jock

please ignore my previous comment. THE EXPERIMENTAL IMAGE DID BOOTED FROM SD CARD! IT WORKED 

I have forgotten to erase the flash on the first time... After I erased, it booted from the SD Card.

I cannot thank you guys enough!!!! <3 <3 <3  
 

@Vinicius Guastala I agree with @fabiobassa, thanks for the very detailed post of your board and broad description of the behaviour.
I would suggest you to erase the internal flash and try to boot from sdcard with this armbian image. It is an "experimental" image with opensource Trust OS; many recent boards are having issues with proprietary trust os, possibly yours has similar issues, so you could give a shot to this. By the way, the serial log output would be indeed very handy if you have the chance to find the serial port.
 
Beware also that armbian (and multitool) use 115200bps baud rate for the serial, while proprietary software uses 1.5Mbps baud rate!

@Vinicius Guastala I agree with @fabiobassa, thanks for the very detailed post of your board and broad description of the behaviour.
I would suggest you to erase the internal flash and try to boot from sdcard with this armbian image. It is an "experimental" image with opensource Trust OS; many recent boards are having issues with proprietary trust os, possibly yours has similar issues, so you could give a shot to this. By the way, the serial log output would be indeed very handy if you have the chance to find the serial port.
 
Beware also that armbian (and multitool) use 115200bps baud rate for the serial, while proprietary software uses 1.5Mbps baud rate!

You should not advise to buy shit, they are cheaper because:
* they are made of scrap parts, that often break after very short usage (see the emmc in the rk3318 thread)
* they have no kind of warranty
* the power supply is a joke, made of cheap components and very lousy - switching power supplies are one of the thing the more they weight the better; confront with a quality 5V/2A power supply and see the difference
* the HDMI cable is crap quality, often not capable to transfer CEC or collects any kind of interference at 1080p/4K
* the case is a bit of plastic, with little to no design for heat dissipation - right now I have a rk322x board here withing its case that reaches 97°C while simply installing a package with apt...
* many sorts of limitations to keep them as cheap as possible: no sd card UHS mode, no real shutdown/suspend, USB ports have limited power: be prepared to have headaches if you try to attach something that requires just a tiny bit more power like an external hard drive.
* wifi is a lottery and clearly tells you the general quality: you can find freshly made boards with wifi chips discontinued years ago!
 
Most of all: they have absolutely no software support; if you are able to run armbian on your tv boxes it is because some people within armbian and other projects spent their time for the fun of making it.
Tv box makers don't care at all, they just need to sell their cheap shit to make some profit. Some (not all) SBC makers at least in some way provide support, but tv box makers are mostly parasitic and should not be endorsed.
 
Now that you stated that about 20 pcs of different tv boxes run armbian, may I also ask you what you did in change for that for armbian? Because tv box makers obviously did nothing for armbian, still keeping up the servers infrastructure and the general maintenance cost real money to real people, and who pays that?

Please read first page , its very very hard to brick the board normaly insert sd-card and flash another image and you good to go
 
please provide serial log if possible , else we cannot see where th problem occur

Closing this.  This isn't going anywhere good.  Both sides have made their points.

@jock Thank you for the opportunity.

Hello, you may want to edit the device tree and turn off the mmc@... node where the sdio wifi chip is connected. You may find it easily looking for supports-sdio property, then switch status property do disabled

You're welcome in supporting the armbian project if you want and if you can. 😉

UPDATE!
 
Hello everyone, I'm glad to give a fresh update.
 
After a couple of weeks and more or hard work, I finished the complete overhaul of the repository. It is now handled in a much tidier way. 
The result of this is a much easier support for new distributions as soon as they are published!
 
I have just updated the instructions, since the old repository is no longer active; I suggest you to remove the old repository from you apt sources and install the new repository as described in first page.
 
Packages for Noble Numbat are already available!
 
Enjoy!💪

It won't work, openvfd is another driver and wants things a different way.
Not to blame the author, but unfortunately openvfd is badly designed. tm16xx driver instead is very well designed, and is the way to go. 👌

Perhaps @Seth can give some advice.

