fabiobassa

Sorry for the late reply, it looks like I'm allowed only one post per day due to bot/spam prevention measures.

The board is marked as MXQ-HX-V2.0 and has a sv6256p wifi chip which means no wi-fi for me (not that I really needed it, but still...)
 
Here's a picture:
 

 
I can clearly see the serial port pads marked between the USB and SPDIF connector so I should be fine if anything goes pear shaped.

Still, I'd feel more comfortable knowing if there's been any test done on this board.
I don't need video output or anything else as this is going to be the DNS server of my local network (Pi-Hole, DNSCrypt and all that jazz), but I'd really appreciate not having to sacrifice an SD to hold the rootfs and, more importantly, the ethernet MUST work.

@jock at the end I was impatient and I cleared the emmc and tried to restore the backup... Everything went well, Android has been restored successfully! I think I was lucky because the backup is 2.5gb, under the fat32 limit, but after decompression it is as big as the all emmc (16gb). The problem is that I cannot extract anything from it, since the decompressed file is not an archive according 7zip, it's just a file without any extension. After cleared the emmc again, Linux from sd booted successfully and also after flashing in the emmc. wifi, hdmi works (only audio doesn't but I don't need that). I'm a bit disappointed by the performance, xfce doesn't run that fast, but it's ok since I need just to install klipper for my 3d printer and I hope it's enough for this purpose. Thank you for all the support, you have been precious!
 
 
 
 

@donluca

yes this board is NOW supported and you will have great satisfaction in using it for your purposes.

And yes ethernet will work out of the box ( and if I am not wrong, wifi too but about this let's wait @jock suggestion )

@donluca

yes this board is NOW supported and you will have great satisfaction in using it for your purposes.

And yes ethernet will work out of the box ( and if I am not wrong, wifi too but about this let's wait @jock suggestion )

@Henn
This forum Is about armbian and Linux, not android 
Go find Android forum please
 
 
 
 

Fixed multicast too: https://github.com/HandyMenny/ssv6xxx/commit/5ff256e8c84665253379e43e2608f7debef2d1b4

@handymenny Cool, thanks! Maybe the broadcast decrypt can be fixed adding a proper -DUSE_MAC80211_DECRYPT_BROADCAST directive in the kernel module makefile nearby the other conditionals that relate to hardware/software encryption and decryption, without hardcoding the conditional.
 
Anyway thanks, do what you prefer and if you open a pull request I will accept and rebuild the armbian patches to fix the problem

@jock Done. I wonder if it's a hw/firmware issue or it's the driver itself the cause. But so many flags linked to SW decryption, makes me think that even the authors didn't trust the HW capabilities...

board version? sometimes those 4 pads do not work for me, what i sometimes do when i'm feeling lazy is i try connecting the ground on the board first then i try connecting the rx pin of usb serial to different pads of the board while booting to find its tx pin. you only need two pins to capture serial debug logs. i found mine at the back of the board. i think i posted the pics in this post at page 26. you get very low chances of bricking your board if you do it this way. other method i use is a low cost stm32 o-scope and a multitester which a is way safer method in my opinion.

Do you know if it is sufficient to install packaged falkon, qt and gstream packages on Ubuntu Jammy/Debian bullseye to get thing working or there is the need to compile something by hand?
I ask because it would be nice to have some out-of-the-box solution to say that the path is traced and things are getting squared.
 
Thanks!

GPU is only doing 3D graphics.
Media applications are accelerated by VPU, which is a totally different part of the chip. I think gstreamer is already quite capable of using the v4l2 interface to profit of media acceleration drivers already in mainline kernel (namely hantro and rkvdec for rk3318, both accelerating h.264, vp8, vp9 and hevc, but some codecs still have partial support on rockchip64 armbian branch).
Ffmpeg needs to be built with patches and in a custom way because kernel interface for codecs has been made "stable" very recently (I guess in kernel 5.19).
Also mpv has the capability to use hardware video decoding via v4l2, but still need a custom build because it uses in turn ffmpeg. There is this old thread where I provided a custom build binary of mpv, but it was for ubuntu hirsute and debian bullseye; surely it would require some adaptations and tinker if you want to run on newer distros.
 
Accelarerating youtube in a browser is a whole different story. I don't know what is the current status (maybe @usual user has some clues?), but surely it is much more challenging than standalone video playing.
 

