I followed the steps today to burn the most recent Channels DVR RPI image on to a 16Gb card and put into a brand new RPi 4 2Gb and it looks like the bootloader is unable to find the .elf file based on the green led flashing 4x while the red led is solid.
If I reburn the same SD card with the standard RPi desktop image, into the same RPi 4, it boots up fine, so I'm thinking it's an image issue. Any thoughts?
The image is designed to be burnt onto a USB drive. It requires a Pi 4, and the EEPROM must be updated first. See the instructions on https://getchannels.com/docs/channels-dvr-server/installation/raspberry-pi/#prepare-your-raspberry-pi-for-usb-boot
So, I went back, re-read everything and tried again. I used the EEPROM image and burned that to the SD Card. I then burned the channels DVR image to a USB stick instead. Now I just see a green screen and the red led is solid and the green led is blinking fast and it just stays like that (15 mins at the longest so far). I tried power cycling and I get the same thing.
I think I figured it the green screen issue. You've got to yank out the EEPROM SD card. Sorry in all my years of working with RPis, I've never not booted from the SD Card, so I wasn't expecting to remove it and leave it out so that there's no SD Card loaded in the RPi at all.
I'm still not actually getting any display on the micro-HDMI out from the device though and I'm not sure how I'm supposed to connect it to the wireless network without some sort of display on the RPi out.
When it first boots up, I see some text on the screen, but then it stops and the monitor just goes black and there's no HDMI signal any longer. The red led is solid, the green led keeps blinking twice over and over again.
All the instructions you need is in the Thread for the PI image.
Wifi is not supported before setup it seems.
On the page that tmm1 had shared, they mention this:
A micro-HDMI adapter can be used to plug the Pi into a TV or monitor. This may be necessary for troubleshooting in some cases, to see where the Pi is stuck and if any error messages from the firmware/kernel/OS are displayed on screen.
Which is why I was thinking there would be content on the HDMI
You should see boot messages and stuff over HDMI. Here is the LED sequence over boot. Can you compare these steps with what you see over HDMI? Even with no USB or SD connected there will be HDMI display for the bootloader eeprom.
The green LED on the front of the Raspberry Pi will go through the following sequence after power-on:
The DVR web interface on http://dvr-server is accessible as soon as the OS boots (step 4), approximately 25-30s after the Pi is powered on.
yea...but only if it is connected to ethernet right?
the Op needs to connect the Pi to Wifi, and there is no way to do that?
There is a way to connect to Wi-Fi but it needs to boot up first. You should see a login prompt over HDMI.
The green LED seq I'm seeing is:
Don't know if the custom image supports serial console via usb to serial adapter.
Do you see HDMI output without any SD or USB attached?
What kind of USB storage are you using? Is it an enclosure with your own drive? What brand drive and enclosure
I do see HDMI output with no SD card and no USB attached. It gives some basic info about the device and a QR code in the upper right and the RPi logo on the upper left.
The USB storage is a SoCal usb to SATA adapter that's connected to a WD 500Gb drive. I have a 512 Ultra USB 3.0 Sandisk flash drive showing up on monday, but I thought I'd test out with what I had to start with.
So the RPi4 USB port is powering your external SATA drive?
I would go with an external enclosure that powers the drive.
Most likely the pi can't supply enough power for the drive.
There are also USB3 to SATA3 adapter cables that come with a 12v (2A) power adapter (for use with 3.5 SATA drives).
That's a good point chDVRuser, I don't actually have a powered SATA adapter or enclosure. I can wait till the USB stick gets here on Monday, but I was looking forward to playing with this setup over the weekend lol.
How far do you get over HDMI if the USB is attached?
So here's where things are at:
So the DVR is up and running and I can access the web interface now and I was able to migrate my old setup to the new box. I don't see a way to switch this over to wifi, which is a bit unfortunate. I do really like how easy the SAMBA setup and integration is though, very handy. Also, I'm assuming there's some default root password and what not for this box, but I've not seen it anywhere in the documentation or the other thread.
Something seems wrong if you don't get HDMI out. Maybe an issue with the display or cable/adapter?
You can I se nmcli to setup a Wi-Fi connection. There is no root password on the console. SSH access requires a key which can be transferred using a usb drive named CONFIG as described in the docs.
RE: https://community.getchannels.com/t/issue-with-raspberry-pi-image/25577/12
I didn't mean this as an endosment. It was put there for those who don't know about tty console over serial interface.
The Debian/Raspbian distribution images include support out-of-the-box for accessing the shell console via the hardware serial port. This can be extremely convenient if you need to access your Raspberry Pi when it is not connected to a monitor and network remote access is not available.
I don't have a Rpi (yet), but I use putty and other programs to connect to various systems via serial ports and telnet, ssh, etc.