For some reasons, Rockchip is extremely fond of Windows based firmware tools, and instead of providing a simple SD card method, they’ve continued to use these awful tools to upgrade firmware for Rockchip RK3288 devices. I don’t mean to say these are useless, but they should not be used by end users, unless their device is bricked. Nevertheless, Rockchip has now release version 2.3 of their Android tools for Windows, and GeekBuying has published a guide showing how to do, which I’ll summarize below. Rockchip will most probably also release an updated version for the Linux Upgrade Tool (upgrade_tool) soon, as part of their SDK, that also supports RK3288.

1. The first thing to do is to make sure you’ve got the latest Rockchip USB drivers installed, the same as for RK3288 root method.
2. Download and extract AndroidTool_Release_v2.3.zip which contains both AndroidTool for firmware flashing, and some development tools such as AFPTool.exe and RKImageMaker.exe
3. Enter AndroidTool_Release_v2.3/AndroidTool_Release_v2.3 directory, and click on AndroidTool.exe to start the program.
4. Connect the USB OTG port of your RK3288 device to your Windows computer, making USB debug is enabled in Android
5. AndroidTool now merges the functionalities of RkBatchTool (single file firmware) and RkAndroidTool (flash the NAND flash with an image corresponding to a particular partition such as kernel, system,. boot, etc..), and hence supports the two methods:
   • Single file (firmware.img) – Select Upgrade Firmware, load your device firmware, and click on Upgrade
     

      

      

     

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   • If you’ve got several images for the kernel, recovery, boot, parameter, etc.., you need to click on Download Image, and load the images for the partitions would want to flash, before clicking on Run to complete the firmware upgrade.
     

      

      

     

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6. Be patient, and the firmware update should be done after a while.

I haven’t tried it myself since I don’t currently own any products powered by Rockchip RK3288. There’s also an Advanced Function menu, that will extract kernel.img, recovery.img, boot.img, system.img, etc.. from a single “firmware.img” firmware file, read the Flash ID, get Flash info, read the IDB, and so on.