Community blog on PINE64

Quick update: May 2026

Mon, 18 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Whats been going on recently?

Hello everyone, we wanted to do a quick update on what’s been happening recently. Life has been pretty busy but there’s lots of nice things happening in the background that we’d like to share.

PineVoice

The PineVoice Home Assistant speaker (formally PineVox) is in its final stages. Production begins. Further on this, there will be limited bundle with this device which will include a PineVoice, Zigbee dongle, power supply and two matter modules. Pair it with a SBC of choice and run your Home Assistant instance locally!

PineTime/PineTime Pro

The current PineTime LCD is EOL and a new one is replacing it, though it is essentially the same display. These will be shipping in the next PineTime batch.
New PineTime Pro samples have been received by developers. Shiny!

LoRa? (Left-handed operational Radio authority, obviously)

The PineDio USB LoRa Adapter is at the focus of a new effort to begin progress on potential new LoRa devices. MeshCore is the current protocol target for the USB LoRa Adapter along with help from the pyMC_core library project.

The current problem with the device is that the crystal oscillator is heating up too much and can cause clock frequency drifting instability. In a nutshell that means your messages come out garbled. This may eventually be fixed with a TXCO (Temperature-Compensated Crystal Oscillator) to maintain a stable clock frequency.

Important recent community updates:

DanctNIX PineTab2 updates (including factory image)
Adam Piggz: PinePhone, PinePhone Pro, PineTab2 all updated to kernel 7.0, and improved USB config. Zypper ref and dup to update.
machaddr@mastodon.sdf.org: with their new Gentoo PineTab-V image

Do you have news to share with the community? You can have your news posted on this blog by heading over to this tutorial and following the template. All community updates are written in markdown which you can learn how to write here.

If you get stuck, feel free to ask the folks in chat by finding your respective chat platform at https://pine64.org/community/.

Contact

Community

Feel free to contact me if you have any concerns about community related topics. This can be about getting project support, sharing project updates, prolonged wait times for support from PineStore (anything after 1-2 weeks) and any general feedback that could help improve the community.

Community manager: camden.b@pine64.org

PineStore

If you have quality control issues with your device once you receive it, don’t wait, contact PineStore support.

For general queries and information from the Pine Store: info@pine64.org
For queries regarding support from the Pine Store: support@pine64.org
For sales/wholesale related questions: sales@pine64.org
If you have hardware defects or any other hardware issues to go: https://pine64.zohodesk.com/portal/en/home

Shocking disclosure, 20 volts to be exact

Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hey everyone, we’d like to make a public disclosure to the community about a product currently selling on the PineStore website (pine64.com).

The current Desktop PinePower V2 batch has an issue where in some situations the USB-C ports will report “0V” when there is obviously something attached. In reality it is actually outputting the correct voltage.

This has been fixed for future batches, but the current batch still has stock available. There is no fix available for affected Desktop PinePower V2 batches as the MCU can only be flashed at the factory. We have no ETA when the fixed batch will start production as this depends on the rest of the buggered batch being sold. We’ll let you all know when the fixed ones hit the store.

And please don’t open your PinePower devices as they’re high voltage power supplies, which can lead to serious risks.

Introduction to the PineTime Pro

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Introducing the PineTime Pro

The PineTime Pro was officially announced at FOSDEM26 on the Pine64 stand. The demo was a bit modest (more on that later on), but we were delighted to showcase the first prototype of the “next generation PineTime” along with a demo running on a development board!

We also mentioned the PineTime Pro in the FOSDEM 2026 Update blog post. In this blog post, we would like to provide a more in-depth look at the PineTime Pro.

Why “Pro” and not “PineTime 2”

The PineTime project started in October 2019, that’s more than 6 years ago! Needless to say, the PineTime has been a great success. The community has been very active in developing firmware for the device, companion apps, tools and more. And, according to PineStore, it sells very well.

The reason the PineTime Pro isn’t called the PineTime 2 is because it’s not meant to replace the original PineTime. The original watch still has a lot going for it: it is simple, hackable, efficient and already supported by great community projects like InfiniTime and WaspOS. It will continue production alongside this new model.

The PineTime Pro should be seen as a more powerful, more feature-rich sibling rather than a direct successor. If the original PineTime is a solid open smartwatch platform, the PineTime Pro is our attempt to push that idea much further with new and improved components.

What makes it “Pro”

Compared to the “OG” PineTime, the PineTime Pro brings a significant hardware upgrade.

At its core is a dual-core Cortex-M33 SoC, with one application core running at up to 200 MHz and a dedicated Bluetooth core. It also comes with 800 KB of internal SRAM and 8 MB of PSRAM.

