Sick RK3288 Q8

[scole of TSBT]

Two of the RK3288 android boxes I just bought just a few months ago are already on the fritz. I've given them the franken-droid treatment so I can't return them They're not completely dead, I don't think. They power up, then drop into a power down state (or that's what the red light on them is supposed to mean). I thought maybe they just need a factory reset, but there's no factory reset. So I figure the next step is re-flash them. Except I can't seem to find a good stock firmware file to flash them with. I found a site that appeared to be a legit site for the seller and it had a firmware file I used to flash one. Before the flash, I would get nothing on the HDMI output. After the flash, it boots to android and goes briefly to main screen, then drops into the power off state. Over at freaktab, they have a thread about this box, but there's apparently several specific models. Mine are the XT-Q8L-V10 2014-09-02 C with label Q8L 8G/2G XT201410154 ST and there's no firmware listed for that model. Any suggestions?

http://freaktab.com/forum/tv-player-sup ... at-we-know

[Alez]

Was going to look at these when you posted how good they were. Freaktab is a legit site, see if you can find a finless bob rom for them. His stuff is top notch. If it will reflash then it is not bricked so there is hope eternal yet. Even a generic finless will probabily get you out of the dead droid predicament, hopefully anyway

[Dirk Broer]

Little hope (yet), as your model is specifically mentioned under 'not working for'

[Janos (retired)]

Try a new power supply/supply cable. I've seen those symptoms when the board is not quite getting enough power.

[scole of TSBT]

You da man Janos :) The stock psu was 5V 2A. Found a 5V 3.8A psu from a usb hub I had lying around, plugged it in and it's up and running.

[Alez]

Just another reason why we need Janos around.

On the scolding side ..... you are using stock psu's ?????? , they are for watching TV . Get a 5v 20 or 30 amp transformer and wire all the droids to it :protest: . Less plugs, far more stable and stock psu's are crap on all TV / Droid boxes. Chinese electronics, great products usually let down by crap, defective or poorly performing PSU's. And don't even get me started on the ' adapters ' supplied for the UK market. Fire hazards in the making. :blob6:

[Janos (retired)]

You da man Janos :) The stock psu was 5V 2A. Found a 5V 3.8A psu from a usb hub I had lying around, plugged it in and it's up and running.

Nice one!

[Janos (retired)]

I posted this quite a while ago but thought it relevant to link it again here. It shows my power distribution system for my devices:

http://www.dunadd.co.uk/seti/forum/view ... arm#p19881



... plenty of spare capacity and zero power problems, especially now that the whole thing is fed by an APC UPS.

[scole of TSBT]

Any idea how many amps these quad core android tv boxes actually pull when crunching on all 4 cores?

What % utilization can you take these 5V psu's to? For a 40A psu, what is the max amps you should draw from it? 20A, 30A? I guess they seem to have multiple outputs and I'll have to see how many amps per output. I guess the question is what % of the capacity can you use per rail?

I see what appears to be a voltage adjustment on many of these psu's. Is it necessary to test and adjust the voltage?

Also, a lot of the units I'm seeing are for LED lighting. Any reason they can't be used? I've found a couple 5V 40A LED psu's for less than $30 US.

And Janos, does Doc know you have his flux capacitor. Maybe we should take this pic off before you get a visit from the DoD. Or does that fall under the jurisdiction of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission? Doesn't matter, doing neutron enrichment without a permit is just asking for trouble.

[Janos (retired)]

Any idea how many amps these quad core android tv boxes actually pull when crunching on all 4 cores?

My tv box is a brick so I can't test it. If you have a standard volt meter handy you could take a reading, even the cheap meters are normally quite accurate.

What % utilization can you take these 5V psu's to? For a 40A psu, what is the max amps you should draw from it? 20A, 30A? I guess they seem to have multiple outputs and I'll have to see how many amps per output. I guess the question is what % of the capacity can you use per rail?

My ones have two rails both rated at 20 amps. I've run them at 20 amps during testing with no issues. The devil is in the fine print. Some quote n Amps as the maximum possible while some quote n Amps as the recommend safe max.

I see what appears to be a voltage adjustment on many of these psu's. Is it necessary to test and adjust the voltage?

