Sen5 Dual Tuner Android Set-top Box Review – Part 1: Unboxing and Teardown

There are only a few companies manufacturing Android TV boxes with tuners with names like VideoStrong and WeTek coming to mind. Shenzhen Sen5 Technology is another one, and the company sent me one of their DVB combo Android TV boxes for review without providing that many details. So let’s have a look at what I received.

Sen5 Android Combo STB Unboxing

The product might be not ready for retail just yet, as I received it in an old carton box.

Once I remove all the bubble wraps, I ended up with the device, an IR remote control, and a 12V/1.5A power supply. Once the product is actually launched I’d expect you’d receive a retail package and a user’s manual too.

The box itself is made of plastic with plenty of randomly arranged (ventilation) holes on the top. The front panel comes with an IR window and a “Standby button”, one of the side includes a “mirco” SD slot, two USB host ports, and the other a Smart Card slot named CA for Conditional Access. The rear panel comes with a coaxial connector where we’ll plug the TV aerial antenna, and a F type connector for the satellite dish, as well as Ethernet, HDMI and the power jack.

The bottom of the case show it can be wall-mounted, and the recovery pinhole is easily accessible. We can also some information aboit product including the model name: SH6B7FA.

Sen5 SH6B7FA TV Box Teardown

After removing the four rubber pads, and loosening four screws, I could remove the top cover to have a closer look at the board.

The processor is covered by an heatsink, so I had to start the box to find out it’s an Amlogic quad core ARM Cortex A53 processor with a Mali-450MP GPU, so probably  Amlogic S905D since we have two demodulators on the board with Availink AVL6211LAX DVB-S2/DVB-S channel receiver IC,  and Availink AVL6762TA DVB-T2/T/C demodulator, which should mean each tuner is independent, and you should be able record live TV on DVB-S2, while watching a channel on DVB-T2.

We have two 4 Gbit Samsung K4B4G1646E-BCMA DDR3 chip (1 GB RAM) on this side of the board, and an 8GB Samsung KLM8G1WEPD-B031 eMMC flash. That’s the lowest Samsung eMMC 5.0 flash available with theorethical 140/8MB/s R/W sequential speed, and 5K/0.6K R/W IOPS. Performance in Android may not always be optimal. Since the box is now only for distributors/resellers, it’s possible some will update to a faster model.

Networking is achieved with Ampak AP6212A module for 802.11 b/g/n WiFi (2.4 GHz only) and Bluetooth 4.0 LE, as well as Realtek RTL8211F transceiver and TNK QT24A03 transformer for Gigabit Ethernet.

The serial console should be accessible via CN7 or CN4 both of which are 4-pin headers. The board name is SMB.150.01 manufactured on February 2017, so it’s pretty new.

It took out the shield on top of the circuitry for the coaxial connector, and it’s using Rafael Micro R836 digital TV tuner for DVB-T/T2/C, ISDB-T/C, DTMB, ATSC, J.83B. I could not easily remove the other shield so I skipped it.

I still removed the board completely from the enclosure, and we can see a thermal pad placed right under the processor connects to a thick metal plate for cooling, There’s also tow more RAM chips bringing the total memory to 2GB, a micro SD slot and the recovery button.

So to summarize, Sen5 SH6B7FA set-top box must be powered by Amlogic S905D processor with 2GB RAM, and 8 GB flash + micro SD slot, supports HDMI 2.0a output, Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11 b/g/n WiFi + Bluetooth 4.0 (likely upgradeable), and comes with three USB ports (but only two exposed by the case, why?), independent DVB-T2/T and DVB-S2/S tuners, and a smart card reader for conditional access/premium content.

I also booted it to check the processor, but I also quickly had a look at the software, and it’s running Android 6.0.1 with Kodi 17 pre-installed, and a separate TV app is used to watch live TV.

NesTV launcher looks quite prettier than many of the other launcher I’ve used. But we’ll find out more about the software and how the box performs in the second part of the review which I’ll probably publish sometimes in May.

I don’t have pricing, nor availability information yet, and beside their HKTDC page, the company also has its  own website, but it has not been updated for a while…

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 reviews full time later in 2011.

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