How To Set Up A Rock Pi S - Part 1: Basics

Update / Warning:

Until now, I was not able to get this project working. So if You are looking for a working solution, this is none. Maybe You do not need to read the following part of this project, because they were written, before I figured out, that this will not work. As it turned out, the Rock Pi S cannot run Snips.ai any more (after a Kernel update to get the sound working). 

(Original Article Starts Here)

With the progress of my smart home assistant project, I finally found an adequate hardware with the possibility to connect up to eight microphones: the Rock Pi S from Radxa.

What sounded like a promising small device turned out to be a little bit tricky. Inspired by an interesting article of the german IT publisher heise.de, I decided to order a Rock Pi S for my project. So I took the version with 512 MB RAM, Bluetooth and WiFi (ordered at the at this time point only available store n Germany, maker-store.de).

After delivery and unboxing of the device, the first few questions appeared in my head. Though Radxa created a basic documentation with a set up guide, I wondered that Google didn't find many search results for the Rock Pi S. Furthermore, I faced some problems during the set up of my Rock Pi S. This was also the reason why I wrote this article later that evening.

What You Need To Get Started

• Rock Pi S (at least with an Ethernet port, because I had no luck with the USB-serial cable)
• LAN cable (CAT 5)
• Micro SD (uSD) Card with more than 8 GB (I used 16 GB and an adapter)
• USB-C cable and a power supply
• A familiar network infrastructure (a switch/router with at least one free LAN port; You should be able to find devices in your network with command line tools and understanding the Internet Protocol)
• A second computer for downloading, writing to the SD card and hosting SSH terminal session

Step 1: Download Etcher And The OS

There are some implausibly descriptions in the Getting Started Guide. So, please don't follow it blue-eyed. I guess, the implausibilities result of copy & paste errors.

• First, You need to download the proper OS image, Debian Stretch. In the guide is written that Ubuntu 16.4 is being used - that doesn't really work, hence there wasn't even a download for Ubuntu Server at this time point.

  

  Nobuntu? At least not at this time point

You also need to download the tool "Etcher", which is required to bring the Debian Stretch OS properly onto the uSD card

Use Etcher to get the downloaded Debian image from your hard drive to the uSD card (maybe You need an SD adapter; for more details, see the original guide).

Step 2: Starting The Rock Pi S

• Insert the uSD card into the card slot of the Rock Pi S, connect it with the LAN cable to a LAN port (and to a network you are familiar with) and make sure, that your computer and the Rock Pi S will be in the same subnet (yes, network know-how is needed here)
• Connect the Rock Pi S via USB-C cable with a power source (only the USB-C port will work as power supply for the Rock Pi S)
• Rock Pi S boot: first, the green LED will glow, then, some seconds later, the blue one will blink two times a second (the so called "heart beat" 💓)

Step 3: Network and SSH

• Now, You should be able to open an SSH session (forget trying with the serial cable - I had no success with this method, but LAN worked easily)
• You need to find the Rock Pi S in the network. Its host name is NOT "debian.local" as described in the original guide. Instead, try a ping to "rockpis":
  ping -a rockpis
• If the ping is successful (yes, You need that much network knowledge to also interpret the result of the ping command, sorry), You should be able to connect with SSH
• Open an SSH session (on Windows, you maybe need an extra tool, e. G. Putty) Connect to:
  rock@rockpis
  with password:
  rock
  and - if everything worked as described here - you'll see something like this:

Console after successful connection to the Rock Pi S 

As of here, everything else on the Rock Pi S will start ...