Around that MCU, the hardware currently includes:

Bluetooth 5.2 - Classic (BR/EDR) & Low Energy
A 410×502 AMOLED display with touch support
A digital crown that also acts as an extra button
GPS
A heart rate sensor with blood oxygen measurement capability
Improved accelerometer -> full 6D Interial Measurement Unit
An I²C battery charger, which can be configured and monitored by the MCU
External QSPI 8MB flash memory
Microphone and speaker
A vibration motor
A 4-pin connector for power and debug/programming, with configurable pins for serial output or SWD

Yes, it’s still an embedded platform, but much more powerful. Here is a quick comparison between the PineTime and the PineTime Pro:

	OG PineTime	PineTimePro
MCU	1x ARM Cortex-M4 core	2x ARM Cortex-M33 cores
RAM	64 KB SRAM	800KB SRAM + 8MB PSRAM
Flash	512KB internal + 4MB SPI	8MB SQPI
Display	240x240px, 1.3"	410x502px, 2.13"
Sensors	Heart rate + accelerometer	heart rate + blood oxygen sensor, 6D IMU
GPS	No	Yes
Debug port	Internal	Available on external pin

Altogether, this opens the door to much more ambitious software (like PebbleOS ;) ) and use cases than what is practical on the original PineTime: fast, smooth and rich UI, fitness tracker, localization and tracking, external apps and watch faces and more!

A long road to get here

The PineTime Pro has been in discussion for quite a while. Community members including JF, Gamiee and Ralim have been exploring the idea for a long time, and from the beginning, one thing was clear: choosing the right MCU would make or break the project.

Earlier iterations were based on a RISC-V MCU. In fact, the demo shown at FOSDEM 2024 was based on that platform. While the idea was exciting, we ultimately ran into issues with power consumption along with the quality of the available documentation and SDK. Those limitations made it difficult to see a good long-term path forward.

Things became much more concrete when PineStore started collaborating with a large smartwatch manufacturer in China that had developed its own chip. That collaboration has been very valuable so far: PineStore and the community have been working together on the hardware design, and documentation and SDK materials have been shared to help software development move forward. All of these resources will also be available to the community once the device enters production.

Along the way, we explored a few extra ideas too. For example, we looked at adding LoRa, but that introduced major challenges in terms of PCB space and RF design. A light sensor was also considered, but dropped it for similar reasons. On the other hand, adding a speaker and microphone turned out to be relatively easy, so those ended up becoming a nice bonus.

Recent progress

During FOSDEM 2025, we received the first two development boards based on the new Cortex-M33 platform. Throughout 2025, PineStore and community members, especially Gamiee and Ralim, continued reviewing the hardware design while JF was experimenting with the development board and the SDK.

Toward the end of 2025, the first two actual watch prototypes were sent to Gamiee and JF. Unfortunately, those boards had hardware issues that left the SWD port (the programming and debugging port) non-functional, which made software bring-up much more difficult than expected.

A second batch of prototypes arrived just before FOSDEM this year. We had hoped to show them running on the Pine64 stand, but another hardware issue got in the way: the flash memory was not working properly, so the demo had to run on the development board instead of the actual watch hardware.

That said, progress is still very real. After several rounds of review between PineStore and the community, a third hardware revision is expected at the beginning of April. We’re optimistic that this revision will finally resolve the remaining blockers and let software development ramp up properly.

What about software?

Just like the original PineTime, we expect the community to enjoy this new device and develop many projects on top of it!

The good news is that developers from both InfiniTime and WaspOS are already involved, which gives the platform a strong starting point. The PineTime Pro is exciting not just because it is new hardware, but because it offers much more room for experimentation. Features that are extremely challenging to fit into the original PineTime due to resource constraints may become practical here.

Can it run Doom? Most probably, and I guess someone will take the challenge and make it happen!

On the InfiniTime side, the original PineTime is not being abandoned. InfiniTime is already a fairly mature project, and it will continue to exist. And I guess the same is true for Wasp-OS.

But realistically, the PineTime Pro is likely to keep developers busy for quite some time, simply because it creates so many new possibilities.

Right now, JF is mostly focused on low-level experiments and validation, with the goal of getting basic drivers and a demo application working as soon as possible. Gamiee is also expected to help with OpenOCD integration once he wraps up work on the PineVoice.

What happens next?

The next major milestone is simple: get the new hardware revision in hand, confirm that the remaining issues are solved, and continue pushing software bring-up forward.

There is still work ahead, and we are not pretending otherwise. But after a long period of exploration and hardware iteration, the PineTime Pro is finally starting to feel real.

We’re looking forward to sharing more as development continues.

If you get stuck, feel free to ask the folks in chat by finding your respective chat platform at https://pine64.org/community/.

Contact

Community

Feel free to contact me if you have any concerns about community related topics. This can be about getting project support, sharing project updates, concern about prolonged wait times for support from PineStore (anything after 1-2 weeks) and any general feedback that could help improve the community.

Community manager: camden.b@pine64.org

PineStore

If you have quality control issues with your device once you receive it, don’t wait, contact PineStore support.

For general queries and information from the Pine Store: info@pine64.org
For queries regarding support from the Pine Store: support@pine64.org
For sales/wholesale related questions: sales@pine64.org
If you have hardware defects or any other hardware issues to go: https://pine64.zohodesk.com/portal/en/home

FOSDEM 2026 Update

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Housekeeping

Hey everyone! So long no talk. It’s been a long time since a proper community update, but rest assured a “full size update” update is coming sometime in April (Charlie the Pinecorn returns!).

