Category: Allwinner A-Series

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 17 Comments on HackBerry: AllWinner A10 Development Board with 1GB RAM

HackBerry: AllWinner A10 Development Board with 1GB RAM

After the Raspberry Pi, the Gooseberry, here comes the HackBerry. This is another AllWinner board similar to the Gooseberry, but which Ethernet, a full sized USB ports, an IR sensor and 1GB RAM. Here are the board specifications : SoC – AllWinner A10 System Memory – 1 GB RAM Storage – 4GB Flash + SDHC slot USB – 2x USB 2.0 ports Connectivity: 10/100Mbit Ethernet Wifi – 802.11 b/g/n Video Output – 1 x HDMI + 1x Composite Audio I/O – Headphone + microphone IR sensor The board runs Android 4.0, but since it’s an AllWinner device, you can run what you want. In a way it’s similar to the Mele A1000, except it has more memory, but lacks SATA, VGA output and has one less USB port. I can’t see the serial port pins on the PCB picture either. There is pricing information or availability yet, as Jasbir only […]

Posted on by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 14 Comments on XBMC for Android on Mele A1000 Media Player (Video)

XBMC for Android on Mele A1000 Media Player (Video)

Following this morning announcement, I’ve started to build XBMC for Android using the instructions on XBMC Android github repository, but it takes hours on my machine. In the meantime, I’ve found a prebuilt apk that I’ve tried on my Mele A1000 and shot a (super blurry) video. This is still a development version, so there are a lot of bugs, but it shows good progress. The user interface renders at 28 fps and it’s very smooth, although CPU usage is about 65%. The remote control can work properly, but XBMC does not respond to mouse clicks and keyboard input. It can find UPNP servers (Windows) and locate your file. SMB client crashes XBMC on my system I’ve tried Big Buck Bunny 480p, 720p and 1080p, and none of the sample can play smoothly, so NEON software decoding does not appear to be fast enough to play videos smoothly. The APK […]

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 […]

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