[BPI-R4] SD image not working

Hello guys! I’m new into all of it stuff, so as you may expect, I’m having difficulties with making BPI-R4 to work.

So, I have BPI-R4 and WIFI-7 NIC module. So, I tried to burning different images on my SD card and got no luck. If any of you can give me any advice I’d be very grateful.

My setup is the following - i’m powering up the board, and plugging ethernet cable into LAN on board and my computer. Also I have USB-Serial cord connected to it, I’m trying to view it’s output using screen /dev/ttyUSB0 115200, but it gives me nothing with any image.

I tried burning this image on my SD - it gives me power light on, green blinking, and no connection through ssh. I’m trying to do ssh [email protected] and get no response, same if i ping it.

I’m also trying to make it work with the other image under BPI-R4-Main-V11-assambly heading. This one only lights up power light. But gives me more - now i can connect via ssh [email protected], but if i’m trying to access 192.168.1.1 in my browser, i’m getting bad request, but that is not the biggest problem. If I turn it off and back on (just unplugging power), everything which I installed/set up on the board disappears. Even if i do it just by simply typing reboot gives me the same result - reset to defaults. Also, if i plug in the WLAN with internet on it - i can ping google, and just any site in general, but opkg update just hangs (i assume it is because it is trying to reach some SNAPSHOT distribution of packages, which does not exist.)

I’m no expert in that things.

What you have to solve (despite from the other problems) is, to get USB-Serial adapter to work!

Which USB to serial adapter you use?

→ Common mistake is to use a 5V Adapter :scream: (Board needs 3.3 V) → can damage the board

→ Another mistake ist to connect Tx to Tx and Rx to Rx :persevere:

  • Tx to Rx and Rx to Tx is right :+1:
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Try to first fill your SD card with zeroes before writing any of the OpenWrt images onto it. It might seem unnecessary, but it really isn’t. One would assume that when the partition table on the disk is overwritten, the old data is gone, but that’s apparently not the case for OpenWrt. I hope someone has an idea why. As for the official firmware, forget about installing extra packages. It’s based on an outdated OpenWrt version, which the repository has long abandoned. Mainline snapshot is already good enough, and you can even use WiFi 7 with the advice from here: [Banana BPI-R4] Wifi7 status - #427 by Betonmischer - For Developers - OpenWrt Forum

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Thanks a lot everyone for trying to resolve my issue. The problem was with my flash drive, it was faulty.