AMIKO Amiko A3 Owners Thread

[Cham]

My A3 gets really hot actually... Have not measured the temperature, but I would think the aluminum case reaches 110-120f on top at normal room temp, usually just less than 70deg. Seems to work fine at that temp... Sometimes I have to re-boot it 4 times before it works properly, seems like it has to warm up before it really functions. Haven't taken it apart, maybe it has vacuum tubes inside?
Running version 2.0.73, it came with 2.0.72.

 

[barleyguy]

I think he was talking about the Mini.

I couldn't tell. That's why I answered both possible questions. Both of them are totally genuine, AFAIK.

 

[Jim S.]

My A3 gets really hot actually... Have not measured the temperature, but I would think the aluminum case reaches 110-120f on top at normal room temp, usually just less than 70deg. Seems to work fine at that temp...

I'm glad to see that mine isn't the only one that gets hot, except mine crashes a lot. I don't know whether that's heat-related though. Using the web streaming feature on mine seems to be responsible for much of the crashing, but not all.

I do have two ideas that I need to test this weekend about the heat:

1) I felt my LNBF the other day, and it seemed a bit warmer than I expected too. In particular, the metal collar on the coax connector seemed almost as warm as the one on the A3 end of the coax. I have some old DRO LNBFs around that have a much lower current draw than the PLL I'm using now, so I'll swap one and see what happens -- although the PLL should still be well within the A3's ratings, unless something has happened to it to make it draw more current.

2) I need to reboot the A3 and NOT log in remotely for a while, to see if it still runs as hot. I have an idea that the web server might be sucking up CPU time even when I'm not logged in to it, because there's no logout button on the interface.

Sometimes I have to re-boot it 4 times before it works properly, seems like it has to warm up before it really functions.

Mine almost always has to be rebooted at least twice, even if I reboot by pulling the plug. (It may have got better with .73 and .74, I haven't really had them on that long though, or had them crash/lockup quite as much...) This is possibly the single most ridiculous behavior I've seen from any computer anywhere ever! I've never even seen another Android device do that. (I don't think it has this problem from a normal shutdown, however I rarely do a normal shutdown for two reasons: first, I like the web server to be available; second, my motor has some issue where frequently but at random, it loses track of its position when it loses power, so I have to go into the motor menu and drive it to 0 and back at least once, and I don't feel like doing a motor replacement right now.)

 

[Babadem]

Mine gets hot too. I have been locked out many times and had to unplug and plugin the power plug of the A3 at least 3 times for things to go back to normal. Jim covered all issues I experience.

 

[mc6809e]

Neither of my A3s gets hot. I just checked the one in the living room that's been on for about 3 hours now, recording to the internal drive part of that time. Using a Fluke model 51 K/J thermometer, the temperature measured 6" in front of the A3 is 73.2°F. The surface temperature of the case on top of the A3 at this time is 86.2°F.

One is running 2.0.73 and the other is on 2.0.74.

 

[Jim S.]

Rebooting mine and not exercising the web interface made no difference in the temperature. It was running around 99 this morning with a room temperature in the low 70s, now running 104 with a room temp of 80. Not even watching TV, just in false standby (which really doesn't do anything other than turn off the video output.) I have some other things to take care of before I can change out the LNB.

 

[fred555]

Rebooting mine and not exercising the web interface made no difference in the temperature. It was running around 99 this morning with a room temperature in the low 70s, now running 104 with a room temp of 80. Not even watching TV, just in false standby (which really doesn't do anything other than turn off the video output.) I have some other things to take care of before I can change out the LNB.

Is there any particular chip or component inside that is heating up?

 

[Michael Nixon]

I think he was talking about the Mini.

Yeah I was talking about the mini, I also bought my a3 from titanium

 

[Jim S.]

Is there any particular chip or component inside that is heating up?

I haven't opened it to check -- I seem to remember Joe saying that the aluminum cover is part of the heatsink system and removing it voids the warranty.

 

[Jim S.]

I replaced the PLL LNBF with a DRO LNBF, and the temperature might have dropped a few degrees, nothing significant.

