I emailed FriendlyElec 4 days ago and they still have yet to respond. I'm a bit discouraged purchasing from them again; all their forums / community has very old posts and is unmaintained - seemly support is non-existent. I think my next SBC purchase will be a radxa board.
I just short the two mask rom contacts then apply power to the board and it boots from sd-card.( Holding it until it starts booting)
I had the same problem I flashed a rom following the user guide to install a third party rom.
I used e-flasher edited the config so it installs the selected ROM.
And after that the devices did not boot.
Downloaded the e-flasher friendly-wrt installed on the sd-card inserted the sd-card.
Shorted the 2 contacts applied power and the board starts with flashing the emmc.
Wait untill it blinks constantly and reboot the board using the power cord.
Thanks! What I was missing is that I had flashed my SD card with the eFlasher friendlywrt image. Your comment led me to using rk3328-sd-friendlywrt-5.15-20220125.img which did boot from SD card after shorting MASK and from there I wiped out the mmblk2 eMMC storage. Now it's back
I was trying to build armbian for R2C since there's a motorcom driver issue - I tried your build today on the R2C and the motorcom NIC works there. I didn't do a lot more testing than that
@anaelorlinski I contacted you a while ago for support for the R2C.
I thought I had a standard R2C but received the plus.
I tested your build and i was not able to boot from a sd-card. (only by shortig the mask-rom contacts)
Today i gave it another shot and with the method discribed in the wiki it works i now can boot your latest build.
What i dit was this:
The following situations will always start from eMMC:
If the system in the eMMC, or the system in the TF card uses the first Loader type U-Boot TPL/SPL, it will always boot from the eMMC;
If you want to boot from the TF card, there are the following methods: Method 1: Clear the Loader on the eMMC, the clearing method is as follows, after starting from the eMMC, enter the following command on the command line to clear the Loader on the eMMC:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/mmcblk2 bs=8M count=1
In serted the sd-card and then powerd the device.
Thank you for this build I can now finally get rid off openwrt lol.
!An update!
I installed everything what i normally use with my R4S and everything works.
The R2C is my backup unit and i use it to experiment. Will use the R2C overnight to see if it is usable as a dailly router (and for me to see if i can use it as a reliable backup solution).
Orderd the R5S hope to see support for this device aswell in the future.
Ohh @TheLinuxGuy i do not know why but i am able to boot from sd-card suddenly.
I booted from the buildin storage - used putty and enterd the code to clear the loader -then powerd off the device (pulled the plug) - then tested if could boot from sd with the friendly-wrt sd version. that worked - then booted the @anaelorlinski build. Witch booted and also when i reboot etc.
How to flash it correctly? I have tried squashfs image with Balena Etcher, it does not work: initially sys led blinks, after that device hangs, both lan, and sys are glowing with constant light. 'Native' image from FriendlyElec works normally. r4s image from OpenWRT works normally for r4s.
I flashed the squashfs image of 23.05-rc1 with dd and had the same results. The SYS and LAN leds light up solid. The WAN port status leds are off even with a cable connected. The LAN port yellow status light turns solid when a cable is connected and turns off when the cable is unplugged. I can't ping the device at all. Sorry, I don't have a cable to provide logs.
Just tried this image and it works booting from eMMC, i don't have a USB to serial/TTL adapter (ordered one should arrive soon), but here are the system and kernel logs:
