MeLe A2000

Mele file storage

http://www.lundman.net/ftp/mele/

v1.3BETA firmware

Mele_HTPC_0929_BETA_V1.3.rar Mele_HTPC_0929_BETA_V1.3.ddimg.bz2

v1.2 firmware

Mele_HTPC_120907_Ver1.2.rar

Status

Current status with the Mele A2000, Allwinner A10.

Official release: Android 4 ICS, 4.0.8. Kernel: 3.0.31+

Positive:

• Video playback 1080p
• MKV playback
• TS playback
• YouTube
• Android market and Games (Angry Birds etc)

Negative:

• Network Streaming Fixed. NIC has been patched to allow smooth 1080p steaming
• Audio. The settings; CODEC no sound, but probably on RCA. HDMI choppy sound, unusable. If made to work, only stereo on HDMI. SPDIF not working, does not turn on. (No red light)
• Bitstreaming; Unconfirmed since SPDIF is not functional. But can the hardware bitstream TrueHD, and DTS-MA ?
• 10bit video does not play (not supported by hardware, CPU too slow for software)
• AVI/XviD does not play (not supported by hardware, CPU too slow for software)

Currently, it is no good for mediaplayer. But if all you want is a toy to play youtube, some android games, and only stereo sound, it is definitely capable.

Android 4 ICS wired NIC patch

I have been working on trying to improve the wemac NIC driver in the Mele A2000 Allwinner A10 hardware, which will stutter when playing 720p/1080p over network. The current patch makes it much better, such that I think it is usable now. There is a mynewerimage.img image in the storage area, that you can dd to the nandc device. I will work on submitting the patch upstream.

For example, if you boot miniand image:

# modprobe nand     # nand.ko on my storage area too
# wget http://lundman.net/ftp/mele/mynewerimage.img
# dd if=/dev/nandc of=mele_nandc_backup.bin bs=65536
# dd if=mynewerimage.img of=/dev/nandc bs=65536
# sync
# reboot -f

And take out the SD card to boot Android again. If you do this using Android, the device node is /dev/block/nandc

Android 4 ICS official Mele image

The official Mele Android ICS image is out, called Mele_HTPC_Android_4.0_V1.rar which you need to use PhoenixCard to "burn". Once installed, you can use audiopatch1.3.apk to enable some sound features. Otherwise it seems quite similar to A10 firmware.

For those not using Windows, I also made a dd image: Mele_HTPC_Android_4.0_V1.ddimg.bin.bz2 [1] Just dd the whole thing to your raw device.

Android 4 IceCreamSandwich

Update: the non-beta release of ICS4 came out (for the A10, not Mele's release), which has settings/display, and lets you chose resolution

For Unix and clones:

wget http://www.lundman.net/ftp/mele/homlet_4.0_v1.0_20120609_dd.img.lzma
7z x homlet_4.0_v1.0_20120609_dd.img.lzma
sudo dd if=homlet_4.0_v1.0_20120609_dd.img of=/dev/sdX bs=1M
sync

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! (Read more: [2]) See I kept the paste URL cos I'm nice! :)

There is also an audiopatch for the ICS4 image to get sound to work. Copy over audiopatch1.2.apk (adb, or physical media) to your ICS4, install and run.

Not convinced it makes any difference for me. Audio appears not to work still.

It appears the contents on audiopatch1.2 is pretty much just libswa.so. Not entirely sure what it thinks to do with it, but if I do a find from root, there is no such library, before and after running patch.

I copied the file by hand:

busybox cp /data/data/com.android.audiopatch/files/libswa.so /system/lib/

and I get sound playing videos with some audio formats now. Like, TV MKV releases.

Mele A2000

I purchased a MeLE A2000 from Tom over at aliexpress, and been playing around with it as well. First I wanted to install ICS4, to do that I downloaded the android_4.0.img file from the 'net. Alas, there is a large volume of confusing information on what to do with this.

http://www.lundman.net/ftp/mele/ 
https://www.wuala.com/zercosz/Mele%20A2000/Firmware/?key=ThisIsFC2012

For the MeLE A2000, I also downloaded PhoenixCardV303(win7) and installed that in my VirtualBox Win7 system, forwarded the OSX USB drive and told it to install android_4.0.img.

https://www.wuala.com/zercosz/Mele%20A2000/Utilidades%20Mele/?key=ThisIsFC2012
http://www.lundman.net/ftp/mele/ 

After that, I inserted the SD card into Mele, and rebooted.

The power LED will blink RED + BLUE for a while, then power LED will turn off.

Take out SDcard, and reboot MeLE. It will now boot ICS, but only on HDMI@720p.

I can confirm BubbleUPNP + 2160pPlayer will play 1080p MKVs over network. Nice!

Google Market/Play

I installed one of the Terminal programs, and told adb to use TCP (haven't bothered to open my mele yet). Using adb and the instructions found allwinner a10 scripts I loaded Google Market/Play to the mele.

Changing resolution

This refers to the Beta ICS4. Probably is not useful any more, but I will leave it here for reference.