However, the A3 is having other issues. When I powered it back up after the LNBF swap, it came right up, but then after trying to change channels a few times I got a blank screen with the all too familiar "Spark Home has stopped, do you want to wait for it (Wait) (Close)" menu. Selecting either option did nothing -- usually, closing it gets things started again. The only key on the remote that it would respond to at this point was the power key. I chose to do a soft reboot, and when it came back up it got into some sort of loop where the boot screen just kept cycling. So I pulled the power again, and when I reconnected it, all of a sudden I'm in Dee Land! (Hi, Dee!) I'm looking at the first-boot sequence, with it asking me to pair the remote, select my screen resolution, select my antenna setup, etc! I exit out of that and sure enough, it's set up with the European satellite list etc. It's set to get time from satellite rather than the net, it's set to use ethernet instead of wifi, everything is basically back to a clean slate. (Except, when I enabled the wifi, it somehow had retained my network name and password. Pretty baffling, that!) I re-loaded my satellite/channel list from the hard drive, and it's running OK at the moment, other than that all my other settings such as my complete XBMC settings were wiped out. I'm tempted to NOT reload anything (other than the satellite list) from backups, but rebuild my settings from the beginning just in case that has something to do with the software issues. That way if I start having issues again, I'll have a pretty good idea that it's the hardware!

 

[T134]

Quick notes on A3 temperatures guys...

The original factory production sample is still here and runs 24/7. I reboot it on a regular basis (1-2 days) just because this is a good thing to do on all Android devices to clear out processes and memory. I also use a memory manager from the "Jenny" package to clear RAM when I mess with it since many Android Apps keep running even though you "quit" them.

Temperature wise that A3 is sitting at 91F according to my IR thermometer. The unit is sitting on the EPG basically doing nothing. It can get way warmer. Temperature increases as the processor does more and/or with load from LNB, switch, motors etc. I can get it warm running no satellite and pushing the processor with Apps. It is nothing to worry about, A3 is built to handle it. Guesstimating here but I think I've measured 120F range before which to the touch feels really hot. To compare, the top exhaust of my Xbone was running 129F playing Black Ops III last week when I checked. Had I not grabbed the IR I would have thought it felt like 150!

The heat sink design is a big aluminum square mounted to the processor with a thermal pad that meets the top of the aluminum outer shell. The reason why opening this voids the warranty is that it is easy to knock the pad off when reassembling. I probably shouldn't say this part but the design is way overkill. When I was at Amiko in Budapest doing the pre-release dev we'd often run them with the cover off. They were fine. I wouldn't want to do this long term or under heavy load but they were ok this way for hours of testing. These also have CPU protection where functions and speed are slowed if they get too hot. I think this is pretty much standard now with most decent processors. In short, it would be extremely hard to get A3 too hot and even harder to damage it this way.

 

[Dee_Ann]

Going on almost two weeks soon and my A3 has been working ~PERFECTLY~ !!

The most current beta update is the cure for all the grief I've been having.

I'm pretty much tickled with it as it is right now. It's been chugging on, recording stuff every day for, I dunno, like a week and a half now and not one single episode of stupidity.
No lockups, the video has remained stable, it just works. I wish it could have been running like this for the last 9 months..

Unless there's some miracle update that comes out, I'm not updating it again. This is the right stuff that it's been needing and I'm not touching it.
I am backing it up about twice a week just because I'm paranoid.

There's no need to send it in for repair because right now there's not a single thing wrong with it.

As for it running hot? It doesn't. Not even a little. It's almost cool to the touch and there's even a 500gb disk inside of it running. I think maybe once a few months ago it might have felt a bit warm but it has never felt hot, not at all.

Thank you guru guys for whatever it is you did in the 2.0.74 beta update !

 

[primestar31]

Going on almost two weeks soon and my A3 has been working ~PERFECTLY~ !!

The most current beta update is the cure for all the grief I've been having.

I'm pretty much tickled with it as it is right now. It's been chugging on, recording stuff every day for, I dunno, like a week and a half now and not one single episode of stupidity.
No lockups, the video has remained stable, it just works. I wish it could have been running like this for the last 9 months..

Unless there's some miracle update that comes out, I'm not updating it again. This is the right stuff that it's been needing and I'm not touching it.
I am backing it up about twice a week just because I'm paranoid.

There's no need to send it in for repair because right now there's not a single thing wrong with it.

As for it running hot? It doesn't. Not even a little. It's almost cool to the touch and there's even a 500gb disk inside of it running. I think maybe once a few months ago it might have felt a bit warm but it has never felt hot, not at all.

Thank you guru guys for whatever it is you did in the 2.0.74 beta update !

Is it recording the problem-child MeTV on 101W? No more stuttering?

 

[Jim S.]

Thank you guru guys for whatever it is you did in the 2.0.74 beta update !

