Ahoy,
I'm feeling much better the past couple days so back in action. Yesterday I received two more Android H3 boxes I bought on eBay. After testing I either have the worst luck possible of all boxes are not created equal!
My first box I bought brand new on Amazon. It was a generic T95 Super 2+16 H3 box distributed by AMAMINIBOX. I successfully booted Android 10 from flash, and Engine BASIC NG, as well as Armbian 10, Lubuntu 16.04 and RetrOrangePi from uSD Card.
Since it worked so well I searched on eBay and found a couple more boxes. My second box is a used Turewell T95 Super 2+16 H3 box that appears identical to my 1st box. I successfully booted Android 10 from flash. I then tried Engine BASIC NG from uSD card. Although it signals the HDMI monitor nothing booted. I then tried Armbian and again no boot from uSD card.
I next moved on to the third box. It is a used Dolphin R69 1+8 H3 box. That is the cute box Hawk is getting with the green stripe. It successfully booted Android 7.1.2 from flash. So again I tried Engine BASIC NG from uSD card and the exact same problem: briefly signals HDMI, then nothing. Armbian does the same thing also.
So I now have 3 of these H3 boxes with one more generic T95S on the way, but so far 2 seem to be forever just Android TV Boxes which I need like a hole in my head. I have no idea what the problem might be. The odds that I bought 2 different boxes of 2 brands from 2 sellers and they both have failed uSD slots is pretty slim. I have Engine BASIC on a PNY 4GB uSD card and Armbian on a SanDisk 64GB uSD card. Aftere my attempts I tried the uSD cards in my original T95S box and they again boot fine. Next I'll try booting Android and seeing if file manager sees the cards. Then I'm out of ideas.
I'm very curious what others may find with their boxes especially Hawk with his R69 box. If anyone has any idea why booting is failing please clue me in. I suppose I could try flashing Tauon OS on one of the boxes but then if it reads the card and fails I may totally brick that machine.
I hope everyone is well and I'll try to contribute more this week as long as I feel well. My goals are some teardowns and boards pix and contibute to the working boards wiki. Then maybe I can do more EB NG programming than a test program or 3. But sometimes the treatment is as bad as the disease and that's what happened last week.
daveyb