A95X F3 AIR no video

[gloryhit]

Hi,

 

I have an A95X F3 Air tv box that has an s905x3 chipset. I followed the instructions here. I believe i used the correct dtb file and tested out multiple others. I've tried reformatting my drive with SD card formatter. I've tried flashing my stock firmware. However I cannot seem to get armbian to boot. I'm getting no video output. I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong here. I've searched high and low on the internet and I could not find a solution. I have seen aml_autoscript.zip being mentioned here and there however the image I've downloaded doesn't seem to have it. Any help would be appreciated.

[tgillett]

HI

I have just received the same type of device and started trying to install the Armbian firmware.

I have followed the steps in SteeMans post here: 

 

    

 

 

The steps I have taken are listed below.

I am using the "toothpick" method to power up with the boot switch depressed, then releasing after a few seconds. (How long should it be??)

But no luck.

 

Obviously someone has done this before since there is a dtb file specifically for this device, so I think I am missing some step along the way.

I have installed Armbian on a S2905 device previously, but not the S2905X3 which is used in this device.

 

Other than finding some problem with my installation process, the only alternative would seem to be just trying out all the dtb files in turn.

But that sounds dubious in the face of there being a specific dtb file for the device.

 

Any comments, advice or suggestions would be very welcome.

Thanks in advance.

 

--------------------------------------------------

Installation

 

1. Download firmware:
    Stable Builds: https://redirect.armbian.com/aml-s9xx-box/archive
   
2. Burn the firmware to SD card with Etcher
   
3. Edit the    armbi-boot /extlinux/extlinux.conf    file to point to the appropriate dtb file:
   
  LABEL Armbian
  LINUX /uImage
  INITRD /uInitrd

  FDT /dtb/amlogic/meson-sm1-a95xf3-air.dtb
  append root=UUID=afbf3a1b-d905-4b27-b78a-3682d3db0dca rootflags=data=writeback console=ttyAML0,115200n8 console=tty0 rw no_console_suspend consoleblank=0     fsck.fix=yes fsck.repair=yes net.ifnames=0 splash plymouth.ignore-serial-consoles

4. Copy armbi-boot /u-boot-s905x2-s922  to  /u-boot.ext

5. Install the SD card and attempt to boot

 

 

Edited May 27, 2023 by tgillett

[tgillett]

Success!

 

I used an SD card that was set up and working in a S905 based device, using an earlier version of Armbian.

I added the new dtd file (/dtb/amlogic/meson-sm1-a95xf3-air.dtb) and adjusted extlinux.conf accordingly.

I copied   u-boot-s905x2-s922   to   u-boot-ext.

 

Then I did the toothpick boot thing and held it for around 30 secs (not sure if this duration had any specific effect).

After releasing the boot switch, the boot process started and it ended up running just like the previous S905 device.

 

I then went back and tried again with the stable build that @SteeMan referenced, but that failed.

So there seems to be some outstanding issue that needs a bit more time and testing to sort out.

 

But at least now I know the dtb and u-boot files are ok so it is easier to try out other things.

 

I have to say that the S905X3 processor handles the workload (Kolibri application) with much less effort than the previous S905 device.

 

Hope this helps.

 

 

Edited May 29, 2023 by tgillett

[tgillett]

Just for the record...

 

The image file I used to get my S905X3 box running was from this tutorial:

https://i12bretro.github.io/tutorials/0269.html
 

which references this site for the image file:
  https://drive.google.com/open?id=1n6CZa582uJECV3lzQDtFbmbyvmOSiUSg

 

The file is:
    Armbian_20.10_Arm-64_bullseye_current_5.9.0_desktop.img.xz

 

I used the dtb file  "meson-sm1-a95xf3-air.dtb"  from the Stable image referenced in SteeMans post.

 

This at least gets the board running and allows for an upgrade to the Debian Bullseye operating system using the apt-get command.

 

I can't get the current Stable images from the site referred to in SteeMans post here to work:

 

https://forum.armbian.com/topic/17106-installation-instructions-for-tv-boxes-with-amlogic-cpus/

 

Also the SHA checksums for these files don't seem to agree with the published value, so it may be there is some problem...

 

 

I hope this helps.

 

[adrian0541]

Hi.

 @tgillett

I've tried the Armbian_20.10_Arm-64_bullseye_current_5.9.0_desktop.img file (link) (mentioned on your previous messages) with the Armbian_23.8.1_Aml-s9xx-box_bookworm_current_6.1.50_xfce_desktop.img DTB files (link) (from @SteeMan 's post) .

 

The system started well to a XFCE Desktop enviroment. It has sound working well since the beggining and it appears to have ethernet working too. However, I can not make the wifi connection to work. Could you, please, help me with that?

 

Also, the Debian 20.10 repositories since to be oudated and not working anymore. How can I update the repositories?

Edited November 26, 2023 by adrian0541

[Jens J.]

wifi can be a tricky thing

you need to identify what wifi chip it's using

you could open up the box and look at the wifi module on the board, or

you could grab a boot log from serial console output from original android installation, or

you could try to run `lsusb` to see if there are any obvious usb-based wifi adapter VID/PIDs there (e.g. realtek, etc)

 

If it's not usb internally-connected wifi module, then likely the module may be connected to internal SDIO bus, which I think will require custom dts to modify and produce a dtb which tells the kernel where to find the wifi adapter. (This usually involves dumping/grabbing the original dtb on the box, which is usually flashed to a particular amlogic partition, and then inspecting it, and hand translating it to modern devicetree - as steeman mentioned, all the android-based images use an ancient 3.x custom, vendor provided kernel, with very vendor specific devicetree features. Modern kernels use a different set of devicetree syntaxes.

 

Then you have to make sure you have the right wifi driver installed/available. Then you have to make sure you have the right firmware installed/available (as most of these wifi modules require soft-loading firmware at boot).

 

root@onecloud:~# lsusb
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0bda:8179 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8188EUS 802.11n Wireless Network Adapter
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 05e3:0608 Genesys Logic, Inc. Hub
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub

[JuFe00]

Does anyone have detailed steps to boot recent versions on this device.

 

It's old, obsolete, (Armbian_20.10_Arm-64_bullseye_current_5.9.0) it's the only one I've been able to make work.

[KanexMarcus]

Here I have managed to get it "working" with the Armbian_community_24.5.0-trunk.93_Aml-s9xx-box_bookworm_current_6.6.18_minimal.img but it keeps bootlooping...

[SteeMan]

@KanexMarcus I only have two suggestions:  Try different SD cards (especially a lower capacity card if you are using a high capacity sd card.  Try other dtb files.  I don't have that box so can't help beyond generic suggestions.