gounthar

SMART AM40 iQ Appliance
P/N: 1031572
Model: UGK-AM40-EDU | EWY1-AM40-EDU | EWY2-AM40-EDU
 
Processor            RK3399, Dual-core A72+Quad-core A53, 64 bits, 2GHz
Memory              4 GB DDR3L SDRAM
Storage 32 GB eMMC 5.1
Wireless technology       Bluetooth 4.1
802.11A/B/G/N/Ac
Capture options               Establish a Bluetooth wireless connection with a supported mobile device
Connectors         HDMI 1.4 (1920 × 1080) output for external monitor
USB 3.0 Type-A (×2)
RJ45 Gigabit Ethernet
 
 
 
--Update--
For device tear-down and technical sheets included in package - SEE SECOND POST
 
Reference links posted at bottom are sourced as I dig up more details that may be useful . It looks like the power will have to be supplied via gpio as far as I can tell.. The official documentation and fccid technical orders refer to the Headless SBC / Module what have you; as an "IQ Appliance".  Tagged 'grep' for control/command function searching through fccid or other official documentation) Otherwise found simply as AM40 rk3399 or AM40 iq on google/other engines  
 
--AM40 iQ - Anyone seen or attempted armbian on something similar?--
 
Figured this forum may be one of the few places that might appreciate and see what I first saw.
So if anyone might have an idea where to proceed with a possible hidden gem like this..
 
I picked it up for reasonable price a quite a bit LESS than current nanopi m4 cost  the other night. Can't say quite yet if it will be a useless paperweight, or a diamond in the rockchip. heh.
As soon as it arrives I intend on seeing what kind of hac.. err educational research can be done to place Armbian on it eventually over its intended OS. There seems to be a service switch that is used on other models to allow intel modules and windows OS. The form factor seems to be carrier board size, so here's hoping for that switch to be more open to source than intended for this particular model.
 
It's just something about the specs on it raised an eyebrow, yea? And the case it comes with is pretty solid compared to the shit, err, other case and fan combos you normally see.. That alone..
 
I didn't see any tear-down from the ffcid schematics available to the public, possibly because it sold as an education exclusive device to school system.
If anyone here shows interest, I'd be glad to do a tear-down (bubba do like destroy) and share it with the RK3399 community.
 
-Follow up-
Regarding cost. I paid somewhere under $50. If anyone else considers it, I suggest you be firm with the seller, and make an offer that is well under what they're going to be asking.
Reason to be a cheapskate on these things? Well..
 
1. Likely these were paid for by government tax funds for schools. Or written off as a privately owned business cost anyhow, which means someone like us already helped pay for them.. In the form of tax or tax return budget allotted to business owners.
 
2. Considering I'm not even sure if its possible to power on so simply without gpio testing or a breakout wizard beard
 
3. Cause we can build this things ourselves already for under $100 easily. So yea don't pay something more than that, even brand new for sure!
 
Open Power Specification and 2 pins in the back is all I see so far.
 
Ebay:
 
https://www.ebay.com/itm/SMART-Model-AM40-Part-Number-1029788-Rev-07-No-Antennae-Very-Good-Condition/174156468137?hash=item288c88cfa9:g:DvwAAOSwCRVdcQyW
 
https://www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-SMART-iQ-Appliance-AM40-Education-Digital-Signage-Player-Rockchip-RK3399/173853101572?hash=item287a73ce04:g:AccAAOSwaAlccc2l
 
 
Manufacturer Reference:
https://support.smarttech.com/docs/software/iq/en/about/specifications/am40.cshtml

https://support.smarttech.com/docs/software/iq/en/about/iq-appliance-connectors.cshtml
 
FCCID Technical Orders: doesn't seem to have its own nomenclature listing however, it is referenced in great detail its carrier device (an over priced touch screen)
sourced for IMPORTANT notes before any reversing or mod attempt at introducing hardware compatible touch screen, PSU, OPS (serial) etc

 
 
user manual control/command function search 'grep AM40'
 
FCC ID QCIIDS665P1
QCI-IDS665P1, QCI IDS665P1, QCIIDS665P1, QCIIDS665PI, QCI1DS665P1, QCIID5665P1, QCIIDS66SP1, QC11DS665P1, OCIIDS665P1, 0CIIDS665P1
SMART Technologies Inc. SMART Board 6000S and 6000S Pro Series Interactive Displays IDS665P1
SMART LCD Monitor SBID-6065S, IDS665-1
Smartboard Interactive Display 6000S / Pro SBID-6265S, SBID-6275S, SBID-6265S-PW, SBID-6275S-PW
 
https://fccid.io/QCIIDS675P1
https://fccid.io/QCIIDS675P1/Users-Manual/User-Manual-4554712
 
