T-chip, the company behind Firefly-RK3288 development board and HPH NT-V6 media player, has sent me their latest company brochure this morning. The brochure mentions the company history since 2005, various tablets solutions they have done over the year, and new and upcoming products. One of the slides particularly caught my attention. RK3288 is pretty popular right now, but I had never heard about RK3126 and RK3128 SoC with four ARM Cortex A7 core with a Mali GPU supporting HEVC decoding up to 1080p resolution. Both processors are manufactured using 40nm technology, so I’d guess these target ultra low cost tablets, which should become available in October and November 2014. Even more interesting is the mention of “MayBach” Tablets. I’ve been told MayBach, which could just be a temporary codename, is an upcoming Rockchip SoC. Based on the information in the slide, it should be an Octa-core Cortex A53 processor with […]
Rockchip RK3288 Android 4.4.2 SDK and Schematics Released for Firefly Board
Firefly-RK3288 development board was first announced in July. I still don’t have news about availability nor pricing, but the T-Firefly website launched yesterday. They seem do have a nice Wiki, but unfortunately everything is currently in Chinese, except when you go to the download page. You’ll find firmware upgrade_tool for Linux and Windows, the USB drivers for rooting and firmware update, firmware images (Android 4.4.2, Ubuntu 14.04, and dual boot), the board schematics (PDF), and Android KitKat 4.4.2 SDK with U-Boot, Linux, and Android source code, some documentation, XBMC apk (no source) with H.265 hardware decode support for MP4, MOV and MKV container formats. The SDK is available on Bitbucket. I planned to test it, but unfortunately my network connection is very slow (and unstable) to this server, and I failed to retrieve it with git clone. The company also posted the build instructions in Chinese in their website, but […]
Firefly-RK3288 Development Board To Support Android and Lubuntu
We’ve already got a long list of upcoming Rockchip RK3288 based Android media players, but no low cost development boards have been announced to date. We can certainly expect a Radxa Rock 2 board with the Cortex A17 processor, but it might not be the only one, as Firefly-RK3288 development board powered by Rockchip RK3288 is currently being developed by another Chinese team. Current specifications for Firefly-RK3288 board: SoC – Rockchip 3288 quad core ARM Cortex A17 up to 1.8 GHz with Mali-T764 GPU supporting OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0 /3.0, and OpenCL 1.1 System Memory – 2G DDR3 Storage – 8GB eMMC flash + micro SD slot Video I/O HDMI 2.0 up to 3840×2160@60p VGA out (D-SUB connector) VGA in is available via the expansion headers. LCD, MIPI and LVDS Audio Output / Input – HDMI, optical S/PDIF, microphone header, and built-in MIC Connectivity – Gigabit Ethernet, dual band 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi with external antenna, and Bluetooth […]