Raspberry PI 4B+ won't boot

Installing and Using OpenWrt
1

Hello,

I'm trying to get OpenWRT to work on my Raspberry PI 4B+, but so far everything I've tried results in absolutely nothing happening. If I connect to a monitor I see only a blank screen. And I'm not able to ping the default IP address.

I am using Linux to flash the SD card. I have tried using the raspberry pi imager, and also dd. Also tried three or four older versions.

I know that my hardware is good. Using official pi psu, and I'm able to flash and run raspbian with the same SD card.

I have no idea how to debug this as there is no output to debug.

Anyone else having trouble with this?

Anyone have any suggestions?

2
  • delete all sd card partitions before writing the img, it consists of I think at least 2 partitions for the Rpi4.
  • download the factory.img.gz, use gzip to decompress
  • write the img file to sd card ( post your img write command line, maybe someone is able to point out a problem)
  • connect the display before booting (I forgot which of the 2 HDMI ports it was. I think, it was the one further away from the USB-C power port)
  • debug the boot process without any attached USB devices (the default power supply can already be too weak for a single 1GBit USB LAN adapter)
3

Confirm that you're using the factory image (not the sysupgrade image) from the firmware selector. Ether ext4 or squashfs works, but I recommend squashfs because OpenWrt's "factory reset" function depends on it. Use Raspberry Pi Imager to write it to an SD card.

There should at least be output on the serial console. If you've already confirmed you're flashing the correct image, you may need to hook up a USB serial adapter or another Raspberry Pi to read the console output. Use pins 6 (GND), 8 (TXD) and 10 (RXD) at 115200 baud.

4

Thank you so much for the suggestions. Your comment about the HDMI ports and USB-C made me realise that I'm actually using a PI3B+! Schoolboy error. It's now working fine that I'm using the correct image.

5

That's great. Thank you for the tip about using a serial console. I forgot this was possible.

6

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