Hi guys. I got myself a NanoPI R1S H3:
What are the chances that the uboot for Orange Pi H3 be usable for the NanoPi R1S H3 ?
or do I need to borrow uboot from some other distro ?

Hi,
did you already checked there ?

I'd say no chance -each boot loader is built for a specific target Hardware Model (the only exception I've personally seen being the RPi, where a single U-Boot can support both the v3 and v4).

Building U-Boot is easy.
http://ftp.arm.slackware.com/slackwa.../bootware/src/

Have a look there at uboot.build for ARM32 - you can see it's basically make boardname_defconfig, make
Then if you look at sdcards.build, basically all it does is dd the u-boot binary to an SD card (but the script is more complicated because it creates an image that you the user dd to your SD card, but the only thing on that card is the U-Boot SPL.
What you could do for example is to download the U-Boot SD card image for the Orange Pi:
http://ftp.arm.slackware.com/slackwa..._sdcard.img.xz
Write it to an SD card, then dd your new U-Boot binary to the SD card using the same dd command as in sdcards.build

The reason why there's a fat partition on those sd cards is to save the u-boot environment to.

Yes I did that's why I'm trying to get something sane on the device


Interesting but I don't have the time to chase down the gory details to set it up for this device

The NanoPi R1s H3 only has uSD card slot as storage ... it will have to live there with the other stuff.

I think the quickest solution would be to borrow stuff from something functional.