Posts by vaughng

So... I found this regarding reading the required information via FEL mode. However, running these commands:

./sunxi-fel read 0x42400000 0x82d0 boot1.header 
./sunxi-fel read 0x43000000 0x20000 script.bin

fail with usb_bulk_send() ERROR -7: Operation timed out which I believe may be related to size limits as outline here.

I don't know what length would be appropriate to avoid the error. If I knew how addresses work (I read something about 8 bits but didn't quite grasp it) I could script a read in chunks and concatenate them into a single binary. Apologies, I know I need to learn on my own but if someone could just point me in the right direction I'll figure it out myself. Many thanks

EDIT: Ignore the above, boot1 isn't loaded so cannot be read. My bad!

Thanks for the info! I'll dig deeper and see what I can do about it. Much appreciated.

A huge thanks to everyone who has/is responding to my noob questions. I really appreciate it especially @/jernej (avoiding a mention).

Follow up question

What uboot compatible board is closest in configuration to mine? [H2+/H3] [512MB RAM] [8GB Sandisk ROM]

Or is there a way to read find/create a config for my board? I read some of the existing configs but I'm not familiar with all the variables or how to retrieve them. I'm at the "Booting U-Boot over USB" section of the FEL/USBBoot doc.

So I've played around with some binaries but can't seem to find any compatible ones. Running sunxi-fel write xxxxxxxx fes1.bin and sunxi-fel exec xxxxxxxx results in FEL crashing (fes1.bin is the NES Classic binary for dumping firmware I think, read a tutoiral...).

Can anyone direct me towards resources regarding finding/building binaries that will work with this board? I'm very new to low level stuff but I do understand the basics such as addresses and hex data. Are the binaries board specific or chip specific?

EDIT: This is the tutorial that I was reading through: https://xor.co.za/post/2018-12-01-fel-bootprocess/

Now we're getting somewhere. Turns out the extra traces are for power to be fed back into the USB port. After connecting the USB-A to USB-A cable, the device powered on! Never seen this before so it's pretty cool, but I guess it's just a hacked OTG port with a type A connector. In any case, I disconnected the cable, held the recover button and reconnected - success.

Bus 001 Device 064: ID 1f3a:efe8 Allwinner Technology sunxi SoC OTG connector in FEL/flashing mode

jernej The output of sunxi-fel ver is:

AWUSBFEX soc=00001680(H3) 00000001 ver=0001 44 08 scratchpad=00007e00 00000000 00000000

EDIT: I will check for serial output in a bit, the FEL docs say there may serial output now.

The USB port closest to the Ethernet port appears to be the OTG port as there are more traces than necessary for USB that are going directly to the chip and I'm assuming these are the ID/VBUS for OTG although not sure how they're connected to a type A port, maybe faked when forced into FEL? The floss trick worked, I was so close, it's not an H3 but rather an H2+. Cannot identify the RAM but it is a Chinese brand (GCAI). WiFi chip is XR819.

jernej Installed sunxi-tools (thanks AUR). I see the sunxi-fel command has these options:

hex[dump] address length        Dumps memory region in hex 
dump address length             Binary memory dump

does that mean I can dump firmware from the device's NAND flash by cycling through the addresses? Or does memory in this case mean RAM?

jernej I have a USB-A to USB-A, I will try to look more closely at the board to see if I can tell which is the OTG port. Yes the lack of a card slot is a disappointment but I'm hoping I can force some sort of USB boot. Even if I can't run proper LE I'd like to try get some form of linux running even if I have to build my own custom image to install drivers. I've gotten x11 kodi running on armbian on my tanix tx6 before so it would be a nice experiment especially with such little RAM to work with, if it ends up being possible that is.

It's my first time hearing of FEL but I'll do some research.

Thanks chewitt ! I tried but I think it's thermal epoxied to the chip /: will try the floss trick later. The only mentions of EASiTEK I've found online are Chinese forums about other Android TV boxes.

I'm blind... If you look between the two USB ports there is a backward facing button which on the board is labelled "UBOOT RECOVER". Still no UART but it's progress nonetheless.