We are still planning to migrate to Codeberg for primary git hosting and committing to the move from mediawiki to our documentation site created by community member Funeral. We hope to make this happen sometime this year.

And a message to the team over at Genode, yes I did read your book :) - Caffeine

What happened at FOSDEM 2026

FOSDEM 2026 was a very productive meetup for members of the PINE64 Community, aside from the occasional shenanigans. We had the opportunity to work on the PineVoice (formally PineVox) and PineTime Pro in person which helped push forward bring-up. There were additional discussions on potential new products and the effect of the DRAM chip shortage.

Demos

PineNote

The PineNote was shown off at FOSDEM with a few demos featuring hrdl’s Arch image and a pre-release image of QuillOS using hrdl’s kernel tree. With a massive thanks to Tom.K, Phantomas and hrdl for staying around and helping demo with his PineNote. Some demos included smoothly playing videos, playing doom (you had to be there to believe it!) along with its capabilities as an actual ebook reader.

PineTab 2

Danct12 put together an image for FOSDEM with camera and support for h264 video decoding. The demo also included a copy of big buck bunny and a razor1911 demo.

DRAM shortage impact

Currently the DRAM shortage will impact the production of devices like the Pinetab2, PineNote and PinePhone. PineStore founder TL Lim has stated that he doesn’t wish to increase the price of hardware significantly so production is halted for the time being. Any remaining stock will be sold and that will be it for now.

This will not impact devices such as the PineTime, PineBuds, Pinecil or PineVoice.

PineTime Pro

The new device is an improvement on the original with an AMOLED display, GPS, a custom chip, a digital crown which also features an extra button and new sensors including a blood oxygen sensor. Power to individual components can be cut unlike the non pro watch which will improve battery life.

There has been discussion on if we do fund raising by baking in a small offset cost into the devices; or if we do a service with costs for fund raising. This decision has not been made yet.

More information to come!

Future of community editions

Discussions were had concerning compensation and payment for work of developers working on PineStore devices.

Why can’t community editions exist for already released devices?

Creating a community edition device requires PineStore to create a new SKU for a device, this means that the community needs to agree on purchasing a device at an extra cost as the price of the device will go up (which represents the portion that is going to be donated).

Devices like the PineNote or PineTab 2 are likely not going to get community editions due to this, and we’re very much at PineStores discretion in this regard. As long as a price is organized before a new device reaches production, it is okay. But this process can be difficult if a bulk of the development happens after release hardware production begins.

Challenges

Donations are messy, sending money overseas is messy, deciding who gets how much is messy. It’s a mess.

Tax: Taxes can significantly reduce the amount of funds developers end up receiving. Which makes everyone unhappy.
Donations to groups of individuals rather than projects: For the PinePhone community edition devices donations were sent to projects. In the case for some devices where the factory firmware was made possible by the contributions of a number of individuals (not under a project), the problem arises of where to send donation funds.
- Fund allocation: How are funds shared between individuals and who actually gets a share (the people who worked on the shipped firmware, what about the people who worked on components like the kernel that the firmware relies upon?). In this situation the individuals would have to agree on how funds are split.

Where is the PinePhone 2?

The PinePhone 2 is a common topic within the community and was a hot discussion at FOSDEM in 2026. Aside from the current chip shortage, PineStore has determined that it is too high of a financial risk to release another phone. This is because the interest of the mobile Linux community has shifted to porting cheaper and more powerful Android devices to mobile Linux projects such as Sailfish and PostmarketOS.

This will inevitably create a gap in the Linux phone space as the PinePhone is one of the few devices that a user can flash their own bootloader and modem firmware.

However, potential components for another phone were discussed during the trip. A RK3572/6 as a potential SOC and a RedCap 5G modem which has an identical command set to the Quectel EG25-G modem found in the PinePhone/Pro. Though note none of these components are locked in for an actual device.

So to conclude, the PinePhone 2 is currently in limbo for a number of reasons (financial riskiness, DRAM shortage, old Android devices make cheaper and more powerful Linux phones). But hopefully PineStore will eventually bring out another model.

To conclude

FOSDEM was a great turnout this year and we had a lot of fun meeting and catching up with people in the FOSS space. Thanks to everyone who came to FOSDEM and to those who came to say hi at our stand. Thanks to those who stuck around the stand with us, it made it a lot more enjoyable having you guys around. And of course, A special thanks to TL Lim from PineStore for sponsoring a group of our community members to visit FOSDEM.

If all things go alright (touch wood), a full community update should be out sometime in April (time/motivation permitting :P). See you in a tick!

If you get stuck, feel free to ask the folks in chat by finding your respective chat platform at https://pine64.org/community/.

Contact

Community

Community manager: camden.b@pine64.org

PineStore

If you have quality control issues with your device once you receive it, don’t wait, contact PineStore support.

For general queries and information from the Pine Store: info@pine64.org
For queries regarding support from the Pine Store: support@pine64.org
For sales/wholesale related questions: sales@pine64.org
If you have hardware defects or any other hardware issues to go: https://pine64.zohodesk.com/portal/en/home

Project Showcase: Movuan

Wed, 27 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Movuan project

The Movuan project was started by community member lxb and announced in a forum post as an alternative to mobile distributions using the systemd init system. Thanks to being forked from Mobian, the project makes use of modified Mobian debos to build it’s images.

One of the modifications that lxb makes is an optional script which can customize a Movuan image to install extra software like AndroidImpEx for importing contacts and sms messages from an Android phone, Ungoogled Chromium, local caching DNS (bind) tunnelled through TLS (stubby) to privacy minded servers and an inbuilt adblocker through a caching proxy (squid). These modifications are a personal preference of lxb’s but anyone is free to use them to help improve their privacy.

Installing Movuan

Movuan offers an image based on Devuan 5.0 (Debian 12) with Phosh. Users can find Movuan images in the GitLab repository along with instructions on installing said image. As usual you can use a tool like Balena Etcher or Gnome Disks to write them to an SD Card as well.

You may build your own images as well using the debos recipe in the GitLab repository.

What is Devuan?

Devuan for users who are unaware is a fork of Debian which provides alterative init systems to Systemd such as:

sysvinit (default)
openrc
runit
sinit
s6
shepherd

The benefit of using a different init system depends on the features it offers over another. So it is highly depends on user preference. Other than this change it runs the same (at a surface level) as Debian/Mobian.

Users can learn more about the Devuan project here.

Future goals and contributing

The goal of the Movuan project is to merge into Devuan as an official version, but it still requires some polishing to do before this can happen. Specifically help with packaging and testing would be appreciated! Anyone who is interested in helping with this project can contact lxb1@yahoo.com.

If you get stuck, feel free to ask the folks in chat by finding your respective chat platform at https://pine64.org/community/.

Contact

Community

Community manager: camden.b@pine64.org

PineStore

If you have quality control issues with your device once you receive it, don’t wait, contact PineStore support.

For general queries and information from the Pine Store: info@pine64.org
For queries regarding support from the Pine Store: support@pine64.org
For sales/wholesale related questions: sales@pine64.org
If you have hardware defects or any other hardware issues to go: https://pine64.zohodesk.com/portal/en/home

August Update: Note-able Tablet Updates

Sat, 16 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Housekeeping

Welcome back to another community update! In this update we announce a new community manager, updates to the PineTab2 and PineNote, FreeBSD on the PinePhone Pro, a guide on upstreaming PinePhone Pro patches and a small bit for you Pinecil users.

PinePhone Pro discontinuation

Recently PineStore has also discontinued the PinePhone Pro which was talked about in the last recent blog post. TLDR, sales were low which lead to the discontinuation of the device. Spare parts will be available for purchase for up to two years depending on if they sell well. If you still want a PinePhone Pro, refurbished ones will be put up for sale on the PineStore around the end of the month, similar to how it worked for the PineBook Pro.

For more details, people can find it at the link below. https://pine64.org/2025/08/14/august_2025_short_update/

New community manager

Authors: Caffeine

Today I would like to formally announce that I have stepped up to take the roll as the community manager. This decision was made a few months ago as life has become a lot busier for Gamiee. We would like to thank him for the work he has done maintaining our community cluster and the countless hours spent on helping the community. Gamiee will continue maintaining the cluster for the foreseeable future.

About me

Hello everyone, my name is Camden, but you may also know me by my online alias CarbonatedCaffeine. I am a computing student from New Zealand (that country next to Australia) and I have been an active part of the Pine64 community since 2020, around the time the PinePhone Braveheart was launched. I enjoy playing badminton, tinkering with phones and computers, writing and hiking.

My goals as community manager

As I step up, I aim to be a transparent and approachable community manager that community members can easily get along with. I promise to voice the concerns of community members so that important matters can be addressed as quickly as possible. We will continue to work towards bridging the communication gap between the Pine64 community and the PineStore which we hope will get smoother as time goes on.

Bringing back community editions is something that we have personally been asking PineStore to do for a while. This requires compensation to be arranged up front before a device is put up for sale. So while PineStore has continued in it’s goal to make cheap hardware that can easily get in the hands of developers, key community members who helped set up the community edition program have gone. This means that there has been nobody to help arrange compensation for those who have worked on software for recent products. If community editions return in the future it will increase the price of new devices, but this sacrifice is something we’re sure community members would be willing to pay if it meant supporting the developer(/s). We pledge to keep on PineStore’s heels about this and make sure that it will happen in the future so that developers will be paid for their effort. As of writing, PineStore is open to bringing community editions back for future products as long as proper planning and arrangements are made.

In terms of quality control and hardware failures I am aware that such issues exist. So to anyone, if these reports sent to Pine via email/tickets don’t get a reply for hardware replacements like some have experienced, I will get in touch directly with the PineStore founder to attempt to get the issue solved. Unfortunately I cannot do anything about fixing hardware defects other than report them, but I will do what I can.