I'm glad yours is behaving, but if you look up a few posts, mine just did a near-total reset on 2.0.74!

It hasn't been behaving perfectly since the reset, either It hasn't totally locked up or crashed, but it was only on a few hours before I got "program not running". Changing channels fixed it though, unlike the usual scenario where it requires reboot(s). It's running OK this morning, I'll just have to see how long it goes before anything else happens.

 

[Dee_Ann]

Is it recording the problem-child MeTV on 101W? No more stuttering?

I'm afraid I have no way to know that, I still haven't gotten my BUD put up at my new(ish) home yet. I just do not know. Sorry about that.. :/

I'm glad yours is behaving, but if you look up a few posts, mine just did a near-total reset on 2.0.74!

It hasn't been behaving perfectly since the reset, either It hasn't totally locked up or crashed, but it was only on a few hours before I got "program not running". Changing channels fixed it though, unlike the usual scenario where it requires reboot(s). It's running OK this morning, I'll just have to see how long it goes before anything else happens.

I wonder if there is a physical difference? Like I bought in early, I did that pre-order to get the discount so mine is one of the very first batch that shipped in the US.
Maybe they put different chips in them between that first run and the one you have?

Also, this afternoon I turned on the TV and saw that the picture on COZI was stuttering really badly. That was probably because of storm clouds that came through yesterday.
I never power the thing down or let it go to sleep, it stays running 24/7, I just shut the screen off or have it switched to my Mac. The screen is on my desk and is shared, it's primarily the second screen on my mac via DVI but I can switch it to the HDMI input so I can also watch TV on it. All of my screens are at least dual purpose and some of them are 3-5 inputs so I can watch many things at once or even have MANY screens available to my four Macs.

S anyway, I pushed channel 1 to change to channels to Retro on 97, it displayed the number one on screen but didn't change channels.
So I pushed the center button in the middle of the scroll thingie, I can't read what it says anymore, the letters wore off already.
The menu of channels popped up so it was still responding, I selected Retro, it said motor moving and it did change channels.
But the video was pausing kinda herky-jerky like so I decided against my better judgement to reboot it. I let it sit for about a minute
and the video did smooth out and was working fine at this point. With it working fine I thought "Well, there's no good, legitimate reason to reboot it but I'm going to anyway, just because."
So I pushed the power button and told it to reboot.

And thus began another 15 minute power of "Pull the power cord" games. It did shut down and start to reboot but when it came up with that initial screen, it would never go past that.
It normally would show a static screen for a few seconds, then a black screen then the animated screen and so on... But it wouldn't go past the initial static image screen and the IRD display was stuck saying boot.
I finally held the power button and told it to wipe the cache then reboot. It hung up trying to shut down from that menu and I had to pull the power again.
Waited, still hanging on the initial screen. Pulled the power again and held the power button until the menu came up. Hit wipe cache and reboot and then it finally came back up.
When it came up everything was fine except the time was off by about 5 hours, I checked to see that the internet connection (wired ethernet) was OK and it was, as soon as I checked that screen the time adjusted to the right time for here.
I checked everything else and all the apps were as they should be, nothing missing, all the channels were fine, recording schedules all as they should be.

So after about a week and a half it was fine with the exception of channel misbehaving because of storm/signal loss. The only reason it messed up was because I rebooted it and there was no good reason for me to reboot it other than I have seen many people say that you should reboot android stuff fairly often. I don't know about that, I think from now on I will not reboot it unless I have to.

Oh, and here's a stupid question/suggestion. How about some sort of diagnostic app that we can run to check and make sure everything is as it should be? Also maybe a "tune up" app that looks for problems and tweaks them back into proper working order? And is there any sort of anti-virus checker you can recommend? I don't think I need one that sits in memory playing nanny 24/7 but a simple one that just scans the system for viruses then goes away when it's over?
I use ClamAV on my Macs and it's very well behaved. I know that on windows computers the AV apps can make the computer so unresponsive that you can't even use the stupid thing.

Thanks..

 

[primestar31]

So, your A3 is behaving completely at your NEW house, where you only have a KU dish up and running? But it didn't work properly at your OLD house, where you had all sorts of dishes, wiring, and God knows what hooked up every which way?

Doesn't that location situation difference strike you as a little bit OFF?....

Maybe it isn't just the new firmware install that suddenly made your receiver work properly...