@Max Sterg
 
May I ask if you have any experience with Linux in general ?
Because if you cannot choose by yourself an image with xfce desktop , that Is one of the severals desktop laying around, I guess you Will experiment many other problems in this experience with armbian and you Will come back here to ask even obvious things 

@Max Sterg
 
May I ask if you have any experience with Linux in general ?
Because if you cannot choose by yourself an image with xfce desktop , that Is one of the severals desktop laying around, I guess you Will experiment many other problems in this experience with armbian and you Will come back here to ask even obvious things 

hello again. @jocki'll be taking pics of both boards tonight and extracting the dtb's. some vendors do give clues as to what wifi chip is placed on the board. my squared h96 max v1.4 board works fine on 2.4GHz and 5GHz and works on default distro of the 5.15 kernel build including hdmi, hdmi does not work on the 5.19 kernel though. my rounded one which i will disassemble seems to have the same board but has no 8 segment lcd. it works almost the same as the squared one with the exception of the nvram that needs replacing.
edit:
i seem to have identical boards for the rounded one and the square one, both are rk3318 v1.4 dated 2020/06/29.
differences are square and rounded respectively.
wifi chip: fx8934, sp2734c
crystal beside wifi chip: none, 37.4MHz
inductor beside wifi chip: none, 4R7
fd6551 and 8 segment: yes, no
 
square pics:https://photos.app.goo.gl/U5LEJrav5FZMh6LEA
 
rounded pics:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/dUBqpmVfWpshq4PV9
 
i think @fabiobassa can chime in on the hardware part because it seems we can put in an fd6551 and an 8 segment on the rounded h96 max box easily and make openvfd work on it too. i also think we can transplant a similar but better wifi chip on it if ever we have those on hand.

Hello @rafaeldavid, thanks a lot, you're very kind!
 
About the r29 board, yes as you noticed there are issues with that board.
The HDMI problem is very well known and it is quite obscure, maybe some gpio has to be set to the right state but I wasn't able to find useful hints inspecting the device tree.
The stability issues are very new to me, but looking at the board photos I see a bit of different design for the power section than usual boards. These differences may have some stability implications, but I'm just guessing.
Another potential problem can be related with the Trust OS binary: during early development we noticed that the wront Trust binary could freeze the device after a predefined amount of time because it was triggering a sort of "sleep" mode, but the Trust (proprietary) binary now is working pretty fine for the vast majority of boards, so it would be quite strange that this is the offender.
 
As you read in the other posts, this R29 board seems to be one of the bad ones and unfortunately I have no sample to study, so I'm very open to receive one sample.
Recently I received a couple of rk322x boards from @Jason Duhamell and those were terribly useful to fix eMCP issues and support esp8089 wifi; having such R29 board on my desk to work with obviosuly increases a lot the chances to understand and fix those issues.
 
edit: in the past we have encountered R29_MXQ boards, those may be a bit different than yours but the HDMI problem looks like is the same. You may try to apply led-conf7 from rk322x-config to see if stability problems goes away, but I'm afraid it won't really chance anything.

i got myself a new box, still an h96 max, same as what @paradigman has. it also has a 2734c wifi chip, his posted nvram from the manufacturer works. hdmi on edge kernel still doesn't work on my monitor/tv but i can access it via ssh after install so everything is good. thanks again @jock, @fabiobassa and @paradigmanfor the awesome community support.

@DavidJS

yes. it does

Moved posts to proper forum (Allwinner TV Boxes from Rockchip TV Boxes)

Hi Pals,
 
This is my first post here. My approach on armbian has been a little bit complicated but always read this thread.

I have a tv box with an r3228a on it. I'm not totally sure because I didn't perform an test using hexdump as described before, but is one of things I have to do.

In the next posts I'm going to tell you what test I've done and which others I'm failing, but this first one is mainly to thanks you for all this information and hard work you put freely to public use.

Just trying to run armbian on this box I've learnt a lot! There are many hours of fun and mainly learning (I'm a terrible linux user) to try to give a new use to this little box.


see you! Thanks again!!
 

ethernet is always working in armbian, it is embedded in the soc, so if it does not work it means that armbian did not boot.
Also the led should be blinking if the kernel is alive, but I see no leds on your board, am I right?

You may try one of the newer images built from trunk above, maybe you got an image with the invalid voltages I published by error some weeks ago.
 
The definitive way is to to debug this is using a USB-to-TTL serial adapter connected to the serial pads of the board, which are sometimes under the heatsink (but just sometimes...), or maybe are those pads in the lower right corner, near the IR receiver.

Announce:
 
Hello, I want to announce that Community Supported Configuration (CSC) board images are now built again by Armbian servers on a weekly basis!
This means that you can now download images for CSC boards (including rk3318-box) browsing from https://github.com/armbian/community
 
Images are built from trunk, GPG-signed and SHA-sum is provided.
 
I also removed the manual instructions for upgrades: Armbian 22.08 release is imminent and from that time on it will be sufficient to use apt to get kernel upgrades too! Thanks for your patience!
 
Feel free to donate if you find this useful and wish to offer support to the Armbian developers and maintainers.
 
Enjoy!

