rick0cm

Hi, I have a couple of the "Transpeed 8K" boxes, and have been able to actually productively use them using the MiniArch distribution. I'm booting of a uSD card and running from the uSD. I can see the 32G emmc that is on the boards, but have left it untouched so far. Question - has anyone successfully overwritten a known working image - like MiniArch - onto the emmc and booted and run off of it? The emmc ought to be alot faster than uSD. I don't want to risk bricking the boxes. There are alot of tiny partitions on the emmc, (see below) and I am kind of paranoid one of them is some sort of required bootloader. Any idea how risky overwriting the emmc is? Thanks.. Rick

Yes, another vote for the vontar minarch image mentioned above. It boots up on my board with the on chip ethernet and wifi working. The miniarch dist is quite a bit more "stripped down" than I am used to. It took a bit of work and adding packages to get my development environment up and running. Its usually not so much work with Armbian or other "normal" distributions. .. perhaps a bit off thread for this Armbian forum..

Thanks for the tips Nick. I'll look at the Miniarch. Soooo many slightly different boards. Ahh, maybe I was hung up on the 1.5M baud uart - I've been playing with several Rockchip boards recently that need 1.5M. My goto serial is tio on Linux.

Well, after taking a break with fighting with this board for a couple months, I just tried to catch up. You may recall I have this board: I downloaded the server image from https://armdev.pixeldrift.net/transpeed/8k618-t, wrote it to a uSD, added the brcmfmac4335 drivers as described previously. For some reason I could not get the serial console running at 1,500,000 bps. Garbled - probably a baud rate mismatch? This worked for me a few months back. Oh well, a text session was usable on hdmi and keyboard, so I continued there. Neither ethernet or wifi was working. - The kernel finds dwmac-sun8i, but it fails to initialize "dwmac-sun8i 5030000.ethernet eth0: stmmac_dvr_remove: removing driver" Debugging beyond this is way over my head. - On wifi, the kernel was erroring out looking for brcmfmac4334-sdio driver files. I thought this board used brcmfmac4335?? I found what I believe are the correct 4334 *.bin, *.txt, and *.clm_blob files, and placed them in /lib/firmware/brcm - based on kernel error messages. But still No Go. I do not see any error messages in the kernel log, but no network device is created. Another dead end for my ability. I tried plugging in a cheap USB to ethernet dongle I had lying around, and IT WORKS! "usbcore: registered new interface driver cdc_ether" It is slow, attached to a USB-2 link (480mbit/sec) but OK for light work. (The switch port says it's attached at 1Gbit - yea sure!) Thanks to Nick A, apritzel, pixdrift & probably others for their work getting this far - alot more stuff is working now than last time I looked, and with the enet dongle, I can actually start playing with the system. I ran out of time today to further explore https://github.com/warpme/miniarch. I did NOT try to install & boot from emmc, although I see the device at mmcblk2. BTW, that is my serial console attached with the loose wires above. The pins are actually labelled GND TX RX on my board. Different from nicrolack's board.

As far as I can tell, H616 and H618 are _almost_ identical - see https://linux-sunxi.org/H616 This leads me to believe (Hope?) that images for H616 will also work on H618 - but I am not 100% sure! I have not tried Balena Etcher - I have just been using the Linux "dd" command to write images to USD card. This has worked for me on other similar (supported!) boards, but Balena Etcher should work also. My box has some EMMC flash on it. I am not sure how the boot process goes. - With no USD card, the EMMC boots into the built-in Android TV box software. - With a USD card installed, an attempt is made to boot from that - either from built in CPU firmware or maybe the EMMC? Yes, the biggest problem with these boards is that there is NO documentation at all. I cracked my case open to look at what chips are on the board. (See below) That is how I can see that the DDR DRAM chips are different than OrangePi. (Which make sense with the serial port error message I see when attempting to boot the OrangePi image - The DDR DRAM hardware is not compatible) May someone fluent in Mandarin can search some Chinese forums. There are multiple Chinese manufacturers of these boxes and information on how to design the PCB's and configure the software must be out there somewhere. Here is my box, with the PCB exposed, and my serial port attached.

I haven't had much time to work on this, but simplistically, the problem is that the DRAM chips and how they are wired up on my Transpeed box are different from the Orange Pi image I attempted to use, so the AllWinner chip DRAM setup has to be different. I'm far from an expert, but I believe U-Boot is responsible for setting up DRAM before it finds and starts the OS image on the uSD card. The documentation I have found is very sparse for how to setup U-boot for different DRAM chip configurations. Unless someone can find a U-Boot/image setup for an Allwinner H616/H618 board with the same DRAM chip setup - 8 4G DDR3 chips, or alternatively figure out how to configure U-Boot for this DRAM, we are stuck. BTW - My Transpeed box has no ROM (or flash) on board - I looked at the PCB. It appears to be booting directly from the uSD Card.

Hi, I also bought a cheap H618 TV Box. Mine is branded "Transpeed Android TV Box", but I suspect all are similar. I have not gotten it to boot linux, but have made some progress: I noted that the Orange Pi zero 3 also uses the Allwinner H618, so tried some images for it. I followed the boot procedure outlined here: http://mrbluecoat.blogspot.com/2021/07/install-linux-on-t95-mini.html I tried an Armbian image and a Ubuntu image - both from the Orange Pi website - with basically the same results. The Good: I am getting u-boot messages on the serial console with Armbian or Ubuntu in the text, so the board _IS_ attempting to boot off the uSD ! There are obvious pins on the PCB for the serial port, but you do need to solder a connector. The BAD: the boot process quickly errors out with: "This DRAM setup is currently not supported" for both images. So, the issue is with uboot trying to set up DRAM. The Orange Pi Zero 3 uses a single LPDDR4 dram chip - based on their documentation. My TV Box has 8 DDR chips (4 top, 4 bottom). I'm not 100% sure, but believe they are 4Gbit DDR3. .. So that explains why setting up DRAM is a problem! I realize these TV boxes aren't supported by anyone. Either an image supporting this DRAM setup is required, or someone familiar with uboot configuration to do some magic.. Maybe I wasted my US $23!