AMIKO Amiko A3 Owners Thread

[primestar31]

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.

You got one of those $20 Harbor Freight battery tenders plugged into your garage, and charging a battery? They broadcast MASSIVE amounts of rf into AM band and above. I just found that out myself. I unplugged it and the interference stopped immediately. Another thing that was causing issues, was my old Dell 90watt power brick for my laptop. That sucker was putting out a lot of RF, and interfering with my OTA reception on VHF. I unplugged it, and replaced it with a new model. Problem went away.

Tune a pocket AM radio to 540kHz, and go hunting....

 

[Cham]

Turn off the wifi for a couple of hours and see what happens... Your milage may vary...

 

[Dee_Ann]

And here we go again. Back to it's old tricks...



One thing, I held the front button during power up and got into the recovery menu, I wiped the cache and rebooted. When it came back up it had a message on the screen that said "Unfortunately Dolphin Browser has Stopped" and I had to press OK to clear the message.

I am starting to think that there are all sorts of apps running in the background that do not need to be running and that's where the problems are coming from.

There needs to be a way to look deeper into all the running processes (like holding the home button on an iPhone does) so you can kill off unneeded apps from running.

Also there needs to be a way to configure what apps start up on boot or not.

On my my little Chinese tablet you can see all the junk that's running and kill things off.
There was TONS of junk that it booted up and I was able to use an app called Comodo to kill off the junk and prevent a lot of them from starting at all in the first place. But this screenshot that shows running processes and apps is built into Android, it's not from the app store.

I see no such way to do that on the A3.

 

[Dee_Ann]

Ah, and now we're back to very serious fun. Again.

 

[primestar31]

Ah, and now we're back to very serious fun. Again.

View attachment 109901

QUICK! Get to the CHOPPA!

Send it back...

 

[Michael Nixon]

And here we go again. Back to it's old tricks...



One thing, I held the front button during power up and got into the recovery menu, I wiped the cache and rebooted. When it came back up it had a message on the screen that said "Unfortunately Dolphin Browser has Stopped" and I had to press OK to clear the message.

I am starting to think that there are all sorts of apps running in the background that do not need to be running and that's where the problems are coming from.

There needs to be a way to look deeper into all the running processes (like holding the home button on an iPhone does) so you can kill off unneeded apps from running.

Also there needs to be a way to configure what apps start up on boot or not.

On my my little Chinese tablet you can see all the junk that's running and kill things off.
There was TONS of junk that it booted up and I was able to use an app called Comodo to kill off the junk and prevent a lot of them from starting at all in the first place. But this screenshot that shows running processes and apps is built into Android, it's not from the app store.

I see no such way to do that on the A3.

View attachment 109893 View attachment 109894

That's the way Android is, I don't know why they do that or why they allow that that to happen programs start without you wanting them to thank Google because Google prevents anybody from making or should I say preventing Android running the way that it does, doesn't make sense especially on something like a phone that's battery powered programs running use CPU power which in turn uses battery power?

 

[bigg t]

My son has an android phone and was having trouble all of a sudden keeping it charged. I don't have one but told him it had to be something running in the background. It turns out that the facebook app was to blame.

 

[fred555]

My son has an android phone and was having trouble all of a sudden keeping it charged. I don't have one but told him it had to be something running in the background. It turns out that the facebook app was to blame.

Those who are having repeated issues, You are running at factory defaults and not loading up on apps are you? Once you load the first new app, all bets are off, no app is guaranteed not to screw something up. Just curious.

 

[Jim S.]

Only thing I added to mine was XBMC/Kodi, and also I added VLC to test something once but haven't run it since.

The latest thing to happen on my A3 is something that's happened before: I'm not even doing anything with it and it totally freezes up, not even updating the clock. Again, it was in fake standby, but wasn't doing anything else. I had hoped that after the crash the other day that was so bad that it went back to the first-boot setup wizard, whatever might've been causing the problems might have been flushed out, but apparently not.