We admit that both PineStore and Pine64 have dropped the ball and it has been very difficult to restart and recover after everything that has happened in the past. We will do our best to rebuild the community and we are going to start by replacing large community updates with smaller more frequent community driven project updates that anybody will be able to post onto this blog (not without moderation of course). We are doing this because it is tedious to write large community updates every month (and to keep a schedule). This will give power to project maintainers to announce important updates like new factory image releases through our community blog. I will write a tutorial on how to do so, which will be available on the Pine64 documentation website in the future.

We have confidence that the future is bright for the community and we hope you will join us in rebuilding our community.

-Camden

PineNote

Authors: hrdl, Phantomas

Current status

The last community update featured some video demos of another major update of the display controller driver and an integration into a sway-based setup. Since then the kernel sources and integration have been published, packaged, and bundled into an image that can be extracted onto os2, giving users an Arch Linux-based setup that contains hrdl’s kernel, their sway/dbus integration, and a functional sway/waybar/gtkgreet/squeekboard setup.

Phantomas has been improving the rust-based PineNote dbus service which has just and has been solving some long-standing firmware-related WiFi issues. The required firmware will be rolled out once there’s clarity on their license.

hrdl has fixed an outstanding issue with multi-touch inputs. Ten finger touch support has been added by modifying the touch controllers configuration which is achieved by running a script from userspace. This issue occurs because the display controller is flashed at the factory with firmware that only supports two touch inputs at most. A single byte change to this firmware allows a maximum of ten touch inputs to be recognized. The fix will allow the support for 3-4 finger gestures on desktops to switch workspaces or bring up Gnome overview.

Diederik made some minor contributions to the mainline kernel. They mostly remove some warnings, and unlike my work these were submitted to and accepted by upstream. He has planned some more work, so he suggested that it might make more sense to wait with mentioning his work until the next community update. dsimic has also upstreamed several patches.

Operating Systems

There are four new operating system options to choose from, just in case you need some variety.

Arch

As seen in the header image for the PineNote section, hrdl has made a complete Arch installation that can be installed on the OS2 partition next to Debian. It is up to date and includes the latest software improvements.

Instructions: https://git.sr.ht/~hrdl/pinenote-dist
Image: https://files.hrdl.eu/arch.tar.zst
Signature: https://files.hrdl.eu/arch.tar.zst.sig

PostmarketOS

Ayakael has made a functional PostmarketOS port based on hrdl’s kernel and sway setup.

Merge request: https://gitlab.postmarketos.org/postmarketOS/pmaports/-/merge_requests/6711
Installation instructions: https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/PINE64_PineNote_(pine64-pinenote)

Nix

Two NixOS setups by werapi (https://github.com/WeraPea/pinenote-nixos) and jzbor (https://github.com/jzbor/nixos-pinenote/blob/main/packages/fs-image/default.nix)

WiFi Compatibility

Some background, the chip inside the PineNote is an AzureWave CM256SM, which internally uses the CYW43455, which used to be the BCM43455 until Cypress bought Broadcom’s IoT division. That chip supports 5GHz WiFi, as well as the 802.11ac (WiFi 5) standard. That being said, WiFi, especially on the 5GHz band is subject to heavy regulations, since the frequency is shared with other tools (weather radar amongst other). This means 5GHz capable devices aren’t allowed to emit on most 5GHz channels, as long as they cannot ensure they respect local regulation. Linux’s way of managing this is through wireless-regdb, but drivers are allowed to disregard that information, which is exactly what brcmfmac does. Instead, that driver depend on Country Locale Matrix (CLM) blob being either baked in the firmware, or as a standalone file that the driver load.

The issue

Broadcom/Cypress cannot ship a universal CLM blob for a given chip, because they cannot ensure the regulations will be respected by a final product (e.g. on board amplifiers, internal vs external antennae, etc.), so the one shipped in linux-firmware has a very limited set of features active. On the 2.4 GHz channels 12 & 13 are disabled since they aren’t allowed in the US. The 5GHz band is way worse however, being more heavily regulated. On that one, only bands 36, 40, 44 and 48 + some upper bands (> 149) are enabled. However bands > 149 are usually reserved for low emission devices (about the range bluetooth offer), so routers/APs can’t use them. The issue is that WiFi 5 compatible router/APs often select the best channel automatically, unless explicitly disallowed, meaning the PineNote could randomly lose 5GHz connectivity if the router picked a higher band. This happens more often in dense urban area, and is highly dependent on the AP/Router in use.

Workaround #1

A simple workaround for the user to be able to manage their access point is to disable automatic channel selection and pick one of the supported bands. This can come with a performance hit, but these bands offer the highest compatibility with most devices.

