[neilv]

Nice properties of the Raspberry Pi SoC devices include that there are brands involved that aren't going to fly-by-night, and the brands and the people behind them could be reached by civil and criminal action.

Of course, that doesn't fully prevent malware, but it's a more reassuring than buying something that fell off the back of a truck, in a dark alley(baba).

[captainmuon]

These things also show up on Amazon. I think the real problem is Allwinner. I've dealt with them before and it was nightmarish.

If you want to buy their chips, they insist on setting you up with one of their partners. Fair enough, but that other company is an Allwinner employee's side hustle. They ended up selling us boards that looked like surplus from a settop box project. Outdated, weirdly modified Android version, Google stuff but no license, lots of diagnostic tools installed and ADB wide open like in the article. No source code provided, even though it was agreed upon. We managed to get the source, but it wouldn't build. Then I flew over to our factory in China and asked to meet the guy, so we can sit down and he can show me how to build it. He never came of course, but we suddenly got a mail with the correct source... That's just a fraction of the stories we had with them.

With all the development effort, RMA cases and lost sales I would say our company lost a bunch of money thanks to Allwinner. I wonder how Allwinner still manages to exist. Maybe their stuff is "good enough" in those cases where cheap trumps everything else? We did stick with them for quite a long time and sold a couple of their boards after all...

[DesktopECHO]

Thanks for this fascinating insight. The jankyness you describe lines-up exactly with what I'm seeing here.

If H616 was the mainstream/volume chip box to have in 2021, then I'm super-interested to see what their 2023 H618 boxes look like. They are all over Amazon with loads of reviews on YouTube, just like its predecessor.

Considering the interest this write-up has generated I'm inclined get one and 'take the bullet' to see if this behaviour is continues. Given your insight about how these chips get sold, chances seem quite high.

[captainmuon]

Yeah, I must admit that I have a morbid fascination with these devices. I mean they are cheap and hackable after all. And after reading your article I also thought about getting a new one to see what they are up to these days :-D.

[ilyt]

> Maybe their stuff is "good enough" in those cases where cheap trumps everything else?

Well doh.

First of those cheap multimedia CPUs that figures out that having good docs/"out of the box" working open support gives them sales will eat the market.

Also aren't allwinner chips one of better mainstream kernel supported ones out of ARM bunch ?

[megous]

Allwinner SoCs have very good mainline support, including most of their multimedia capabilities and can run LibreELEC just fine.

[DesktopECHO]

Not this one.

> Nope. While basic Linux support is slowly materializing, two major blockers are still at the same spot - HDMI audio (no useful driver) and bug in display driver (big code change may be required to fix it).

https://forum.libreelec.tv/thread/24275-allwinner-h616-suppo...

[megous]

> "Nice properties of the Raspberry Pi SoC devices..."

I will only trust devices that have readily available, fully opensource platform firmware, bootloader, and OS. That beats some blind trust in "a massive blob that has control over everything and runs on an independent CPU from OS, because companies would not do bad things, because...brand??" anytime.