Posts by buzzmarshall

  • Viewable Down Streams

    was just meaning what kinda of downstreams were people pulling with there dvb setups? here in NA theres really not much left in the way of decent FTA stuff without using motorized dish'es or still doing buds. With Dish and Vu encrypted and Direct TV (actually its not really dvb compliant anyways) i was just curious as to what peeps were watching, I quess things are somewhat different in the Asian and European markets as theres more FTA on un-encrypted feeds still kicking around.

  • Recommended Rockchip SOC?

    Quote from jbond7

    balbes 150, thank you for your input, I know I did not start this thread but I too have been looking for a new box, after buying both the x99 and the Vero 4K+ and after buying a 4K TV my chromebox is a bit outdated for 4K, that said, I am not confident enough to test a Magicsee N6 Max RK3399, since like the x99 I did not see a img for the x99 (rk3399) here specifically for the x99 or the Magicsee N6 Max RK3399. So with just this thread and a couple of posts here and there I think I will test RockPro64, I will purchase the following:

    1. ROCKPro64 Premium Aluminum Case
    2. ROCKPro64 Slim Profile Graphene Heat Sink
    3. ROCKPro64 board
    4. 12V/5A Power Supply (US Plug) and a
    5. High Performance eMMC Module, I think that should do it. If anyone has anything to add, would truly appreciate any input.

    Not sure where your ordering from but you may want to consider ordering the wifi/bluetooth module at the same time as its pretty cheap and you might end up actually wanting it. While i am constructing my own linux distro i have been checking out a couple of Libreelec builds that actually work quite well. 1 was a precompiled build from the site here and the other i built from balbes github.

    Since wed night i have had it pretty much continually streaming movies from my local san cluster. I created a cue made up of a wide variety of movie sizes and formats and not had a single lockup yet. I have not put my board in a case but the normal finned metal heat sync without a fan seems to hold up just fine.

  • Trash-talk

    Actually i kinda prefer the github looks as well and at least am familiar with it and where things are... gitlabs look i find somewhat confusing and not as intuitive in its layout.

    I just wasn't sure if projects from one were totally compatible between the 2 systems as i have been struggling to even add ssh keys with the account i have on gitlab and wasn't sure if that would translate into other areas of the project.

    i think i will just clone Rob Herrings and Linus's gitlab stuff locally and when i am ready push it up to my dormant github site.

    thanx.

  • Trash-talk

    hey... on another unrelated subject i would like to ask ya ...

    i am way old school and predate most repo setups like github or gitlab and have been following the panfrost stuff over on gitlab and am thinking about cloning a few things and eventually opening them up publicly and was wondering if theres any real advantage of gitlab over github.

    github i am somewhat familiar with as i have one with nothing it on github... normally for backup sake i have my internal git hub servers setup in the house and just push things to it for protection but since following the panfrost stuff have been looking at Gitlab and wondering about cloning their repo over into my own gitlab account and that way when i want to push from my local copy of their repo i can push to my own and let others just take what they want.


    i don't have much time to spare and really don't want to spend a lot of time learning all that stuff as i typically don't use it. Over the years i tend to have gone with what i know and not bothered dragging my butt up into current stuff, so most of the stuff i do when building custom linux code is strickly just been in altering the source code and building... even things like patches i don't do enough to keep it all in my head and by the time i look things up and refresh my memory its just easier to do directly...

    getting old kinda sucks when you got to much crap in your head and every time i try and put somthing new in it seems i gotta knock something else out. lol

    basically i am getting to the point where i would like to help but because i don't really no my way around the repo stuff don't want to end up screwing up someone else's repo. Lately while picking away i have been using my userland (drm/abi and few other things) i built for the S912-t820 to play with what i have been watching on their repo but i need to spend a lot of time going thru things to put them into proper order and formats and making sure there is nothing inappropriate in them, i have a buddy that is copy-right patent lawyer that is looking into a few things i need to know about.

    anyways i would appreciate any thoughts.

  • Trash-talk

    its been like -25 here in Ontario for the last few days and with all the workstations and servers running in my basement the furnace still hardly comes on... i cut passive floor registers in to the upper 2 floors to allow the heat to rise... A/C tho in the summer is another case... for years i used to get yearly checkup as the local electrical authorites used to think i was running a grow op downstairs because of the hydro bills. I was one of the 1st internet service providers in my area back in the 90's so when i closed the office i moved alot of the servers home and put a trunk line into the house and maintained about a 100 connections out of the house and some of that is still use even tho i moved out of the business years ago but still maintain a few private servers for uucp and irc. I would like to look more into some of the solar stuff and try and offset some of the costs but want to wait tilll we move up north next year..

    radiant floor heating here in Canada has finally started to grow in the last couple of years which is good

  • Trash-talk

    i would be inclined to call most things in electronics a heat sync as radiator to me usually implies something capable of transmitting more heat like you say a hot water rad or heat reflector like in radiated heat in the hvac industry like infra-red tube heaters which is technically referred to as radiant heating.

    i think chewitt is right tho in this case as english not being his native language and its a problem with gootle. years ago when we hacked nagra i had a buddy from that part of the world and it was allways a issue and its funny how after all these years the translators at google and others still have these types of typical issues. lol...

