Inside the "$10" Rockchip TV dongle

Last year Rockchip demoed a "$10" Miracast/DLNA TV dongle.  The $10 was not a target retail price, but probably the BOM cost.  They can be found for under $20 including shipping from China.  I bought one and posted a review of the Miracast and DLNA functionality.  In this post I'll document a basic teardown of the dongle, along with instructions on setting up a root console connection.

There are no screws holding the dongle together; the top and bottom of the case simply snap together.  The RK2928 is underneath a small heat spreader.  Next to it is a Spectek PE937-15E 256MB DDR3 chip. the rest of the components appear to be for power regulation.

On the bottom of the board is a Winbond serial flash chip and a Realtek rtl8188ETV USB wifi module.  Small pads labeled TX, RX, and GND are visible near the edge of the board.  They are obviously for a serial console.  I soldered some 30AWG wire-wrap wire to the pads, and to some 0.1" header pins.  With my soldering iron I melted an opening in the plastic case where I hot glued the header pins.

After putting the dongle back together, I connected the serial console to a USB-TTL serial adapter, and powered up the module.  I could see the Rx LED on the serial module flickering, indicating it was receiving console output data.  I started a terminal program, and was not seeing anything when I tried 9600 and 19,200bps.  Then I remembered my logic analyzer has a serial baud rate detection.  I hooked it up, ran a capture while the dongle was booting, and found the baud rate was 115,200kbps.

After setting the terminal program to 115,200, I could see what I recognized as the console output of a Linux kernel.  When the output stopped, I saw a "#" indicating a root shell prompt - no password required.  However the prompt wouldn't last long before the dongle seemed to reboot and repeat the start-up console output.

I first checked the board to make sure nothing was shorting from the connections I made to the serial port pads.  I then used a home-made USB cable with exposed power connections to measure the voltage.  I found the voltage was briefly dipping below 4.5V when the dongle was rebooting.  The dongle's peak power draw was too much for the PC USB port.  My solution was a 220uF capacitor connected to my home-made USB cable.  With the capacitor added, the voltage stayed above 4.8V, and there were no reboots.

The Linux installation seems to be a stripped-down android image rather than a standard linux distribution.  While the 256MB of RAM is ample for an embedded linux distribution, the 16MB of flash makes installing something like Picuntu Linux very difficult.