jock

@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.

­DISCLAIMER (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.

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).

Thank you!
 
This thread is to give stable and mature long-term range support to rk3318/rk3328 found in many tv boxes in Armbian project as Community Supported Configuration (CSC).
The current work is mainlined into Armbian project, but your mileage may vary; most recent developments live on my personal fork on github -> here <-
 
Important notes: is just a personal opinion, but apparently widely supported, that rk3318 chip is not an official rockchip part. They probably are scrap rk3328 parts which have not passed conformance tests but are sold anyway to tv boxes manufacturers. They don’t reach the same operating frequency of the rk3328, have much higher leakage currents (and thus higher temperatures) and often the boards they are installed on are low quality with low quality components, in fact a very very common issue is the eMMC failure due to bad parts and bad soldering. So said, I personally suggest not to buy any rk3318 tv box, but instead find a properly supported SBC (Single Board Computer) if you need a reliable product. In the unfortunate case you already have such product, this thread may help you have some fun with them.
 
What works:
    • Works on RK3318 and RK3328 TV boxes with DDR3 memories
    • Mainline u-boot
    • Mainline ATF provided as Trusted Execution Environment
    • All 4 cores are working
    • Ethernet
    • Serial UART (configured at stock 1.5Mbps)
    • Thermals and frequency scaling
    • OTG USB 2.0 port (also as boot device!)
    • EHCI/OHCI USB 2.0 ports and XHCI USB 3.0 ports
    • MMC subsystem (including , SD and sdio devices)
    • Hardware video acceleration (fully supported via RKMPP on legacy kernel, support via hantro and rkvdec kernel driver on mainline)
    • Various WIFI over SDIO are supported
    • Full acceleration on legacy kernel and mainline kernel
    • U-boot boot order priority: first the sdcard, then the USB OTG port and eventually the internal ; you can install u-boot (and the whole system) in the internal 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 clock pin on the PCB. The procedure is explained here for rk322x, but for rk3318/28 is the same.

In most of the rk3318/28 boards, shorting the clock pin is difficult or impossible because eMMC are BGA chips with no exposed pins. Pay double attention when burning something on the internal flash memory and always test first the image booting from the sdcard to be sure it works before burning anything in internal flash.
 
This is a list of posts where forum users have been able to spot the eMMC clock pin to trigger the maskrom mode:
H96 Max+ (board signature: RK3318_V1.4) by @Gausus X88 PRO 10 (board signature: X88_PRO_B) by @mathgaming Ninkbox N1 Max RK3318 by @enigmasphinx  
 
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;  
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/ Legacy kernel: If you need multimedia features, like OpenGL/OpenGL ES acceleration, hardware accelerated Kodi, ffmpeg and mpv you can take a look to this post  
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 /TVB/ boards and select "rk3318-box" from the list.
   
Prebuilt images:
Archived images - built by Armbian servers and GPG-signed: https://imola.armbian.com/dl/rk3318-box/archive/ Nightly stables - built from trunk by Armbian servers and GPG-signed: https://github.com/armbian/community Stables provided by me (unsigned): https://users.armbian.com/jock/rk3318/  
Multitool:
Multitool - A small but powerful image for RK3318/RK3328 TV Box maintenance. Download it from 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 rk3318-config to configure the board specific options Run armbian-config to configure timezone, locales and other personal options Congratulations, Armbian is now installed!  
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 , the box may not boot anymore forcing you to follow the unbrick section at the top of this post.
 
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 flash; 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 rk3318-config to configure the board specific options Run armbian-config to configure timezone, locales and other personal options, or also to transfer the SD Card installation to internal ; Congratulations, Armbian is running from SD Card!  
Tutorial - How to install Armbian on your TV Box (by @awawa) :
https://www.hyperhdr.eu/2022/01/tv-box-mania-i-part-x88-pro-10.html
A note about boot device order:
With Armbian also comes mainline U-boot. If you install Armbian, the bootloader will look for valid bootable images in this order:
External SD Card External USB Stick in OTG Port Internal  
The Multitool does not boot / How to burn image directly on eMMC:
 
Some boards have the sdcard attached to an auxiliary (called also sdmmc_ext or external) controller which is not the common one.
Forum findings declare that those boards are not able to boot from sdcard with stock firmware and they neither do in maskrom mode: the stock firmware always boots even if you put the multitool on sdcard.
 
