Add more boards: ROCK 3A/B?

[wirano]

Overview

Hi guys,

I would like to submit a request to add support for the RADXA Rock 3A/B boards. ROCK3 is a series of Rockchip RK3566/RK3568 based SBC(Single Board Computer) and Compute Module by RADXA. These boards offer strong performance with a wide range of applications, especially for home automation and edge computing use cases.

Several Rockchip boards, such as the Green and Hardkernel ODROID series, are already supported, but adding support for the RADXA Rock series would provide users with more options and flexibility.

Contribution

Here are some contributions I can offer:

• Add HAOS BSP support
• Prepare a HASS integration for RADXA homeassistant/components/radxa

If possible, I hope I can add more RADXA boards to this project (possibly Rock 5B).

[peterwang2050]

Great, Good Job

[agners]

Hi @wirano, thank you for the architecture proposal.

From experience with the boards we support now, the main worry with any additional board is the long term maintenance cost. The initial port is one thing, but once it is in the list of supported boards, we want to keep it up-to-date, so updating U-Boot and Linux regularly. Every now and then we do run into boards specific bugs, which we have to track down 😢

As you mentioned, we already have boards which support that SoC, so at least from a SoC standpoint maitenance effort is shared. It is probably more boards specific issues (like supported storage devices etc.) which could become problematic.

• Add HAOS BSP support

I think this would be the first step. What I also would suggest to look into existing boards support, specifically ODROID-M1/M1S. We intended to make these two boards actually just a single board, but because the memory configuration was different, we had to split the boards 😢 . Currently we mostly use separate boards because we have to deploy different U-Boot bootloaders. But if we can get away with a single U-Boot for two boards, that would make things easier and avoid adding another board (we'd probably have to rename odroid-m1/m1s to rk3566-generic or something along these lines).

Do you know if the initial boot code/boot loader of ROCK 3A/3B can be made compatible with one of the existing boards?

• Prepare a HASS integration for RADXA homeassistant/components/radxa

Currently we only have board specific integration for a few boards, and the feature set is rather limited. While the idea was to add more speciific board features, so far this did not materialize yet 😢

As for a RADXA specific integration, do you have anything specific in mind you'd want to have controlled from the integration? 🤔

[wirano]

Hi @agners,

Thank you for the reply!

• the long term maintenance cost

I understand the worry about long-term maintenance costs. For myself, I'm running HAOS on my rock-3a SBC, and will use it for a long time, not as a developer but also as a user. It will keep me actively maintaining the board.

• I think this would be the first step.
• we have to deploy different U-Boot bootloaders.

Emme, besides the various u-boot, what confuse me most is that we have to build board specific docker images (core and landingpage) for each board. To commit BSP to HAOS, we must add relevant docker build first (#135355, #136). Why don't we use a more generic aarch64-homeassistant image? AFAIK, there is no distinct difference between ${board}-homeassistant images? And OS will provide the hardware info to upper software, so we can just select the associated integrations as hass-core is capable of aware hardware.

• We intended to make these two boards actually just a single board
• we have to deploy different U-Boot bootloaders

I have a look into odroid-m1/m1s's hardware schematics. Unfortunately, there is no on board EEPROM or resistor jumpers indicating board varieties. So we must use a hardcoded u-boot config. However, it seems that 'odroid-m1/m1s' has been upstreamed for u-boot and kernel. So we can switch to upstream version instead of maintaining a set of patches?

• Do you know if the initial boot code/boot loader of ROCK 3A/3B can be made compatible with one of the existing boards?

These boards share different u-boot configs. I think upstream existing boards and use upstream branch is a better choice.

• As for a RADXA specific integration, do you have anything specific in mind you'd want to have controlled from the integration? 🤔

To be honest, I don't really know what is the true role these integrations play in HASS. As for me, I just want to display board info on config->hardware like Green :) I'm running green-homeassistant image on my rock-3a now, not really familiar with the behaviour of other hardware and images.