It won't work, openvfd is another driver and wants things a different way.
Not to blame the author, but unfortunately openvfd is badly designed. tm16xx driver instead is very well designed, and is the way to go. 👌

DISCLAIMERS (PLEASE READ):
Everything you can find in this thread (binaries, texts, code snippets, etc...) are provided AS-IS and are not part of official Armbian project. For this reason not people from Armbian project nor myself are responsible for misuse or loss of functionality of hardware. THIS POST explains very well the troubles with TV Boxes and why they are not suitable for everyone Please don't ask about support or assistance in other non-community forums nor in the official Armbian github repository, instead post your questions in this thread, in the TV Boxes forum section (hardware related) or in the Peer-to-peer support section (general linux/software related).  
Following the recent thread on LibreElec forum about an unofficial image for rk3229 devices, I would like to make public the work made by me and @fabiobassa about bringing rk322x support to armbian.
The project is now in -> mainline Armbian <- development fork -> here <-
 
This first page and the last 3 or 4 pages of the thread are enough to get up to date with recent developments.
Many useful experiences are scattered through the thread, but the most important things are collected here in the first page, so please read it carefully!
 
Mainline kernel is fully supported and will receive most support in the future. Legacy kernel 4.4 is deprecated, but is kept around only for special purposes.
 
What works:
Should boot and work flawlessy on all boards with RK3228a, RK3228b and RK3229, with either DDR2 and DDR3 memories. Mainline u-boot Proprietary OPTEE provided as Trusted Execution Environment (needed for DRAM frequency scaling) All 4 cores are working Ethernet Serial UART (configured at 115200 bps, not 1.5Mbps!) Thermals, CPU and DRAM frequency scaling OTG USB 2.0 port (also as boot device!) EHCI/OHCI USB 2.0 ports MMC subsystem (including eMMC, SD and sdio devices) Hardware video acceleration NAND is available only on legacy kernel. To fully boot from NAND, use the Multitool and its steP-nand installation (instructions are below) Various WIFI over SDIO are supported (SSV6051P, SSV6256P, ESP8089, Realtek chips, etc...), ssv6256p driver is available only on legacy kernel Full GPU acceleration U-boot boot order priority: first the sdcard, then the USB OTG port and eventually the internal eMMC; you can install u-boot (and the whole system) in the internal eMMC and u-boot will always check for images on external sdcard/USB first.  
Unbrick:
Technically, rockchip devices cannot be bricked. If the internal flash does not contain a bootable system, they will always boot from the sdcard. If, for a reason, the bootable system on the internal flash is corrupted or is unable to boot correctly, you can always force the maskrom mode shorting the eMMC clock pin on the PCB. Here there is the procedure, but you can also google around if you get stuck on a faulty bootloader, the technique is pretty simple and requires a simple screwdriver.
 
There are however some unfortunate cases (expecially newer boards) where shorting the eMMC clock pin is difficult or impossibile, like eMMC or eMCP BGA chips with no exposed pins. In those cases pay double attention when burning something on the internal eMMC/eMCP and always test first the image from the sdcard to be sure it works before burning anything on eMMC/eMCP.
 
Some useful links with pins, pads or procedures for some boards:
Generic procedure for boards with non-BGA eMMC MXQPRO_V71 - eMCP H20 - eMCP ZQ01 - eMCP  
NAND vs eMMC vs eMCP difference:
RK3228 and RK3229 tv boxes comes with three different flash memory chips: eMMC, NAND and eMCP.
It does not depend upon the market name of the tv box and neither the internal board; manufacturers put whatever they find cheaper when they buy the components.
 
NAND chip is just the non-volatile memory eMMC chip contains both the non-volatile memory plus a controller. eMCP chip contains the non-volatile memory, a controller for the non-volatile memory (like eMMC), but also contains a bank of DDR SDRAM memory on the same physical chip.  
The difference is very important, because eMMC and eMCP are far easier to support at various levels: the controller deals with the physical characteristics of the non-volatile memory, so the software has no to deal with.
NAND chips instead are harder to support, because the software is required to deal with the physical characteristics and non-standard things that depends upon the NAND manufacturer.
 
If you have a NAND chips you're unlucky because mainline kernel currently cannot access it, but also because you need special care and instructions explained later.
 
You can discover if you have a NAND, eMMC or eMCP chip looking on the board are reading the signature on the flash memory chip.
The Multitool (see later) also can detect which chip you have onboard: the program will warn you at startup if you have a NAND chip.
 