 
FCC ID QCI7086
QCI-7086, QCI 7086, QCI7086, QCI7O86, QC17086, OCI7086, 0CI7086
SMART Technologies Inc. Interactive Display 7086
 
https://fccid.io/QCI7086
https://fccid.io/QCI7086/User-Manual/Users-Manual-3626573
 
https://fccid.io/QCI7086/Internal-Photos/Internal-Photos-3626563
 
 
user manual control/command function search 'grep iQ appliance'
 
FCC ID QCI7000
QCI-7000, QCI 7000, QCI7000, QCI7OOO, QC17000, OCI7000, 0CI7000
SMART Technologies Inc. Interactive Display 7000
 
https://fccid.io/QCI7000
https://fccid.io/QCI7000/Users-Manual/user-manual-3417295
https://fccid.io/QCI7086/Internal-Photos/Internal-Photos-3417295
 
 
OPS: Open Plug-gable Specification  Serial (40 pin) Seria(40 pin) = OPS (80 pin
*note, not sure exactly if this is the way to go, but closest I could find for now to adapt the OPS interface
 
manufacturers "support" forum search regarding ops
https://community.smarttech.com/s/global-search/OPS?language=en_US
 
 
A Challenger Appears
https://hackaday.io/project/20193-open-pluggable-specification-breakout-board
 
https://www.digikey.com.au/products/en/connectors-interconnects/rectangular-board-to-board-connectors-arrays-edge-type-mezzanine/308?k=tx24&k=&pkeyword=tx24&s=54162&pv1989=0&FV=ffe00134&mnonly=0&newproducts=0&ColumnSort=0&page=1&quantity=0&ptm=0&fid=0&pageSize=25
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
OPS: Open Plug-gable Specification
potentially an inconvenient convenience.  (hdmi,usb,rj45 and etc..) to make the platform a module.
imagine your favorite usb to serial, or whatever favorite debugging i/o.  Now, chop off the USB part, and replace it with this. heres hoping those 2 pins are simple logic level voltage and ground

 
Service Switch:
Possibly switches between EMMC and SD Boot? May be interesting

 
 
TLDR;
possibly epic fail or epic win
used condition: metal case / fan / rk3399 / 4GBDDR3 / 32GB EMMC

 
vs
 
NanoPi M4 Metal Case w/ Cooling Fan 
$30 to $45
 

 

 
Metal Case with Cooling Fan and
RK3399/4GBDDR3/32GB eMMC
$35 to $100
 

 

 

Hello everyone!
Just wanted to say that i'm really happy with this board.
Even I haven't solved the reboot issue yet, it works perfectly as my new home server.
 
mini pci-e to 2xsata - works.
Usb-connected hdd - works.
wifi - works.
 
And the performance is enough for simultaneous work of rtorrent, samba and live media streaming with Plex Media Server.
Default Orange Pi 4 PSU is 3A 5v.
As a heatsink I use a heatsink from old video card with a cheap raspberry pi 5v cooling fan, temperatures holding from 28C to 47C.
And the most nice thing - looks like everyithing works very stable.
 

You could just add some larger capacitor in parallel to the power bank. If chosen right it should surpress the voltage spike and buffer enough so it does not drop. Might even use more than one to get a better frequency response. Or put a 5.2 volt zener / tvs diode across the board to protect it from the spike. 
 
I can edit this with some wiring later if needed. 
 
EDIT: Some wiring idea:
 

 
Use some resistor voltage divider on the powerbank input (eg. 10k to 10k which gives you 0.5) to get some measurement to your sbc. With the given voltages this would be: 5V in -> 5V * (10k / (10k + 10k)) = 5V * 0.5 = 2.5V .
If you feed this to some GPIO you can either use some analog pin to measure it directly (and initiate shutdown if it goes to low) or you can hook it up to some digital one if you only want to know wether it is high or low. Might need to change the resistor ratio then. Do not exceed your max gpio voltage!
 
On the Powerbank output add either D1 or D2  (zener or transient voltage surpressor diodes) rated for slightly above 5V. These will get rid of nasty voltage spikes for you. Additionally use some small capacitor (to remove high frequency ripple) and some larger one in parallel (to reduce low frequency ripple / voltage drops) to buffer over the voltage drop when powerbank is switching on / off.
 