@fabiobassa
This one https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003671383647.html

I have uploaded the OpenWRT-22.03-rc6 image for rk322x on my google drive here's the link:
 
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MxEDd1COSNiQDrocZLgSscracWDXdVqT/view?usp=sharing


NOTES/INSTRUCTIONS:

The .dtb for booting is the GENERIC rk3229 from LibreELEC made by @ilmich.
Other .dtb files are in the FIRST PARTITION (fat32/boot) of the image. Copy & overwrite the one you prefer to rk322x-box.dtb. i.e.:

Once the box has booted, enter the console via an attached keyboard and:

mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt
cp /mnt/<name of the dtb you prefer>.dtb /mnt/rk322x-box.dtb
umount /mnt
reboot

The .dtb files are fom LIbreELEC 10 - check this post

https://forum.libreelec.tv/thread/25236-unofficial-rk3228-rk3229-libreelec-10-x-builds/

on "supported devices" for names/clock etc.

 ON FIRST BOOT the eth0 (br-lan) interface has default IP to 192.168.1.1

SOMETIMES ON FIRST BOOT - AND ONLY FIRST ONE - eth0 gets "stuck" and does not respond: to make it work just enter the console with an attached keyboard and do a

ping 192.168.1.xxx

with xxx as a "live" host on your network: after a couple of pings the interface responds. It happened to me a couple of times, just on FIRST BOOT. Once you configure the interface in OpenWRT everything is ok.

Point your browser to 192.168.1.1, configure OpenWRT.

P.S. obviously you have to configure br-lan with an appropriate gateway/dns to install/upgrade packages.

Check OpenWRT docs if in doubt.

WIFI is disabled by default: to enable it, do :

echo <name of wifi module> > /etc/modules.d/<name of wifi module>

example:

echo ssv6051 > /etc/modules.d/ssv6051

(do not enable ssv6051: for some reason it slows down everything)


Enjoy.
 

Since I'm not really a developer but a Linux System Administrator with hacky tendencies, that's what I usually do to use different Linux-es on these rk322x boxes:

- I use MultiTool to burn a .. Multitool image on the internal flash of the box, so I get a fat32 uboot/extlinux partition that boots

- I boot from Multitool again, drop to a shell and repartition the internal flash w fdisk, then I modify the extlinux.conf with the kernel boot parameters I need (kernel, initrd, dtb ..)

In OpenWRT case it was pretty easy: it has no initrd, and it's as bare-bone as it can be: you just have to add a line "init=/sbin/init" to the kernel line and youre basically good to go.

The challenge was to find a suitable arch: rpi2b (bcm 2709) is the perfect match i.e.: arm_cortex-a7_neon-vfpv4:

So I grabbed the .img from OpenWRT, put it into the multitool SD card, mounted it with a loop device, and did a simple "cp -R" of the whole sys partition to the second partition of the internal flash.

Then I extracted a 5.16.11-rk322x kernel & modules & firmware from bullseye-minimal build from @jock, and copied them into /lib.

The next step was to find a suitable .dtb to boot: I used @ilmich dtbs from his LIbreELEC 10.0 builds, since they worked beautifully in the tvboxes rk3228a/rev 3.1 I own.

Then I modified the /etc/modules.d files of OpenWRT to load proper modules for the rk322x board: wifi, thermal, etc.

Then I added the bootup "hardware-optimization" armbian script, just to optimize things further, IRQ routing, eth0 queues etc.

Sync & reboot: OpenWRT is up & running, awaiting connection on default address 192.168.1.1 on the ethernet port.

All packages work, kmods are simply written in the wrong directory inside /lib/modules but the kernel gets them from the right place /lib/modules/$(uname -r) so in practice everything is 100% OK, as long as the modules are present. I copied ALL the modules since I have a lot of free space in the internal flash, it's a full ext4 install, not a squashfs rootfs.

Even updates are OK.

I'm fine-tuning some parameters, then I'll add link to the .gz image, ready to flash w Multitool, later today.






 

Today I assembled a fully working image of OpenWRT 22.03.0  for this rk322x tvbox.

It's a patchwork/mix from multitool/debian kernel 5.16.11 and the userland from the latest OpenWRT I could find for raspberry PI 2/B (same cpu arch):

OpenWrt 22.03.0-rc6 r19590-042d558536 / LuCI openwrt-22.03 branch git-22.213.35949-d09fbe0

I've tested wireguard/vxlan/wifi, all working nice (wireless AP too, much to my surprise!).

You can turn this (rather old for 2022) TVBOX into an extremely capable router with a nice www interface (too bad for the 100Mbit LAN port...). I guess you can add some more ethernet interfaces using USB ports, but do not expect too much on the performance side.

The best way to add ethernet ports for these devices is a managed switch, so you can use VLANs (€20 for a cheap 5 ports on Amazon).

Speed of wireguard VPN is quite nice (around 70Mbps on iperf3).

If anyone is interested I can post the link for the image (flashable via multitool).

It was - as usual -  painful, but  a nice challenge.

edit:
I had to do this because there are no OpenWRT releases for rockchip/32bit armv7: arm64 builds for Rockchip 3318/3328 are officially available.