NAND bootloader upgrade:
IMPORTANT: don't do this is you have an eMMC or eMCP; skip this paragraph if you are unsure too!
For very expert people who are having issues when (re)booting images, there is the chance to upgrade the bootloader on NAND.
The NAND bootloader is nothing else than a regular idbloader (see official rockchip documentation) but contains some bits to correctly access the data on your flash memory.
Upgrading requires to erase the existing flash content, in the worst case will require you to follow the Unbrick procedure above or restore an older but more compatible bootloader.
If you are not mentally ready to overcome possible further issues, don't do this!
 
The detailed instructions and the binaries are available at this post
 
Multimedia:
Mainline kernel: 3D acceleration is provided by Lima driver and is already enabled. Hardware video decoding: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/19258-testing-hardware-video-decoding-rockchip-allwinner/ Deprecated legacy kernel: multimedia features, like OpenGL/OpenGL ES acceleration, hardware accelerated Kodi, ffmpeg and mpv you can take a look to this post An effective tutorial from @Hai Nguyen on how to configure a box as a hi-quality music player using an USB audio card, and controlling it via remote control is available in this post  
Brief explanation about kernel naming:
current kernel is the mainline LTS kernel version, most maintained and tested. This is the suggested version for production devices. If you don't know what to pick, pick this. legacy kernel (version 4.4) is provided by manufacturer; it is deprecated, unmaintained and not suggested. edge kernel is the development mainline kernel version, with experimental features and drivers; usually stable but perhaps suitable for production devices.  
You can switch from one kernel flavour to another using armbian-config or manually via apt.
 
Installation (via SD card):
Building:
You can build your own image follow the common steps to build armbian for other tv boxes devices: when you are in the moment to choose the target board, switch to CSC/TVB/EOL boards and select "rk322x-box" from the list.
 
Download prebuilt images from the following links:
Archive builds (GPG-signed) - https://imola.armbian.com/dl/rk322x-box/archive/ SUGGESTED - Nightly built from trunk each week by Armbian servers (GPG-signed) - https://github.com/armbian/community Old images provided by me (unsigned and outdated) - https://users.armbian.com/jock/rk322x/armbian/stable  
Archived/older images:
https://armbian.hosthatch.com/archive/rk322x-box/archive/
 
Multitool:
The Multitool is a small but powerful tool to do quick backup/restore of internal flash, but also burn images and general system rescue and maintenance via terminal or SSH.
Compressed images will be uncompressed on fly.
Multitool - A small but powerful image for RK322x TV Box maintenance (instructions to access via network here)  
Quick installation instructions on eMMC:
Build or download your preferred Armbian image and a copy of the Multitool; Burn the Multitool on an SD card; once done, place the Armbian image in images folder of the SD card NTFS partition; Plug the SD card in the TV box and plug in the power cord. After some seconds the blue led starts blinking and the Multitool appears; OPTIONAL: you can do a backup of the existing firmware with "Backup flash" menu option; Choose "Burn image to flash" from the menu, then select the destination device (usually mmcblk2) and the image to burn; Wait for the process to complete, then choose "Shutdown" from main menu; Unplug the power cord and the SD card, then replug the power cord; Wait for 10 seconds, then the led should start blinking and HDMI will turn on. The first time the boot process will take a couple of minutes or more because the filesystem is going to be resized, so be patient and wait for the login prompt. On first boot you will be asked for entering a password for root user of your choice and the name and password for a regular user Run sudo rk322x-config and select your board characteristics to enable leds, wifi chips, high-speed eMMC, etc... Run sudo armbian-config to configure timezone, locales and other personal options Congratulations, Armbian is now installed and configured!  
Despite the procedure above is simple and reliable, I always recommend to first test that your device boots Armbian images from SD Card.
Due to the really large hardware variety, there is the rare chance that the images proposed here may not boot. If a bad image is burned in eMMC, the box may not boot anymore forcing you to follow the unbrick section at the top of this post.
 