  • Trash-talk

    you might be right but the real world is where things really matter as most the are involved in higher education and high level engineering tend to work in isolated none real world environments where millions of dollars of equipment and controlled environments are their workspace.

    the real world which is unfortunately based on cashola tend to cut corners to reduce cost but end up with products out in the field that may eventually fail sooner as compared to things from days gone by where quality ruled rather then quantity.

    its not that i don't understand your opinion or even think that your wrong i just no if somethings within reason manufacturers will release the product and in the end in most cases the enduser takes it.

    Ps3-4, xbox260-new one, tons of different laptops and the list goes on and on, and even tho because of bad flow profiles not really corrected to the none lead based solder has lead to tons of graphix failures occuring before they really should have. and a large part of those actually aren't even related to bad soldering but because Nvidea decided to let the graphix chips go out into the real world when they should not have.

    in Nvidea's case the real issue lays not with board level bga mount but with bad flip-chip manufacturing which was a ENGINEERED calculation prior to packaging the wafer inside the outter bonded bga carrier. People think that reheating the board/bga mount is fixing the problem when all they are really doing is overheating the bga package which is making the flip-chip connections temporarily reconnect inside the chip itself.

    as i said i understand your concern but i honestly think that until people that actually own and use the board start to complain about heat related issues i think you should do yourself a favor and let the issue go as i hate when i see unending debates over unproven issues and over the years i have watched you contribute since you 1st appeared over on Freaktab doing the linux thing along time ago and would never want to see people loose respect or credibility over something like this, especially when you've earned somuch cred's over the years by helping others.

    oeace man...

  • Trash-talk

    cool...

    actually looking at that and seeing the size of the heat sync on the bottom i visually don't see why that would not be suffice.

    assuming from what i see the SoC is on the bottom and the heat sync is sitting on it i would think it should work not to bad as the board profile would allow air between it and the heat sync which is only planting on the top of the SoC.

    it appears to be the full size of the board so being on the bottom should be big enough to allow the radiated (convected) heat to spill up over the edge of the main board rather then trapping it under the board which would happen if the heat sync was smaller then the boards full profile.

    the only concern i can see would be Maybe a issue with the case ventilation itself but that is easy to play with.

    without actual test its hard to make any real conclusions but based on stuff i have hacked over the years i cant see any real issues. and as said before its way better then most others without anything in the tvbox market.

    the rockpro64 i got i still have not bother'd putting the heat sync on it as it barely gets warm not matter what i run... right now outside the kodi type of use i am running a hobbled together version based on slackware that i am running software i am righting that handles motion control over a huge 3d printer i build and am prototyping which pushes the board alot harder then any libbreelec or armbian type of setup and not had any heat issues.

    i currently build custom dc motor drives that handle up to 15amp per phase and use heat syncs like that all the time and they work great.

    thanx for posting the pics.

  • Trash-talk

    cool thanx...


    i predate docker and even things like github so taking the time to learn new things at my age is hard to justify so i tend to stick to what i know and am familiar with.

    to be honest thats probably one of the main reasons i have never pushed anything to the kernel repo or other things as i learned the old way and have been building custom kernels since the 90's... over the years ive learned some of the rudimentary github commands and can clone and do the basic things but for all these years i just alter the kernel source code to what i need and the stuff the finished sources on a server farm i keep close so even the simple things like creating a patch for me was just easier to edit the sources the way you need then compile and your good to go.

    just to old , and to lazy and would sooner spend my time playing around at wafer level under the microscope...

    thanx tho...

  • Trash-talk

    Out of curiosity are you talking about the normal Libreelec github sources or is this something from your own github sources? i have built bables rockpro64 build and am interested in looking at others as well...

    My normal toolchain is different then the Libreelec one and lately ive been fighting with it not finishing while CoreELEC's and balbes seem to work without any intervention on my part... Libreelecs probably just because of the huge coverage of devices its trying to handle and i never build on anything but real linux boxes... sofar i can get Coreelec and balbes to work on 15.04, 16,04 and 18.04 machines.

    Sorry not that has anything really to do with my question, just thought i would qualify what i build with but am curious to have a look at what your referencing against and was not sure if it was your own github or libreelecs

    thanx

  • Trash-talk

    Quote from vpeter

    You can comment coolling solution. You wrote it is bad and tkaiser wrote it is good. Also numbers from real devices concur him. So why are you saying it is bad design? Do you even have this device to make some tests yourself?

    i would agree with what your saying as well..

    being a old semi-retired dude one thing i still actively do is repair at motherboard level a lot of macbook motherboards and one thing i have learned thru experience is that its one thing to just look at something and try and form a opinion when the reality is that until you actually watch something in its running environment its almost impossible to rate if its a good working design... when it comes to heat you can't just go by what you think based on a visual look. I do reflow's all the time and have all the appropriate equipment and its easy to make the assumption that what appears bad actually works well enough to stay within the operating specs and manufacturers do that all the time.

    thermal transfer and dissipation are not things to judge just on appearance... and sorry to say balbes that if you don't actually have the unit to test i would have to disagree with the logic, i understand your visual concerns but without actually testing the board its hard to say how its going to react and operate.

