Tomas Catone

Hi @datatech451 - glad to hear I am not alone. Yep - I fiddled with SuperCeleron, ATVx and custom launchers a few years back. I have an old pc with LibreElec around here somewhere too. But today I am no longer trying to keep Android going on this one. I moved on to Firesticks since then and the remote control is a big factor on why we stay there. But for the S912 - I am focusing on the mediaserver side and thinking of adding photo backup of my phone. I am just in the tinkering and learning phase. I've had Plex working and have been trialing Jellyfin lately. It works well to stream locally to my firesticks. Big Buck Bunny of course and it seems pretty solid. But I am not doing 4k BBB or anything. But still testing and troubleshooting random issues and craziness. In fact - I put Portainer on board. Jellyfin in a Docker. Homarr in a Docker, Grafana in a Docker, Adguard in a Docker and Cockpit... But lots of things not working exactly right but I think because I overload it. Really trying to push it to the limits just to see and learn. Burning that all down today and doing a fresh build with just what I need - Jellyfin, Cockpit and Adguard. I'm gonna skip Docker this time and I bet I get it all working well enough to learn the next level. As for cooling - I bought some extra heat sinks but never made it further. I am a little worried about pulling the existing sink off - don't want to crack the cpu. Feels more solid than thermal paste - more like thermal glue. But yes - seems to get HOT in a hurry when it is busy. This box has a heat sink plus heat tape and a piece of sheet metal. I am betting that is no longer standard build. BTW - I fiddled with my watt meter and this thing just sips... Seems to idle around 3.6 to 4.1 watts. Did some measurements during 2 hours of streaming, and did some math it seems it would only use about 2.9 kWh per month if on all the time. My spinning HDD uses more than that - could justify that SSD upgrade in the future. I found another box with a S905 (I think) in my recycle bin - I might look at optimizing that for retro gaming. We will see what happens next. Do you have a favorite gaming ROM or experience? Anyway - best of luck and keep the faith!

Hey buddy - thanks so much for the support. I really appreciate all you do.

I have got my T95Z Plus with S912 booting 6.12.24-current-meson64 just fine now. Getting Jellyfin up and running with all my old DVDs and CDs. Seems very capable. When do I push the OS into the eMMC? Is there a downside? Are there only so many times I can do this safely? If I chose to try the Debian builds - don't I just boot from a SD card and try it out? If I like that one better - then don't I just repeat the process and push that onto the eMMC? I believe I have the Android Source - or more precisely - I have a rom called SuperCelleron that I installed almost 10 years ago... That still boots when I don't have an SD card in. Also - visual inspection of this board proves I have an eMMC. I have another box that is identical outside. But on the inside it clearly has a NAND chip. I am sure this is a silly question - but just thought I'd ask. Thanks all.

Take apart your tv box. Take pictures of all the components inside. Looking for your exact part number of your wifi module - mine was AP6330. Then I googled and found this person solved it on their tv box. But the procedure might work for other wifi chipsets. Just have a look in /lib/firmware/brcm and you will see plenty of them. Plus I believe that is the broadcom designs. Going up one level there are even more. WARNING - Not an expert... but this trick worked for me. Good Luck.

TV Box Name: Sunvell T95Z plus Octagon shaped box (Beware – apparently a lot of variants) CPU Amlogics S912 Armbian build file name: Armbian_community_25.5.0-trunk.370_Aml-s9xx-box_noble_current_6.12.23 DTB file used: meson-gxm-vega-s96.dtb (but several seem to work… none with wifi out of the box) Kernel Version: 6.12.24 Distribution Installed (focal, buster, etc): Noble Working Ethernet (Yes/No): Yes Max Ethernet Speed that works (100/1000): Not sure how to determine... Does wifi work (Yes/No): YES *** See Below Does bluetooth work (Yes/No): Not tested Does HDMI audio work (Yes/No): Yes Additional Comments (provide any additional information you feel is important): Tested many files. Ubuntu (noble) seemed much more usable than Debian (bookworm) Also tested Armbian_community_25.5.0-trunk.334_Aml-s9xx-box_bookworm_current_6.12.21 _gnome_desktop.img.xz Armbian_community_25.5.0-trunk.334_Aml-s9xx-box_noble_current_6.12.21 _gnome_desktop.img.xz Armbian_community_25.5.0-trunk.334_Aml-s9xx-box_oracular_edge_6.14.0 _gnome_desktop.img.xz Armbian_community_25.5.0-trunk.334_Aml-s9xx-box_oracular_edge_6.14.0.img.xz Since I am trying to learn server/media center/adguard or pihole stuff – chose the server headless install eventually. Learning has started. **** Thank you thank you to @ZuiMelanieForno and their post here: But basically looks like the easy way is to create a soft link of the ap6330 driver file as the brcm4330 file that must be loaded by default. sudo mv /lib/firmware/brcm/brcmfmac4330-sdio.txt /lib/firmware/brcm/brcmfmac4330-sdio.txt.old sudo ln -s /lib/firmware/brcm/brcmfmac-ap6330-sdio.txt /lib/firmware/brcm/brcmfmac4330-sdio.txt Not sure of this solution will survive update. (UPDATE: Confirmed - it does not survive update - but doing the commands again and a reboot seemed to work.) I have installed pihole and had it running. I had jellyfin running. Rebuilt from 0 again and am trying to do inside of docker containers. Dockers seems running but still some learning to go. If I write my sd to my eMMC – can reset to 0 again by booting from an sd card … and when ready burn that to eMMC? Or should I keep the writes to the eMMC as few as possible? I own two of these boxes – Identical on the outside but the newer one (bought probably 1 year later) does NOT have an eMMC. It has the dreaded NAND chip(BiWIN 16GB)… Also a different wifi module I think…. (LTM8830) Oh and – can I just say I love pulling this thing out of retirement and having a tiny low cost media server in the house. Thanks @balbes150 and @SteeMan and Everyone for their hard work! This is amazing... until I blow it up again...