In early March of this year, I picked up a set of Wave CD1000 monitors from Xiaohuangyu for around 200 yuan, including the monitor, set-top box, keyboard and mouse, and a camera. It's quite an odd combination, designed for cloud computers so it's a monitor set with a rear-mounted set-top box.
The camera has poor resolution, the keyboard and mouse use disposable batteries and have poor feel, but the monitor is okay. This small set-top box, however, looks a bit interesting among this pile of junk.
image
The set-top box has a good appearance, with a small and exquisite white body, giving it a good first impression. The hardware is equipped with the RK3528 chip, 2GB of RAM + 32GB of storage, and can smoothly decode 4K video.
The interface configuration is also very practical: three USB2.0 ports, one USB3.0 port, plus an HDMI port and a 100Mbps network port - a 100Mbps bandwidth is a bit challenging for light-duty routing, but it's more than enough to serve as a light NAS.
However, I was too lazy to tinker with it at the time and used it to maintain the original Android system to watch TV for two months. Then recently, I just wanted to set up a 24/7 robot and didn't want to build a dedicated server for it, so I started thinking about this box again.
I saw the Amlogic-s9xxx-armbian project on Github, and while browsing the list, I happened to see that someone had submitted a request in January of this year (Issue-3302) to adapt it. By the time I was looking through this issue, it had been adapted quite well. As of the release of this article in May 2026, it works basically normally under the 6.1.141 kernel, while the 6.12 and 6.18 kernels have HDMI issues, which means it can't perfectly flash the Finn OS Arm system (Finn OS requires at least a 6.12 mainline kernel). If you flash Finn OS Arm, you'll either have to tolerate no HDMI output and use pure SSH and network operation terminals, or you might want to hold off for now.
If you understand the above issues and plan to flash Finn OS Arm, you can check out this project, which can flash Finn OS Arm systems with kernels 6.18 and above. If you also want to set it up as a soft router, you can also choose amlogic-s9xxx-openwrt.
Flashing the System
Preparation
If you want to flash the system, you need to prepare the following:
- A dual-headed USB cable
- A Type-C power supply cable
- A CD1000 box
- A toothpick (to enter Loader mode)
- System image, flashing tools and drivers, and a Windows-running computer
Process
First, go to amlogic-s9xxx-armbian/releases to get the system image. I chose Trixie (Debian 13), there are many firmware options, you can use Ctrl+F to input CD1000 to quickly find (first expand the list), find it and download (6.1.141)
After everything is ready, install the drivers and tools on your computer, then open the tool. The interface should look something like the image below.
image
Extract the downloaded system image (tar.gz) to img format, then change the path of the system file in the tool to the path of the system image. Connect the box's USB3.0 (USB 1) to the computer using a dual-headed USB cable, then insert a toothpick into the 3.5mm audio port and press the button inside (there's a very obvious pressure sensation), then connect power to the box's Type-C power port. The computer tool will prompt you to enter Loader mode. Open the tool's advanced features, switch to maskrom mode, and click execute to start flashing automatically. There is no progress bar, just wait for the prompt to complete and you can remove the box.
Once the box is powered on, it will automatically initialize the system. Connect the keyboard and HDMI to execute the Armbian initialization process.
Experience
In terms of experience, it can serve as a low-power server. By connecting the dashboard, the power consumption is around 0.5W-3W, with normal power consumption of about 1W, allowing me to run it stably for over 48 hours with a power bank. After deploying Astrbot (Docker) +Napcat, I still have about 1GB of free memory (2GB SWAP), and the energy efficiency ratio is quite good.
![image](https://mx-file.101045700.xyz/blog/2026/05/image/14kcm2jg4koo0sc