Sorry, I do not have any experience with FT232RL adapter. But today I bought the CP2102 based adapter for little money and it works like a charm at first try. See here: https://www.gme.cz/prevodnik-usb-uart-reset-pin#product-detail.
Have switched to Profilic PL-2303HX and still no luck … I will try if Ubuntu wants to talk on serial
Please follow below steps to change a setting for EMMC, and then the lede image will work fine.
Sorry. Everything works. I made mistake to connect serial ttl to GPIO uart instead of u-boot uart debug.
Thank you gary a lot. This did the trick! Now I boot to LEDE from SD card and EMMC as well. I believe it would be useful to add this hint here: https://bananapi.gitbooks.io/banana-pi-bpi-r2-open-source-smart-router/content/openwrt.html.
So partial success so far. Unfortunately I still do not boot the Ubuntu. I moved my ask for help here (believe it is the better thread for that topic than this one):
@garywang could you please compile test images every let’s say week? (I beleve someone make progress in development …)
Do I need to fat SD before carry on step 2?
I move SD card to my R2 board and then power on it, but get nothing output from debug UART.
No need to format the SD, please follow below steps to change the EMMC setting.
Hello Gary I have the same issue. Please, how can we manage to still boot from Emmc and keep custom settings over any reboot ? What is the alternative ? Keeping LEDE booting on SD Card ?
The squashfs and jffs2 are working fine, please check above comment for details.
I just copied the image onto the sd card, and when I try to boot the banana pi R2 I just get this kind of violet screen with no prompt/console or anything like that, can you help me out?
(Same issue like @pkalemba @Tohin @Maciek_Szelagowski)
To Have console you need to ssh or Have a uart serial cable, as i said in post above Lede does not Have graphical interface
Hello Gary Thanks for the information. I’m trying to download the files from your Test_1023 directory since yesterday unsuccessfully. I will retry soon. Regards.
It’s still available to download, please have a try.
I just scanned my network and my laptop and smartphone showed up, but not the banana pi, so there’s nothing I can ssh into 
Have dhcp running? Maybe you found the ip in the log of the dhcp-server
Or you can use debug-uart to login local to get ip
I don’t know if dhcp is running, and I don’t know where I could possibly get the log of the dhcp-server, because I don’t have a UART-Debug adapter. I just placed a lan-cable in the very left lan(/wan) port, and turned it on. But it should be powered on, because when I place a HDMI cable in the HDMI port, I get that violet screen, and all the lights are on.
I mean dhcp-server behind lan-connection (existing router,not the pi itself)
as @pkalemba said, lede has no graphical interface…why no console,maybe hdmi is not supported yet.
debug-uart is the simplest way to find out what’s wrong…
Hello Gary I finally succeed in downloading and installing the files. Now my BPI R2 is up and running, and the settings are persistent. Thanks a lot for your help, i will now try to configure my router correctly. I need to learn everything about LEDE. Have a nice weekend. Regards
Hay great work but I’m having a real problem trying to get the download as I only speak English I have tried everything but I still can’t get it please help