Quick installation instructions on NAND:
Build or download your preferred Armbian image and a copy of the Multitool; Burn the Multitool on an SD card; once done, place the Armbian legacy kernel image in images folder of the SD card NTFS partition; Plug the SD card in the TV box and plug in the power cord. After some seconds the blue led starts blinking and the Multitool appears; OPTIONAL: you can do a backup of the existing firmware with "Backup flash" menu option; Choose "Burn Armbian image via steP-nand" from the menu, then select the destination device (usually rknand0) and the image to burn; Wait for the process to complete, then choose "Shutdown" from main menu; Unplug the power cord and the SD card, then replug the power cord; Wait for 10 seconds, then the led should start blinking and HDMI will turn on. The first time the boot process will take a couple of minutes or more because the filesystem is going to be resized, so be patient and wait for the login prompt. On first boot you will be asked for entering a password for root user of your choice and the name and password for a regular user Run sudo rk322x-config and select your board characteristics to enable leds, wifi chips, etc... Run armbian-config to configure timezone, locales and other personal options Congratulations, Armbian is now installed!  
Alternative: you can install the bootloader in NAND and let it boot from SD Card or USB:
Download a copy of the Multitool and burn it on an SD card; Plug the SD card in the TV box and plug in the power cord. After some seconds the blue led starts blinking and the Multitool appears; RECOMMENDED: make a backup of the existing firmware with "Backup flash" menu option; Choose "Install Jump Start for Armbian" menu option: the Jump Start uses the internal NAND to boot from external SD Card or external USB Stick; Follow the general instructions to boot from SD Card below, skip the first erase eMMC step.  
Quick installation instructions to boot from SD Card:
If you are already running Armbian from eMMC, skip to the next step. Instead if you are running the original firmware you need to first erase the internal eMMC; to do so download the Multitool, burn it on an SD Card, plug the SD Card and power the TV Box. Use "Backup flash" if you want to do a backup of the existing firmware, then choose "Erase flash" menu option. Build or download your preferred Armbian image; Uncompress and burn the Armbian image on the SD Card; Plug the SD Card in the TV Box and power it on; Wait for 10 seconds, then the led should start blinking and HDMI will turn on. The first time the boot process will take a couple of minutes or more because the filesystem is going to be resized, so be patient and wait for the login prompt; On first boot you will be asked for entering a password for root user of your choice and the name and password for a regular user Run sudo rk322x-config and select your board characteristics to enable leds, wifi chips, high-speed eMMC or NAND, etc... Run armbian-config to configure timezone, locales and other personal options, or also to transfer the SD Card installation to internal eMMC; Congratulations, Armbian is running from SD Card!  
A note about boot device order:
With Armbian also comes mainline U-boot. If you install Armbian or just the bootloader in the eMMC or the Jump Start on internal NAND, the bootloader will look for valid bootable images in this order:
External SD Card External USB Stick in OTG Port Internal eMMC  
Installation (without SD card, board with eMMC)
If you have no sd card slot and your board has an eMMC, you can burn the armbian image directly on the internal eMMC using rkdeveloptool and a male-to-male USB cable:
 
Download your preferred Armbian image from Armbian download page and decompress it. Download the rk322x bootloader: rk322x_loader_v1.10.238_256.bin Download a copy of rkdeveloptool: a compiled binary is available in the official rockchip-linux rkbin github repository. Unplug the power cord from the tv box Plug an end of an USB Male-to-male cable into the OTG port (normally it is the lone USB port on the same side of the Ethernet, HDMI, analog AV connectors) while pressing the reset microbutton with a toothpick. You can find the reset microbutton in a hole in the back of the box, but sometimes it is hidden into the AV analog jack Plug the other end of the USB Male-to-male cable into an USB port of your computer If everything went well, run lsusb: you should see a device with ID 2207:320b Run sudo rkdeveloptool rd 3 (if this fails don't worry and proceed to next step) Run sudo rkdeveloptool db rk322x_loader_v1.10.238_256.bin Run sudo rkdeveloptool wl 0x0 image.img (change image.img this with the real Armbian image filename) Unplug the power cord Done!  
Installation (without SD card, board with NAND)
If you are in the unfortunate case you can't use an SD card for installation and your board has a NAND chip, you still have an option to use the quick Multitool installation steps via USB.
 
