Installing on old S905 TV box

jim_p · February 9, 2023 at 6:20 AM

That is what I am saying. The tvbox has no reset button at the end of the av socket. It is more than obvious from those 3 tiny holes that indicate a missing switch at that spot. And I know that since 2 years ago that I first decided to install something in it, I did not learn it yesterday that I took it apart!

**chewitt** · February 9, 2023 at 7:09 AM

The row of four pins next to the socket are for the serial UART .. easy to spot as one has a square marking. It's quite normal for the pin header to be omitted from the board (saves a few pennies).

If not in the audio jack I'd expect the reset to be on the underside of the board, which we don't have a photo for.

jim_p · February 9, 2023 at 11:08 AM

Here is the same photo as before, with all its inputs/outputs tagged.
The holes indicated in the red circle are where the reset switch would be. I even raised the brightness so as to make them visible!

**chewitt** · February 9, 2023 at 11:19 AM

It would be highly unusual for a board to omit support for user-initiated recovery. It would be nice to see the underside of the board.

jim_p · February 9, 2023 at 11:47 AM

I never thought taking photos of something would be so annoying. This is the last photo I post. It takes me more time to really capture a clean one than to edit it on photoshop. And this time I had to use external lights so that the camera flash does not reflect on the board itself

https://imgur.com/a/GkEZmPJ

Compared to the one above, this is flipped horizontally, so the side with the hdmi and other ports is now on the left. The usb and card slots are at the bottom like before.

**chewitt** · February 9, 2023 at 1:06 PM

PCB's can be fun to get without reflections and such obscuring the info. However, that's a nice clear pic and there are definitely no buttons on that side of the PCB. Have you tried creating a new install SD from dtech'd image? .. not booting?

At the end of the day it's probably just an unsupported Realtek chip, so unless you really really need BT, maybe just quit while we're ahead?

jim_p · February 9, 2023 at 3:16 PM

Well, I asked a friend who does photography as a hobby and she said I have to use external lighting when I take photos of objects close up. And that is what I did for my second photo, placing 2 light sources on each side and disabling the flash completely.

I tried dtech's image, with both dtb files he provides, and it does not boot. I think I said it earlier and you said it is because of the new boot mechanism used by le 11 on amlogic socs. And I do not care about bt.

If those holes are really for a reset switch, I may ask the neighbor to solder one for me there.

The reason I do not want to quit already is because I really want to get a tvbox with kodi 19+ (= python2 addons will die completely by the end of 2023 imho) to that family I have mentioned in another thread (poor family of 5, with 3 kids aged from 3 to 9yo). It keeps them occupied when their parents are at work.

Right now they have the all black mxq with s805. Unlike the mxqpro4k, that one has a reset button inside the av port and installing dtech's image of le 9.2.x was very easy.

**Da Flex** · February 9, 2023 at 3:26 PM

Second pic has great quality. Can you do the same from the other side? It might help to identify soldering points.

PS: It's probably not necessary to make another pic. It seems like it has no "reset" label anyway. The three soldering points from your tagged pic seem to be right, because two of them are grounded (see backside). So the upper one (on the tagged pic), and one of the others should be right.

jim_p · February 9, 2023 at 3:46 PM

There you go. I could not make the lights from either side reflect less

Please don't ask me to name the inputs/outputs again or to mark the spot where the reset switch would be.

https://imgur.com/a/f487wZP

**Da Flex** · February 9, 2023 at 4:06 PM

Yep, PCB tracks on top seem to proof my theory. You can solder now.

jim_p · February 9, 2023 at 4:08 PM

Where do you mean by "on top"?

**Da Flex** · February 9, 2023 at 4:14 PM

Quote from jim_p

Where do you mean by "on top"?

Upper side of the PCB (where the chips are).

**chewitt** · February 9, 2023 at 4:39 PM

It's still hard to make out, but I think RTL8189ETV is an educated guess on the WiFi chip. This is a basic b/g/n WiFi only module (no BT). The RLT vendor driver can be found here: https://github.com/jwrdegoede/rtl8189ES_linux and while it's relatively simple to package it's not a driver that LE will package due to the long-standing policy of not adding more damn RTL vendor drivers. Unfortunately this is an old and cheap chip and I'm not aware of anyone making the effort to port the (equally old and cheap) vendor drivers to the upstream kernel. WiFi sucks for streaming most media anway, so stick to Ethernet.

**Da Flex** · February 9, 2023 at 5:04 PM

chewitt I'm reading RTL8129ETQ. Just in case you have extra offers for this.

**chewitt** · February 9, 2023 at 6:08 PM

That's not an RTL chip number though. Try Googling..

**Da Flex** · February 9, 2023 at 7:36 PM

Quote from chewitt

That's not an RTL chip number though. Try Googling..

Right, with the ETV ending it should be your guess.

**chewitt** · February 10, 2023 at 11:14 AM

Code

cd /storage/.update
wget https://chewitt.libreelec.tv/testing/LibreELEC-AMLGX.arm-10.95.1.tar
reboot

jim_p run that ^ and then run "pastekodi" from SSH and share the URL

jim_p · February 10, 2023 at 3:05 PM

You don't have to write such detailed instructions. A simple "get that file and update it" would be enough, i know what I must do

There you go. Wifi works now!

http://ix.io/4nEm

As for the realtek driver. I can say the same about wl, which (from what I see in debian's package changelog here) has not seen a major upstream update in years! Yet, that driver is provided with le (x64 at least) instead of the opensource b43.

I have an old laptop that has a wifi card supported by both drivers (hwid 14e4:4315) and it worked fine since 9.0 that I run le on it , but it is partially broken in le 11. I even remember asking for an update to it while I was using the nightly las summer because it gave kernel panics. In any case though, it would be nice to try b43 there...

https://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs//non-free/b/broadcom-sta/broadcom-sta_6.30.223.271-23_changelog

As for the reset button addition, I am still waiting for the neighbor to buy me a button and I will then give him the tvbox to solder it.