Hooray!!! Rockchip SDK!

[tp11]

Does anyone know if there are more source/documents for Rockhip on pudn.com? I have account there and can download so if you find anything interesting, please let me know. It is possible to browse the site without an account.

I couldn't find the following archive (documents for RK27) from this site so I uploaded it to Megaupload. Most of it is in Chinese and looks like it deals with the screen and tvout etc.

MEGAUPLOAD - The leading online storage and file delivery service

[WIZARD]

I've already included most of the Rockchip documents
into this archive with SDK: This link was deleted

I've downloaded your archive, only one file .chm is new,
but I don't know how to open it. Don't worry,
maybe you'll find something new.

[sid6581]

Originally Posted by borelg

I buyed this player last week LINK. In Options-> System information it says:

Product name: RK27SDK
Major version ID:2.2
Hardware ID:080722

The memory size is 16 gb. There is a problem reproducing music: the volume of the singer in all songs is too low! The instruments and the base of the song is perfect but the singer volume is very low!! do you know why? Is it possible to modify my new firmware with another firmware only in the part that regards music player?
Thank you in advance guys!

Not sure it is a firmware problem.
If you get the sound of the music pretty well and don't hear the singer ("karaoke effect") it is probably that left channel is substracted from right channel. It could be that some pin are shorted together.
Of course, I say this because I assume they would not ship a firmware with such an obvious issue, but who knows ........

[sid6581]

Hey Knob,

I am back from vacation and ready to play !!!

I received the same player as yours ordered from tinydeals ( well i hope it is haha ).
It has a RK2705 and uses two 4GB MLC Flash.
Note the empty room for an unknown chip.
It might be there to make future players based on the same PCB but with touch screen capability ? I don't know

A picture of it :


I have 3 other players based on the 270x.
One of them is touch screen, here is a picture


I don't know the difference between RK2706B and RK2705, it could be that RK2706B has some integrated touch screen controller.
Note, in my players that have FM, there is the nearly exact same FM module based on the CL5767 chip.

Cheers

[sid6581]

Originally Posted by AleMaxx

Hi Knob,
so your selfbuilt firmware has audio problems while the original firmware doesnt? In that case I would recommend to look at the working firmware code and compare it to the sdk source. This would require some ARM assembler knowledge and I recommend the non-free IDA disassembler. Have a look at one of my previous posts where I explained how to load a BASE.RKW firmware file if youre not familiar with this. If youve got any further questions, just ask. I havent dealt with sound so far. Also are you interested in getting a real OS running on your player or just modifying that rockchip firmware?

Regards

Hell yeah ! I am interested in getting a different OS running on my player !

Now i am not sure what you mean by "real OS"
You know like me that the RK270x is just an ARM7 (well, a nice ARM7, i had read somewhere it is an ARM7EJ-S), and a nice ZSP400 DSP. No MMU for us, what kind of OS would be qualified of "real" on that thing ? uclinux ?

It is possible that RockOS is actually quite OK, but we don't have the source code for it.
I would be happy just with FreeRTOS for example.

How would you proceed ?

The ideal for me right now would be to have a simple firmware that initializes clocks, SDRAM, LCD, then write ..... "hello world!" on the screen.
Do you know how the RK270x boots from MLC NAND Flash ?

I have no experience at all with it, this is only speculation, please give me feedback:

1) RK270x scans MLC NAND Flash blocks and read first page for example to search for a marker for bootloader
2) once found, reads the bootloader
3) the bootloader has code to mount the file system that is located on the MLC NAND Flash
4) the bootloader loads the firmware binary in RAM and executes it.

Ok now, the only thing i have done so far is to compile the emulator on the PC.
I still have not done actual work with the device since i just received it today !

[sid6581]

This link : Rcckchips RK27XX production tools and upgrade help function -Technical-Mp3 MP4 Player Firmware Downloads Base!

suggests that when the RK7xx players's NAND Flash are blank, the device will enumerate into a proprietary USB device that can talk to the PC.
It looks like it is then possible to upload some bootcode to the player's RAM via USB.

It would make sense to me if Rockchip chose to have some special code in ROM that allows this.
Like, if no valid bootloader code is found on MLC flash, then it enters this mode.
I think it is much faster to burn the code that way in the factory (via USB), rather then burning code into the bare MLC NAND flash chip, especially when we know that NAND flash come with bad blocks that have to be taken care of when building the filesystem....

That would be awesome if we could enter that mode (i bet similar to "DFU mode" of iPhone and OpenMoko and so on...)
Do you guys know of any way ?

AleMaxx, i have seen your page and that usbrocker.c
It looks like you talk to the device via USB but you actually talk to the firmware i presume.
Looking at the firmware USB code you know that some particular SCSI commands are accepted and you use those ?
Mmmmh but here we are still in RockOS' world, not sure it is what I want to achieve, but i presume this way you could also upload some code directly to RAM and execute ?

[sid6581]

Ok so I am learning, and of course all of you guys already know this ...
There are even USB drivers for this.... That failsafe mode is called "RockUSB mode" and there is a rockchip tool that can perform the MLC flash programming from the PC, when we are in that mode. Well well well !!! That's great news
I see that we even have the USB drivers for that special mode, although i would only use them to understand how the protocol works.

Knob, could you tell me the sequence to get our MPx player in this mode ?

I guess we don't have the source code of that rockchip tool, so the next step is to use a USB packet analyzer on the PC, in order to see how it uploads the boot code into rockchip's RAM.
This is one of the doors for complete control of the Rockchip players !
It is probable that we could use the libUSB drivers instead of the rockchip "RockUSB mode" drivers and then talk to the device.

Maybe it has already been done ? I don't want to re-invent the wheel .....

[sid6581]

Knob, i haven't found how to put our player into RockUSB mode (soft way).
So I used your post here : Rockchip DEAD Player Recovery Guide

The hardware tweezers method makes sense to me.

The idea is to short some data lines together of the MLC NAND Flash so the RK270x ROM CODE will always read wrong data from the flash and will never find a valid bootloader. Then, it goes into this RockUSB mode automatically to give a chance to reprogram the whole flash.

This is very cool !!!! ( although i would prefer the soft mode haha )

[sid6581]

Originally Posted by knob

Here's compiled firmware from SDK ;-
Send big files the easy way. Files too large for email attachments? No problem!

Hey Knob, I am getting a red screen with this firmware ?
( The bootloader i use is version 3.34 2008-03-04 15:42:22 )

[DSX]

Hey guys

I was thinking, the only thing stopping us right now is incompatibilities. So, what if we had a program that would copy the init from our old firmware and inject it into our new firmware, then all we would have to worry about is having the right screen size.

Unfortunately, I'm not very experienced with c or assembler. So, I'm just putting the idea out there.