No Sign of Life from Freedom Box (Pioneer)

Pioneer Support
1

Hi everybody,

I bought my FreedomBox Pioneer on May, 2020. It worked initially, but I messed around with some of the user settings which caused me issues and eventually took everything down and forgot about it. Well now I’m motivated again and decided to try starting from scratch.

I’ve tried to flash the latest stable Pioneer FB software twice from my macbook, once via

# should wipe clean the microsd
sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk2 bs=8192
# then put the image on the microsd
sudo dd if=freedombox-stable_pioneer_a20-olinuxino-lime2-armhf.img of=/dev/disk2 bs=8192

and then again using etcher, after having re-downloaded and uncompressing the image.

In both cases, I connect the FB device to one of the RJ45 ports of my Ubiquiti Dream Machine, plug in the microsd, and then plug in the power to the FB.

And from there, I get a blinking red light near the power adapter, wait 10+ minutes, and otherwise no sign of life whatsoever. Nothing showing up on the router’s site to indicate that something is plugged into the port.
No source found when plugged in to HDMI, can’t connect to freedombox.local, nor 10.42.1.1. Might as well be a blinking brick.

Could it be that the hardware is toast? What is the next step for trying to figure this out?

Thanks y’all, <3

2

Hi @emg,

My FreedomBox is sick too :slight_smile: different reason. Here’s a couple thoughts:

  • can you confirm that your Pioneer is trying to boot from the SD card? (I don’t have a pioneer and can’t tell you specifics)
  • your dd command looks about right to me - read the image file and write to /dev/disk2.

Maybe try reading the card in your macbook to confirm that it contains the contents you tried to write there.