Workaround #2

After confirming the chip was actually able to make use of these bands (by retrieving hrdl’s blobs coming from the first batch android image), I searched for other firmware/CLM blobs compatible with the CYW43455 or the BCM43455, because while technically working, the android firmware could not be redistributed, and came with an unreasonable performance hit (better than nothing, but still). It turns out that raspberry uses a compatible chip (the AP6255 module, which internally uses the same BCM43455/CYW43455 chip), and their CLM blob are perfectly working on the PineNote. For the ArchLinux user, I made a PKGBUILD that pulls that firmware and installs it for the PineNote, as a replacement to the one shipped by linux-firmware (I consider it experimental until more people test it.)

Some words of warning with this workaround

While I can confirm the blobs to be working, I don’t have the hardware to make an EMF measurement and check that the PineNote perfectly respects local regulations. I don’t expect this to be an issue when used as a WiFi station because it will passively listen for existing AP before trying to emit, and I dout it has sufficient transmission power to cause interference once it start transmitting on an already authorized channel.

However, DO NOT set it up as an Access Point. We don’t know if it can pick low power radars, so it might not be compliant with local regulations. Sometimes the driver fails to load on boot, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it happen with the standard firmware, so it could just be some weird dependencies on my side. A reboot fixes the issue so I haven’t bothered troubleshooting that yet.

PineTab2

Authors: Danct12

There is nothing much with the PineTab 2, but there has been more work on the BES2600 driver.

Kernel

Suspend and resume bug with the BES2600 Wi-Fi driver has been mostly fixed in v6.15.2-danctnix2. There are still some bugs with the SDIO driver, but they’re considered “minor” for now.

On that note, a new driver for Bluetooth is currently being worked on. It is mostly working, I tried pairing a phone, a Bluetooth keyboard, I even tried BLE GATT and they’re all working. I haven’t tried out BLE audio as I don’t have any Bluetooth earbuds that uses it.

Host wakeup is currently not supported, so Bluetooth devices cannot wake the PineTab 2 from sleep mode yet. I’m looking into how that works and I’ll implement that to the driver some day.

Unfortunately, sometimes when the BES2600 SDIO driver does a read/write while Bluetooth is turned on, there’s a chance that it’ll timeout and bring down the WLAN driver altogether while Bluetooth (UART) is still working flawlessly. Because of that, it’ll take a while before the Bluetooth driver is ready for public testing.

OS (DanctNIX’s Arch Linux ARM port)

A new factory image for the PineTab2 (20250731) has been released: https://echo.danctnix.org:7269/factory_images/pinetab2/20250731/

Flash the image to your SD card using dd or Win32DiskImager, boot with the SPI/eMMC disable switch (optional if the bootloader is working) and follow the instructions using the volume and power key. You may only use this if you need to reset the PineTab2 to factory defaults.

If you’re getting an error regarding the linux-firmware package such as:

linux-firmware-nvidia: /usr/lib/firmware/nvidia/ad103 exists in filesystem
linux-firmware-nvidia: /usr/lib/firmware/nvidia/ad104 exists in filesystem
linux-firmware-nvidia: /usr/lib/firmware/nvidia/ad106 exists in filesystem
linux-firmware-nvidia: /usr/lib/firmware/nvidia/ad107 exists in filesystem

Please read linux-firmware >= 20250613.12fe085f-5 upgrade requires manual intervention from Arch Linux news.

Mesa (GPU)

Luigi311 (Luis Garcia) has tested a patch which rearranged texture format to BGRA meaning the GPU driver doesn’t have to do format conversion and thus, massively improved performance for certain applications. The patch has merged to upstream mesa and will be available in the next mesa release. You can check out the patch here

PinePhone Pro

Mainlining project

The PinePhone Pro is currently running a near mainline kernel, but the PinePhone Pro tree currently requires a number of patches (114 commits to be specific) on top to be usable.

In light of this, community member LogicalErzor has created a guide on how to submit patches upstream towards the effort of making the number of patches needed to zero. The guide goes into detail on building, testing and upstreaming patches. If any community members are interested in helping out with this effort you can find the guide below.

https://forum.mainlining.org/t/upstream-pinephone-pro-patches/138

FreeBSD port

There is a new FreeBSD port for the PinePhone Pro that is being developed by Toby and Stephan (@hnygd). Currently there is an image available for users to test that includes a minimal Xorg desktop environment and an on-screen keyboard. The latest update includes touchscreen driver support, limited networking support via the headphone jack, drive along with the aforementioned minimal desktop setup. In terms of what’s planned in the future, the plan is to bring a working USB and WiFi driver to FreeBSD which will make the device much easier to develop with. Pictured below is a demo of the PinePhone Pro running OS/2 Warp under QEMU on FreeBSD by Stephan (that’s a mouthful).

Contributors welcome!

Toby and Stephan are looking for contributors to help with testing, feedback, upstreaming and driver development. If you’re interested in this project you can get in touch with them with the links on the repository.

https://codeberg.org/Honeyguide/freebsd-pinephonepro

Blisp

Authors: Ralimtek

This is a small note that blisp (used for programming the Pinecilv2 and other Bouffalo IC’s) has tagged out and released the 5th release. Version 0.0.5 has been released. There is a lot of cleaning up and improvements in there, including BL808 support and (basic) hex file support.

