software

Bricking the UG802 Android TV stick

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Pulled out my soldering iron, soldered a reset button and a switch to boot into recovery on the PCB and connected my UG802 clone/revision to my TV. Nothing. lsusb. Crap, it boots in flash mode. Let’s try reflashing the whole bloody thing. Well that works so the NAND is not defective or anything. Reboot. Nothing, lsusb still reports the device is in flash mode. So I removed all my soldering efforts which I really regretted because it was quite nicely done given my poor soldering skills and tried again. Still nothing. Arrrggghhhh. Enjoyed a cold Warsteiner and let it rest.

Today I brought the device with me to the office. Hooked it up to a Windows machine, ran the ROM flash tool from Finless’ custom ROM package for this device and powered it up. I was greeted with the most ugly Android boot animation I had ever seen. But at least the device works again so thanks Finless!

So now I can move on again. I had Jack1 running on it so it should be possible to turn this device into a very cheap, yet powerful alternative to do real-time, low-latency audio. Compared to the Raspberry Pi JACK already consumed way less CPU (12% on the RPi compared to 2% on the RK3066 device with the same JACK settings) and I noticed the device has some more IRQ’s so if I could get all of those threaded that should give me some more flexibility to get everything working in a more stable way. I did have to disable WiFi otherwise the whole USB stack crashed after starting JACK. Also tried with an external WiFi dongle, same issue. I can even generate xruns when pressing keys on an attached keyboard. So it’d be really nice if I had serial console access to this thing. But I’ll figure that out too. And maybe the USB part of the kernel can be tweaked to improve things on the USB level.

Bricking the UG802 Android TV stick

New notebook: minor issues

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“My keyboard seems a bit loose on the lower left side, is that something that could be fixed?”
“We’ll take a look at it, should be no problem.”

So I paid a visit to BTO again, had to be at a Horus meeting anyway, and within 15 minutes the tech guy returned with my notebook from the workshop.

“Could you try it out?”
“It’s perfect, no loose spots anymore, what did you do?”
“Oh, I just replaced the keyboard with a new one.”

He just replaced the keyboard with a new one. Now that’s what I call service. With any mainstream brand you will have to do without your notebook for at least 3 weeks and in the worst case they’ll start nagging the faulty keyboard is not a warranty case. Not at BTO. Fixed within 15 minutes, ready while you wait.

At the Horus meeting one of the items on the agenda was “Jeremy’s new monster notebook”. Did I really have to show off my notebook? Yes I had and soon 2 or 3 people were like I’m going to get a BTO too and told me I should become a sales rep. More on the Horus meeting in a separate blog post.

I did find out the card reader doesn’t work. But fortunately System76 apparently uses Clevo parts too so after installing their dkms package the reader immediately started working as the udisks package already contains the needed udev rule for this card reader.

New notebook: minor issues

Ardour with video and LV2 MIDI plugins chaining support

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Got so absorbed hacking my UG802 that I completely missed this: https://community.ardour.org/node/7219

So not only can you add video to your Ardour project but now it’s also possible to chain multiple LV2 plugins that accept MIDI. The video support is the great work of Robin Gareus and it was actually a presentation on this functionality that got me acquainted with the Linux Audio meetings at the HKU almost 3 years ago. So yes, he’s been working on it quite a while so I assume it works well.

I have actually never worked with Ardour, I’ve always used Qtractor. But maybe it’s getting time to check out Ardour too, especially now that the MIDI part is stabilizing.

Ardour with video and LV2 MIDI plugins chaining support