On the heat issue: I shut off my wifi today and it does indeed run much cooler! The only thing that gets hot is the coax connector. But only time will tell if the heat is what's causing my issues, or something else. To really exercise it, I'm going to have to get it back on the net. I do have an old ethernet/wifi bridge around somewhere that I'll have to find and remember how to configure...

 

[Dee_Ann]

Now that my A3 has completely puked and I have to go back to ground zero and start over from step one I'm going to try something different.
After I do the recover process I'm going to NOT restore any of the freaking apps.
I don't need or want all that other fluff bulls***... I don't want freaking browsers or games or any other stupid garbage in it.
I have a strong suspicion that all the extra junk is causing the problems even if I never click to run it, I suspect it's running anyway simply because it's present.

I want a satellite receiver that runs reliably and records shows on schedule. All the other garbage can go hang itself.

So, down to absolute minimum basics.

 

[N6BY]

...
I want a satellite receiver that runs reliably and records shows on schedule. All the other garbage can go hang itself.....

Maybe get a Mini HD SE before they're all sold out?

 

[Dee_Ann]

Maybe get a Mini HD SE before they're all sold out?

Nope. No way. Not having anymore Amiko stuff. This was my first and last Amiko product. The concept was great, had it worked it would have been a dream come true, it had all the cool stuff that would have made watching TV even more fun. But I have THREE Roku's, a one, two and Roku 3. The Roku 3 does tons and tons of stuff, I've even added extra channels to it outside of the Roku walled garden and they don't really care if you do that.
I have a 3rd gen Apple TV. I'm a bit angry because I just bought it about six weeks ago only so I could get HBO NOW. They've been promising that they would bring HBO NOW to the Roku but that hasn't happened and I rather doubt that it ever will. Maybe on the mythical Roku 4, if that ever comes out. Now that Apple has announced the Apple TV 4 that is open to third parties I'll be buying one of those so I can have HBO NOW and Plex on it because I run Plex servers on three of my Macs and on my FreeNAS server as well. My Apple TV 3 won't let me see any of them unless I use iTunes which I deeply despise. I hate iTunes with a burning passion and wish it would die and go away.
Plex has already said they are working on a client for the ATV 4 right now and will have one available very soon. I hate having a dozen of these various gadgets but there's no "One box to rule them all" solution.
I thought that the A3 was going to be that but it's not.


As for a tuner that I can count on, the MicroHD gets 1000% thumbs up from me.
THIS tuner has be absolutely 100% rock solid dependable. Not once has it ever given me the slightest bit of trouble..
I think I probably should just buy another one.

The only thing I dislike about it is that I have to plug in an external disk and that I have to unplug it and move it to my Mac to get files out of it.
That's a bit of a bother but it works. I don't remember but it seems like I've had this thing about 2 years maybe and it's just worked.
No fluff, no nonsense. It's like a butter knife that has only one job, it doesn't cook dinner or start my car or walk the dogs, it spreads butter reliably 100% of the time. And this thing is the same way, it tunes in satellite TV and nothing else, 100% of the time. It's been powered up for months and months on end, I never, ever turn it off for any reason. There's no need to. Every time I change the TV input to this tuner, there it is, playing Retro like a boss..

Apparently simple is better.

I'm still going to try to restore the A3 this weekend and leave out all the stupid apps so that it's as stripped down to basics as I can get it.
If that doesn't get it then I'm done with it at that point. I'll just throw it in the junk pile and write it off as a lesson learned.

 

[Dee_Ann]

Well through sheer repetition alone I've learned how to go through the recovery process.
Held the front button, cycle power, wipe cache, reboot, wipe user data, reboot, install update.zip, reboot.
Do basic setup just to get through to the system and install 2.0.74. Reboot.
Restore from backup the A3 apps. Run Eurotrash, reboot again.
Restore from backup channel data. Back to watching TV.