Obtain a copy of rkdeveloptool: a compiled binary is available in the official rockchip-linux rkbin github repository. Unplug the power cord from the tv box Plug an end of an USB Male-to-male cable into the OTG port (normally it is the lone USB port on the same side of the Ethernet, HDMI, analog AV connectors) while pressing the reset microbutton with a toothpick. You can find the reset microbutton in a hole in the back of the box, but sometimes it is hidden into the AV analog jack Plug the other end of the USB Male-to-male cable into an USB port of your computer If everyting went well, using lsusb you should see a device with ID 2207:320b Run sudo rkdeveloptool wl 0x4000 u-boot-main.img (download u-boot-main.img.xz , don't forget to decompress it!) Unplug the power cord  
Now you can follow the instructions on how to install on eMMC/NAND via SD card, just use instead an USB stick to do all the operations and plug it into the USB OTG port. Once you reboot, USB OTG port will be used as a boot device.
 
NOTE: NAND users without SD slot may be unhappy to know that it will be difficult to do extra maintenance with Multitool in case something breaks in the installed Armbian system: installing u-boot-main.img makes the installed system unbootable because it is missing the NAND driver.
 
 
Alternative backup, restore and erase flash for EXPERTS:
These backup, restore and erase flash procedures are for experts only. They are kept here mostly for reference, since the Multitool is perfectly able to do same from a very comfy interface and is the suggested way to do maintenance.
 
Backup:
Obtain a copy of rkdeveloptool: a compiled binary is available in the official rockchip-linux rkbin github repository. If you prefer, you can compile it yourself from the sources available at official rockchip repository Unplug the power cord from the tv box Plug an end of an USB Male-to-male cable into the OTG port (normally it is the lone USB port on the same side of the Ethernet, HDMI, analog AV connectors) while pressing the reset microbutton with a toothpick. You can find the reset microbutton in a hole in the back of the box, but sometimes it is hidden into the AV analog jack Plug the other end of the USB Male-to-male cable into an USB port of your computer If everyting went well, using lsusb you should see a device with ID 2207:320b change directory and move into rkbin/tools directory, run ./rkdeveloptool rfi then take note of the FLASH SIZE megabytes (my eMMC is 8Gb, rkdeveloptool reports 7393 megabytes) run ./rkdeveloptool rl 0x0 $((FLASH_SIZE * 2048)) backup.data (change FLASH_SIZE with the value you obtained the step before) once done, the internal eMMC is backed up to backup.data file  
Restore: first we have to restore the original bootloader, then restore the original firmware.
Running rkdeveloptool with these switches will accomplish both the jobs:
./rkdeveloptool db rk322x_loader_v1.10.238_256.bin Downloading bootloader succeeded. ./rkdeveloptool ul rk322x_loader_v1.10.238_256.bin Upgrading loader succeeded. ./rkdeveloptool wl 0x0 backup.data Write LBA from file (100%) Download here:
 
Erase the flash memory: clearing the internal eMMC/NAND memory makes the SoC look for external SD Card as first boot option.
If there isn't any suitable SD Card, the SoC enters maskrom mode, which can then be used for full eMMC/NAND access using rkdeveloptool. This is perfectly fine if your box has an eMMC flash memory.
NOTE: In case you have a NAND flash memory this option is however discouraged. The original bootloader contains some special parameters to correctly access the data. Clearing the flash memory will probably garbage the NAND data and restoring the bootloader may require some special instructions.
 
Obtain a copy of rkdeveloptool: a compiled binary is available in the official rockchip-linux rkbin github repository. If you prefer, you can compile it yourself from the sources available at official rockchip repository Unplug the power cord from the board Plug an end of an USB Male-to-male cable into the OTG port (normally it is the lone USB port on the same side of the Ethernet, HDMI, analog AV connectors) while pressing the reset microbutton with a toothpick. You can find the reset microbutton in a hole in the back of the box, but sometimes it is hidden into the AV analog jack Plug the other end of the USB Male-to-male cable into an USB port of your computer If everyting went well, using lsusb you should see a device with ID 2207:320b run ./rkdeveloptool ef and wait a few seconds once done, the internal eMMC is erased and the device will boot from the sdcard from now on  
Partecipation and debugging:
If you want to partecipate or need help debugging issues, do not hesitate to share your experience with the installation procedure of the boxes.
In case of issues and missed support, provide as many as possible of these things is very useful to try and bring support for an unsupported board:
 
some photos of both sides of the board. Details of the eMMC, DDR and Wifi chips are very useful! upload the device tree binary (dtb) of your device. We can understand a lot of things of the hardware from that small piece of data; and alternative is a link to the original firmware (you can do a full backup with the Multitool); dmesg and other logs (use armbianmonitor -u that automatically collects and uploads the logs online) attach a serial converter to the device and provide the output of the serial port;  
Critics, suggestions and contributions are welcome!
 
