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TBS2910 - My favorite, forgotten board


ahrlad

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A couple years back a company named TBS, mostly known for their DTV hardware, released a mini PC styled thing. It's called the TBS2910 Matrix and was marketed mostly as a Kodi box. 

 

tbs2910_5.jpg

tbs2910_21.jpg

Sadly it doesn't seem the product made the sales necessary to keep the company interested - which in my view is a shame since it's got some interesting hardware features:

  • Quad-core i.MX6 CPU (1GHz) 
  • 2GB DDR3 Ram
  • MiniPCIe slot 
  • 16GB eMMC Storage
  • SATA connector with 12V power, capable of powering a 3.5" HDD
  • On-board 2.4GHz Wifi
  • Gigabit ethernet (likely limited to 400Mbps or so)
  • 3 USB 2.0 ports + 1 mini USB otg port
  • 1 full-size SD slot, 1 microSD slot
  • HDMI, analog and optical audio out
  • Ir receiver, HDMI-CEC support

Software support is predictably bad, I don't think it's gotten an official update in at least a year. There's an old Ubuntu distro available and an old non-Elec Kodi build.Thankfully vpeter, a LibreElec dev, has released updated LibreElec builds for it, available at the tbs forums. 

 

I love this board. I use it as my Kodi box connected to the TV, with a mPCIe Wifi card to boost network speed, and for most purposes it works great. I don't expect anybody to work on an armbian release for a dead board of course, though the hardware features might allow for some cool use options. 

 

It's available for £50 at amazon.co.uk, which includes the plastic box and a 12V power plug.

 

Other links: 

Product page 

TBS forums

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Hello,

That's my favourite board, too. Would it be possible for this board to create a Armbian-Linux image?

 

Greetings, clash

 

Well, it's certainly possible, but not without first putting in a lot of work to support the board - work that I bet nobody's all that excited to do ;)

 

The hardware is pretty similar to the Cubox-i so with luck a lot of the work from there can be used, but if it was easy somebody would probably already have done it.

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For u-boot:

Download the here:

ftp://ftp.denx.de/pub/u-boot/u-boot-*
make distclean; make tbs2910_defconfig; make u-boot.imx

Changes to the default environment of the new u-boot (with setenv + saveenv or Patch):

bootcmd=run bootargs_mmc; load mmc 2 0x10800000 boot/zImage; load mmc 2 0x10700000 boot/dtb; bootz 0x10800000 - 0x10700000
bootargs_mmc3=root=/dev/mmcblk0p1 rootwait rw consoleblank=0 quiet

For the Kernel (Example: 4.8.15):

- download Kernel-4.8.15
- make imx_v6_v7_defconfig
- make -j6
- make modules_install

cd /usr/src/linux 
cp arch/arm/boot/zImage /boot/zImage-[Version]
cp arch/arm/boot/dts/imx6q-tbs2910.dtb /boot/imx6q-tbs2910-[Version].dtb
cd /boot
ln -s zImage-[Version] zImage
ln -s imx6q-tbs2910-[Version].dtb dtb

Greetings, Clash

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For u-boot:

Download the here:

ftp://ftp.denx.de/pub/u-boot/u-boot-*
make distclean; make tbs2910_defconfig; make u-boot.imx

Changes to the default environment of the new u-boot (with setenv + saveenv or Patch):

bootcmd=run bootargs_mmc; load mmc 2 0x10800000 boot/zImage; load mmc 2 0x10700000 boot/dtb; bootz 0x10800000 - 0x10700000
bootargs_mmc3=root=/dev/mmcblk0p1 rootwait rw consoleblank=0 quiet

For the Kernel (Example: 4.8.15):

- download Kernel-4.8.15
- make imx_v6_v7_defconfig
- make -j6
- make modules_install

cd /usr/src/linux 
cp arch/arm/boot/zImage /boot/zImage-[Version]
cp arch/arm/boot/dts/imx6q-tbs2910.dtb /boot/imx6q-tbs2910-[Version].dtb
cd /boot
ln -s zImage-[Version] zImage
ln -s imx6q-tbs2910-[Version].dtb dtb

Greetings, Clash

 

That's cool. Did you really get kernel 4.8.15 up and running? With any hardware working?

 

This guy got it running a recent-ish kernel a while ago, but he didn't get a lot of hardware working. 

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