GoClever Tab A73

GOCLEVER TAB A73 is a 7-inch tablet with Allwinner A10 chip sold by Goclever. It has 3400mAh Lithium battery (3.7V) and 371g of weight. It became very popular due to low price (90-150€), Linux support and some bargains in supermarkets.

Hardware

 * FEL/LiveSuite button in microphone hole
 * AXP209 power management unit
 * Realtek RTL8192CU WiFi
 * FocalTech v5 capacitive 5-point touchscreen (ft5x_ts), with extra touch buttons (Back/Menu/Home)
 * Elpida RAM chips (2 * 256 MB)
 * Samsung/Hynix NAND chips (1 * 4 GB)

Different hardware versions
There were 3 hardware versions (HwvX) released by GOCLEVER. They have different PCB, camera or g-sensor:

GCTA731207XXXX is made with the parts that were in stock - there are some components from HWv2. and some from HWv3. There are problems with choosing correct Android version for them.

Taking apart
To get access to PCB, you have to remove four screws on the ports side and then from opposite side. For detailed informations, watch this YouTube video (Polish language).

Linux
This tablet has big Linux ARM developers community in Poland. There are tested images of:
 * Ubuntu by Miniand (after changing script.bin to GOCLEVERs ones)
 * Debian (there is precompiled version specially for A73)
 * Cubian (there is huge tutorial how to setup it on this tablet)
 * Fedora (runs with A10_whitelabel_MID settings and GOCLEVERs script.bin)

Here is available kernel compiled for A73 HWv2 (cameras should work with guvcview/Cheese, but g-sensor needs packages and modified Xorg drivers that fully supports xrandr).

Android
Official firmware is available here

There is 4.0.3 MOD by Fatum, with zRAM, external Bluetooth dongle suppport, external GPS support, performance fixes, etc. for HWv1 and for HWv2.

Android 4.1.1 Firmware from LY-F1 is 98% compatible with HWv1 - only G-sensor works bad, and touch buttons (Back/Menu/Home) are not responding).

This tablet also supports Android 4.2.1 from Sumvision Astro+ (on HWv1 only gsensor and touch buttons are not working)

Increasing RAM
There is possibility to increase RAM memory to 1GB, but then we need to edit script.bin to detect full size of memory. This tutorial is both English and Polish translated. Also we can try to increase NAND to 16GB, but usually this makes system unstable.

Touchscreen driver
In most situations, there is need to recompile kernel with working FT5X touchscreen driver (commenting out CONFIG_FT5X0X_MULTITOUCH in drivers/input/touchscreen/ft5x_ts.h). Kernel for HWv2 have working driver OOTB.

Recovery
When using Android 4.0.4 or newer, after rebooting to non-stock recovery, tablet will hang on bootloader stage, and it will never boot. Only one solution is reflashing FW with LiveSuit.

It's unknown behaviour, only on 4.1.1 (port from LY-F1) there is possibility to use TWRP. Older Androids (2.3.4/4.0.3) support CWM without problems.

Linux problems

 * Pengpod images may work not correctly (graphical glitches and kernel panics after starting Xorg).
 * The same problem is when trying to access NAND memory in Fedora.
 * For now, only Cubian nand-installer works correctly, other tools causes kernel panics (this is also weird behaviour)

Memory informations
dram_clk = 384 dram_type = 3 dram_rank_num = 1 dram_chip_density = 2048 dram_io_width = 16 dram_bus_width = 32 dram_cas = 6 dram_zq = 0x7c dram_odt_en = 0 dram_tpr0 = 0x30926692 dram_tpr1 = 0x1090 dram_tpr2 = 0x1a0c8 dram_tpr3 = 0x0 dram_emr1 = 0x4 dram_emr2 = 0x0 dram_emr3 = 0x0

build.prop from Android 4.0.3

 * Model Number: GOCLEVER TAB A73
 * Build Number: crane_evb-eng 4.0.3 IML74K 20120504 test-keys

script.bin
Contents from bootloaders (4.0.3 and LY-F1 4.1.1) can be found here.

There are also decompiled script.bin files (in FEX format).

Similar devices

 * Texet TM-7025 (1:1 clone of HWv1)
 * Vedia X7 (1:1 clone of HWv1)
 * Bmorn V11 (1:1 clone of HWv2)
 * Eken T02 (clone of HWv2/HWv3)
 * Saycool A720
 * etc.

Additional informations

 * Platform name: sun4i_crane
 * Build product: crane-evb

External References

 * Specs from GOCLEVER site (unfortunately, new GOCLEVER site doesn't contain any infos about A73, we need to use archives).
 * All about GOCLEVER A73 (PL) - for example HW versions, cameras and g-sensors
 * ROMs and MODs for A73 (PL)
 * Android 4.2.1 from Sumvision Astro (PL)
 * GCA73 ICS Mod V1.4 2012-05-20 HWv1 and HWv2 (PL)
 * Problems with booting Linux - photo