Got Armbian running fully on the RK3518 "R69" TV box - a ~$35 full kit
With Pi prices skyrocketing, cheap TV boxes are about the only affordable option left for running a small home service. And these days AI makes bringing up full functionality on Armbian surprisingly doable - I basically hooked up a serial console and let Claude iterate over it until everything worked.
The result: ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, sleep, HDMI, and USB all work out of the box on this RK3518 R69 box. It's a genuinely cheap full kit too - board, case, PSU, remote, and HDMI cable for ~$35.
One gotcha I found: it's sold as 2GB RAM but it's a binned Samsung module - only ~1.5GB is actually usable, with stock Android faking the full 2GB. The eMMC is decent though (~300MB/s reads).
Setup is dead simple: grab the stock Radxa Rock 2F image, run the patch script, flash to SD, done - no custom image to build.
Since the IR remote works perfectly under Linux, I'm planning to use this as a host for CNCjs and repurpose the remote as a control pendant (jog control). Cheap, silent, low-power, and it already comes with the remote - pretty ideal for it.
Repo with setup notes: github.com/sormy/rk3518-r69-armbian
