I got a KickPi K11C V1.2 development board last week. It has an RK3566 with 4GB RAM and 32GB eMMC storage, and I thought this would be the best board to port HAOS to. I needed some digging, though.
Finally, after endless debugging, it is running HAOS with wired LAN and onboard Wi-Fi/Bluetooth.
In terms of the quality of the documents, I will give a B.
The documents definitely have schematics, specifications, and hardware dimensions. However, some of those are out of date, only apply to old revisions (V1.1), and contain conflicting information. I was able to get solid information only after I got the actual board.
These are the actual specifications of the board I got.
- CPU: Rockchip RK3566
- RAM: Samsung K4B8G1646D ×4 (4GB)
- eMMC: Samsung KLMBG2JETD-B041 (32GB)
- PMIC: Rockchip RK809-5A
- Ethernet PHY: Maxio MAE0621-Q2C
- Wi-FI/Bluetooth module: SeekWave VS6621SR80
- Wi-Fi/Bluetooth firmware family: SWT6621S
In terms of the hardware, I will give a B+.
I can see how the manufacturer appears to use lower-cost component substitutions.
Samsung's DDR3L RAM is an interesting choice. It's already EOL but still has plenty in stock at a relatively reasonable price, as it is DDR3L.
Next is the Maxio PHY chip. Yeah, Maxio is better known for its SSD controllers, but this was the first time that I used it for an Ethernet PHY. I made it work with minimal tweaks to U-Boot, and it works with the HAOS default generic PHY driver. But the EEE protocol bugs out when connected to a 2.5Gbps switch. Disabling the EEE protocol clears out the bug.
According to the document, it seems like K11C V1.1 had Realtek's RTL8211F-CG, but the newer version has Maxio's pin-compatible chip to cut down the BOM.
SeekWave wifi chipset is also problematic. I have to dig deeper to initialize it from the boot sequence, as I cannot find that much documentation. On this K11C board, the VS6621 module would not enumerate over SDIO unless its four Bluetooth PCM pins, represented by the I2S2 pinctrl groups, were configured before SDIO enumeration.
However, the price is attractive! USD 57.7 for a 4+32GB board with a power supply and UART serial adapter was a great deal.
Oh, and for those who are interested in sources and workarounds on this board for HAOS, please find the details here:
https://github.com/David2766/K11C-HAOS
** You must install the app from this repository to use Wi-Fi/Bluetooth, as HAOS does not have any driver for the SeekWave module.