Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Kogan Smart TV Dongle Restarting

kogan_smart_tv_7

If you also bought Kogan Smart TV dongle and it keeps on restarting whenever you try to turn it on you might be able to fix it by reading on.

Mine always restarted, at a time when the Android robot man is in view or when Android word is shown.

I did two main things to get it to work normally.

A) Changed the power source – I found the Red LED light in the dongle was not having the brightness it used to have. After doing some testing I found the power adapter which came with the dongle was faulty, so I used another similar power adapter and immediately the restarting of the dongle became less.

Also sometimes this power limitation is caused by the connector slack between the power adapter and the cable. Try changing the cable or adjusting the orientation of the adapter. For example if the adapter is lying flat try to turn it to a side or try to put some kind of an object underneath to reduce the slack between the cable and power adapter.

B) Update the firmware in the dongle – In my dongle updating the firmware made the restarting issue almost vanish. So if you like to make the fix complete try updating the dongle by following the steps below.

Before starting the process make sure that you will not have any power outages until you complete your firmware update (for about 30 mins). If power is interrupted while the update is happening most likely you will have problems using your dongle again, it might even be bricked so be careful.

  1. Download the new version of firmware  from the following link.
  2. Find an empty USB flash drive or a Micro SD card of capacity 512MB or more.
  3. Unzip the downloaded zip file into the USB flash or the SD card. Make sure only the contents of the zip file is present on SD card or flash drive.
  4. Plug the SD card or the USB flash into the HDMI dongle.
  5. Go to Settings, find System Update then select Local Device and select either USB flash drive or the SD card.
  6. This will start the firmware update process and when completed dongle will be restarted.
  7. Then you need to do the initial configuration again for things like screen size, WiFi, accounts etc.

Hope this helps you, if you have any questions let me know I might be able to help. Some of the information about updating the firmware is thanks to a reply made by Ozzie Tigar in forums.whirlpool.net.au.

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