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Not sure 'AI' is the answer, this requires actual embedded dev skills. I have (lame) news tho. I gave the box away. A family member needed a TV box and the Tanix is doing that now. Giving up is kinda lame I know but there were good reasons for it. Mostly that the box is pretty much undocumented except that it has an rk3566 on it. This and that the manufacturer seems to have no interest in open source support and never replied to repeated attempts of getting some documnetation, SDK etc. The idea was to teach myself SBC embedded linux/android and reverse engineering seemed interesting at first but ialso maybe not the best way to learn. In the end it didnt seem worth the effort. I bought a firefly rk3566 instead, stationpc m2 instead. Well documented board with NVME interface, good wiki/docs, Android and Linux SDKs on gitlab, plenty of tools and firmware to play with. It's a much more rewarding environment for a developer to learn. Sorry if I disappointed people replying, trying to support here. Thanks in any case!

The box can be toothpicked into a loader from where there are options available including ADB - which I also have no experience with. When trying to boot a generic rk3566 LE image from SD the device stays dark. Which means to me it's trying to boot. Good but not progress. I now have a UART adaptor but didnt get a word over the line yet. UART may need enabling or may be misconfigured or may not be a UART port at all. Flying blind is not great. ADB may be a more productive approach. Eyeballing the board there is a wifi 2.4/5 & BT chip (LGX9358) which had me worried cos no search engine hits but device tree says wifi_chip_type = "ap6398s" and this seems known. I tried to contact the manufacturer wrt general information and about getting maybe access to their (legacy) kernel SDK, but haven't heard back yet. Other sources suggest that this manufacturer is not interested in open source software on their products. Maybe this is true, maybe not, I'll wait, it's only been a week. There is a lot to learn and I havent spent much time on this yet, busy with other stuff.

Ok I did that which produced a binary identical dtb to what I already have. naturally my dts comes from using dtc on the dtb. I originally used this method btw: https://www.cnx-software.com/2014/05/12/how-to-extract-a-device-tree-file-from-android-firmware-files/. Mostly because using Windows tools is not impossible but a bit awkward for me. I use an arm mac and its easier for me to use mac & linux tools. I will look at what @hzdm did on the H96 thread next but I'm still waiting for my serial/USB adapter so I'm flying blind which is probably not worth doing. Yes android 11 on kernel 4.19.232. I will look at @hzdm method. Atm I dont know can I take some existing image and 'patch' my dtb in there or do I need to install sdk for some legacy kernel (5.10?) and build from there. I had a quick look and @hzdm actually has a build process with an H96 configuration it seems. Thanks @maka and @hotnikq

Thx that's good news. So when you said above I have a 5.10 compatible dtb are you saying 5.1.x is the legacy kernel for rockchip I should continue with and I should be able to build a bootloader with the dtb I extracted? Will do some reading on differences to dts/dtb between android (older linux kernel) and legacy and mainline. And differences to boot process in general. But one thing I noticed the dts I decompiled from the android dtb seems to be a flat dts whereas when I looked at box demo dts its all nicely separated with includes. I'm assuming thats because its decompiled from dtb.

Ok, thanks. I'll have to fully decipher this but I think I'll get there. Are you saying my dtb is not good? Did some more reading through the threads and it was said that I will not get HDMI w hardware acceleration since GPU is not open source and the stuff thats there is only working for android fork. That would be a problem for kodi I think.

Hi everyone, newbie here. Experienced developer with some outdated embedded experience. Very little experience in nowadays embedded technologies, but it's something I'm interested in learning about. Doing fewer hours on the day job atm and picked up one of these as a home project. Goal is to get armbian working fully on this. When (if) successful probably will do a libreElec - this should make for a powerful Kodi box. Tanix Tx66, around €50 on aliexpress, I have the 4GB RAM 32GB eMMC flavour. Product Specification: CPU : RK3566 / Mali-G52 GPU RAM : 2GB/4GB LPDDR4 ROM : eMMC 16G/32G/64G Bluetooth : BT 5.0 DC In : DC 5V/2A USB Host : 2 High speed USB 2.0, 1 USB 3.0 Card Reader : TF Card reader Lan : RJ45 Ethernet port 1GiB Wifi : Built-in Wifi, 802.1.1b/g/n/ac ; 2.4G/5G SPDIF : Coaxial(Optical) Vendor firmware both as IMG and zip archive: Google Drive by Tanix It contains a boot.img, dtbo.img and uboot.img. I dipped into some of the other threads here and armed with that I was able to extract & decompile a device tree from boot.img. rk3566-tanix-tx66.dts rk3566-tanix-tx66.dtb I made some half-hearted attempts sticking the device tree into some 'close enough' images (libreElec & armbian generic rk3566) and see what happens booting from SD but without success. The box just stays dark. I guess I need to brush up on modern bootloader and kernel/device-tree concepts etc, but wrt the task at hand, am I right in saying first step is getting serial debug going to see what goes wrong where? ^^^^^^^^^^^ This here looks like the serial debug pins, bottom left next to the SD card reader. I couldn't find anything else that looks remotely like it. I ordered an FT232RL serial to USB converter and will have a go. I'm new to this site and I hope I'm doing this right, creating a thread here. If not please be gentle Thanks!