For now, it's working again. I didn't install any apps other than what I felt it had to have to run.
Anything outside of the basics I just skipped. I no longer care to try and use it for anything other than a simple satellite tuner.
All those other things, I can do with my Rokus or my Apple TV or my Macs.
All I want the A3 to do it tune and record FTA channels. Nothing else.

I wouldn't even put it online except that it needs to be so it can keep the clock accurate.
If I can figure out how to have it get the time from one of my Macs rather than the outside world I could completely isolate it from the outside.
I tried shutting of the internet from it but the clock got wackydoodle within a few days and recordings where messed up then.

I found some instructions that I think may let me do this but I don't really understand what is going on with this so I need to do a lot more reading before I try this.
https://theredblacktree.wordpress.com/2015/01/19/make-your-mac-osx-serve-as-a-ntp-time-server/

It seems the guy that wrote that was doing it for a very different reason so I don't know if I could make it work for what I need it to do.
My Macs get the time from time.apple.com and they are very accurate. But this whole android thing, I don't know doodly about it so getting it to sync it's clock from one of my Macs, I don't know..
Surely it can be done but I'm not clever enough to make that happen on my own.

 

[Cham]

If you plug in the ethernet cable for a few seconds once every day the clock stays fairly accurate on the A3, as long as you don't shut ot off or use the deep sleep option. That's what I do with mine.
I use time.nist.gov for the NTP server.

 

[Jim S.]

Well, I've been running my A3 with an ethernet-to-wifi bridge for a week and until last night, everything was OK. No lockups or rebooting, and it even ran 10-15 degrees cooler than with the built-in wifi. But last night it locked up again (even the clock stopped keeping time) and by the time I noticed it today, it was running at 105 degrees F, as high as it was running constantly with the wifi enabled! So I'm assuming that the lockup was due to some runaway process slamming the CPU -- but what accounts for the hotness when it's running normally, but with wifi instead of ethernet?

 

[Comptech]

My turn with the wrong UID and android.com has stopped working. Stuck in boot loop. Worked fine last night,turned it off and today boot loop. A couple of months ago it reverted back to a European model and I blamed it on a power surge, now I am not sure.

 

[Titanium]

Thinking out loud... Love the concept of Android OS on an appliance device, but I wonder if too many cooks really do spoil the soup? Seems like little tweeks in the Android update code have significant impact on hardware and apps. Makes one wonder how hardware and apps are vetted for compliance and remain compatible?

 

[Comptech]

Wiping and restoring brought it back,hopefully it will stay that way. The first 6 months or so were fine, now it is getting a little flakey. But I still love this little box, now if I just had the nerve to load up Kodi and hope it doesn't crash. Even if it does, it's still a great little STB. I am thinking the new A3 will be a lot like the wetek box which is fine by me as long as a ATSC tuner can be added.

 

[Jim S.]

Well, I've been running my A3 with an ethernet-to-wifi bridge for a week and until last night, everything was OK. No lockups or rebooting, and it even ran 10-15 degrees cooler than with the built-in wifi. But last night it locked up again (even the clock stopped keeping time) and by the time I noticed it today, it was running at 105 degrees F, as high as it was running constantly with the wifi enabled! So I'm assuming that the lockup was due to some runaway process slamming the CPU -- but what accounts for the hotness when it's running normally, but with wifi instead of ethernet?

I'm finally getting a pretty good idea about what's going on with my lockups! I've belatedly come to the realization that if I leave it on a stable channel, it behaves itself indefinitely. If I leave it on a feed or other channel that's marginal and keeps going out, it eventually locks up. (The main offender for me is Reuters, which has been problematic for me since they switched to S2 a few years ago.)

I guess the next thing to test is to turn the wifi back on and see if it's still stable at the higher temperature that the wifi produces.

 

[KE4EST]

But I still love this little box, now if I just had the nerve to load up Kodi and hope it doesn't crash.

Been running Kodi on mine for I don't remember how long and it works great! Wife uses the receiver more than I do since I put Kodi on it.