Blog from March, 2022

Install Android 11 on SECO boards - SOLON (formerly SBC-C31)

Michele Cirinei posted on Mar 11, 2022

SECO Android 11 BSP for Rockchip-based boards at the moment supports only C31 SBC.

The C31 board only supports the USB OTG cable installation procedure, and only eMMC is supported as a primary boot peripheral. Future releases will include uSD/USB support.

Android 11 support for SECO SBC C31 includes:

Wifi/BT
ADB over ethernet
Sound support over HDMI
HDMI and LVDS display with onboard backlight
Double ethernet card
4G modem
OTA update
recovery environment

Other supported peripherals include:

debug UART
RS232
I2C busses
eMMC
SDCard (storage only, not as a boot device)
USB (CN7, CN8 and CN10, USB-C not yet supported)
RTC

HOW TO install SECO Android 11 BSP on onboard eMMC via OTG cable

Requirements

A Linux PC
USB Type-C cable

To flash Android 11 on SECO board using an OTG cable, please follow these simple steps:

Build SECO Android 11 image for C31, and prepare the distro as described in Build Android 11 for SECO Boards - SOLON (formerly SBC-C31)
1. As an alternative, a prebuilt distro can be downloaded at https://secostorage.blob.core.windows.net/secosoftware-public/rockchip/c31/seco-rk3399-c31_android_11.0.0_v1-00-00_20220324.tar.gz
Extract the distro archive
- tar xzf <ANDROID_11_BSP>.tar.gz
Change to the uncompressed folder
- cd <ANDROID_11_BSP_FOLDER>
Connect the USB Type-C cable between PC and connector CN9 on the board
Insert jumper in JP4, to block watchdog timer and avoid it resetting the board during flashing
Execute the script “seco_flash.sh" (requires superuser privileges).
- ./seco_flash.sh
Press button SW3 (in the center of the board), power on the board, and immediately release SW3
The script waits for the USB device to flash (“Bus 001 Device 045: ID 2207:330c Fuzhou Rockchip Electronics Company RK3399 in Mask ROM mode”), completely erases the flash memory, partitions it, and writes all the images
Wait until the end of the procedure

After the flashing, the board automatically reboots.

Build Android 11 for SECO Boards - SOLON (formerly SBC-C31)

Michele Cirinei posted on Mar 11, 2022

Building a custom Android 11 for SECO board is a simple operation.

In the following instructions, we consider the specific case of C31, SECO SBC based on RK339 from Rockchip. Therefore at the moment “C31” is the only valid value for <BOARD_CODE>.

Requirements:

a powerful PC HOST with Linux OS system (Ubuntu, Debian, ARCH Linux are valid options);
a docker environment installed and running;
a configured git and repo environment;
a personal access token or a deploy token, to download source code from git.seco.com;
250 GB of free space on storage drive;

Detailed procedure:

Configure repo:
- mkdir ~/bin
- PATH=~/bin:$PATH
- curl https://storage.googleapis.com/git-repo-downloads/repo > ~/bin/repo
- chmod a+x ~/bin/repo

Configure git:
- git config --global user.name "Your Name"
- git config --global user.email "your.name@example.com"

Obtain an access token:
- if you have an account on git.seco.com, you can generate your personal access token from https://git.seco.com/-/profile/personal_access_token
- if you don’t have an account, ask your contacts in Seco and you will be provided a deploy token specifically prepared for this Android release

The full Android repo can be divided in two blocks:

AOSP: repositories downloaded directly from Google
SECO: repositories downloaded from our servers

While AOSP is freely downloadable, SECO part is shared only via access token (i.e. username and password). Therefore, for every GIT repository downloaded from git.seco.com, username and password should be inserted. Consider to speed up the procedure, adding the following section in ~/.gitconfig

[credential "https://git.seco.com"]
  username = <username>
  helper = cache --timeout=86400

Thanks to this, username is never requested, and password is requested only once, and cached for future use up to the declared timeout.

Init and download Android 11 repository:
- mkdir ANDROID_11
- cd ANDROID_11
- repo init -u https://git.seco.com/arm/rockchip/release/android/android_11.0.0/manifest.git
- repo sync -j 20

Pull the latest SECO docker for Android building image:
- ```
sudo docker pull secodocker/android-builder:latest
```

Run SECO docker for Android build:

docker run --rm -it \
    --privileged \
    --volume="/etc/passwd:/etc/passwd:ro" \
    --volume="/etc/group:/etc/group:ro" \
    --volume="/etc/shadow:/etc/shadow:ro"  \
    --volume $PWD:/workdir \
    -v ~/.bash_history:${HOME}/.bash_history:rw \
    -v ~/.vimrc:${HOME}/.vimrc:rw \
    -v ~/.vim:${HOME}/.vim:rw \
    -v ~/.cache:${HOME}/.cache:rw \
    -e BOARDCODE=${boardcode} \
    --workdir="/workdir" \
    --user $(id -u "$(stat -c "%U" Android.bp)"):$(id -g) \
    secodocker/android-builder:latest

Set up the Android environment and run the build commands:
- source setup<BOARD_CODE> # for example: source setupC31
- ./build.sh -f
Wait until the end of the compilation process (build process can last 1 or more hours according to the speed of your system)
You can produce a tar.gz archive to be used for installation by running the following script:
- prepare_distro.sh [<IMAGE_NAME>] # Where [<IMAGE_NAME>] is an optional text string for naming the image file (default to “Android_11_<BOARD_CODE>_Distro_<DATE>.tar.gz”)
You will find the results of the build process in the folder ANDROID_11/Distros/

The freshly created distro includes everything you need to flash the board:

system binaries (bootloader, kernel, support partition images, android system…)
flashing tool and script to launch it easily
otapackage to update an already working board

What can I do now?

Install Android 11 on SECO boards - SOLON (formerly SBC-C31)

Special build options for Android 11 on SECO boards - SOLON (formerly SBC-C31)