[LAU] Google TV device w/ AV out

[Jeremy Jongepier]

On 06/18/2013 11:14 AM, Dan MacDonald wrote:
> Thanks for sharing that Jeremy!
>
> What are you going to use your 3066 for?
>

Hi Dan,

I'd like to use it for doing real-time lo-latency audio. Basically the 
same way I'm using my Raspberry Pi.

> What are your initial impressions and findings?

Ambivalent. It sure is faster than a Raspberry Pi but RK3066 based 
devices have some drawbacks:
* No easy debugging access, I have yet to find the TXD pad on my RK3066.
* Fragmented development efforts. There are a gazillion git repositories 
with all kinds of kernel sources, tools, etc.
* There are simply a lot of RK3066 based devices around and since 
RockChip refuses to release their kernel source code people hacking on 
the RK3066/RK3188 depend on third-party manufacturers that do understand 
how GPL works and release parts of the code. Still there are things 
missing, I'm now searching for a way to access the NAND from within 
Linux but there is no source code anywhere for accessing the NAND on 
RK3066 based devices. Yeah, there are pre-compiled kernel modules but 
those don't work on my install.
* Closely related to the above bullet, yesterday I decided to flash the 
kernel to the kernel partition only to realize later that now I can't 
boot into anything else but Linux. And I can't flash anything either 
because I can't boot in the bootloader. Apparently I can short two pads 
and have the device boot into recovery but that won't help me either 
because I've flashed the recovery partition with, you guessed it right, 
a Linux kernel.
* JACK doesn't run on my device it with an external USB interface. It 
starts and then the kernel crashes.

So I'm thinking about getting another TV stick but then a model that is 
easier to debug and that has some more community support.

  It should perform notably
> faster than your Pi.

It does but development effort is far from finished so it doesn't work 
as good as my Raspberry Pi. Well, at least WiFi works so I can just 
power it up and SSH into it.

Regards,

Jeremy