  • Trash-talk

    Quote from CvH

    I moved the whole offtopic discussion into that thread, that was about RK and not about N2. And you may already realised that a lot at that topic here is more or less trashtalk and about throwing with mud. My time is limited so I moved everything since it started - thats it, I have no intention to police every single comment.

    fair enough, i understand and am well aware of a mods job being tough enough and really don't want to be part of a problem over stuff like this... i am capable of getting into enough trouble on my own and this just ain't worth the time

  • Trash-talk

    Not quite sure how a mod figured i trashed talked anyone, but hey its not my job to moderate.

    I just felt a bit bad for balbes for what appeared to me as a few insults over what appears to be a personality rift based on things of no real pertinence to the topic that I actually started. Seemed to me like the whole topic which was based on information about the rk3399 turned into a debate about branding and things not even related to the technical information regarding the rk3399 which is what i started the post over.

    to be honest i was not aware of the comments that were made on cnx-software as i very rarely watch that site, and if thats whats been going on i would agree its not really the right thing to do as it effects opinions formed by others while they are looking for information, so i can understand how stuff like that can rub others the wrong way.

    Being a technical person I to at times go off on my total disappointment in Amlogic over the years and realize i need to temper my own remarks at times and i do understand that those types of things are sometimes best served by being kept more in a more private setting and out of the view of others trying to learn.

    anyways... hopefully I have not offended anyone as trash talk is not something i normally waste my time on, and truly my intent was to just try and put things into perspective because without that it just makes people not want to bother wasting their personal time trying to help out.

  • Trash-talk

    Quote from Shoog

    You lost credibility when you said that plenty of cheaper TV boxes running S922x were just around the corner. The record of cheap TV boxes providing the sort of cooling offered by the N2 is about zero. Cheap TV boxes will have zero cooling, zero software support and no high spec DAC. Your observations regarding the effectiveness of the cooler fly in the face of the actual real world experience of the many developers who are using pre-release samples who are reporting die temps of 40C when doing software decoding of netflix at 1080p quality.

    Shoog

    I agree in that i doubt cheaper S922x boxes are around the corner as the existing S912 boxes are already overpriced here in Canada and the dealers will just use the new stuff as a way to over market and squueze the enduser price wise. maybe in other places in the world things are cheaper but here in Canada its the land of getting raped by the so called dealers.

    The comment about zero cooling and software support is dead on, Cooling is always a good subject for debate and pretty much everyone from Apple to Microsoft and everyone in between has introduced products with poor cooling so i its kinda a given to not bother debating that issue on anything.

    The only thing that i would be interested in seeing results on is at the actual wafer level of the newer SoC as sometimes going down in fab size sometimes leads to issue with a new product until its more mature. Ive already seen decapped / micrographed S912 and theres a lot of stuff on that wafer so seeing more on smaller will be interesting to see.

  • Trash-talk

    boy you guys are like a dog with a bone that just refuses to let go. how does anyone know what another person really knows or don't know and if its his opinion then thats find as were all entitled to one. right or wrong. besides where you live and have to bring things in from can have a huge impact on what you think something costs. eg: the rockpro64 if i would have sourced from a canadian dealer was pretty much double what i paid compared to just buying it direct the plant. costs are always subject to where you live and exchange, shipping and duties.

    people need solutions NOT insults based on personal opinions which always seems to get in between people when it comes to opposing views on a subject.

    besides ts all BS anyways, anyone that has spent any amount of time in the sport already knows that both Rockchip and AML have already dumped boxes on the market in the last while that are running no where near their claimed spec's that either of them are running anywhere near what the specs claim and how anyone can logically make the jump that these new next gen SoC's are going to be any better when the older ones are still working on a mostly crippled gpu stack is just looking to argue for the sake of arguing.

    does it really matter?... and you may be right with balbes maybe speaking about something he's not that familiar with but then again how many others are not guilty of having a opinion.

    As someone that stays in the background on a lot of places this much i DO know, and that is balbes at least is someone that has proven himself with actual releases that a lot of people seem more then happy to make use of and insults are not something that makes one all fuzzy and warm and want to continue to give up their personal time by trying to help others. opinion or not, i think you guys should cut him some slack personally.

    i'll crawl back into my hole now...


    yo balbes, i have compiled your newest Libreelec for the rockprio64 and its looking not to shabby... still need more time to play but nice start.