Nexbox A95X freezing (Amlogic S905X)

[topbanana]

I have two A95X boxes which have worked great for a few years now. I’ve been running LibreELEC 8.2.3.1 but I had to run a special build with the temp sensor disabled.

I thought I’d try upgrading as a holiday project. Sure enough, Matrix works perfectly for about 20 minutes and then it freezes.

I know the cooling isn’t the greatest on these boxes, and I could open it up and add some heatsinks. But I’d prefer a software fix as I know they are stable when the sensor is disabled.

Is there some sort of boot flag I can set for this?

[bhf]

You need to upgrade your bootloader to Android 7.1.x for operating CE Matrix on S905x SoC. I refer you to this post.

Nexbox A95X B7N Failed update to NG Nightly

I had some time to test the ceemmc -x command on the NexBox A95X-B7N CoreELEC (official) nightly_20200723 (Amlogic-ng.arm) has been successfully migrated from USB Flash Drive to eMMC with the Team CoreELEC ceemmc command line tool. These instructions are for MS Windows 10 but can easily be modified for other environments. INSTRUCTIONS Step 1 can be skipped if the TV Box is already running the latest Nougat 7.1 Firmware Update to the latest NexBox A95X Nougat 7.1 Firmware With the Rufus …

[topbanana]

Thanks. That’s good to know when I get as far as installing to MMC.

[bhf]

The point I’m trying to make was the bootloader upgrade. It doesn’t matter, if you’re running CE from SD card, USB pendrive or emmc.

There is a mega source for the firmware which Betatester is running on his own Nexbox.

Onboard networking for Nexbox A95X-B7N (s905x) not working correctly on CE19.3

I use this firmware on my Nexbox A95X-B7N, which is part of my testbed.

[Betatester]

@bhf

Betatester is running on his Nexbox

What matters is that the device has to run Android 7 (Nougat) or better…

[topbanana]

Thanks guys. I can boot using the SD card and it runs for quite some time until it freezes, so I guess I must have the correct booloader?

[Betatester]

If you can boot the device from SD Card you are using a working device tree.

SoC S905X is the bottom line we support and your issues could very well be caused by overheating.

I suggest looking into better cooling for the box since -ng (19.x.x / Matrix) is more resource hungry than legacy (9.x.x / Leia).

[kshi]

Some S905x devices with a stock Android 6 bootloader are able to boot into CE and have it run for a while before it crashes and locks up for no obvious reason.

If you haven’t updated to Android 7 before installing an NG build, I would strongly advise you to do so. You’ll save yourself untold headaches down the road.

Heat could also be an issue worthy of correcting but upgrading the bootloader is almost certainly a must if you desire any reliable operation from this box.