What are the minimum requirements to get the board past blinking red blue

Community Support
,
1

What are the minimum requirements needed to get a framework 16 gen 1 motherboard to post past the stupid red and blue blinking
I have ONLY the raw motherboard with a 140w pd supply, a USB c to HDMI converter, and one stick of ram. (No rtc battery, fans,or laptop battery or case or screen)
When plugging the board in,it draws ~30w and gets a little warm, but just blinks red and blue alternating instead of booting up. How do I get past this

2

Two things come to mind.

  1. You will probably need fans.
  2. The firmware has an “is everything OK?” check that will display any detected issues (“incomplete input deck”, “missing input deck”, “missing interposer”, “missing fans”, …) and, if it does, will require a single click of the power button to resume booting.

If you click (note: not hold) the power button again, does it shut down or continue booting?

3

How do I tell if it’s shutting down or booting?
It just keeps blinking no matter what I do. The blinking starts several seconds after being plugged in to power

4

Ah, good question. Usually I’d go by what the fans are doing, but seeing as you haven’t got any… :stuck_out_tongue:

Okay, there are a couple different “any time” blink codes and a couple that happen at specific times which you might be able to use as a diagnostic.

Any time:

  • red-blue-off: battery disconnect is active
  • red-blue-off: battery is not detected, standalone mode is OFF
  • red-off-off: chassis is open (C cover (midplate) removed)
  • red-amber-off: GPU bay open
  • red-amber-off: GPU module fault
  • red-blue-off: input deck not fully populated

These are assessed in order. The first one to hit wins.

Outside of that, you’ll get “diagnostic” codes. These only happen when the power is on and the AP firmware has started. They override the blinking codes from above.

15 seconds after you press Power and only if anything fails to initialize, you will get a series of 1-12-1-8-1 blinks in different colors.

If you don’t get those blinks with the chassis open and all of those components out, you are not booting far enough for anything to matter. :slight_smile:

5

I see. Are there any debug pins I can use? Like Uart or something to see what’s happening?
I assume since it’s a used motherboard it still might be expecting a onboard screen and it’s original hardware configuration…
Is there any way to reset this?