Venz V10 (S905L) Bring Up

bertiera · April 3, 2022 at 7:21 PM

Hi,

I'm using currently using a Venz V10 (not the Pro) with AMLogic S905L 1G ram. I initially used the libreElec image which was delivered by the vendor, but the the last version was LibreElec 8, so I changed to CoreElec (running from microSD).

Since it looks like they drop support for this hardware, I checked LibreElec again, an found this thread and the 'AMLGX box image'.

So far, I was able to install a recent nightly from chewitt (using the meson-gxl-s905x-p212.dtb). thanks for the great work!
I did notice the WiFi and BT-adapter cannot be detected, (they worked in coreElec) could this be due to the dtb?

**chewitt** · April 4, 2022 at 5:13 AM

bertiera What WiFi chip is in the box?

bertiera · April 5, 2022 at 9:37 PM

Quote from chewitt

bertiera What WiFi chip is in the box?

Just swapped the coreELEC 9.2.8 sdcard (with working wifi and BT) in and found this in the dmesg output:
RTL871X: rtl8189es v4.3.18.4_22798.20170620

RTL871X: rtw_ndev_init(wlan0) if1 mac_addr=a0:2c:36

Meanwhile I noticed some other issue with the LE-build: there is a lot of flickering for everything which is displayed (i.e. subtitles & volume indicator) as overlay while playing some media.

**chewitt** · April 6, 2022 at 4:06 AM

bertiera please run "dmesg | paste" from the box and share the URL generated.

frakkin64 · April 6, 2022 at 11:42 AM

Quote from bertiera

hmmm, my mistake probably, I have to admit I didn't try, but I do remember I read it under somewhere at the end of some Release-notification. Probably it's my mistake, and I misunderstood the information about the new amlogic-ng builds...
Thanks for correcting my statement, I'll give it a try.

Yeah, CE works fine on gxl. I was running CE on my gxl (Vero 4K+/S905D 2GBe) device via SD card. Early on in the the 19 cycle they were missing some reserved memory and some of the gxl devices wouldn't start Kodi, but that was fixed about 8 or 9 months ago.

I am just using OSMC on that device (which is what it comes with, since it's an OSMC branded device), and testing LE via SD card. But something is hosed up with YouTube on LE 20, and haven't had time to dig into it, which 80% of what I watch is YouTube on that device.

bertiera · April 7, 2022 at 4:36 PM

chewitt

LibreELEC (10.85.0) dmesg (no wifi, no BT):

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CoreELEC (9.2.8) dmesg (working wifi/BT):

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frakkin64 vpeter

I gave the latest stable coreELEC (amlogic-ng) another try, but currently without success. maybe because my Venz V10 (S905L) has only 1GB RAM?
I created new sd-card and configured with the 'gxl_p212_1g.dtb'.

During first boot I saw the partition resizing, after the next reboot I once received the 'setup wizard', but the device 'froze' before I could complete setup. additional attempts to boot, seem to fail. It kind of boots, but not successfully. While booting, I get a short period of ping-replies, but soon after that it's gone again. (Maybe that's a mention/questiong for the coreELEC forum)

**chewitt** · April 9, 2022 at 11:23 AM

bertiera please install (or update to) https://chewitt.libreelec.tv/testing/LibreE…85.0-box.img.gz for testing. I've added a device tree specifically for the box (meson-gxl-s905l-venz-v10.dtb) which should get WiFI working at least.

Does the box have power LEDs or power buttons on the case?

Is there an IR remote for the box? If yes, what keymap is used?

bertiera · April 10, 2022 at 10:43 AM

Quote from chewitt

bertiera please install (or update to) https://chewitt.libreelec.tv/testing/LibreE…85.0-box.img.gz for testing. I've added a device tree specifically for the box (meson-gxl-s905l-venz-v10.dtb) which should get WiFI working at least.
Does the box have power LEDs or power buttons on the case?
Is there an IR remote for the box? If yes, what keymap is used?