Changing resolution can be done by modifying the boot time scripts that the A10 uses. Usually done on a separate boot partition. For example, the Mele image has the files:

mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /mnt
ls -l /mnt/
evb.bin

git clone https://github.com/amery/sunxi-tools
cd sunxi-tools
make
./bin2fex /mnt/evb.bin > evb.fex    

Edit the file any odd way you want, changing screen0_output_type and screen0_output_mode. See modes here: [3]

./fex2bin evb.fex > /mnt/evb.bin

If you are running the Android 4 (ICS) Beta that was released, to change the resolution to HDMI 1080p, you can do this. Using either a terminal program on Android (ConnectionBot for example) or the USB Console (if connected).

On the mele root shell

setprop service.adb.tcp.port 5555
stop adbd
start adbd
netstat -na       # Check that it is listening on port 5555

On remote adb machine

adb connect 192.168.xxx.xxx    # Put in the Mele's IP
adb shell
adb> mount -t vfat /dev/block/nanda /mnt/obb
adb> exit
adb push script-HDMI-1080p60.bin /mnt/obb/
adb shell
adb> cd /mnt/obb
adb> busybox cp script-HDMI-1080p60.bin script.bin

If you don't want to edit the script file yourself, you can download my prepared one: script-HDMI-1080p60.bin

U-boot

Since I added ZFS to u-boot for CuBox, and also patched in Samsungs EXT4 patches, I built hno's u-boot to test.

https://github.com/lundman/uboot-allwinner/tree/zfs

wget http://lundman.net/ftp/mele/sunxi-spl.bin
dd if=sunxi-spl.bin of=/dev/sdc bs=1024 seek=8        # Obviously, sdc is my SDcard, change device to applicable.

wget http://lundman.net/ftp/mele/u-boot.bin
dd if=u-boot.bin of=/dev/sdc bs=1024 seek=32          # Obviously, sdc is my SDcard, change device to applicable.

U-Boot 2012.04.01-g39085db-dirty (May 29 2012 - 02:29:31) Allwinner Technology 

CPU:   SUNXI Family
Board: A10-EVB
DRAM:  512 MiB
MMC:   SUNXI SD/MMC: 0
*** Warning - bad CRC, using default environment

sun4i#zfsload
zfsload - load binary file from a ZFS filesystem

sun4i#zfsload mmc 0:2 0x48000000 /boot/@/uImage
Loading file "/boot/@/uImage" from mmc device 0:2 xxa2
zfs fsname = '/boot/' snapname='<NULL>' filename = '/uImage'
4230340 bytes read

sun4i#bootm 0x48000000
## Booting kernel from Legacy Image at 48000000 ...
  Image Name:   Linux-3.0.8+
  Image Type:   ARM Linux Kernel Image (uncompressed)
  Data Size:    4230276 Bytes = 4 MiB
  Load Address: 40008000
  Entry Point:  40008000
  Verifying Checksum ... OK
  Loading Kernel Image ... OK
OK

Starting kernel ...

DRAM: 512[    0.000000] Initializing cgroup subsys cpuset

Android Kernel

I wanted to replace the ICS4 kernel with my own, for the nic fixes. These are the steps I took:

git clone https://github.com/amery/linux-allwinner
git branch lichee-3.0.8-sun4i
make sun4i_crane_defconfig

Check that .config has

CONFIG_MODVERSIONS=y
# CONFIG_MODULE_SRCVERSION_ALL is not set

The wemac nic was panicing on boot everytime, until I changed this:

drivers/net/sun4i/sun4i_wemac.c
#define PHY_POWER 0   /* was 1 */

make uImage

From android, I used ConnectBot to make a copy of the 'boot' partition, nandc.

adb shell
adb> dd if=/dev/block/nandc of=/mnt/sdcard/nandc bs=65536
adb pull /mnt/sdcard/nandc

Then split it up into kernel and ramfs, you can find split_bootimg.pl my storage area (url above)

# ./split_bootimg.pl nandc
Page size: 2048 (0x00000800)
Kernel size: 8410564 (0x008055c4)
Ramdisk size: 975609 (0x000ee2f9)
Second size: 0 (0x00000000)
Board name: 
Command line: 
Writing nandc-kernel ... complete.
Writing nandc-ramdisk.gz ... complete.

The idea is to make a new kernel, that looks roughly the same as nandc-kernel, and re-use the nandc-ramdisk.gz

Once the compile has finished, we make a new image. According to the nandc ANDROID! header, the base address for Mele is 0x40000000

# mkbootimg --base 40000000 --kernel arch/arm/boot/Image --ramdisk ../nandc-ramdisk.gz -o ../mynewimage.img

Now I boot into Miniand image on SD card, use my nand.ko to load the device for /dev/nand*. You can find my Miniand kernel uImage and nand.ko in the storage area too. The default Miniand kernel did not come with nand driver.

# modprobe nand.ko
# dd if=mynewimage.img of=/dev/nandc bs=2048
# sync
# reboot

and remove the SD card to boot Android. If you want to undo, and go back to ICS4, put nandc file instead of mynewimage.img in the dd line above.

