Eric Ehlers
1. Notes
Here is the documentation from the manufacturer:
Ports
The HDMI and USB C power ports are too close together. Existing cables that I had lying around at home, they did not fit well into the back of the device, because the sleeves caused the cables to be too thick for the ports. I bought a slimline HDMI cable with no sleeve, so that it is no wider than the port.
Hama 205021 High Speed HDMI Cable Ultra Slim 4K Male to Male Ethernet 2.0 m
Now everything fits.
In this picture I have the ethernet cable connected to the LAN port. That is because I am sharing the internet connection from my laptop to the NanoPi. To use the NanoPi as a router you connect the WAN port to your main router and the LAN port to your network.
Observations
Below are some points that I have noted about the device. I am new to this and I may have gotten some information wrong, if you see a mistake then please let me know.
No Upstream Repos
The images (kernel, OS) provided by the manufacturer are disconnected from their sources. So you do not receive software updates.
The project below provides for the R6C ubuntu images which are connected to the official repositories:
Unable to Boot from SSD
The device can boot from the microSD card, or from eMMC (which is optional). There is an NVMe SSD slot, but the device is not capable of booting from SSD. The best you can do is to install the root partition to the SSD and boot from the eMMC.
No U-Boot Script
Many devices of this type allow you to create a script which gets loaded by the bootloader to customize the device startup. The R6C does not support this feature, the manufacturer’s fork of U-Boot is not configured to load a boot script.
U-Boot parameters ignored
At startup you can hit CTRL-C to access the U-Boot “monitor” (command prompt), where you can edit the startup parameters. Then you hit boot and normally your changes are applied to the current run. But this does not seem to work on the R6C. I did some digging and it turns out that the bootloader disregards any values entered into the monitor. This looks to me like a flaw in the vendor’s implementation of U-Boot.
Unable to Save U-Boot parameters
Normally from the U-Boot monitor you should be able to save any changes with the command saveenv. This does not work on the R6C, the bootloader was compiled with this feature disabled. I tried recompiling the bootloader from source with the feature enabled but it still didn’t work, I think because the SD image lacks the partition which U-Boot requires to store its state. A similar problem is described here.