Car infotainment systems somehow have become a staple in today’s automobiles, yet when it comes down to it they have all the elegance of a locked-down Android tablet. In the case of the Honda infotainment system that [dosdude1] got from a friend’s 2016/2017-era Honda Accord, it pretty much is just that. Powered by a dual-core Cortex-A15 SoC, it features a blazin’ 1 GB of RAM, 2 GB of storage and runs Android 4.2.2. It’s also well-known for crashing a lot, which is speculated to be caused by Out-of-RAM events, which is what the RAM upgrade is supposed to test.
After tearing down the unit and extracting the main board with the (Renesas) SoC and RAM, the SoC was identified as being an automotive part dating back to 2012. The 1 GB of RAM was split across two Micron-branded packages, leaving one of the memory channels on the SoC unused and not broken out. This left removing the original RAM chips to check what options the existing pads provided, specifically potential support for twin-die chips, but also address line 15 (A15). Unfortunately only the A15 line turned out to be connected.
This left double capacity (1 GB) chips as the sole option, meaning a total of 2 GB of RAM. After installation the infotainment system booted up, but only showed 1 GB installed. Cue hunting down the right RAM config bootstrap resistor, updating the boot flags and updating the firmware to work around the LINEOWarp hibernation image that retained the 1 GB configuration. Ultimately the upgrade seems to work, but until the unit is reinstalled in the car and tested it’s hard to say whether it fixes the stability issues.
Thanks to [Dylan] for the tip.
great video and anyone into board level modifications should sub to dosdude1’s channel.
Could it have been replaced with a new system? I mean that’s just a lot of work for a measily Android 4 and 2 gigs of memory and the end result is still unknown.
If there is nothing really Honda specific (i don’t know what Hondalink is, but doesn’t seem essential), like actual info on the status of the car / changing car parameters, (which it didn’t seem to have) then i would’ve spent the time figuring out how to replace the damn thing.
But hacking the memory setting was impressive and for that sort of reason i can understand spending some time on that.
These infotainment headunits are car-specific, with custom CAN-based hookups that work only with the car’s ECU(s). Since people tend to use cars longer than a few years this can be a worthy upgrade just to eek a few more years out of the infotainment system.
HondaLink appears to be the smartphone-based app that you can use to communicate with the car to keep an eye on car vitals.
Some are, some aren’t. You are right about the HondaLink, which is too bad.
My car has one that has all the settings and messages baked in, so i can’t swap it. It’s not even on a CAN bus, it’s some GM specific bus (forgot the name). It sucks, but atleast it’s not some crashing, old Android POS.
I don’t know if i want to start scoping that bus though. So much work for almost no reward.
If the SOC has bumps for the second memory channel, then another option is to make an interposer from flex PCB to bring those out where they can be populated.