One of two fresh MCIMX8M-EVKB boards not working out of box

[terrillmoore]

Dear NXP,

We recently purchased two MCIMX8M-EVKB boards and I'm setting them up.

I'm testing without a mouse or HDMI display attached. One of the two boards comes up to the point of giving uboot output, and I can interrupt the boot. (If I don't interrupt the boot, I see what looks like a normal kernel boot sequence.) We are not using Android, and we plan to run just with a serial port for our testing; so all is good so far.

The other board doesn't seem to launch uboot when I apply power. Monitoring the debug UARTs with TeraTerm; the PC receives a gltch character when I cycle power on the target, so I presume that the core is changing state. Pressing the reset button also causes glitch characters to appear. Baud rate is properly set (115200).

I have swapped power supplies between the two boards, ensured that the DIP switches are set properly, etc.

The defective board is marked Rev A2; the working board is marked Rev A1. (Both are SCH-38820.)

Are there any other tests I should do before I return the board to the distributor?

Thanks,
--Terry

[joanxie]

The other board doesn't seem to launch uboot when I apply power.

>what image do you use? did you use the sd card with the board? pls try to download demo images and try again, you can use linux image or android image, one can download to the emmc direclty

"https://www.nxp.com/design/software/embedded-software/i-mx-software:IMX-SW"

[terrillmoore]

This board has an embedded eMMC that comes preloaded with Android. No SD card media is required, and I wasn't using one. I'm just trying to follow the unboxing video, more or less (except that I'm interrupting uboot).

[joanxie]

ok, maybe the images in the emmc is broken, try to download new one and test again, you can download linux pre-built images, and use uuu tools to download to the emmc and boot up again

linux image

"https://www.nxp.com/design/software/embedded-software/i-mx-software/embedded-linux-for-i-mx-applicat...

uuu tools

"https://github.com/NXPmicro/mfgtools/releases"

The follow command burns into eMMC (If only one board is supported in such a release package and the board supportseMMC chip):
"uuu <release package>.zip"

[terrillmoore · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the links. After some head-scratching, I made things work.

The docs are a little confusing, because they don't seem to use consistent names, and sometimes when I followed links, I ended back at docs for the MCIMX8M-EVK (not EVKB): different board.

The instructions referred to the boot settings, but I couldn't find clear documentation. Ultimately, I found the boot switch settings in the schematic. In case it's useful, I summarized in a gist here.

The instructions also referred to "the latest" image, and I was not really confident I was getting the right thing for my board. So, at least to help my colleagues at MCCI, I wrote up a step-by-step quide to flashing, posted as a gist on GitHub: 

Reflashing the MCIMX8M-EVKB with Android

That page has links and screenshots to help others like me who are not very familiar with the NXP support site.

Anyway: I succeeded in getting the board to come up. Thanks for the pointers!