fabiobassa

@fukowaka
Hello, some answers:
no mixed android/armbian boot. It is done this way on purpose: no random proprietary pre-installed crap, for a number of reasons. It is possible to manually make the thing work, but on first u-boot upgrade the installation will probably break and you will come here asking why apt upgrade broke your system the "dts from lakka" is not suitable, don't mix things, they won't work as @RaptorSDS said, minimal variant is suitable for headless server usage again, as @RaptorSDSsaid, armbian makes use of device tree overlays and rk322x-config makes easier to configure board specialties. There would be hundreds of device trees to support boards minor and major differences, device tree overlays solves this thing. Don't use other distro dtbs, they will break things.  

Hello Vittorio

thank you so much for this effort.
Effectively nas, pbx,adblockers ,vpn' s are the best ever applications for those boxes
I run several pbxes on rk322x , but ALWAYS have found freepbx , even on x86 or 64 very heavy, caotic, too way customized . I run mostly pure asterisk 13  ( or 16 it depends which is shipped with debian itself) with the old, ugly digium GUI interface.
The interface is lightweight since uses static contents and js files and when I need something more customized, I do it in extensions.conf by hand

Maybe we can discuss in private for some improvements ( I think to billing solutions) so we can leave free the 3ad for more hardware/kernel related problems

@jock Thanks for the info. On a side note, I found a small bug: when making the emmc backup, if the resulting file is bigger than 4Gb it will just stop there (because of the FAT size limit) and you will get a broken backup.
 
Probably could be solved by splitting the backup, for example along these lines:
# Split backup in 2Gb parts, with two-character suffixes dd if=/dev/mmcblk1 | gzip -c | split -b 2000m - tvbox-backup.img.gz. # Restore the backup cat tvbox-backup.img.gz.* | gzip -dc | dd of=/dev/mmcblk1  

I spent this morning trying out things in my Dolamee D5 and these are my conclusions:
HDMI audio and AV audio are working! This box also supports SP/DIF audio (which is detected and appears as an output device in ALSA) but I have no devices to test that on. On the note of audio, you can't control the volume of any of the internal devices (HDMI, spdif and analog) using alsamixer. Because this is a TV box, could it have been designed so that the volume is changed on the TV? On the other hand, the included remote has volume buttons (that worked under Android). The remote is working with ir-keytable (no changes needed)! I mentioned that it wasn't working on a previous post because my first attempt was unsuccessful (a few months ago) when I installed an older image (legacy kernel) and limited myself to running the auto configuration tool (didn't run ir-keytable manually). I couldn't open the TV box up (this box uses plastic tabs that I couldn't remove). I didn't want to drill through some (maybe safe?) places (likely plastic holders for the board) fearing damaging the board. Though, it is likely an eMMC system, as it boots flawlessly on the newer kernels. @fabiobassa said and I don't know if this matters, but this box is from 2016 (at least the 1GB RAM model; mine is a 2GB model and was bought 2017, though I don't know when it was released). Is there the possibility of it being an eMCP model, when the product listing (https://web.archive.org/web/20160924063015/http://www.dolamee.com/dolamee-d5-comes-with-rockchip-rk3229-cpu-and-android-5-1-os/) lists eMMC?
 
Also, @Igor, what do you mean by "the resources we have" in this sentence?
Are you talking about human resources for testing and development or actual hardware for building all the images? I can help with either.

yeah, that got me scratching my head too. anyway, the sdio wifi is now detected as ampak ap6330  specifically brcm43342 and it works on mainline 5.15 even with full desktop when i tested it earlier. i reverted back to minimal since i have no need for the desktop, i'll consolidate the logs here as well as android device tree. i'm really having fun with these tv boxes especially when i got one to work as klipper host for my 3d printer... also the price of raspberry pi's are ridiculous nowadays. orange pi's are just fine though but i find this helter skelter of armbian tv box zoo so fascinating minus the gpio headers of course. thanks again @jock and @fabiobassa for all your effort. you guys are awesome!
 
