working.

If I try: /etc/init.d/uhttpd restart

I get this output:
4+0 records in
4+0 records out

I tried booting friendly WRT from microsd, but it only is booting from EMMC.
I used these directions to expand EMMC to the full 30GB.

root@NanoPI_RC5:/usr/bin# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/root 28.5G 201.9M 28.3G 1% /
tmpfs 1.9G 6.7M 1.9G 0% /tmp
tmpfs 512.0K 0 512.0K 0% /dev
/dev/sda1 56.1G 1.1G 52.1G 2% /mnt/60GB

I can live without Luci, but it was nice to have for Luci Statistics.

EDIT

I figured it out. Once I installed luci-app-uhttpd and rebooted, luci works as intended.