Category: Allwinner A-Series

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 11 Comments on XBMC Media Center Coming to Android

XBMC Media Center Coming to Android

I’ve received a mysterious picture this morning without further details… After a little Google search, it appears XBMC has announced their progress on XBMC for Android. There was already XBMC remote and thin client available on Google Play, but the latest announcement is the real deal, and XBMC can be launched on you Android based devices be it a set-top box, a tablet, a phone, or whatever… It will be the same user experience as on the desktop Have a look at a short (and blurry) teaser video showing XBMC running in Android. “Big Buck Bunny” video is to media player what Angry Birds is to tablet, it has to be shown during demos… XBMC developers explain that most devices only support software decode of audio and video for now, but expect on OpenMAX based player to eventually be available. The main development platform was a Pivos XIOS DS set-top-box […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 23 Comments on 72.90 USD AK802 Android Mini PC with AllWinner A10 and 1GB RAM

72.90 USD AK802 Android Mini PC with AllWinner A10 and 1GB RAM

No, it’s not a typo in the title, and I did not mean to write “MK802”, but a company (which does not appear to be Rikomagic) released a product called AK802 which looks very similar (not to say exactly) the same, but comes with 1GB by default. Here are the specifications of the device partially taken from Dealextreme, so there must be an error somewhere, we just need to find out where ;). CPU AllWinner A10 @ 1.5GHz + Mali 400 GPU Memory 1 GB RAM Storage 4 GB Flash microSD slot (Up to 32 GB) Connectivity WiFi 802.11b/g USB micro USB 2.0/OTG port USB 2.0 Host port Video output HDMI (up to 2160p) Video Codecs & Containers WMV, ASF, MP4, 3GP, 3G2M4V, AVI, MJPEG, RV10, DivX/VC-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.263, H.264/1280*720P HD 30 fps, 1080P/720*480 D1 30fps Audio Codecs AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, AMR-NB, AMR-WB, QCP, MP3, WMA, WAV, MIDI, M4A […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 12 Comments on Rikomagic MK802 II Mini PC Will Be Available in September

Rikomagic MK802 II Mini PC Will Be Available in September

Rikomagic announced that they are working on two new versions of the MK802 Android mini PC. The first version (MK802 II) will be based on basically the same hardware (AllWinner A10 SoC), but with a different casing, an HDMI male connector, and 3 USB connectors (2 microUSB and 1 standard USB). They will apparently add some holes to the casing for better ventilation in order to decrease excessive heat. The company also mentioned they are working on a version with a dual core processor without giving further details. If we want to play guessing games, it could be next generation AllWinner dual core Cortex A9 processor (codenamed sun6i), or a low cost dual core Cortex A5 processor such as TCC8925. Source: Rikomagic Forums Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 20 Comments on List of 39 Low Cost Linux Friendly Boards and Products

List of 39 Low Cost Linux Friendly Boards and Products

Dmitry (omgfire), one of my awesome readers, compiled a great tabular list of Linux friendly boards and products that sells for less than $300 US (usually less than $200). This list includes technical details such as the processor, GPU, memory, NAND flash, connectivity, ports, supported Linux distributions… as well as availability and pricing information. There are currently 39 Linux devices in total. The vast majority are ARM based boards, but he also included 2 x86 products by VIA, but those are relatively pricey ($265 and up). Here’s a summary list with SoCs used, links to blog posts and product pages (if available), as well as price information. Raspberry Pi Model B – Broadcom BCM2835 (ARM11) – Blog post (That’s my first post about the R-Pi last year, and the board is much different now) –  Product page – Price: $35 + shipping Rikomagic MK802 – Allwiner A10 (Cortex A8) –  […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 141 Comments on Ubuntu 12.04 Server ARMHF Image for Mele A1000/A2000

Ubuntu 12.04 Server ARMHF Image for Mele A1000/A2000

I’ve seen quite a few people who want to use the Mele A1000 – or its brother the Mele A2000 – media player as a server (Sacrilege!). Since recent ARM servers are running Ubuntu 12.04, and Tom Gall has (conveniently) posted the live-build config necessary to generate Ubuntu 12.04 Server image this week, I thought I’d give it a try on Mele A1000. The image generated is a headless system running Apache 2 and sshd (openssh_server). I’ll detail the steps I followed to generate this image first, so if you just want to try the SD card image, scroll down at the end of the post. The first step is to generate Ubuntu Linaro Server rootfs, by following the Live-Build instructions on Linaro website together with Tom’s live build config. I’ve followed those steps in a machine running Ubuntu 12.04. Let’s install the required packages:

Configure the build and […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 90 Comments on Mele A1000/A2000 Android 4.0 Image Released

Mele A1000/A2000 Android 4.0 Image Released

At last, a (semi-)official Android 4.0 release (and not a beta) for Mele A1000 and Mele A2000 media players has been released. This release is based on AllWinner Android 4.0 SDK. You can download homlet_4.0_v1.0_20120609_dd.img.lzma or here and dump it to the SD card with dd (Linux) and Win32DiskImager (Windows). It is also available via Bittorrent. There is also another image named homlet_4.0_v1.0_20120609.img.lzma that can be flashed via the Phoenix Utility, but the download link is not available anymore at the moment. Here are the instructions in Linux:

Where you need to replace X in /dev/sdX by the correct letter for your SD card reader. Now insert the SD card in your Mele, and wait until the LED stops blinking, remove the SD card and restart the device. Et voila! The default language is Chinese, so you’ll have to go to the Settings to change the language to your […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments on MK802 Android 4.0 mini PC Factory Video

MK802 Android 4.0 mini PC Factory Video

Nicolas Charbonnier, better known as charbax, has shot yet another cool video in one of the small factories where MK802 is assembled, showing the different steps they follow to build a complete device. The PCB assembly is probably done in another factory, and they just assemble the device in this factory, or I should probably call it a workshop… The place appears to be rather small and everything is done by hand, but that’s what makes the video very interesting. This is the company that sells it on Amazon under the brand “OEM Systems Company”. The first five minutes shows a tour of the factory, and in the rest of the video, Charbax interviews the sales manager and the owner of the factory who both dodge sensitive questions about pricing, BOM costs and quantities manufactured monthly… But hey, you’ve got to try. Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 81 Comments on Hardware Packs for AllWinner A10 Devices and Easier Method to Create a Bootable Ubuntu 12.04 SD Card

Hardware Packs for AllWinner A10 Devices and Easier Method to Create a Bootable Ubuntu 12.04 SD Card

Linaro has a tool called linaro-media-create to install Linaro Ubuntu to an SD card by passing the device, hardware pack file, the rootfs and the board as arguments. Hardware packs are files that contains hardware specific binaries and configs files (e.g. bootloader, kernel…). I’ve done something similar (albeit more basic) for AllWinner A10 devices so that you can easily install and run Ubuntu (and possibly other distributions) on an SD card. I’ve written 2 scripts for this: a10-hwpack-bld.sh – Script to generate evb.bin, build the latest u-boot and linux kernel, retrieve some config files and compress all this in an hardware pack file a1x-media-create.sh – Script to make a bootable SD card for AllWinner A10 devices. You can get the scripts with git:

I’ve only tested it with Mele A1000, but if you have other A10 devices such as MK802 mini PC or MINI X media player, it should […]