after updating. kernel and headers held using apt hold. http://ix.io/445q
 
device-tree-copy-android.tar.gz device-tree-copy-kernel-5.15.tar.gz dmesg.multitool.log dmesg-5.15-kernel.log dmesg-android10.log

unfortunately x96 max ...mini.. half sized 🤣 are so useless categories.

they use the same name for 322x and 3318 and even amlogic
Thank you @Seth for your apport and support 👍
looking forward for photos and further infos

Greetings, @jock! It's the guy that would like to help out with these community maintained TV boxes. Sorry for the delay, but I'm only allowed 1 post and 0 messages a day on this forum. Is there any other way to reach you (I was told you don't use IRC frequently) or to increase my limit?
 
In terms of suggestions, I have some to present. I could even help out in the process:
Getting the broken multitool link working again (https://users.armbian.com/jock/rk322x/multitool.img.xz -> https://users.armbian.com/jock/rk322x/multitool/multitool.img.xz) on the information page (https://www.armbian.com/rk322x-tv-box/). I know the file is in the post that started this forum thread, but that might be best for new users. Debian bullseye builds. Debian is great for mini servers, and if someone is installing it now, they'd probably like to get the newest version for longer support (LTS support for older versions ends sooner, requiring moving to a new one if you want to secure your system). Also, some prefer the Debian package release cycle to the Ubuntu one. I can help out the builds (my CPU for sure won't be happy, but I'd be pleased to help out)! Considering wayland as a suggestion for those who wish for graphical acceleration. It is still slow, but I have experienced better performance with the lima driver on the 5.15 kernel than on X11. Also, congratulations on the project! Things like wifi work flawlessly out of the box, something I can't say for all laptops when I install Linux.

Ok, waited a bit before posting. i got myself an h96 max box to play around with and did some preliminary testing with the stock android firmware, installed terminal and copied the device tree using hexdump's script as well as dmesg log. will upload photos of the board soon as well as the device's relevant part numbers.
dmesg.log device-tree-copy.tar.gz

hello! H96 box finally arrived so i might hit the other thread soon. scishion box is working flawlessly at the moment running armbian, klipper/mainsail for my 3d printer, and it also serves as my mqtt server/bridge, resource usage is about 2-10% while printing. i agree, if going for production deployment go with serious and supported sbc. i keep the tv box as non critical part of my home network apart from the time i used it as my main router, http cache and squidguard it did work for about half a year and only broke down when it got wet. it does work thanks to @jock and @fabiobassa.Unfortunately the production of this box is quite unpredictable since the hardware is not fix, they just put whatever is the cheapest available parts at the time of production. anyways, a good rule of thumb when dealing with these boxes is the first post, it gets updated as more and more people submit findings, its the power of the community. like i said back then, if it works it only consumes 10 watts and it can do a ton of crazy stuff.
 
edit: typo stuff

If anyone needs it, as a convenience, I leave here a google drive link for an Armbian "bullseye-minimal" image for the 322x box with FreePbx16 & Asterisk18 compiled in.

Took a whole afternoon of compiling code to make it work.

It's a .gz image you can restore via MultiTool.

root password: freepbx
Freepbx login: admin/freepbx

Hardware .dtb is left vanilla to boot on any platform -  use rk322x-config to configure proper cpu/ddr/storage/led speed.

Gets IP from DHCP, you can of course use armbian-configure to use wifi or whatever.

ODBC connector compiled and included for mysql, codec g729 compiled and included.

It's working quite well with softphones ad Yealink VOIP DECT phones, on a couple of pjsip trunks. I expect it to work well with at least 8/10 extensions, maybe more.

Interface is quite heavy for my taste (node.js ....) but it seems it's  the "new normal" we have to adapt to.

It's 2 gigs in size.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PYuakmA-9JNVmJ3VOYE7GFQBo6dqN-8t/view?usp=sharing

all credits to @jock for creating the original Debian Bullseye image.

