A95X R2 TV BOX, need help!

[Qvy]

Hello there,

I followed from afar the advancement of the support on TV boxes for a while already, and I happened to stumble uppon a very cheap one on my local market.
The specs are the following : 
-Amlogic S905W

-2GB of ram

-16GB of EMMC

Following are some pictures I took, that shows the bare PCB.
I hope that it will help answering questions I have.

 

After looking into many written tutorials on getting armbian to boot on such machine, I have tested all .dtb files that are available, as long as quadruple-checked the u-boot file that needed to be used with that specific chip.

I made sure to also press that buttom behind the jack-port before plugging in the board to hopefully boot onto the armbian install.
Here are a few things I have observed.
On all 3 available DTB files for the s905w, when using the u-boot-s905x-s912 file, none of them got me a picture after the first "splash screen".
I have watched the power consumption during the "boot" and have seen the power fluctuating between 1.6 and 2.4W, until it setteled to 1.4W and stopped fluctuating.
My very premature conclusion is that it somehow booted armbian but did not give me picture.
The display that I am using was also showing that something was powered on, trying to send a picture but was not giving correct signal.

Here's where my abilities end off. I do not know where to go next and what to try.

I have not seen obvious pads to try connecting to UART, and I need assistance with going forward with that specific board.
If anyone with experience can guide me, I'd appreciate it grately!

Thank you in advance and hope this message finds the right person

PS: The board boots fine to Android 7.1 otherwise, when not trying to boot to the SD card, so the machine is confirmed to be working!

[SteeMan]

What type of monitor do you have connected?  If you have another monitor, I'd try that.  What I find works best is a monitor that is native 1920x1080.  I sometimes have issues with monitors that are higher resolution or lower resolution than a standard 1080P display.

 

Otherwise finding the uart pads is the only other advice I have, so that you can see what is going on during the boot.

[tabrisnet]

so first thought: you likely want a serial console [what @SteeMan said about UART pads]. If I had to take a stab in the dark with a rubber knife, see the 4 copper-lined holes near the SD card. you'll have to guess at the pinout tho.

also, I went googling for 6051p s905w, and I found this armbian post.

 

I am concerned that there are multiple posts [in general, not just here] saying that the wifi chip isn't supported. but they're old.

 

this looks vaguely like your board

https://github.com/ophub/amlogic-s9xxx-armbian/issues/2635

 

[Qvy]

I do not have any other monitor available but I did order a UART to usb device, and I have identified with a multimeter the uart pads, which are next to the SD card slot.

I will keep this feed updated!

[Werner]

On 9/16/2025 at 4:19 AM, tabrisnet said:

ophub/amlogic-s9xxx-armbian/issues/2635

As long as you keep the discussion about this at their place...

ophub is (ab)using the name Armbian without permission and they do not contribute to the core development process. Rather they trick users into thinking they get support here and therefore (ab)using our resources.

[Qvy]

Hello good people, it's update time!

I have made a bit of progress but got stuck again.
Here's what I did :

 

I have tested the pads I found next to the SDCard and indeed, they were serial connections.

With a little bit of brain power and luck, I figured out that the one with the square pad is GND, and both in the middle are tx/rx.

 

Please don't judge my deskmat...

 

 

Once that was done, I was able to connect to the serial port through a terminal and armbian surprizingly booted.

I was able to test the 3 different DTBs that are supposedly compatible with my board and all of them booted, though with no luck of getting the eMMC working.

 

I then got the idea to find the dtb of the original android install and got to work.

I was able to extract a dtb.img file, which after some work, got 2 dtb files out of it, supposedly for both 1G/8G and 2G/16G versions of the board, the later being mine.

 

Sadly it does not work as is, but I believe that it gives me enough information to keep going.

But here's the road block, no matter my attempts yesterday at trying to get the correct code inside of the dtb file, nothing would get the emmc to work.

Otherwise everything works fine, the armbian install for that board is not the cleanest but after fixing a few things, I was able to ssh into it through network and work on it from there.

 

If there's a kind soul out there with dtb manipulation skills, I would be grateful to get help from you!

[Reddwarf]

You can run Armbian just fine only from SD card, I do that on a Beelink box, you do not NEED emmc to work. Did you get picture on the monitor?