Credits:
@fabiobassa for his ideas, inspiration, great generosity in giving the boards for development and testing. The project of bringing rk322x into armbian would not have begun without his support! Justin Swartz, for his work and research to bring mainline linux on rk3229 (repository here) @knaerzche for his great contribution to libreelec support and mainline patches @Alex83 for his patience in testing the NAND bootloader upgrade procedure on his board @Jason Duhamell for his generous donation that allowed researching eMCP boards and esp8089 wifi chip

As stated in the post you referred to, technically Rockchip devices cannot be bricked.

Since you flashed a wrong image, it probably not right to say internal flash doesn't contain bootable system. Rather that system is wrong and cannot compete boot hanging somewhere, eg ddr init.

So I guess you have to go by the mask room path to recover (flash correct image or erase internal flash to enable SD card boot, which might be easier to experiment with).

Not to hijack the thread, but there is a much better alternative driver rather than OpenVFD, you can take a look here

Hi @gnusmag45, I'm sorry you are having issues with your board. I hope the multitool still boots after you erased the flash
Unfortunately your board has an eMCP, which is a chip that contains both the eMMC and the DDR memory. I never had the chance to test a board with such chip by myself, so it is totally guesswork.
 
The multitool has a dtb which is usually very compatible because it does not use any "advanced" features of the board, and also uses lower operating frequencies to maximize compatibility at the expense of performance. Something does not work for your board although.
 
I edited the device tree of the multitool to provide more current strength to the eMMC pins and also some other configuration that may be of some benefical effect for your board.
 
This is the dtb: rk322x-box-emcp.dtb.
Put it in the root directory of the multitool, then edit the the file extlinux/extlinux.conf and change the existing rk322x-box.dtb with this rk322x-box-emcp.dtb.
Save the conf file and try again to boot the multitool. Check if after some reboots the flash memory is detected consistently, maybe make a backup to "stress" it and see if the backup is completed correctly, but don't install any armbian image yet.
 
I suggest you to first try to burn an Armbian image directly on the sdcard and boot armbian from sdcard. This may let you upload a full set of logs (via armbianmonitor -u) to the internet and let us inspect them before proceeding to install the image on the eMMC.
Also check if the eMMC is correctly detected within Armbian after some reboots: it is important that the kernel detects it otherwise even if you install Armbian on eMMC it won't boot anyway.

Hi,
I got my recording from Headphone Mic fixed.
 
Here is what I make work for me:
a)
have pinctrl-0..2 set in the i2s0
b)
make sure the reg=0x11 for the i2c1-codec
c)
add the Mic Bias.
 
Tested with 6.12.12 which got a fix es8316 codec.
 
&i2s0 { status = "okay"; pinctrl-names = "mclk", "bclk_on", "bclk_off"; pinctrl-0 = <&i2s_8ch_mclk>; pinctrl-1 = <&i2s0_8ch_bus>; pinctrl-2 = <&i2s0_8ch_bus_bclk_off>; resets = <&cru SRST_I2S0_8CH>, <&cru SRST_H_I2S0_8CH>; reset-names = "reset-m", "reset-h"; rockchip,playback-channels = <2>; rockchip,capture-channels = <2>; #sound-dai-cells = <0>; }; &i2c1 { status = "okay"; i2c-scl-rising-time-ns = <300>; i2c-scl-falling-time-ns = <15>; clock-frequency = <200000>; es8316c_codec: audio-codec@11 { compatible = "everest,es8316"; reg = <0x11>; #sound-dai-cells = <0>; clocks = <&cru SCLK_I2S_8CH_OUT>; clock-names = "mclk"; status = "okay"; }; }; es8316c_card: es8316c-card { compatible = "simple-audio-card"; pinctrl-names = "default"; pinctrl-0 = <&hp_det>; simple-audio-card,format = "i2s"; simple-audio-card,name = "rockchip-es8316c"; simple-audio-card,mclk-fs = <256>; simple-audio-card,hp-det-gpio = <&gpio4 RK_PD4 GPIO_ACTIVE_HIGH>; simple-audio-card,widgets = "Microphone", "Mic Jack", "Headphone", "Headphones"; simple-audio-card,routing = "Mic Jack", "Mic Bias", "MIC1", "Mic Jack", "Headphones", "HPOL", "Headphones", "HPOR"; simple-audio-card,cpu { sound-dai = <&i2s0>; }; simple-audio-card,codec { sound-dai = <&es8316c_codec>; }; };  

