Installing on old S905 TV box

**Da Flex** · February 10, 2023 at 3:14 PM

Quote from jim_p

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.

Ask for a small round button. So you can drill a hole with that size, and glue it on from inside the case.

**chewitt** · February 10, 2023 at 5:46 PM

Ye olde 'wl' was added for AppleTV support aeons ago and was noticed again recently. It will survive LE11 (bit late to drop it) but I suspect will be gone and replaced by b43 (which doesn't cover exactly the same cards) for LE12.

jim_p · February 11, 2023 at 10:30 AM

Honest question. Now that the wifi works, do I have to do all that recovery procedure to get the info you asked? I have no problem doing so, but the addition will probably take a couple of days.

Moreover, I do not really want to drill holes on the tvbox's housing. And in case I did not mention it earlier, it also has a small square ~8*8cm steel plate (2-3mm thick) mounted under its top so as to weight more. Removing that will probably make it 90% lighter

**chewitt** · February 11, 2023 at 1:15 PM

No need. I'll keep the RTL driver in my private branch for as long as it compiles (and drop it when it breaks). I won't be sending it upstream to main repo.

**Da Flex** · February 11, 2023 at 1:54 PM

Quote from jim_p

Moreover, I do not really want to drill holes on the tvbox's housing. And in case I did not mention it earlier, it also has a small square ~8*8cm steel plate (2-3mm thick) mounted under its top so as to weight more. Removing that will probably make it 90% lighter

They gave you a useless metal block instead of a reset button. Marketing geniuses...

You just need one hole to reach the button. Nobody will see.

**chewitt** · February 11, 2023 at 4:05 PM

It's quite common to find weights in boxes. Without them they're so light an HDMI or Ethernet cable will twist the box all over the place.

jim_p · February 17, 2023 at 7:22 AM

I noticed that images for 10.95.1 (11 beta2) reached the greek mirror a few days ago and I was curious if I would have to redo the dtb change in the ini file again. I also had a suspicion that wifi will not work after updating

Anyway, I did the upgrade and now wifi is not detected again, so I will flash the image from here again.

Index of /testing/

Do you really create images every single day? Because it is stressful for me to update it every single day!

In other news, I am still waiting my neighbor to find or buy me a button for the tvbox! That is why I have not replied all week

**chewitt** · February 17, 2023 at 7:28 AM

You only need to update when you need to update. Otherwise "if it works, don't fit it" applies.

jim_p · July 24, 2023 at 5:13 AM

Sorry for reopening the thread 5+ months later, but I had more important stuff to do outside of le. Since there will be no unofficial images for amlgx in the near future, on which I had to rely for its wifi, time to move on.

First and foremost, my stupid neighbor kept the tvbox for almost 1 month before me asking when will it be ready. He said he did not and will not fix it because he does not like me cursing/swearing (not at him, cursing/swearing in general)! Sadly, I did not find another technician to do it since then, so it still has no reset button.

No reset button = no way to make it boot from its emmc. A workaround to boot it to recovery by having an empty update.zip file in the root of the sd (found on xda) does not seem to work with the new booting procedure. At this point, I thought that I'd rather use that small sd for something else and make the tvbox boot from usb. Is that possible? These are my last attempts to make it work with le 11, because the time I have wasted on this I would rather spend it on dtech's build of le 9 for s905 or lakka or emuelec.

jim_p · July 29, 2023 at 9:12 AM

I got a reset button in the tvbox! And it cost me more than it should.

I do not have the tvbox in my hands yet, but the technician (who took the photo) said it does nothing when pushing it, it just stays on the amlogic logo with the tiger and nothing more. In fact, he said it did the same just by short-wiring the contacts there, thus a button would be pointless, but I told him to install it anyway.

And that is why I asked on dtech's thread about what it should do. So, what do I do now?

jim_p · July 7, 2024 at 6:03 PM

Please excuse my semi-offtopic. May I ask what wifi chip my tvbox had? Please don't say broadcom

Excluding my rpi3b, this is the first time I come accross a broadcom wifi chip (bcm43228). It peforms like trash with b43, with the download speeds maxing at 300kb/s. It performs perfectly with wl, but it gets a kernel panic on boot.

Regular x64 distro installation.

**chewitt** · July 8, 2024 at 4:49 AM

It was either Realtek RTL8189ES or RTL8189FS .. I forget which.

The wl driver has been unmaintained for years so hearing it panics doesn't surprise me. Share the report and a dmesg log in a separate thread.

jim_p · July 8, 2024 at 4:23 PM

Are you sure? Because I am pretty sure even le 12 uses wl for the broadcom chips,

My issue it is not libreelec related though. The kernel panic brought back memories from that tvbox and I said "omg please do not have the same chip with the tvbox"! The only hardware I have used extensively and has a broadcom wifi chipset is my rpi3b, and its wifi is... bad, plain and simple.

**chewitt** · July 8, 2024 at 6:01 PM

The wl driver is only used with a small handful of really old Broadcom SDIO chips. Newer designs are supported through in-kernel brcmfmac and brcmsmac drivers which are well supported and actively maintained.

Poor WiFI performance on RPi3B (and every other RPi board that I used) is a radio signal issue, not a chip or chip-choice issue. An external antenna connector would solve the issue, but I guess when you're intentionally cost-engineering boards for short-range hobbyist use there are design compromises to make, and perfomance comes second to cost.

jim_p · July 9, 2024 at 3:53 PM

I learned about brcm80211 and its family of drivers (brcmfmac and brcmsmac) a few days ago, because I thought it was either b43 or wl for the broadcoms. I guess I am the lucky one whose cards are supported by neither of the brcm80211 family. And if I recall correctly, I had asked in the past for le to include b43 instead of wl.

My problem is how this (wireless card on an 15 year old laptop I use with an old x64 version of le, so older kernel)

Code

04:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY [14e4:4315] (rev 01)
       Subsystem: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY [14e4:04b5]
       Kernel driver in use: wl
       Kernel modules: wl

runs better than this (wireless card on a 9-10 year old laptop I set up a week ago with debian unstable and 6.9.8 today)

Code

02:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Inc. and subsidiaries BCM43228 802.11a/b/g/n [14e4:4359]
       Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:0014]
       Kernel driver in use: bcma-pci-bridge
       Kernel modules: bcma

On this laptop, which I will use until the end of summer probably, I have to select between a poor performing b43 or a wl that gives a kernel panic on boot. Last update for the wl driver, for fixing compatibilities or builds with the kernels was on March 4th 2024, so it is pretty fresh.

As for the rpi... don't get me started. A few years ago, when I first got my hands on a 4gb rpi4, I had commented on the lack of a purely arm64 os from the rpi foundation and how dhcpcd is insufficient. Oh what a blasphemy that was for the fanboys! Fast forward to today and to rpi5, there is finally an arm64 image, although not fully 64bit (it has 32bit userspace as someone said) and dhcpcd was ditched in favor of network manager.

**chewitt** · July 9, 2024 at 6:15 PM

In laptops of that age the WiFi modules are normally little mini PCIe cards that can be removed, binned, and inexpensively replaced by something using a chipset from a better supported vendor, e.g. some kind of Intel chip that uses the iwlwifi driver.