Banana Pi BPI-R3 OpenWRT image

[frank-w]

Serial console is needed to determine what exactly goes wrong…all other is speculative

[invisible789]

Hi everyone, I’ve just received my Banana Pi r3 and just getting started with it, serial console is ready and connected, sd card burnt is ready with latest Snapshot from official openwrt Just to confirm, i should boot from sd card and install to nand in bootloader menu? After it’s done, power off device, switch boot switch to boot from nand? That’s it?

Few questions

1. Latest Snapshot is good to go?
2. Will it update my bootloader as well?
3. Nand vs nor , anyone using it on nor , what’s performance difference? What’s preferred
4. Please mention any additional steps needed for process above?

Thanks everyone

[Lorem_amicus (Michael Fischer)]

Congratulation for choosing the R3!!!

As you can see, it can be tricky to install openwrt on BPI-R3:

[Solved] [BPI-R3] Unable to flash on eMMC

I have successfully installed the sdcard.img from OpenWrt Firmware Selector on my SD card, booted from it and selected the “Install bootloader, recovery and production to NAND” option in the boot menu via UART. The installation was successful. Booting from NAND, I can pick the “Install bootloader, recovery and production to eMMC” option in the boot menu. Upon selecting it however, I receive this message: PARTITION_CONFIG only exists on eMMC eMMC not detected Press ENTER to return to menu How…

But you can always fresh start from sd card again.

The 23.05.3 for R3 is some days out (2024-03-23). Do what you want, but I would not prefer the snapshot!

The questions you have are good! I’m also interested in …

[dangowrt (Daniel Golle)]

@invisible789

Latest Snapshot is good to go?

If you want to use the device in production right away and not be bothered with (rare) bugs in snapshot images, I’d recommend to use the OpenWrt 23.05.3 release instead which is known to be stable and work well on this device.

@invisible789

Will it update my bootloader as well?

Yes, choosing to install via the bootloader menu will write the bootloader to the target media (and this is needed. you cannot run vanilla OpenWrt with SinoVoip’s loader which lacks features for uImage.FIT and device-tree overlays).

@invisible789

Nand vs nor , anyone using it on nor , what’s performance difference? What’s preferred

SD vs NOR vs NAND vs eMMC installation

I’m the author of OpenWrt support for this device. While many users here may use this device as-is, it also serves as a reference platform for this SoC. As such the goal is to support as many potential uses of the SoC as possible, while for a final product one may never actually use all of them at once. Which storage option(s) you will want to use really depends on your individual use case. Each storage option is more than large enough to store a production and recovery system when using OpenW…

@invisible789

Please mention any additional steps needed for process above?

It’s important to mention that most problems users have been reporting with the installation process were due to faulty or bad microSD cards. If anything doesn’t work, try with a different microSD card.

Also be aware that all 4 dip switches for choosing the boot device (A, B) and chip-select on SPI (C) and MMC (D) bus need to be in the correct position for each step of the installation:

So “Don’t care” isn’t really true, you do need to care also about those.