Yes. some of the boards are very sensitive. The parallella gets really annoyed if you don't feed it 5.0V.

Also, a lot of the units I'm seeing are for LED lighting. Any reason they can't be used? I've found a couple 5V 40A LED psu's for less than $30 US.

LED lighting loops are mass produced so there are some economies of scale on the cost. What you might find though is that they are not as efficient as more expensive options and may therefore cost more to run. Also, they are generally not designed to work at high load 24/7 and can get rather warm. The general rule of thumb is if you can comfortably hold the transformer in your hand without it being too hot then you have nothing to worry about. If the cable feels more than a little bit warm then you need a thicker gauge cable or you will loose too much power. I always try to run at 50% capacity or less to leave plenty of headroom and to induce less stress in the system.

And Janos, does Doc know you have his flux capacitor. Maybe we should take this pic off before you get a visit from the DoD. Or does that fall under the jurisdiction of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission? Doesn't matter, doing neutron enrichment without a permit is just asking for trouble.

:) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn

[scole of TSBT]

Comments on this PSU appreciated. It's a Mean Well RSP-320-5 psu. 5V 60A output, single rail but multiple connectors. 85% efficient, which is about the best I could find from Mean Well in that amp output range. More output than I currently need, but has room to grow. ~$60 US.


http://www.jameco.com/webapp/wcs/stores ... 2172068_-1

http://www.jameco.com/Jameco/Products/P ... 172033.pdf

[Janos (retired)]

Looks really good :)

[scole of TSBT]

So here's the new PSU, a Mean Well RSP-320-5. Soldered eye connectors to a power cord bought at home improvement store. Made a 4 wire 22 AWG pigtail with female barrel connectors, soldered them into eye connectors. Put a male barrel connector on the android power cord. Getting a hair over 5V at the connector which plugs into the android. Just need to make two more pigtails to connect to the other 5V terminals and put barrel connectors on the other android power cords. Will make the other pigtails 5 wire.

[Janos (retired)]

Very nice! :)

[Silver]

Good job and so much neater than my wiring Scole!
You might have just shamed me into sorting out my 5 volt spaghetti shambles.

[scole of TSBT]

Thanks guys. Some of my projects don't turn out very neat. A big plus for doing this, other than replacing bad PSUs shutting down a systems, is the PSU is more efficient. It uses less electricity and generates less heat than the individual PSUs. I don't know how much electricity from the androids goes into heat (which must be cooled), but those single PSUs do get warm.

[scole of TSBT]

I made the rest of the pigtails and have all nine androids powered off the psu. It appears to give off no more heat than one of the individual psu's, so I'm happy about that. I appreciate everyone's input.

[Alez]

It is rediculous how inefficient the standard plug in PSU's are. Now your 5v cheap crunch power just got more ' green '

[scole of TSBT]

I tried and I tried but all three of my RK3288 androids are dead.

[Dirk Broer]

Comments on this PSU appreciated. It's a Mean Well RSP-320-5 psu. 5V 60A output, single rail but multiple connectors. 85% efficient, which is about the best I could find from Mean Well in that amp output range. More output than I currently need, but has room to grow. ~$60 US.

I tried and I tried but all three of my RK3288 androids are dead.

Have you tried a new SD-card or eMMC?
My Banana Pro is 'on the reserve bench' because it keeps trashing SD cards.
My Odroid-XU4 is not all that stable when pushed to the brink (2000 MHz) either, so I keep changing OS-es. Learning a lot from it actually.
My Cubieboard 4 is 'on the repair bench' ever since it went out with a BANG! -either board or PSU has blown -but I hope the SD-card....

If you want rock-stable ARM crunching, either choose BeagleBone Blacks (Argh! just one Cortex-A8 core) or Raspberries.
The Android64_9_PIE equipped Odroid-N2+ runs good till now too, I just had a 2nd in to be fitted out with 64-bit Linux.

If I were to try a Asus Tinker Board S with RK3288, it will go with a 52Pi Tower Cooler....
More or less the same for a BeagleBone AI, a reported hothead.

But serious: 5V-60A output? You may have fried the RK3288's...I guess 5V-3A is the most they need...