Want to contribute to the next community update?

Do you have a cool project that you’re working on that you’d like to be mentioned in these blog posts? Is there something you’re interested in that you’d like to write about related to Pine64? If you’re interested, please contact us!

Camden/CarbonatedCaffeine:
- @carbonatedcaffeine (Discord)
- @endernightlord:matrix.org (Matrix)
- camden.b@pine64.org (email)

A Quick Community Update on PinePhone Pro and What’s Next

Thu, 14 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Hey everyone! As many have noticed, the PinePhone Pro is currently out ot stock on the Pine Store. Unfortunately we have to deliver you the following news: the PinePhone Pro is officially discontinued. We were told it didn’t sell well enough to keep production going. But the good news for current owners are that spare parts will still be made for up to two years, depending on demand. Meanwhile, the trusty PinePhone (A64) is still alive and kicking, and Pine Store plans to keep it rolling for about two more years.

No new PinePhone (Yet), future with RISC-V

Right now, we’ve got no insider info on a brand-new PinePhone, so don’t expect any surprise announcements soon. Pine Store is steering its energy toward other projects (including RISC-V and a little bit of AI), which you’ve probably noticed with the Oz64, STAR64, StarPro64, and Alpha One launches.

And one last thing: later this month there’ll be a small batch of refurbished PinePhone Pros up for grabs — your final shot at owning one of these little powerhouses.

April Update: Risc It For A Biscuit

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Hello and happy April! The past few months have been relatively quiet on the surface, but there is a lot going on behind the scenes. During the past three months we have seen some improvements for the PineTab2, PineTime and PineNote, along with the announcement that the PineTab-V is back in store and the new micro soldering tip set for the Pinecil. Charlie the Pinecorn also makes his yearly appearance in the update banner, artwork made by Caffeine.

We have been very happy with the feedback after the launch of the PineNote Community Edition. Users coming from the developer edition with Android have been able to successfully move to the new Debian firmware without any major issues (thanks Maximilian, Diederik and hrdl!).

We’d also like to apologize as we had most of this written up around late February early March and things got busy. Thanks for waiting patiently! We’re making sure to focus on getting the word out than increasing the word count from now on.

FOSDEM 2025

Author: Caffeine

Thank you to everyone who came past the pop-up meet-up at FOSDEM, it was fantastic to see everyone and be able to say hello. As mentioned in the previous update we weren’t allocated a table this year, but we managed to meet with community members at Bar Campouce. We hope to get a table for next years event.

PineTab-V

Author: Caffeine

We are happy to announce that the PineTab-V is back in the store! Last year we reported that the PineTab-V would be going on sale in October, unfortunately this did not happen due to there being no default OS to send to the factory. Thanks to our friends over at StarFive, they have kindly built a working image to send to the factory (thank you!). The image is based on Debian with a Gnome desktop.

Much of the hardware is working including the cameras, WiFi and GPU acceleration. One thing to note though, when the battery is lower than 8%, some hardware (specifically WiFi) will not be able to function. We suspect this to be a hardware related issue.

The current status of the PineTab-V factory image from StarFive:

Both cameras working
Lack of support for HEVC or MJPEG hardware decoding in Firefox.

You can find more details about the factory image here.

StarPro64

Author: Caffeine

The StarPro64 SBC will be in the store sometime in the next two weeks. The device includes an Eswin EIC7700 SoC, 32GB of LPDDR5 memory and a 20 TOPS NPU. The device supports Deepseek 7B LLM out of the box.

You can find more extended detail on the device in the September 2024 community update.

PineTab2

Author: Caffeine

It has been many community updates since we have covered any software progress on the PineTab2, That cycle is broken this month as Danct12 who currently maintains the Arch based DanctNix distribution has made some improvements.

Danct12 added U-Boot display support as well as HDMI on U-Boot. But this is yet to be upstreamed. There is also a new factory image which mainly includes package updates, the latest kernel update fixes WiFi on newer U-Boot versions.

PineNote

Authors: Caffeine, hrdl

Since the last community update, there have been significant updates to the default Debian operating system. Notably a configuration to make the pressure sensitivity and eraser work in Xournal++, general user version of the Gnome extension, updated kernel and a new travel mode. The travel mode stops the PineNote from waking up when the folio case accidentally opens in a bag for example.

For users interested or who have just received their PineNote, Caffeine has made a series of videos detailing how to enter Rockusb mode using the magnet method, how to flash, upgrade and recover your PineNote, and a full Debian software demonstration. You can find the video playlist here.

Kernel improvements

Community member hrdl has been improving the overall responsiveness of the PineNote on their Arch based operating system and improved kernel tree.

This means goodbye to artifacting due to mode/waveform mismatches and hello to redrawing changes on the display on a per pixel basis thanks to new bit depth and dithering behavior. hrdl has additionally written a Python script which listens for relevant sway events and updates that can be set up per application automatically.

If users are interested in trying the Arch based operating system (which is able to be installed on the OS2 partition) there is a tutorial on GitHub. Users can install improved kernel on Debian by searching and choosing the latest image using apt search hrdl.

