Engine BASIC NG and USB ports

MC10Guru

Ahoy,
On the Android TV thread the subject on non-functioning USB ports in EB NG was raised. I tested all four compatible boards I have and seem to see a pattern. So I will layout the results of my tests as plainly as I can. Except for the Tauon I tested with both an HP keyboard and a Trooper 2 VR game controller in every USB port.

Orange Pi PC:
3xUSB2 (2 horizontal and one vertical) and 1xmicroUSB OTG
All three USB A ports work.
USB-OTG w/adapter does not work.

Libre Tritium ALL-H3-CC 1GB:
4xUSB2
As looking at the USB ports to the right of ETH port:
Lower left: works
Upper left: does not work
Lower right: works
Upper right: works

Tauon PC-1
2xUSB2: port 1 internal & port 2 external
Port 1 internal: works
Port 2 external: does not work

T95 Super
2xUSB2: port 1 side & port 2 rear
Port 1 side: works
Port 2 rear: does not work

Uli probably knows more about how USB is implemented on the H3 SOC. I have no idea about where the USB-OTG fits in but I think the USB has two buses (lanes?) with 2 ports each: bus 0 and bus 1. So the ports are 0,0 & 0,1 and 1,0 & 1,1. My hypothesis is that port 0,1 is not initializing in Engine BASIC NG. It seems possible that the OPi PC uses pot 0,1 for the USB-OTG port. Also the Tauon PC-1 and the T95 Super have boards that are basically identical except for the amount of RAM & flash memory.

I would appreciate if anyone with any different H3 board could test the USB on those systems running EB NG and post any results or insights. This may be a bug in EB NG or it may be a quirk of the H3 SOC and USB. I know it really hampers the usefulness of the boards, especially the Tauon.

I tried to test a USB hub in EB NG. A while ago I made the mistake of buying a cheap USB3 powered hub on eBay. I found out it had an unregulated & underpowered supply but worse yet it backfed power to the computer at up to 5.48V!!?. I tried to use it as an unpowered hub. It does not even register in EB NG, in fact with it plugged in the T95S will not even boot. It is now in the trash and I will have to get another decent USB hub. My other 3 are in use on other systems (my main RPi, my HiFiPi and my VHS digitizing project).
daveyb

painintheworld

MC10Guru I do not have much to add here, other than a little experience with similar issues. As far as that goes, we are both testing on the same pieces of hardware 🙂

For the most part I am using the Libre H3, which is far and away my favorite. Without knowing what is going on behind the scenes in uli's baremetal operating system, I have only made guesses as to what happens. As you have mentioned, a quality, high output (relatively speaking) power supply is absolutely essential; there are endless stories in forums for the Raspberry Pi and subpar power supplies, for example. Back to the subject, with the Libre, I have had mixed results with three devices plugged in (mechanical backlit keyboard, trackball, and game pad). When only a keyboard and game pad are connected, the game pad in particular must be in a specific USB port.

The el cheapo USB hub I tried was worthless on the Engine BASIC NG or on a BMC64 bare metal R Pi C64 setup. Powered or unpowered, it didn't matter. When using my better USB hub with good power supply(a USB 3 model with SD card and uSD card reader...the name eludes me now, something from an Amazon flash sale), my luck with the T95 and Tauon specifically is much, much better. Will try it on the Libre and Orange Pi on Sunday and post results (if I get down off of the mountain in time).

Hawk

MC10Guru I also don't have much to add to your research. I currently only have a Tauon and an OPi PC. My R69 has been ordered, but I'm expecting that it will be almost identical to the T95. Can we upload photos of the motherboards on the Wiki, where we can capture this info?

uli

The OTG controller is not currently supported; not sure how much effort it would be to add support for it, but I'm sure it would be a lot of effort to debug it, because it's the port used to upload firmware during development. So I'm not inclined to do that.

The other three USB controllers on the H3 are supported. So the non-working ports may either be OTG, or connected to an internal hub that needs to be powered up via GPIO output or something. If it's the former, you're out of luck. If it's the latter, a single BASIC command might do the trick.

If these things run Linux and somebody can track down the device tree source files for these boards, we might be able to find out more. I have taken a quick look at https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/arch/arm/boot/dts but couldn't find anything.

MC10Guru

Ahoy,
After booting Armbian 10 on all my working H3 boards HardInfo and lsusb report the same thing for all USB ports that don't work in EB NG. Every one is port 1 out of the 4 ports. So, without looking at the H3 datasheet I'd say port one is designated as the OTG port whether the OTG hardware is wired to it or not (and it's not OTG capable on all the boards except the OPi PC). After a shipping mixup from the UK my Nanopi M1 H3 SBC is on the way. When I get it I'll check it also. It has OTG on the micro SD power port plus 3 other normal USB ports. I figure it will give me the same results.

As time permits I may be able to get the USB DTS files from the Armbian website. The only DTS file I have is one for the wireless adapter in the Tauon PC-1 and I can't get it to compile. Go figure 😉
Cheers, daveyb

painintheworld

Thank you for check that out, MC10Guru! That really helps things make sense for me.