Guide for Running AmberELEC on a Data Frog R35S / R36S Console with a New Screen

Greetings everyone. Here is my contribution to tweaking AmberELEC for Data Frog R35S / R36S consoles with a new screen.

Requirements:

• Linux OS (I used Manjaro Linux)
• The original file rk3326-r35s-linux.dtb, which comes with the pre-installed ArkOS (located in the BOOT section of the flash drive)
• A flash drive with the pre-release of AmberELEC (in my case, prerelease-20240511_1214)

Steps:

1. Install the program dtc (for Arch Linux) or device-tree-compiler (for Ubuntu).
2. Create a new folder called configs and place two configs in it – one from the original firmware (rk3326-r35s-linux.dtb) and the other from the AmberELEC flash drive (rk3326-rg351mp-linux.dtb).
3. Open a terminal in this folder and enter the following commands:
   • dtc -I dtb -O dts -f rk3326-r35s-linux.dtb -o rk3326-r35s-linux.dts
   • dtc -I dtb -O dts -f rk3326-rg351mp-linux.dtb -o rk3326-rg351mp-linux.dts
4. Open both newly created dts files, navigate to the panel-init-sequence section, and copy the entire panel-init-sequence line from the original config to the AmberELEC config.
5. Compile the new config with the following command:
   • dtc -I dts -O dtb -f rk3326-rg351mp-linux.dts -o rk3326-rg351mp-linux.dtb
6. Place the compiled rk3326-rg351mp-linux.dtb in the AMBRELEC section and start the console.

I hope this guide helps those who bought a new console and are trying to run AmberELEC on it. In my case, the screen on the console from 2024 (week 18) didn’t work without configuration tweaks. The ready-made files from GitHub for new panels also didn’t work – some just had the backlight on, while others had a striped screen.