S912 TICTID X9T (Tanix TX9 clone) - LED/VFD

    I got the above box up and running with the q200 device tree (giving me wired network, the q201 gives unstable wireless). Everything seems to be fine, however I can't get the LED to say something else than "boot".

    I read that the new upstream driver for the FD628 chipset has been released and is now working on the TX3 mini. I have also found the the tm1628 kernel driver that I can load with modprobe... However nothing seems to happen if I do: no new device is being generated and I also can't get lcdproc to work.

    Is there anyone who has gotten this LED to work without openvfd?

    The FD628/TM1628 driver was submitted upstream and then bike-shed'ed to a standstill, so it remains un-merged and the author has no plans to resurrect the effort. I have been including patches in the Amlogic kernel that I maintain for the AMLGX image for some time. To have the driver work, the VFD layout needs to be correctly described in device-tree. I've created device-tree files for other boxes in the past, but the only one I still have in the AMLGX image is for the TX3-mini. The driver is not designed for use with openvfd or lcdproc userspace tools, although the openvfd repo is useful for figuring out the pins that need to be bit-banged to make things work. The nearest you can get with userspace configuration is issuing a sequence of fdtput commands to modify the device-tree file that boots the box (which updates will overwrite).

    This kernel branch has the commits to add the driver, and a device-tree for Tanix TX9-pro with the VFD described:

    Commits · chewitt/linux
    Linux kernel source tree -- WARNING I REBASE MY BRANCHES! - Commits · chewitt/linux
    github.com

    Note that this was 10x kernel releases ago and I've no idea now if these patches were ever proven on a real TX9-pro, or whether your TX9 (non-pro) clone will need/use the same layout; although I'd guess the spec difference is limited to RAM size and WiFi/BT module used. Typically users show-up excited that AMLGX exists and then go quiet once they realise playback is not as polished as the older vendor kernel images (not that these are perfect either) so not all device-tree files that I create get tested and sent upstream.

    The device-tree compatible also needs to be in to https://github.com/LibreELEC/Libr…s/vfd-clock#L25 .. although it looks like I've done that for the tx9-pro in the past and never cleaned it up.

    There are build instructions for creating your own LE images in the wiki if you're that way inclined and want to experiement. I can also pick the patches back into my LE13 test images; although I'm currently working on a kernel driver fix for a long-running bug and it might be a few days before I have that resolved and release a public image again.