In such case, burning images directly on eMMC is the only way to have a working Armbian installation.
You can follow these instructions by @fabiobassa to burn images directly on eMMC:
 
https://forum.armbian.com/topic/17597-csc-armbian-for-rk3318rk3328-tv-box-boards/?do=findComment&comment=130453
 
Notes and special hardware:
Script to change DDR memory frequency here Wireless chip AP2734, SP2734, HY2734C and similars: they are clones of AmPAK AP6334 which is combo wifi + bluetooth of broadcom BCM4334/B0 chips. You may need a special nvram file, instructions by @paradigman are here  
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 rk3318 into armbian would not have begun without his support! @hexdump for his precious support in early testing, ideas and suggestions
@MX10.AC2Nfor his patience in testing mxq-rk3328-d4 board support
All the rockhip64 maintainers at Armbian project who have done and do most of the work to support the platform
 
 

@Minoro Hamada Supposing you removed the sdcard from the slot, the only way to tell you what is happening is providing logs from the serial interface. You may have a broken/read only eMMC. Also you did not specify what image, what kernel, what board you have...

@Mr-TNTplease can you send some picture of board ,
 
there are 2 boards with problem first wherer the right LED-Config has to been set with ssh after flash per LAN , the secound has a close bootloader which need a diffirent OPTEE area wich need to be flash seperatly
 
overall normaly when sd-card boot work than  later it should also boot from that , yyou can also flash armbian direct to sdcard and also try to boot from sdcard maybe as short term solution

Hello @Vladimir Trondin, as @fabiobassa already pointed out, there is no driver for ssv6158. Doing some research, it seems that it may use the ssv6x5x driver, but it would require adaptation, plenty of time, plenty of patience and you would not be sure if it will finally work.
 
About the eMMC of your board, it would be handy to get the output of dmesg command, but in the meantime you could do some experimentation with the emmc parameters in rk322x-config withing this page:
 

 
In particular, try to enable emmc-pins and emmc-ddr-ph45 or emmc-ddr-ph180 or emmc-hs200 (these last three are alternative, only one should be enabled) and see if your emmc gets detected after a reboot.
 
Also your board r3229q is not listed within the led-conf options, but I see some similarities with r329q board (led-conf2) MXQPRO_V72 (led-conf6), so you may start trying with those ones, or stick with generic since your wifi is already detected despite being useless.
 

@Parth the soc is slow, it is one of the slowest socs around with a modest amount of memory on board , so don't expect stellar performance.
The image with debian bookworm is a minimal image: small and good for servers.
 
For all the other questions, you can consult the official armbian documentation  https://docs.armbian.com/ and related forums

Jock thank you for your work! Everything worked on my H96Max RK3318. The sequence was as follows:
1. switch to beta repository in armbian-config or by changing apt.armbian.com to beta.armbian.com in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/armbian.list
2. run apt update and upgrade at least the kernel, dtb and armbian-bsp-cli-rk3318 packages, then reboot, run armbian-config (Software->Hardware->and on  led-conf5)
3. apt install git make linux-headers-edge-rockchip64 -y
4. git clone https://github.com/jefflessard/tm16xx-display.git; cd tm16xx-display; ln -s /boot/System.map-`uname -r` /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build/System.map
5. make install
 
The clock is ticking, the indicators are working. After the Homeassistant docker.
 

It seems that your board is freezing after DDR initialization and before miniloader boot.
It could be an issue with the DRAM or an issue with flash memory, but since you said you swapped the sdcard and moved to eMMC, probably the problem may somewhere in the DRAM.
 
I'm more prone to suspect some power issue or interference issues though. I see from your dmesg that you have a faulty USB device attached: USB device could easily cause the board to misbehave, either by direct effect (faulty or shortcircuited USB device) or indirectly (interference coming from external equipment attached to the USB device).
 
I have seen once a faulty USB stick that was preventing a Raspberry Pi to boot at all; removing the stick allowed the board to boot fine.
 
 

Hello  @Jean-Francois Lessard, congratulations for the excellent driver!
I stumbled here because I started making myself an fd6551 driver , and just after I discovered you already published a fully working product, which is way more polished than mine.
 
Anyway, I did not have yet the chance to tm16xx driver, but will do soon and report here the result. I have a HK1 box with rk3318 and fd6551 chip on board.
 
 
 
 
 

In the meantime I integrated the driver into armbian for rockchip64 targets: https://github.com/armbian/build/pull/7338 , so it will be a bit easier to test it out-of-the box and it would also be easier for amlogic people to copy-paste the driver patch and integrate the device trees as well.
 
My tests on hk1 rk3318 tv box (board silkscreen YX_RK3318) worked like a charm and the display is now pleasantly showing up-to-date date and time
 

About the service and driver issues, you could post in the post of the author about the kernel module:
 
I'm glad you tested also the indivual leds and they work; I will integrate those into the RK3318_V1.4  device tree overlay

@MattWestB led-conf7 does not exist on rk3318 build, it is just up to led-conf5 I introduced very recently; your board should fit into the base device tree.
 