 
 
Cheers, 
count-doku

Aight, I was able to do some testing with the powerbank mentioned above and I guess I was lucky I did not kill my board with it.
An overview:

 
From the left to right.
First the SBC was powered by the powerbank with close to 5 volts.
Then I attached mains 5v to the powerbank and got a 9 volt spike which luckily was short enough (around 1ms with inclined edges) to not cause any damage.
While charging the voltage drops a bit and seems quite rough.
Then I disconnected mains again and you can see a voltage drop that causes the board to restart. Here it is in high resolution:

The voltage came as mentioned above not very high already, very close to undervolage. The drop to two volts finally kills it and let it reboot as soon as the voltage rises again.
 
tl;dr: I'll discard the idea using the powerbank to create a crude UPS.
 

Not sure if this is applicable on armbian or if it could fit your case but maybe you could use extroot overlay. Take a look here in the case of openwrt.

if there would only be a SBC which has on board LIPO charging features with powerdetection and that boardvendor would sell cells which fit to the board...
 
oh wait..
https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/A20/A20-OLinuXino-LIME2/open-source-hardware
 
such boards exist..

if it does not have to be a all in one package you can still achieve this by reducing the 5V supply to 3.3v somehow (like putting 4 1N4007 diodes in series to create a drop of 2x 0.7 volts and yes, that would be a very crude hack ^^) and put it on a GPIO pin. If there is an outtage the board recognizes it.

Interesting. The downside I noticed so far is that the loading current seems to be limited to .5 amps which is not enough if you run certain SBCs with a decent load...

I had also had a lot power outages.
 
I bougt a "Bms 18650 Batterie Schild V3 Expansion Board"
(https://de.aliexpress.com/item/32996504176.html?spm=a2g0s.9042311.0.0.1ec64c4da6MXpj) with a 18650 Batterie, and the problen was solved.
 

 
 

That was also my first idea and it redirected me to a thread on reddit which was not that helpful.
I also could not find anything in the ebay description that could suggest such a feature. Probably because it is not fully functional due to the voltage drop mentioned above.
 
Maybe I can find some time and put an oscilloscope in between to see what we are dealing with...

Wait. The PCB was broken, the cells not. And I fixed it that time.
It can be charged and discharged the same time. The problem is that as soon as I disconnect mains the SBC restarts probably due to voltage drop on switch-over. This may be fixable using a small capacitor or something. I found the PCB I bought: https://www.ebay.com/itm/5V-2A-Power-Bank-Charger-Board-Charging-Circuit-Board-Step-Up-Module-Dual-USB/362589551623

response my post , also to @ubobrov,
I found that node reserved-memory should be outside of SOC, 
after fixing it , the CMA creating works now.
But when installing the sunxi_cedar.ko, it reports 
"sunxi-cedar 1c0e000.video-engine: syscon failed..."
I found the syscon entry is different inside sun8i-h3.dtsi at kernel 5.4.16.
 

A few months later, and I have a little more time, so decided to volunteer to help tidy up the forums.
 
I never directly received a reply to this question, but someone must have heard me because I was just looking today at the Donate page, and now I see (in addition to monthly PayPal option from before):
Bitcoin address Amazon wish list (for purchasing hardware) Contact form (for setting up bank transfer, invoice option for companies, etc.) I for one was happy to see additional options and just thought I would share what I discovered.
 
You like Having Nice Things(tm)? Consider supporting Armbian today! 

I started contributing a few dollars per month to help defray server costs. I might like to increase this amount to help out in purchasing hardware, etc. As I stated before, I have almost no time for anything, but happy to contribute few dollars here and there as luckily I am in a position to do so.
 
I couldn't help but wonder however, how much the PayPal fees and exchange rate were eating into my little contribution each month? And if it's significant, maybe we can figure out a better way to transfer funds. I have a strong dislike for middle men taking a cut anyway. Parasites.

You need to use this script/setup above since we are changing torrents at least on each release. Manual seeding is not much useful.

I finally got everything together to power this thing via the 12V header and it works
I did a minimal Ubuntu build like two weeks ago and it booted fine. I ran sbc-bench: http://ix.io/2aVd
 
Now it might be something more than a paper weight

The script is not compatible with Armbian 20.02.0-rc1, as the Kodi uses `nodm`, but Armbian 20.02.0-rc1 uses lightdm. 
 
