LCD won't light up, Senoko cold start stucked at mainboard pwr LED

If you've got an FTDI or similar USB-serial cable, connecting that to the debug UART during boot might be of help. I wouldn't be surprised if you weren't hitting the backlight issues that other people have seen: http://www.kosagi.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=191

You could also try booting with an HDMI screen connected.

lutzray, add the following line to /boot/uEnv.txt on your SD card to get console to show up on the debug UART:

finalhook=setenv bootargs ${bootargs} console=ttymxc1,115200

If you don't have a USB-serial cable you could also use a Raspberry Pi as it also has TTL serial.  I can explain that if you have one, let us know.

You can also use a 3.3V Arduino as a substitute for USB-serial cable by using the soft-serial library to create a TTL serial port on some of the Arduino pins.  Then just take what comes from one serial port and copy it to the other.

Here is example code that takes everything from the USB serial port and puts it onto pins 9 and 10 of the Arduino.

#include <SoftwareSerial.h> //Software Serial Port
#define RxD 9
#define TxD 10
SoftwareSerial novenaSerial(RxD,TxD);
char incoming;

void setup()
{
  Serial.begin(115200);
  delay(1000);
  pinMode(RxD, INPUT);
  pinMode(TxD, OUTPUT);
  novenSerial.begin(115200); //Set Novena baud rate to 115200
  delay(1000);
  Serial.println("Started");
}

void loop()
{
  if (novenaSerial.available())
    Serial.write(novenaSerial.read());
  if (Serial.available())
    novenaSerial.write(Serial.read());
}

Apologies if there are any typos in the above code, I've cut and paste it from an example I previously used to talk to a bluetooth serial port, and modified it slightly for the Novena.  I'm not sure whether the softserial can actually run at 115,200.  I previously used this at 38,400.  If it can't run fast enough, try setting both serial.begin setting to a lower speed and change the uEnv.txt finalhook line to use a slower speed.

[SOLVED] My laptop doesn't boot because I wiped the uSD card dd'ing a PRINTTOPI image for my Raspberry Pi...
I misread  or mistyped the device name...

<FACEPALM>

Maybe I'll need to start a new topic "I bricked my Novena laptop!" 8-)  For now I'm reading the instructions at "Disk Imaging"

http://kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=Nov … e#Firmware

Can I work on OS X for dd'ing the image and resize partitions?  Hmm, Disk Utility says the fisrt
partition is FAT-16, is it OK? Isn't suposed to be ext4?

Hmm, I flashed the card (but didn't resize anything, being impatient I booted nonetheless), is it normal to get this UART console message:

Unsupported device width, fatal
fatal DDR error 0x03

I'll keep trying to rebuild my card, RTFMing the related pages.

Thanks for your support. Maybe for the others who'll brick their Novena like me, I will start a new topic in the right forum, this is a software issue.

I've tought of a fun topic title:

"Noob bricks his laptop, complains about lack of 1-click recovery GUI app"

I'm the perfect exemple of why bunnie nor xobs want to mass produce this project: being flooded by hipsters jumping in the Open
Source Hardware bandwagon because it's cool but know squat... 8-)

xobs, I read the thread you linked to (DDR fatal error on boot due to SPD flash corruption) and successfully compiled imx-usb-loader on my rPi (for other neophytes reading this, if it complains about libusb.h, sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0-dev ), and wgot the file

https://nas.xobs.io/novena/debugspl/SPL

NextSteps ?

• connect the Novena board to the rPi via the micro-usb OTG connector

• power on  the board with P_USB shorted (near the edge, between the FPGA and the SO-DIMM for those looking for it)

• run imx-usb-loader -v SPL on the rPi

What's not clear for me is why I should then upload the SPL file to the novena board, since imx-usb-loader did it for me...
And if I still have to, I can't use novena-install-spl so I should use dd as specified in U-boot PVT Notes. Is this the right command to run on the rPi?

sudo dd if="SPL" of="/dev/disk/by-path/platform-2198000.usdhc" bs=1024 seek=1 conv=notrunc

Will I have to substitute something? ie /dev/disk/by-path ?

and what about that SPD thang? Will your SPL notice any corruption and bypass it?

Well finally, novena-install-spl did its trick: I used the -s option to specify the source (and went with the default destination). Everything is fine now: booting without OTG and getting at the X login panel but I'm stuck on the external HDMI monitor... the LVDS panel won't light up...

Is there a flag somewhere to activate the panel in the boot sequence? I checked the EEPROM setting and LVDS0 in enabled pourtant.

but edp is already listed in the features, doesn't that mean it's set? Here's novena-eeprom output:

$ novena-eeprom
Current EEPROM settings:
    Signature:        Novena
    Version:          2
    Serial:           485
    MAC:              00:1f:11:02:16:e4
    Features:         0x1f7 (es8328,senoko,edp,pcie,gbit,hdmi,eepromoops,sataroot)
    EEPROM size:      65536
    EEPROM page size: 128
    Oops offset:      4096
    Oops length:      61440
    LVDS channel 1:
        Modeline "lvds1" 148.500  1920 2068 2156 2200   1080 1116 1120 1125 +HSync +VSync
        Flags: 0x3f (channel_present,dual_channel,vsync_polarity,hsync_polarity,mapping_jeida,data_width_8bit)
    LVDS channel 2:
        Modeline "lvds2" 4294.967  65535 131070 196605 262140   65535 131070 196605 262140 -HSync -VSync
        Flags: 0x1 (channel_present)
    HDMI channel:
        Modeline "hdmi" 4294.967  65535 131070 196605 262140   65535 131070 196605 262140 -HSync -VSync
        Flags: 0x61 (channel_present,data_width_8bit,ignore_settings)

No

Hmm, I'm a little nervous now to play inside my Novena...  Everything was OK  before I wiped the uSD card so I had hoped the black LCD was a software issue...