I have my Bolt connected to a 19.5V 3.33A 65W HP laptop supply, a couple of 8GM Crucial DDR4-2400 SODIMMs from the recommended list and an HDMI monitor. Pressing the power button gets me a green light and after a few seconds the fan starts but no HDMI output on either of the sockets. I have tried resetting the BIOS with the switch but it made no difference. Is there anything else I can try or have missed or is this a DOA board?
Very hard to tell. Try to switch the HDMI cable or HDMI monitor to see if it helps. Also, you can find USB-C to HDMI adapter dongle fairly cheap. That's another path to try.
Thanks. I plugged same HDMI cable into an UDOO quad just to rule out it or the monitor had suddenly failed. I haven't got any USB C stuff. It seems every SBC comes with a different video connector these days. I got mini HDMI for my UDOO X86 and then micro HDMI for my RPI4. Can I confirm that with just the SODIMMs and power I should get a BIOS screen out of both HDMI ports without doing anything else?
Plugging an Ethernet cable into the board gives a solid green light and a flashing green light behind the socket and seems to connect. Plugging the same cable into the USB-C dongle provided seems to connect.
The LEDs behind the Ethernet port go out, come back a few times and then one turns orange and ubuntu.lan appears on my network with a MAC address from SECO SRL. It doesn't allow an SSH connection. The fan cycles on and off as if it is responding to temperature. So it looks like the CPU is running but the HDMI ports don't work. There are a couple of transistors missing near the ports but I don't know if they are supposed to be fitted. One is labelled Q51 and the other appears to not be labelled. It is next to Q3, which is fitted. Are the schematics available anywhere? I am a retired electronics engineer so I could investigate further.
I switched to an official UDOO HDMI cable that I got with my UDOO Quad and now it works on either HDMI port. So the un-branded HDMI cable I have that works with UDOO Quad, RPI, Orange PI, etc, does not work with UDOO BOLT. I wonder why? I know it is HDMI 2.0 and I might need a better cable for 4K but I am not using a 4K monitor and it is supposed to be backwards compatible with old cables and monitors. Thanks for suggesting a boot stick, that moved me on.
Hmm, I think there is still something wrong because I can't see the BIOS screen. If I repeatedly press Esc during boot it doesn't run Ubuntu but I get no HDMI output. If I power on normally the first thing I see is Ubuntu booting. I have never seen the BIOS screen.
UEFI is rather picky as there is only a very simple display driver in action at that moment. https://www.udoo.org/docs-bolt/Advanced_Topics/BIOS-UEFI_firmware.html You could try another HDMI display (TV?) to test. .
Yes it works on my HD TV (with the usual overscan issue) but I don't understand why it doesn't work on my Asus 1920x1080 monitor, or why it is picky about the cable. Is there a signal level or termination issue with the HDMI ports? I have lots of other SBCs, including all the UDOOs, and never had any issues with the HDMI cables or monitors. They normally just work. The only problem I have ever had with HDMI is that if I use un-shieded cables anywhere near my TV the leaked EMI interferes with the aerial signal. My main reason for getting into the BOIS was to speed it up but I found it was already set to 25W, not auto.
I suppose it is a typical UEFI issue, you can read more issues on the net with this. The other non X86 architectured Udoo SBC have no UEFI. The Udoo X86 has the same issue (with another UEFI manufacturer).
But is is supposed to be backwards compatible, so old monitors and old cables are supposed to work on an HDMI 2.0 port.
"Backward compatible" is just a marketing invention. How many times we wish that music is consumable?