 

[Dee_Ann]

No no... It's been HORRIBLE here for the past 9 months, it's been such a messed up, malfunctioning nightmare, it's frustrated me to the point where I grew to hate the thing and regretted ever buying one.
It's only been the past week and a half that it all of a sudden started working right. Nothing has changed with the hardware, only thing was that I upgraded from 2.0.72 to 2.0.74 and BINGO! Happy hardware!

Since I moved here I'm now down to a single, 1m motorized KU dish. Just the one dish, no switches, just a straight through RG11 from tuner to motor.
At the old house when I first got it running the original 2.0.6(something) it worked great for months with the exception of not being able to record any of the MeTV channels from C-band.
I had several fixed KU dishes, the C-band and the motorized KU all on one. It was a crazy mix of stuff that I cobbled together over the years. It worked pretty darn well.
Only after I began to start applying updates in my quest to fix the MeTV recording issues did the problems begin to manifest themselves. Over time it just got worse and worse to the point that I had all but given up on it.
I was about to send it in for repair but at the last minute I saw a beta update was available. So I figured "What the heck, it can't be any worse than it is now, might as well try it" so I updated then switched the screen back to Mac duty.
I spent the week cleaning house because my kids and grand kids were coming to stay for a weekend. I didn't check or touch the thing at all for days. After everyone went home I switched back to the A3 fully expecting it to be croaked out and puking all over itself but much to my amazement it was working perfectly. I figured it was just a fluke so I ignored it again for a few days then I checked and again it was working great. This was a new record because the last time it ran for more than 48 hours without croaking was last year some time. So I just do not see that it has anything to do with the dishes I do or do not have connected up, if anything it should be much better because it's extremely simple and basic, a single dish on a motor with no switches or weird wiring. And the wiring is so much better because it's all RG11 now.

Also, here's something to consider in all this.

The LNB I have on this dish is a dual output PLL from Titanium. One output feeds the A3 and one output feeds my MicroHD which is down stairs in the living room. The MicroHD is not connected to the motor at all and has no way to move the dish. It is in passive mode and can only see whatever satellite the A3 moves the dish to. The MicroHD that is sharing the LNB with the A3, has been running 24/7 for the nine months I've been here, flawlessly.
I never power it down either. The dish stays mostly on 97 except twice a day it swings over to 103 and records My Favorite Martian then goes back to 97 when it's done. The MicroHD is always tuned to Retro so it loses signal when the A3 moves the dish and when it moves it back the MicroHD picks up signal on 97 again. I've never had to reboot it for anything, never had to pull the power cord, never once had a single problem with it that wasn't because I'm too dense to read instructions. It just runs and runs and runs for month after month. It's been extremely reliable. But it is a very different critter with many limitations. Getting recordings out of it into my Mac was rather tedious and that's why I was excited about the A3, I was expecting that I could download recordings into my Mac instead of having to move a disk drive around the house every few days. But then I discovered that my Mac was having trouble reading files from the A3's FTP server, it wouldn't copy a 5gb recording, it would only copy about 1.2gb of the file so I could only watch like a few minutes of an hour PBS show. I finally found out that if I use an FTP client app on my Mac called Transmit that it copies the files just fine. I don't know why my Macs won't do it when I just connect through Finder. They would always copy files of any size from the windows pc when I had that and I very often will move terabytes of files between the Macs without any problems.


I really hope that this upgrade keeps on working as well as it has for the past week and a half, so far this is the best it's done since I moved here.

 

[Cham]

Back to the hot A3 issue, I turned off the wifi radio and now it's just barely warm to touch. Been on all morning and working fine and cool.
WIll have to run some cat6 for the receiver, have a spool collecting dust. Just a pain to run it through under the floor/basment cieling. Time to break out the fish tape..

 

[Jim S.]

Wow, seriously, it's the wifi? How bizarre.

I'm still not convinced that the heat is causing all my crashing issues (i.e., I'd rather think that Spark has some poor programmers), but the temperature my A3 runs at is still ridiculous. Unfortunately, the SO would go berzerk at the idea of running an ethernet cable across the house to the router. I don't even think I could manage ethernet-over-powerline because I don't have enough free outlets without surge suppressors, and besides as a radio monitoring enthusiast I'd rather not generate any more RF -- I've already had to choke the heck out of my existing ethernet cables, and I'm still trying to figure out if it's my DSL drop causing interference in the longwave band.

 

[fred555]

You don't need to run Cat5. Use one of thee plugged into the ethernet port then pair with an existing AP.

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