While I was browsing Taobao, a Chinese local shopping platform, I just found this K11C board from KickPi.
It seems like a legitimate product with plenty of documents, so I decided to dig deeper.
I paid a total of CNY 388, which is around USD 57.7, including the board (RK3566 with 4GB RAM and 32GB eMMC), UART debug adapter, and power adapter.
My initial impression was that it was just another SBC with generic Android installed. However, it has a manual, schematics, firmware for various peripherals, and an official Linux image.
I replaced the vendor’s forked U-Boot 2017.09 with lightly patched mainline U-Boot 2026.04, including a special tweak for the wired LAN chip.
It works smoothly with wired LAN, and all USB/HDMI ports work perfectly on HAOS.
The thing is, if everything goes as expected, this one should be able to receive the HAOS generic AArch64 OTA from HA directly without forking or a full rebuild of HAOS.
The HAOS partitions remain unmodified, so it is quite promising, although I haven’t tested OTA yet.
It also has GPIO, eDP/MIPI interface, RTC, and internal USB header, leaving plenty of potential for further expansion.
However, I still have a problem. Wi-Fi/Bluetooth driver is not pre-installed in HAOS, so I need to add it as a custom HA app containing kernel-matched out-of-tree modules and firmware.
I am quite happy to find this device, especially since it only needs minimal U-Boot tweaks