fabiobassa

@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.

 

@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...