The box has 1 multi-color LED (I've seen blue and orange), no power buttons, only button is a reset button in the back (for getting the device into recovery)

The box came with IR remote (media remote only no full keyboard), no idea which keymap but in a previous nigthly build/dtb combo it did work properly. (I my current CE image, I've got lots of bmap-files in /usr/lib/keymaps, do you have any idea how te see which one is in use? dmesg says "Registered IR keymap rc-empty")

official product page

Tried this image with specific dtb, however still no WiFi, and now, also the keyboard/remote is broken (at least in Kodi). only mouse (on same RF-dongle as keyboard) was working.

Also, Kodi says BT-adapter not found.

dmesg output:

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**chewitt** · April 10, 2022 at 12:43 PM

Code

systemctl stop kodi
systemctl stop eventlircd
ir-keytable -p nec -t

^ run the above commands over SSH to put the IR receiver in raw/test mode, then press remote keys one at a time starting top-left and going across then top-down on the factory remote until you have all keys recorded. It would be super helpful if you copy/pasted the keys into a text file and appended notes on what the keys look like; most are obvious, some might need a description. From this I can create a keymap that should get the remote working out of box. NB: I can see the older amremote keyfile in some remote keymap repos, but this document codes for more keys than the remotes I see in vendor pics have, and the codes generated by the upstream kernel are likely different, so best to get them fresh in the right format.

I'll make a guess at the LED setting. I suspect it's orange-red in off/standby and blue when on?

The dts is still inheriting something to do with Broadcom SDIO chips from somewhere, hence it's not probing for the Realtek WiFi chip. I will have a look and see what I can find.

NB: I don't see any mention of BT on the vendor specs, so is this a USB device that you added?

bertiera · April 11, 2022 at 7:57 PM

thanks for the clear instructions. see attached for the logfile of the keypresses.

I regularly double checked while annotating, and had to insert 1 key (hence a shifted timestamp).

Also, 2 rows didn't emit any signal (double checked with the camera on my phone), this was the 3rd row (with arrows up/down/left/right), and the first row of the numeric keypad (1/2/3).

I'm pretty sure they never worked... (Edit: My kid said nr3 sometimes works after pressing lot's of other numbers, I tried shaking/pressing, and indeed I've seen some response from the device, guess I'll need to open up the remote and clean some silicone juice)

ir-keycodes.log

About the LED:

In Libre/CoreELEC I only ever saw the blue light while powered on, off after shutdown.

I just booted the internal android: Blue while 'On', Red while in 'Standby', Purple for a short moment while transitioning from 'Stanby to On'

Probably you're correct about the BT, cannot find it either, but I remember now I once powered an edison-board from the usb-port of this player as a BT-gateway, and I also used a wireless headset (BT+RF), but I indeed plugged the USB-RF into the player.

So probably I was wrong assuming their was BT inside...

Does this IR-keymap also impact the keyboard?

Do you recommend LibreELEC of CoreELEC? for this device? (CE19 seems to get stuck in a freeze/reboot loop, CE20 with a 'slowemmc' does seem to keep running because the ping remains stable, but I cannot get any screen on it - tried on 720p TV, and 1440p 21:9 monitor, so I cannot get it configured)

**chewitt** · April 12, 2022 at 12:09 PM

CE should be functionally more complete than LE, but whatever boots and works out best for you is the one to use

I posted an updated 'box' image to my file share. WiFi might need some more juju/tweaking to get working and I'm not sure what the issue with keyboard could be. In theory the IR remote should now work? .. and hopefully the BT stuff no longer shows up in dmesg. Please update and share "dmesg | paste" again.

bertiera · April 13, 2022 at 8:39 PM

well, CE9.2.8 worked best for multiple years, now I'm trying to find some version which works

I can confirm the remote now works, here's a dmesg:

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Do you have any link/pointer to some architecture/commands on how to get wifi configured/tested/enabled? (I don't need it, but I'm willing to do an attempt for other people)
It's also very strange I've these issues with the keyboard/remote, because I think the first LE10.85 of your images I downloaded, also had a working Keyboard and remote (I think nightly of 20220403) (I used it a couple of days but it was slow an had some flickering issues, maybe because of the restore from my CE-backup in an attempt to keep all addons/settings, I'll retry the image if I can find it)

**chewitt** · April 14, 2022 at 7:08 AM

If you flip back to an image from https://test.libreelec.tv/ or the Python38 folder in my share those images are Linux 5.17.x - and the current ones in my share are Linux 5.18-rc2. If the keyboard works in the older image there's either a defconfig change or something hinky with one of the patch series I've picked into the 5.18 branch; which narrows the scope.