Yeaaaahhh I figured as much LOL. Ah damn okay. Might just have to stick with Android I guess. I will still try a few things and see where it gets me. Fingers crossed the 512MB sticker is false. Can't seem to find the RAM chip online, only the ROM and WiFi chip are known to the internet apparently. I'll keep at it and update if I find anything but I do believe (by process of elimination and knowing that my cpu has 4 cores) that the device has either an H3 or H2+.

I would like to attempt porting LE or at least getting armbian running on an old Android TV box that I got for free. The box looks like a router with a green top. The label underneath says it's a "TVFrog" which I could only locate listing for online and no specifications that actually mean anything. I'm trying to avoid pulling the heat sink off because I don't have any thermal pads lying around. The device is running Android 4.4 KitKat with a sideloaded Netflix and Kodi 16.x.

Kodi reports that the device is a sun8i. The board is long and narrow. It has RCA audio/video (composite out), 2x USB, 1x HDMI out and 1x Ethernet port. HDMI can operate at up to 1080p@60Hz and it actually plays 1080p content beautifully! Netflix works well, Kodi is somewhat iffy because it's old as ever.

The board says it's a "T199 v2.0 Designed by EASiTEK". I've soldered a header to the UART pins (which are labeled GND TX RX VCC). Using a CP2102 USB to UART adapter I cannot get any output. I was hoping to get a root shell and possibly dump the existing firmware before I begin tampering. Any ideas? I'm thinking either I've set something up wrong (baud rate 115200 using minicom on /dev/tty0) or there's something that needs to be done on the board (i.e short pins) to enable UART.

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It's been a while but I have an update! Hopefully I'm not speaking too soon but the device hanging is no longer an issue with LE 11.95.2 beta. It's been running non-stop for over a week now without any issues. I've watched movies from an NFSv4 share on my network as well and everything ran smoothly. Excited for the next stable release!!!

Have a look at this. I use the same method to create small images of large drives. On the other hand, if the decompressed fs is not fitting on your new drive, you may want to shrink the partition with the most free space before creating the image, then when decompressed you can resize it to fit the remainder of the drive space.

I am running LE12 nightly-20240305-03173a9 on my Tanix TX6.

I've added 2 NFS shares using systemd (movies and series using .mount and .automount units) which mounted successfully.

However, when added these folders as libraries, some content is missing. Under "TV Shows" I have "Halo" amongst others but when I select "Halo" or "The Boys", there are no seasons or episodes. Other series are detected fine.

It seems the series that aren't showing up properly are all MKV. The files show up fine when browsing the mounted folders manually.

I haven't had any luck after disabling CEC. The crashes occur not only when idle but also during YouTube and Karaoke (pocketcdg) playback. Seemingly random crashes. Will probably end up replacing the device eventually but until then I shall attempt to figure out what's happening - will probably run stock LE11 for a while and see what information I can gather. Currently using the device on a TV we don't use very often. Ended up installing Kodi on a Debian machine (used as a Desktop PC as well) for the TV that I used to use the TX6 on.

Quote from gadget_guy

I'll post in the other thread, but for me anyway the problem seems to have been CEC.

I'm out of options so I will give this a try and update in a week or if/when it crashes again.

I've read through some of the forum posts but the information i found is somewhat outdated. I currently have a Tanix TX6 but it crashes when idle (seemingly no fix possible) and I'm looking to replace it. I am highly budget restricted (think $80 max).

I've found some used Celeron J3455 Mini PCs for $50 each and was wondering if they would still be okay for native playback from my library (low bitrate 4K and 1080p h264/h265 on an NFS share) and Netflix/YouTube? I don't need anything fancy like HDR. All my media plays perfectly on the TX6 and RPi4.

Thanks.

Sounds like the partition table is messed up. This is happens sometimes when flashing images to a drive (i.e creating a fedora installer). You should load it up in GParted and create a new ms-dos partition table, then format the partition as NTFS if you want to store files larger than 4GB or FAT32/exFAT if you don't. FAT32 is the default for most USB drives.

The issue persists on LE10.

gadget_guy Maybe we can find something in common that might be causing the crash. Do you use the CastagnaIT Netflix addon, YouTube addon or the fTV theme?