GmP Posted October 8 Posted October 8 Hi, welcome everyone. I’m using an H50 TV box that I was about to throw away because I thought I had completely bricked it. I disassembled it and found the pins to activate maskrom mode. I think this could be useful for everyone. I then installed the current image, and everything seems to work except for the HDMI output (blank screen). Do you have any suggestions? Thanks. Some data and photo below. In case you want to install please note that also multitool fails to activate the HDMI, so you will need SSH to config. SOC: RK3188 (Hopefully - I did not remove the heatsink) eMMC: Samsung KLMBG4GEAC-B001 32GB (64x4) eMCP: Samsung KMQN10006B 8 GB eMMC + 1 GB LPDDR3 RAM Wi-Fi IC 339S0209 2.4G/5G LAN working WIFI Working ---------------------------- root@rk3318-box:~# lscpu Architecture: aarch64 CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit Byte Order: Little Endian CPU(s): 4 On-line CPU(s) list: 0-3 Vendor ID: ARM Model name: Cortex-A53 Model: 4 Thread(s) per core: 1 Core(s) per cluster: 4 Socket(s): - Cluster(s): 1 Stepping: r0p4 CPU(s) scaling MHz: 60% CPU max MHz: 1008.0000 CPU min MHz: 600.0000 BogoMIPS: 48.00 Flags: fp asimd evtstrm aes pmull sha1 sha2 crc32 cpuid Caches (sum of all): L1d: 128 KiB (4 instances) L1i: 128 KiB (4 instances) L2: 256 KiB (1 instance) NUMA: NUMA node(s): 1 NUMA node0 CPU(s): 0-3 Vulnerabilities: Gather data sampling: Not affected Indirect target selection: Not affected Itlb multihit: Not affected L1tf: Not affected Mds: Not affected Meltdown: Not affected Mmio stale data: Not affected Reg file data sampling: Not affected Retbleed: Not affected Spec rstack overflow: Not affected Spec store bypass: Not affected Spectre v1: Mitigation; __user pointer sanitization Spectre v2: Not affected Srbds: Not affected Tsa: Not affected Tsx async abort: Not affected Vmscape: Not affected root@rk3318-box:~# free -l total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 1504636 291372 1037440 46940 297848 1213264 Low: 1504636 467196 1037440 High: 0 0 0 Swap: 752316 0 752316 SOME TESTS ON THE HDMI ISSUE: hdmi_debug_20251008_230528.log hdmi_test_20251008_230948.log 1 Quote
Hqnicolas Posted October 9 Posted October 9 16 hours ago, GmP said: I thought I had completely bricked it if you have tweezers and pin location for Maskroom rockchip will never be bricked 16 hours ago, GmP said: I disassembled it and found the pins to activate maskrom mode. thanks for sharing 16 hours ago, GmP said: Do you have any suggestions? I use the best technique of all, trial and error, tears, screams and anger. Search for the work from @jock as @paolosabatino in github You will find all variants dts files for this chip rk3318 and rk3328 test all of them https://github.com/armbian/build/blob/main/patch/kernel/archive/rockchip64-6.6/dt/rk3318-box.dts https://github.com/armbian/build/blob/main/patch/kernel/archive/rockchip64-6.17/dt/rk3318-box.dts also, this chip allready have a topic https://forum.armbian.com/topic/26978-csc-armbian-for-rk3318rk3328-tv-box-boards/ the solution was inside of it, just search DISCLAIMER (PLEASE READ): everything you can find in this thread (binaries, texts, code snippets, etc...) are provided AS-IS and are not part of official Armbian project. For this reason not people from Armbian project nor myself are responsible for misuse or loss of functionality of hardware. 0 Quote
GmP Posted October 9 Author Posted October 9 Thank you for the answer. Yes I will try the various dts, so far I have found that librelec - despiite not running at all, is crashing giving a visible prompt on the HDMI. I will try to compare that dtb/dts to the default rk3318-box and be back. 0 Quote
jock Posted October 10 Posted October 10 One suggestion I can give you is to try a fresh image from https://github.com/armbian/community/releases. Make a backup of the eMMC and clean it up (multitool can do both things), then try to boot from sdcard with the new image. Newer images come with u-boot v2025.10-rc5 and a "fix" to reset the VOP before entering the kernel. Some people on the other thread reported that disabling u-boot HDMI made the HDMI work once in Linux. With kernel 6.17 this issue hit my box and I could arrange a fix, perhaps this fix will address your problem too (for reference: https://github.com/armbian/build/pull/8674/files#diff-70c2c867b6e2024080868c0d5c3230d58be2d2c4b88a24291b0469c7d2229629) 0 Quote
GmP Posted October 15 Author Posted October 15 Hi, thanks a lot for pointing me in the right direction. Indeed so far I am booting from the SD card. I have erased eMMC with multitool via SSH, as multitool as well is not visible via HDMI. Used the newer images as suggested, same situation: everything works via SSH cmd line, no output on HDMI. Log contains mainly errors as the ones posted above. 0 Quote
GmP Posted October 20 Author Posted October 20 Still not clear why HDMI not working, However VFD display based n FD650 is working. Attached the vfd.conf file for openvfd: clock , USB, ETH,WIFI and COLON working. vfd.conf 0 Quote
jock Posted October 20 Posted October 20 42 minutes ago, GmP said: Still not clear why HDMI not working, However VFD display based n FD650 is working. Attached the vfd.conf file for openvfd: clock , USB, ETH,WIFI and COLON working. Very weird HDMI is not functional in both armbian and multitool: they use very different kernels. Multitool uses the 4.19 vendor kernel, which should be supposed to provide "best" compatibility. The dmesg error is highly related to the missing HDMI, but in a way I can't recognize. About the VFD driver, I guess you're using OpenVFD driver. Latest kernels (both 6.12 and >= 6.16) come with tm16xx driver which is by far much much better and candidate to be upstreamed in the mainline kernel. Here is the github project reference; the driver is already compiled in the kernel, but you may need to edit a device tree overlay by yourself to let it work with your board. To try some debugging, the complete dmesg output and the original device tree of the stock android firmware would be very useful. 0 Quote
GmP Posted October 21 Author Posted October 21 I will try to upgrade to tm16xx driver and be back. As for the HDMI, do you mean that Multitool shoud work anyway? THKS 0 Quote
jock Posted October 21 Posted October 21 37 minutes ago, GmP said: I will try to upgrade to tm16xx driver and be back. 38 minutes ago, GmP said: As for the HDMI, do you mean that Multitool shoud work anyway? Yes, or at least there should be less chances to hit some corner case that reduces the compatibility. LibreELEC is using the mainline kernel only for years though, so it is really strange you have issues with both armbian and multitool. I may wonder there is something odd in the device tree, but it would be odd that a misconfiguration in the device tree causes a kernel fault in the DRM code and in particular in the wait for vblank function 🙄 0 Quote
GmP Posted 5 hours ago Author Posted 5 hours ago Attached the source overlay file for the tm16xx driver. All features working. See for details and thanks to https://github.com/jefflessard . rx3318-H50.dtso.txt 0 Quote
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.