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James Kingdon

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  1. Like
    James Kingdon got a reaction from darethehair in What's your favorite board(s) and why?   
    Re heatsinks on PC+, I guess depends on your use case - all of mine do, plus a fan It's probably overkill, but I had the parts to hand for the higher power boards and I prefer the simplicity of not getting into thermal throttling (I mostly run benchmarks looking for performance improvements or regressions). I also run overclocked, which perhaps isn't very smart.
     
    With heatsinks but the fan turned off it will gradually climb into the 60 to 70C range, which would be fine.
     
    1.54 GHz 0.000V 69.0C fan off
    1.54 GHz 0.000V 68.0C fan off
    1.54 GHz 0.000V 70.0C fan off
    1.54 GHz 0.000V 70.0C fan off
    1.54 GHz 0.000V 71.0C fan off
     
    Without the heatsinks it will certainly be into throttling with this workload (scalar, mostly integer, no gpu).
     
    Putting the fan back on holds the temperature in the 40s (it's a 12v fan running on the 5v line, so only very light flow and little noise. I use 12v supplies for the fans on the bigger boards)
     
    1.54 GHz 0.000V 47.0C fan on
    1.54 GHz 0.000V 46.0C fan on
    1.54 GHz 0.000V 47.0C fan on
    1.54 GHz 0.000V 48.0C fan on
    1.54 GHz 0.000V 47.0C fan on
     
    Idle temperature (with the fan off) is typically in the low 30s (depending on ambient of course). The fan comes on and off automatically at a threshold I pick to be a bit above idle temp for each board.
     
  2. Like
    James Kingdon got a reaction from pfeerick in What does your workbench look like?   
    Heh, I love looking at other people's workbenches, seeing all the cool toys and the minor oddities we all keep. Look, a pile of floppies and a torroidal transformer. My eye is drawn to the line of partly glimpsed objects at the top of the frame. My inner 5 year old would never have been able to resist the temptation to see what was in every box...
     
    My own workbenches are just wildly embarrassing. I need to tidy. No, I need to excavate.
  3. Like
    James Kingdon reacted to jgeisler in rk3288 alternative boards (cheap tv boxes).   
    Thanks to the great tip in this thread,I am writing this from a Ugoos UT3S, I got for 36€. So, now I would like to give something back to the community and write about my experiences.
    I already flashed it to the latest available release from Ugoos (Xubuntu Vivid) in a linux only configuration. For this I used a self-made OTG cable, because contrary to what was advertised, that was not included. I flashed from another linux machine using Rockchip upgrade_tool and rkflashkit. Windows AndroidTool on Win7 didn't work at all. upgrade_tool somehow only worked for the bootloader and the parameters. Especially flashing the misc image didn't work so that the device kept rebooting back into loader-mode. Fortunately, rkflashkit solved that problem.
    After some toying around with it, I rebooted and was shocked to find that the display remained black. After lots of frustrating experiments (including a complete reflash) and googling I learned that the display is in power save mode and I have to do Ctrl+Alt+F6 Ctrl+Alt+F7 after every reboot. It seems something in the combination of the kernel drivers and my LG display doesn't work too well together. But thats acceptable for now.
    I have now installed some more software, including mackodi (http://mac-l1.com/) , which gives me all the entertainment I can are for. My current impression is that this tiny box could well become the desktop machine for my day-to-day use.
    Only some things are bothering me:
    I'm stuck at Xubuntu 15 with no more support and updates. Especially being stuck with FireFox 44 gives me heavy security concerns Bluetooth seems to be broken. It still worked with the factory installation of Xubuntu 14.04. But maybe the installation of mackodi broke it, I not sure when it stopped working. Ugoos settings for the LED doesn't work either anymore I don't yet have an AV cable for proper audio. Kodi doesn't seem to work with HDMI audio and the normal three-sleved 3.5mm-jacks give me only one channel So, to conclude: getting a more recent, more fully featured linux on this machine would be really worth it. If anybody has any suggestions for things I could try to improve, that are in the range of my capabilities, I would be happy to try them out.
  4. Like
    James Kingdon reacted to TonyMac32 in rk3288 alternative boards (cheap tv boxes).   
    If anyone picked up the UGOOS box:  http://freaktab.com/forum/tv-player-support/ugoos-aa/530975-official-ugoos-firmwares-for-devices-based-on-rk3288
     
