I needed a way of easily testing builds on the RockPRO64 without writing SD cards, pushing buttons and so on. So, let’s automate as much as possible, even resetting and powering off/on the board under test.

Serial console

The serial console of the RockPRO64 is useful for debugging, as all of the messages from the earliest firmware and bootloader are printed to it by default. Beyond seeing the messages, when we get to the stage of U-Boot starting, we can even send characters over the serial console to interrupt the boot process and then control U-Boot.

I recently picked up a new AYN Odin gaming handheld, and ended up working on support for it in the Linux kernel. I thought the process and things I learned during it would make for some good blog posts, so part of the way through the process I started writing down what I was doing, in the hope it would be interesting to others when published. This post will be the first in a series hopefully following the journey in getting full, or at least workable, support for it in upstream Linux so that anyone can install Linux on their Odin device and keep it up to date with the latest emulators, graphics drivers and so on.