Mele's Wired Network Interface

The wired nic in the Mele is a wemac from Davidcom. It is unfortunately quite poor. You will get decent 100MB speeds from it, but it uses the CPU. If you do any transfers while trying to watch video (including watching video over network) it will stutter for 1080p. Interestingly if you use SD, or USB while watching, it has no problem.

The WIFI driver sits on the USB bus and is not affected by this.

Using a USBEthernet dongle (I tried an Apple brand) also works without issues.

ZFS on Android

I have already ported ZFS to ARM, so that should just work if you compile ZFS with your kernel. But I also wanted to see if I can get ZFS to work with Android. The modules do load ok, but execution does not work:

# cd /mnt/sdcard/
# insmod spl.ko && insmod zavl.ko&&insmod znvpair.ko&&insmod zunicode.ko&&insmod zcommon.ko&&insmod zfs.ko&&insmod zpios.ko&&cp zpool /mnt/obb/&&chmod 755 /mnt/obb/zpool
# cd /mnt/obb
# strace -f ./zpool create melepool /dev/block/sda1    
open("/dev/block/sda1", O_WRONLY|O_EXCL|O_LARGEFILE) = 6
write(6, "\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0"..., 4096) = 4096
fdatasync(6)                            = 0
close(6)                                = 0
open("/melepool", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_LARGEFILE|O_DIRECTORY|0x80000) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
ioctl(3, ITE_GPIO_IN

and it hangs.

djmount for Android

So one option is to have a mediaplayer with UPNP ability, like that of BubbleUPNP or PlugPlayer. However, both of these do poorly with Mele's remote control. With Bubble you can not click on Directories to enter them, but have to Mouse-Mode in/out to do so.

So one option is to mount all UPNP devices as a directory. Since Mele's kernel already comes with FUSE, I compiled djmount for it (patched version with >2GB size fixed).

% adb push djmount /mnt/obb
% adb shell
# cd /mnt/obb
# chmod 755 djmount
# ./djmount  -o allow_other /mnt/sdcard/Pictures                # No reason to pick "Pictures" I just wanted an existing directory
# ls -l Pictures/                                 
-r--r--r-- root     root           49 2000-01-01 20:00 devices
dr-xr-xr-x root     root              2000-01-01 20:00 llink-daemon UPNP Media Server (MediaServer) : 1

# ls -l Pictures/llink-daemon\ UPNP\ Media\ Server\ \ \(MediaServer\)\ \:\ 1/
dr-xr-xr-x root     root              2000-01-01 20:00 DVD
dr-xr-xr-x root     root              2000-01-01 20:00 Game of Thrones
dr-xr-xr-x root     root              2000-01-01 20:00 Music
dr-xr-xr-x root     root              2000-01-01 20:00 Video
-r--r--r-- root     root     14010368 2000-01-01 20:00 movie.m4v

And indeed, if you use the File browser in ICS4, you can just enter that directory, and play any video. Note that djmount is pretty slow on listing directories, and I think we might want to look at speeding that up if we are to use it long term. Also, increase the cache timeout from 60s to something much higher, like 10 minutes.

PS3EYE WebCam

I wanted to see if the PS3 Eye would work with Mele, and Skype.

Video:

# insmod gspca_main.ko                                
# insmod gspca_ov534.ko videomode=13       

That makes the camera work with Skype and Zoom Camera app. When I tried one of the 640x480 modes it just hangs, so currently it is 320x240@60.

Audio:

No idea. The device shows:

# cat /proc/asound/cards                              
0 [sun4icodec     ]: sun4i-CODEC - sun4i-CODEC
                     sun4i-CODEC  Audio Codec
1 [sun4isndhdmi   ]:  - sun4i-sndhdmi
                     sun4i-sndhdmi
2 [CameraB409241  ]: USB-Audio - USB Camera-B4.09.24.1
                     OmniVision Technologies, Inc. USB Camera-B4.09.24.1 at usb-sw-ehci-1.3, high sp
3 [sun4isndspdif  ]:  - sun4i-sndspdif
                     sun4i-sndspdif

And we get the device nodes:

# ls -l /dev/snd/
crw-rw---- system   audio    116,   0 2012-07-03 14:12 controlC0
crw-rw---- system   audio    116,  32 2012-07-03 14:12 controlC1
crw-rw---- system   audio    116,  64 2012-07-03 14:12 controlC2
crw-rw---- system   audio    116,  96 2012-07-03 14:12 controlC3
crwxrwxrwx system   system   116,  24 2012-07-03 14:12 pcmC0D0c
crwxrwxrwx system   system   116,  16 2012-07-03 14:12 pcmC0D0p
crw-rw---- system   audio    116,  48 2012-07-03 14:12 pcmC1D0p
crw-rw---- system   audio    116,  88 2012-07-03 14:12 pcmC2D0c
crw-rw---- system   audio    116, 112 2012-07-03 14:12 pcmC3D0p
crw-rw---- system   audio    116,  33 2012-07-03 14:12 timer

But no idea how to tell Android to use the USB device as the main microphone.

# setprop usb.audio.cap.device pcmC0D0c
# setprop media.audio.in.mode usb

Neither of those work.