once in 100 times

[bogdanm87]

We purchased the parallella microserver board from DigiKey one week ago and we are facing problems with the new board..

We followed the instructions on the setup page, we used the recommended power supply and heatsink installed on the board. We tried headless version of the Linux provided on your site with 32GB and 8GB SD card, but still we are having huge problems to bootup the Parallella board.

After power up, CR8 LED is on, Ethernet port LEDs light up and they start blinking. CR10 has no activity. This is happening in most cases. Maybe 3 or 4 times we manage to boot up the Linux and get ssh connection over the Ethernet. But we need to try 100 times or maybe more???to successfully boot-up the system. When we manage to bootup the system correctly, both LEDs are on and the Ethernet LEDs are blinking "normally".

Is there something we've missed or should we ask for a new board?
Thank you!

P.S.
I have already sent these questions to Parallella Support, but there was no answer.

[peteasa]

Hi, Quick way to identify problems is to use a serial connection and look at the boot log. Without log information it will be difficult to work out what is wrong.

[bogdanm87]

We don't get anything. If we get something on the UART, that means the system will be bootup normally and the board is working fine...

[peteasa]

[bogdanm87]

Thank you for your answer.

We have already check twice our serial cables. They are fine. We are using professional power supply for this board. So there is absolutely no chance at all that this supply is not OK...I'm a little bit frustrated, because we have already spent too much time trying to boot-up something which should be a straightforward line..
We are a prototyping company, and we have too much other "debug" tasks...

Any other ideas?

Thank you!

[sebraa]

If you connect the UART, does the board always boot? I remember that the board wouldn't boot if a UART cable was not connected (related to floating pins). As far as I remember, this has been fixed for a long time, but maybe worth mentioning anyway.

[bogdanm87]

Each time we managed to bootup the board UART cable wasn't connected. We get access to the board over the SSH. Board doesn't want to bootup even if we have connected the UART cables..I'm sure we have already tried with cables connected, but without success...If we get something over the UART it means board will bootup and it will work normally...

[peteasa]

I use the serial console so as a rule I always have to serial cable attached. I just disconnected the serial cable and found that it did not boot fully. My guess is that this is some boot setting.. but not sure because I am not at the moment interested in booting without the serial cable because I get a lot of information from the boot messages.

[bogdanm87]

I think they should write on the Parallella Web site such things (I mean if they are having some issues with board boot up without UART connected).. But as I have already said, we tried to connect UART cable but without success.. Is there any other way to contact Parallella support, except support@adapteva.com? Thank you!

[peteasa]