Anyway, if you'd like to test the new tm16xx driver (which include support for fd6551 and several other led driver chips) you'd need to switch to the armbian beta repository, but beware of the dragons ahead! So take a full backup first!
You can switch to beta repository in armbian-config or by changing apt.armbian.com to beta.armbian.com in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/armbian.list
 
Then run apt update and upgrade at least the kernel, dtb and armbian-bsp-cli-rk3318 packages, then reboot, run rk3318-config and (for your specific case) you should be able to test the fd6551 driver with led-conf5 (YX_RK3318 board)
Now that you are confirming me that RK3318_V1.4 also have a display panel and the fd6551, I can update your board device tree too. Notice that it should be handy to know if leds and segmentes are displaying correctly. You can make reference to the original driver https://github.com/jefflessard/tm16xx-display on how to configure and tweak the driver for your specific board. Everything which is there applies as-is.
 
The same applies for other people with X88 and YX_RK3318 boards: there the led-conf that applies to their board should be already working out-of-the box!
 
 

@Netraam31 well, first of all it would be useful to share the board name you got and the led driver chip you have. perhaps I already got the dts and so you don't need to extract it.
To extract it, the procedure is totally manual, I use a hex editor for that, so if you have no clue on how to do it never mind.

In the meantime I integrated the driver into armbian for rockchip64 targets: https://github.com/armbian/build/pull/7338 , so it will be a bit easier to test it out-of-the box and it would also be easier for amlogic people to copy-paste the driver patch and integrate the device trees as well.
 
My tests on hk1 rk3318 tv box (board silkscreen YX_RK3318) worked like a charm and the display is now pleasantly showing up-to-date date and time
 

In the meantime I integrated the driver into armbian for rockchip64 targets: https://github.com/armbian/build/pull/7338 , so it will be a bit easier to test it out-of-the box and it would also be easier for amlogic people to copy-paste the driver patch and integrate the device trees as well.
 
My tests on hk1 rk3318 tv box (board silkscreen YX_RK3318) worked like a charm and the display is now pleasantly showing up-to-date date and time
 

uhm no, as the last line it should have no effets; it may have an effect if you append to extraargs= line, or create such a line for that:
extraargs=video=HDMI...
 
here there is a comprehensive documentation: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/fb/modedb.rst

Hi
 
I've made a new kernel Auxiliary Display Driver for TM16XX and compatible LED controllers. This driver supports various LED controller chips, including TM16XX family, FD6XX family, PT6964, and HBS658. It provides support for both I2C and SPI interfaces.
 
I wanted it to manage the hardware on the kernel space while having an easy sysfs user space interface. It also aims to reduce the code to maintain by relaying on existing kernel features instead of recoding them. Plus, you can switch to hardware i2c/spi (instead of software gpio) depending on the pins used.
 
You can use "vfdconf-convert" to convert your existing vfd.conf to its device-tree version.  Or you can use the already converted vfd.conf of https://github.com/arthur-liberman/vfd-configurations that are listed in the device table.
 
You don't need to manually edit your device tree, the "make" command will apply the device tree source overlay to your dtb.
 
It comes with a service written as a simple bash script. So it's easily customizable without having to write custom C code.
 
Instructions and source code at https://github.com/jefflessard/tm16xx-display/
 
Could you please give it a try and report your feedback? 

Hello, I am working on an alternative fd6551 and clones led driver for our tv boxes front displays.
It is getting up in very good shape, but requires some tuning up; I would like to ask anyone who owns a box with a front led panel and is interested to report the board name, the display chip (common chips are fd6551, fd650, tm1650, etc...) and the original stock dts if possibile.
 
It would make things easier to support already existing boards.
 
Thank you!
 
edit: for source code and reference: https://github.com/paolosabatino/leds-fd6551
 

Hello, I am working on an alternative fd6551 and clones led driver for our tv boxes front displays.
It is getting up in very good shape, but requires some tuning up; I would like to ask anyone who owns a box with a front led panel and is interested to report the board name, the display chip (common chips are fd6551, fd650, tm1650, etc...) and the original stock dts if possibile.
 
It would make things easier to support already existing boards.
 
Thank you!
 
edit: for source code and reference: https://github.com/paolosabatino/leds-fd6551
 

You'd better ask directly to Radxa for that, they probably know better the specs of their boards.
I would take the power for disks from the PSU anyway if possible to avoid unnecessary stress to the board: I guess the SATA power pins on the board are there for those who wants to feed the board with 12V barrell connector, but if you got a fully-fledged ATX PSU, go with the classic power connection.