hi @jock
 
I agree that changing the SMD 0201 parts is a real challenge - for this reason I used 0402's soldered them direct to the level shifter and run a tiny wire to the 5V source.
I'm thinking that an SoC side strong pull-up would do the trick eventually and remove R90611/12 entirely. But I haven't test this - but will do that with the next PCB I get on my table.
 
The Level-shifter is a Texas Instruments TX0102DCU with and with OE is high the internal 10K pull ups are enabled.  That might me not enough for the external monitor so the 6.8k has been applied.
Same for the SoC side, 10K only , so I support the internal SDA/SCL lines with the light diving strength of 2ma.
Datasheet:
8.3.5 Pullup or Pulldown Resistors on I/O Lines Each A-port I/O has an internal 10-kΩ pullup resistor to VCCA, and each B-port I/O has an internal 10-kΩ pullup resistor to VCCB. If a smaller value of pullup resistor is required, an external resistor must be added from the I/O to VCCA or VCCB (in parallel with the internal 10-kΩ resistors). Adding lower value pull-up resistors will effect VOL levels, however. The internal pull-ups of the TXS0102 are disabled when the OE pin is low.  
I would say it doesn't hurt to add the changes to the DTS for the i2c7_xfer pinctrl. But without fixing the Pull-up value on the 5V it will not improve anything.
 
Yes it is tiny tiny.

@Obmor
here it is a module for kernel 6.6.67 and rtl8189es. Put this module in /lib/modules/6.6.41-current-rockchip/kernel/drivers/net/wireless directory, then run sudo depmod -a and reboot.
If everything went ok, you should get 8189es driver loaded after boot; perhaps you may need a firmware to put somewhere in /lib/firmware. In case, the driver should complain about in dmesg that something is missing or wrong, and that may serve as hint to proceed further.
 
 
8189es.ko.gz

@Obmor
here it is a module for kernel 6.6.67 and rtl8189es. Put this module in /lib/modules/6.6.41-current-rockchip/kernel/drivers/net/wireless directory, then run sudo depmod -a and reboot.
If everything went ok, you should get 8189es driver loaded after boot; perhaps you may need a firmware to put somewhere in /lib/firmware. In case, the driver should complain about in dmesg that something is missing or wrong, and that may serve as hint to proceed further.
 
 
8189es.ko.gz

Everything is here: https://github.com/armbian/build/

@zzc @galenzhao @Obmor tvboxes have a huge amount of wireless chip on board and supporting all of them is very difficult and time consuming taks which I can't afford anymore; the APxxxx series is usually supported because they are basically broadcom chips and the driver is there, but their functionality also depends upon the board wiring, the firmware, the nvram, etc... as you see there are several pieces in the puzzle and it is not easy to fit them without some effort.
 
The best advice I could give you if you need basic wireless connectivity, is to buy a mediatek-based (mt7601) USB dongle; the next best advice is to buy SBCs with standard or premium support (not CSC) by armbian

@hmmm the board boots properly if the leds are blinking, but you need to run rk322x-config via SSH and select the proper led-config for R29 boards: these boards are known to turn off HDMI unless a specific GPIO is switched on.

You already have best possible desktop on this hardware. Simple and fast XFCE. Changing desktop environment won't make any vivid difference. 
https://docs.armbian.com/#key-advantages
 
XUbuntu is more or less identical to Armbian Ubuntu with XFCE subtracted for some Canonical proprietary stuff.

LXDE vs. XFCE ... not worth the troubles maintaining yet another desktop. Difference is too small. We only keep XFCE, Gnome, Cinnamon and KDE Neon in good shape. The rest waits for enthusiast https://github.com/armbian/build/tree/main/config/desktop and you can always start with a minimal CLI image and build on top any desktop you want.