@Vittorio Mori

Good afternoon Vittorio
Somewhere in this same 3ad I already posted the boot seguence of those boxes. Posts are so many that maybe you didn't find it.
It doesn't exist a mbr or uefi , instead buried in the soc itself there is a tiny bootstrap that involves ddr ram and few others things. This is called loader mode
If for any reason not even the initializer is present in the emmc or nand, well we have a mode that is called maskrom mode. Since this is buried into the soc, those box are UNBRICKABLE since at least " something.." is still able to boot.

 


Once the loader is started then the control is passed to u-boot itself

Here you can have an idea of the flowchart

http://opensource.rock-chips.com/wiki_Boot_option

 

I think I know why he is trying to use tv boxes, not exacly why I mean, but I have a idea, and its the price. You see, here in BRZ, tv boxes are very cheap, you can find one in the local scrappy sometimes, or even people selling for less then 10-20 USD a used one, almost same price as a brand new ESP32... A Pi Zero I think costs almost 40 USD...

But you are right, this tv boxes all are used components, all fab data on then is from 13 or 12, 10 year old chips, all with solder flux still under them. It's not reliable, specially with wireless. That's why I told him to use ethernet. I have the first one running here for almost 1 month running home-assistant, that is pretty nice. The only brick wall I hit is this limit on 1GB ram, I swaped very DDR3 chips, even with 4 bit ones, and also buyed another box that came with single 2Gig module, called LPDDR2, even discovered that its used on many many phones, I had a Asus Zenphone 2 board laying around and took a look, and find on LPDDR2 Hynix Haha

Unfortunately I still stuck with 1GB xD I think that must be related with you said - hardcoded on the bootloader without source code... 

There is such 2734C chip, a google search would have confirmed that to you easily.
The chipset under the hood is an ampak AP6334 which is in turn made of a couple of broadcom chips. The wireless part is a bcm4334.
 
Probably your issue is not the dtb but the wifi chip firmware or, more in particular, the nvram /lib/firmware/brcm/brcmfmac4334-sdio.rockchip,rk3318-box.txt which is not suitable for your board setup. The wifi depends on how the board is build for important things like reference frequency, antenna setup, sideband gpio, etc... If the nvram does not specify these params correctly, it will not perform well or will not work at all.
 
The best thing you could do is mount the vendor partition of your Android firmware and search for a suitable firmware for your board or extract from the live Android system.
Tthat could be easy but could also require various steps  to get access to the partition, it depends and how the firmware is built.
 
Otherwise you could look around in google, download new nvrams for bcm4334/ap6334 and try and see if they work for you.
 
edit: BTW the wifi chip is fully supported by linux kernel and works wonderfully well on my board; when I say don't buy tv boxes if you want supported hardware I mean exactly this.
 

All right.. We got our own topic for Docker talking 😁

Done.  I went back to the end of April and tried to pull out all the docker related posts into this new thread.  If you think I should go back farther, or if some of these posts should be moved back to the original thread let me know.

UPDATE!!
 
Hello, I'm pleased to announce that rk3318 CSC configuration has been accepted into mainline kernel!.
This means that next Armbian release (probably August) will provide regular kernel upgrades offered by Armbian ecosystem via normal apt upgrade command.
Until then, please stay stick to the usual manual upgrade!
 
But there is something more: new update for the rk3318/rk3328 images!
Most important changes:
Kernel upgraded to version v5.18.6 Memory clock set to 667 MHz (was 333 MHz), providing a nice boost in general, desktop and GPU performance; despite this works fine on my board I always warn you to test images first via sdcard Introduces MGLRU patches from @yuzhaogoogle (you can read about here and search google for more details), which should provide much snappier experience especially on low-memory devices You can find the images and deb packages for upgrades browsing the directory pointed on first page as usual.
 
You can visit the Armbian MGLRU topic, if you have questions about the features or kernel issues (like crash dumps which involve kswapd, for example)
 
 

Dear friends, lately many many questions on this 3ad are about docker and it's problems.

I really would suggest to open a different discussion and leave here only kernel and hardware relate problems, because if we continue here with user space implementantions the 3ad becames abnormous and difficult to read.

Maybe @MattWestB and @primoitt could start soewhere else an apposit 3ad and guide other friends into solutions.