    Quite a bit of info on how to flash it/etc.  I picked one up because, why not...
  5. Like
    James Kingdon reacted to TonyMac32 in rk3288 alternative boards (cheap tv boxes).   
    I went too far and stuck a copper GPU RAM liquid block on it... 
  6. Like
    James Kingdon reacted to jeanrhum in rk3288 alternative boards (cheap tv boxes).   
    You can actually buy Ugoos UT3S 2GB/16GB on gearbest for less than 40$ (or 36.50€) with GBUT3S coupon: http://www.gearbest.com/tv-box/pp_141997.html?wid=21&lkid=10695139
    There is already a dualboot between android and ubuntu, so it's maybe easier to port armbian to it.
     
  7. Like
    James Kingdon got a reaction from tkaiser in Orange Pi Plus2E changing CPU speed?   
    Many thanks for the additional info, that was enough to get me in the right place. With 1.54GHz enabled my workload runs in the low fifties centigrade without the fan fitted. I'd expect to take another 5 to 10C off that when the fan is in place. So far no signs of instability but if I run into any problems I'll back the changes off.
     
    I'd have to rate the board as very impressive for thermal management, certainly compared to the odroid XU4 which pays for the speed with a whole lot of heat.
  8. Like
    James Kingdon got a reaction from Shimon in rk3288 alternative boards (cheap tv boxes).   
    Still no luck getting the Q8 to boot linux, it seems all roads lead to frustration at the moment. The furthest I've got so far has been with the Tim Potter kernel from
    https://bitbucket.org/DengueTim/q8-rk3288-kernel/overview
     
    That kernel seems to get quite a long way into the boot sequence, bringing all four processors up and probing a lot of hardware. It even brings up the firefly splash screen on the monitor, but then it starts hitting kernel oops and eventually seems to lock up solid.
     
    I confirmed that shorting pins 7 & 8 on the flash chip can bring it into maskrom mode, but I haven't figured out what to do with it from there.
  9. Like
    James Kingdon got a reaction from Shimon in rk3288 alternative boards (cheap tv boxes).   
    A little more progress - I did some debugging on the create-linux-sdcard script from
    and found that the assumptions it was making about the device naming scheme for the sd card reader didn't match my build environment (it assumed a root device such as sda with partition sda1, where as I have a root device mmcblk0 and partition mmcblk0p1). After fixing that the resulting sd card gets further into the boot process and starts bringing up the kernel. Unfortunately the boot appears to hang with no network or screen. The serial log stops at what looks like random places on each attempt, I'm not sure if this reflects the boot crashing randomly or if it's just the non-flow-controlled serial connection overflowing.
     
    This all has the feeling of re-discovering what other people did two or three years ago, but at least it doesn't look like I've completely trashed the system yet.
  10. Like
    James Kingdon got a reaction from Shimon in rk3288 alternative boards (cheap tv boxes).   
    Mine arrived today. Power up with the reset button held makes it accessible to the Rockchip rkflashtool and upgrade_tool, which seems promising.
     
    Here's the cmdline section from the parameter data of the stock firmware
    CMDLINE:console=ttyFIQ0 androidboot.hardware=rk30board androidboot.console=ttyFIQ0 board.ap_has_alsa=0 init=/init initrd=0x62000000,0x00800000 mtdparts=rk29xxnand:0x00002000@0x00002000(uboot),0x00002000@0x00004000(misc), 0x00008000@0x00006000(resource),0x00008000@0x0000e000(kernel),0x00010000@0x00016000(boot), 0x00010000@0x00026000(recovery),0x0001a000@0x00036000(backup),0x00040000@0x00050000(cache), 0x00002000@0x00090000(kpanic),0x00280000@0x00092000(system),0x00002000@0x00312000(metadata), 0x00200000@0x00314000(userdata),0x00020000@0x00514000(radical_update),-@0x00534000(user) Inserting a tf card prevents it from booting up, suggesting that it might be possible to boot from tf card instead of getting straight into blowing away the stock firmware. However there's no sign of life trying to boot either the miqi or tinkerboard images from the card.
     
    Anyone know how to open the box? I'm guessing that serial connection is going to be needed
     
     
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