I have to modify the kodi-gbm-wrapper script to get it work. However, to `service lightdm stop` requiring *authentication*.  so it wont smoothly go to kodi. 
 
Last thing is the version - kodi  18rc4 - it doesn't have PVR addons, and it seems to be a known issue:
https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=336841
 
Update: Feb 7
After further search, I find the PVR addons for Ubuntu platform requires special installation
https://kodi.wiki/view/Ubuntu_PVR_add-ons
 
I tried `apt install kodi-pvr-iptvsimple`, but failed with dependency error: 
kodi-api-pvr (= 5.2.1)
 
I am looking for an update for the Kodi installation script  

Would you consider selling a variant of the board that has the RK3399Pro?

Yes exactly this model, we are actually waiting for sample of this upcoming NPU device.

I wanted to copy the following quote here, for others similarly concerned about such things:
 
 
When I expressed my disappointment and asked them why not just go all the way to fully libre bootloader (since they were so close anyway), my comment was censored. Because they censor discussion, I have no way of knowing whether they object to my question, or maybe it was my link to try and educate others about What is Free Software and why is it so important for society. Perhaps @gprovost can shed some light?

OK, now that I have read through this whole thread, as well as the Announcement over at Helios (and comments over there) I have some further thoughts...
 
 
 
I guess you were so concerned about the price, you saw the need to point it out twice?
 
Sure, x86/amd64 are fine, if you like firmware level backdoors into your system. Personally, I don't and therefore have stopped purchasing recent Intel/AMD hardware for a number of years now.
 
And besides he said...
 
 
Which I thought was quite reasonable (and rare nowadays with how greedy most business people have seen to become) and also allowing for several different options and use-cases. Quite nice in fact IMO.
 
Hopefully we will end up with Nice Things (tm) instead of some proprietary firmware somewhere. From what I can tell there shouldn't be any (required?) video, bluetooth, Wi-Fi stuff here. Those are usually the problem areas, so I remain "cautiously optimistic."
 
ECC
 
For those others like me looking for ECC (for ZFS, or similar), some slight bad news:
the ECC version will be only 2GB (not 4GB) and will not be available immediately at release Apparently up until now there were none at all ECC SDRAM modules available on the market. After reading their Announcement (including comments) I learned they seem to be in the pipeline and getting close (but will miss release). So, hopefully Soon (tm). Also, the only modules that are even available at all are 8Gb (small "b" = bits) x 2 of them on board (see pics) = 2GB (big "B" = Bytes) RAM total). So that is what we will be able to get, for now.
 
They say they will think about upgrading later to larger capacity, as soon as bigger modules become available on the market.
 
I am already thinking I am not sure how patient I can remain, after waiting for something like this for literally years. I may buy first available ECC model of this board, and then later on, well... Maybe I will finally get around to modding our toaster oven into a uController managed reflow oven...
 
Still better than anything that has come thus far, and if you are not doing de-duplication, etc. or certain other features (talking ZFS here) you don't need a ton of RAM (and old guideline of 1GB/TB or whatever does not apply). I plan on doing straight mirrors anyway, with large disks, for lots of different reasons.

Well done, Werner!
 
Official announcement here (with connection details, etc.):
 

I had time to test my newly written DT for the orangepi4:
 
sound still doesn't work (even when I replaced the bits to use rt5651) I guess some of the mic/headphone definitions in the DT are still wrong.. wifi works with network manager ethernet works as well both USB2 are tested and working (I've the NPU version so I didn't try to look at USB3 atm, may or may not work who knows) dmesg shows still some errors to wifi but I've no idea if this is related to the opi at all or just fall out from the normal driver situation here hdmi is untested yet (i've no spare device for doing it) actually the DT should also support eDP over USB-C as far as I've saw in the schematics the opi4 should do it as well.. this should be possible and it's done similar to the pinebook, obviously I've also no spare eDP over usb-c display...
 
so for @piter75 if you want to mess with it.. here is an updated version of it.. And for the less experienced ones.. you might not wanna mess with it yet.. at least on the powertree there's nothing horrible wrong so that the board would not boot up..
opi4b_dts_v1.dts

Ok ! I've finally found my issue with Non-Rev OPi4 : a junior mistake !
A power supply issue, I've decided to measure it after the freeze, it was too low !
I've try another PSU, and it reach the login prompt !
 

My oh my, I absolutely have to witness that!
Thanks a lot for the links.