Felipe Triana

I think I know why he is trying to use tv boxes, not exacly why I mean, but I have a idea, and its the price. You see, here in BRZ, tv boxes are very cheap, you can find one in the local scrappy sometimes, or even people selling for less then 10-20 USD a used one, almost same price as a brand new ESP32... A Pi Zero I think costs almost 40 USD...

But you are right, this tv boxes all are used components, all fab data on then is from 13 or 12, 10 year old chips, all with solder flux still under them. It's not reliable, specially with wireless. That's why I told him to use ethernet. I have the first one running here for almost 1 month running home-assistant, that is pretty nice. The only brick wall I hit is this limit on 1GB ram, I swaped very DDR3 chips, even with 4 bit ones, and also buyed another box that came with single 2Gig module, called LPDDR2, even discovered that its used on many many phones, I had a Asus Zenphone 2 board laying around and took a look, and find on LPDDR2 Hynix Haha

Unfortunately I still stuck with 1GB xD I think that must be related with you said - hardcoded on the bootloader without source code... 

@fabiobassa
 
Hi, I'm only replying now, because the forum limts one post per day for me, for now a least. Ok. Back to the topic.

Yesterday, I was trying to go back to the android because I was thinking in use the TV BOX as a temporary replacemant to my father's notebook, that stopped working and I already resoldered almost everything changed the SIO, SB etc.. Anyway, today I just boght another box, with android and installed for him, and worked fine... but would be nice to have a full backup of the nand anyway, if one day I wish to go back to original firmware, I should have done the backup. 

The box is a MXQ-4K, as i said, but now I will give details:

It features a RK3228A, with 2GB of Micron DDR3 (2 chips on top, 2 on the back of board), a 8GB BGA NAND, and a SV6051 wireless chip and R329Q_V3.0 board revision. I took some photos for more details, right below here:


Here a close up of the rockchip on this board, before I changed the heatsink
 

Here is 2 of the 4 DDR3 ram chips, its HTTC4G83BGR (4 gigabites, or 512MB per module)
 

The wireless chip, SV6051P, nothing special..


An overview of the back of the board, showing the nand and pcb shape


And finely a overview of the board powered on, running main build from SD Card...

Ok, things that I noticed, that can ou cannot be bugs:
 
So far is what I noticed... 

I would be already happy if a least I could recognize the full 2GB of ram on board and wireless worked on inbound connections, a least I could use the box as a home server, for files, websites, etc.

I found other issues that I think is maybe the hardware itself that cant cope with todays demands: main or legacy, even with multimedia tools installed, Youtube can't even play at 144p without dropping 20 to 40% of the frames, tested windowd, and fullscreen, same. Youtube keep rendering on CPU mode, with firefox or chromium, even if I run the browser with glrun command.

So far thats it, I'm afraid that I will be able only to reply after 24 hours, because of forum limitation, so in this case, until tomorrow! Thank you for the attention,