Thanks for confirming the remote works. I'll have a poke at WiFi things over the weekend.

**chewitt** · April 14, 2022 at 1:43 PM

Have a play with https://chewitt.libreelec.tv/testing/LibreE…85.0-box.img.gz .. there's a slim chance the LED and WiFi chip might work now. As usual .. "dmesg | paste" and share.

bertiera · April 14, 2022 at 9:07 PM

Version with working keyboard is the image I have on my disk with name: LibreELEC-AMLGX.arm-10.85.0-box.img.gz

It has modification date 2022/03/28, and matches with my download manager address: https://chewitt.libreelec.tv/testing/LibreE…85.0-box.img.gz

according to 'uname -a', it's indeed a 5.17 kernel (don't remember any more where I downloaded it from), and indeed a python 3.8.12

Linux LibreELEC 5.17.0 #1 SMP PREEMPT Wed Mar 23 10:34:38 UTC 2022 aarch64 GNU/Linux

here the keyboard works (with generic p212 dtb) (rc doesn't work).

about the remote: I've cleaned/opened it twice, first time, I was able to see some IR-flashes in a cmos camera, but never successfully could capture the code, so my remote is partially broken I guess. (I see the keymap is compiled to a .ko-file, is there a guide somewhere on how to support custom remotes, probably I can find some spare remote)

LED (Blue when on, Off when off, but that's normal to me :-)) & Wifi (not working out-of-the-box) seem to behave as previous versions

dmesg: (At line 4 I do see a kernel image misalign error)

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**chewitt** · April 15, 2022 at 4:39 AM

I've been looking around in the kernel and I see mentions of RTL8189 on a bunch of allwinner boards, but digging deeper I can only see the USB driver, not SDIO, so WiFi will need the out of tree vendor driver. I avoid adding those in my images as they break all the time and in the mid-term once we switch over to iwd instead of wpa_supplicant none of them will work anyway.

The row of up/down/left/right buttons on the remote looks a little superflous with the round up/down/left/right/ok present too, so I wouldn't fret about those. I've marked them missing in the keymap and they can always be backfilled if someone else shares them later. I'm confident the codes for the 1/2/3 key in the embedded keymap are correct as the last two digits on other keys you captured and the amremote codes I can see elsewhere match.

Thanks for confirming the LED guesswork

If you update to https://chewitt.libreelec.tv/testing/LibreE…arm-10.85.0.tar I've reverted some patches which I think are the cause of the USB keyboard issue; please confirm back if that resolves the issue or not?

bertiera · April 15, 2022 at 7:21 AM

No problem for the WIFI, I'm not using it anyway, but thought it might be useful for others, you've a reasonable explanation...

For the remote, if you're that good at guessing missing parts you should start playing the lottery/casino

LED: well, actually it behaves like all the previous images of LE/CE i've ever used (but so did all your previous testbuilds, so I don't know what changed, might be nice maybe if we could control it's color (maybe orage when pauzed, of depending of the source/bandwith/buffer-level, ...) But just like the 1/2/3 buttons, I've never used it, and I don't need it

For the keyboard, I've downloaded the .img.gz because I messed up the storage on the previous SD and wanted to have a valid test.

kernel: Linux LibreELEC 5.18.0-rc2 #1 SMP PREEMPT Fri Apr 15 01:39:19 UTC 2022 aarch64 GNU/Linux

Still no keyboard

Another thing I noticed on your recent images is that the smb-shares are not discoverable any more.

in 'Ubuntu-Files' I could browse to 'smb://libreelec/' and saw all shared folders, this doesn't work, but I can browse to 'smb://libreelec/backup'

dmesg:

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**chewitt** · April 15, 2022 at 10:11 AM

Can you be specific/clear. Does the LED work, or not? .. Does the keyboard work if you connect it after boot?