Lately if solution needs an intervent on kernel all of you will be welcome to ask here

Thanks a lot !!! 🤗

 

Dear friends, lately many many questions on this 3ad are about docker and it's problems.

I really would suggest to open a different discussion and leave here only kernel and hardware relate problems, because if we continue here with user space implementantions the 3ad becames abnormous and difficult to read.

Maybe @MattWestB and @primoitt could start soewhere else an apposit 3ad and guide other friends into solutions.

Lately if solution needs an intervent on kernel all of you will be welcome to ask here

Thanks a lot !!! 🤗

 

Dear friends, lately many many questions on this 3ad are about docker and it's problems.

I really would suggest to open a different discussion and leave here only kernel and hardware relate problems, because if we continue here with user space implementantions the 3ad becames abnormous and difficult to read.

Maybe @MattWestB and @primoitt could start soewhere else an apposit 3ad and guide other friends into solutions.

Lately if solution needs an intervent on kernel all of you will be welcome to ask here

Thanks a lot !!! 🤗

 

Ah-ha, nope... or to be precise: I guess you would need the android kernel sources/headers to compile a working driver for it.

@Revsearcher
Try to remove heatsink the uart could be there

@Felipe Triana DDR memory detection is made by a rockchip proprietary code that is called ddrbin as the very first binary code.
It's a closed source binary, so whatever it does and how it does is not known. It produces some debug messages that may be useful to you (memory arrangement, density, bus width) when the serial adapter is connected to the board.
 
There is a tool, ddrbin_tool, that can be used to alter ddr speed, ddr command rate timing and uart debug speed, but nothing more.
 
If you totally erased the NAND, then the ddrbin in use is the one from the sdcard, if you installed "jump start" with multitool, then the ddrbin in use is from NAND.
 
Multitool can't completely erase the NAND because the kernel driver has some limitations and cannot access the first sectors of the NAND, thus multitool can't neither write or read the installed ddrbin  in NAND.

@fabiobassa
 
Hi, I'm only replying now, because the forum limts one post per day for me, for now a least. Ok. Back to the topic.

Yesterday, I was trying to go back to the android because I was thinking in use the TV BOX as a temporary replacemant to my father's notebook, that stopped working and I already resoldered almost everything changed the SIO, SB etc.. Anyway, today I just boght another box, with android and installed for him, and worked fine... but would be nice to have a full backup of the nand anyway, if one day I wish to go back to original firmware, I should have done the backup. 

The box is a MXQ-4K, as i said, but now I will give details:

It features a RK3228A, with 2GB of Micron DDR3 (2 chips on top, 2 on the back of board), a 8GB BGA NAND, and a SV6051 wireless chip and R329Q_V3.0 board revision. I took some photos for more details, right below here:


Here a close up of the rockchip on this board, before I changed the heatsink
 

Here is 2 of the 4 DDR3 ram chips, its HTTC4G83BGR (4 gigabites, or 512MB per module)
 

The wireless chip, SV6051P, nothing special..


An overview of the back of the board, showing the nand and pcb shape


And finely a overview of the board powered on, running main build from SD Card...

Ok, things that I noticed, that can ou cannot be bugs:
 
So far is what I noticed... 

I would be already happy if a least I could recognize the full 2GB of ram on board and wireless worked on inbound connections, a least I could use the box as a home server, for files, websites, etc.

I found other issues that I think is maybe the hardware itself that cant cope with todays demands: main or legacy, even with multimedia tools installed, Youtube can't even play at 144p without dropping 20 to 40% of the frames, tested windowd, and fullscreen, same. Youtube keep rendering on CPU mode, with firefox or chromium, even if I run the browser with glrun command.

So far thats it, I'm afraid that I will be able only to reply after 24 hours, because of forum limitation, so in this case, until tomorrow! Thank you for the attention, 

Until are kernel related problems Is ok discuss here.
Or you can discuss elsewhere, test and then make requests here about missing features in kernel

Until are kernel related problems Is ok discuss here.
Or you can discuss elsewhere, test and then make requests here about missing features in kernel