Demos

PineTime

Author: Caffeine

There has been a new update to the WaspOS reloader to add support for the BY25Q32 SPINOR flash chip found in recent batches of the PineTime. This means that the watch will no longer soft-brick. This happened when users tried to switch from Infinitime to WaspOS and back again. This is now fixed. See our previous blog post about the topic here for more information.

Users are able to find the new reloader artifact here at this actions page.

Pinecil

Author: Ralim

Continuing on the theme from launching the threaded insert tool, we are bringing a new set of tips. This time we are bringing out some micro soldering tips. Watching some of the discussions there has been demand for smaller tips that are more focused on smaller component sizes. So after working with the factory, we have made sample test units of the new design. As shown in the picture.

These are really focused more on SMD work. Below is the tips with 0603(Imperial) / 1608(Metric) sized resistor for a sense of scale.

The tips are designed to be plug & play with the Pinecilv2. They are the same 6.2 ohms as the short tips already available for sale. Due to the significantly smaller thermal mass, the tips heat up faster than the larger tips.

Community content

PineNote

Community user Shom has been making some helpful and informative content on the PineNote.

A really well written review with some nice feedback. We are hoping that with the next batch the user won’t be required to run any u-boot commands after getting their PineNote. However, the main struggle I’ve encountered is from flashing the PineNote, this process can be improved in the future along with improved documentation.

Want to contribute to the next community update?

Do you have a cool project that you’re working on you’d like to be mentioned? Is there something you’re interested in that you’d like to write about related to Pine64? If you’re interested, please contact us!

Camden/CarbonatedCaffeine:
- @carbonatedcaffeine (Discord)
- @endernightlord:matrix.org (Matrix)

January Update: Thinking Out Of The Vox

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This month we report on some news concerning the PineVox, what the community have been up to with their PineNotes and the brand-new 1.15 InfiniTime update. We would like to wish our community a happy New Year and hope you all had a good end of 2024.

But since it’s now the beginning of 2025, we’d like to fill you in on what we have planned for the first part of the year.

We plan to release the PineVox to the public thanks to Gamiee’s recent progress and we plan to continue improving the software for the PineNote, thanks to Maximilian, Diederik and our testers in the community. We have some exciting devices coming as well, mentioned in previous community updates. The PineCam and StarPro64 have been sent to developers in our community, so we hope to report on these devices in the coming months.

Gamiee has also been working with a group of our friends over at Meshtastic on an independent project which will become the second version of the PineDio USB LoRa adapter. We plan to talk more about the progress of that project more in the February update.

FOSDEM

Author: Caffeine

Unfortunately, a stand at FOSDEM hasn’t been allocated for us this year. But that doesn’t mean we won’t be there to represent PINE64! Gamiee, Ralimtek, JF, TL Lim and Lukasz will be attending in person this year and will be planning a get-together. We will announce on our social-media when we have confirmed the time and place.

Of course, our PINE64 community members will still be wandering around the event, we love talking to all our friends at other projects and meeting the members of our community! So we hope we’ll see you there!

PineVox

Author: Caffeine, Gamiee

Gamiee has been working on the firmware for the PineVox recently (haha, now the title pun makes sense), he has made some significant progress on the usability of the device.

Right now, the device can connect to home assistant, detect wake-up and process commands. Wake-up detection is currently done on the Home Assistant side, streaming audio data through Home Assistant. This will change as work is done to get wake-up detection working locally on the PineVox.

As for what’s next, Gamiee wants to implement a protocol for connection via Wi-Fi. This is much better for devices like smartphones, which in an ideal situation will provide coverage all throughout the home, rather than the small area that Bluetooth LE covers.

Regarding the release of PineVox, it depends, currently this will depend on when Gamiee considers the firmware for the device to be usable. Only then will manufacturing for the device begin, which is loosely aimed at the end of February (take this with a grain of salt).

PineNote

Author: Caffeine

Users have been enjoying their new PineNotes for a few months now and there has been a lot of good feedback. In fact, the device was used to write most of this community update.

Important - Software Update Issue

“cannot proceed with upgrade” (as of Dec 11, 2024)

Users running the factory firmware on their PineNote Community Edition will encounter an issue updating their system. This happens because Debian has moved /lib, /lib64, etc. to /usr and because the system still includes a /lib64 symlink, attempting to update the system results in the base-files package failing to install.

You can fix this by removing the symlink by running sudo rm /lib64 in your terminal (via SSH, UART, etc.).

Development updates

Since users have received their PineNote Community Edition devices, various bug fixes and a kernel update to Linux 6.12 have been pushed. Users can update through the command line (using APT) or through the Gnome Software application. Xournal++ has also since been updated.

Users wanting audio out (and other USB goodies) using the USB-C port will have to update their kernel manually currently. This can be done with this command in the terminal. Though this is completely optional, as everyone will eventually get these updates soon.

sudo apt install linux-image-6.12.6-pinenote-202412310358-00187-g0aa6f8665258

PineNote Community Spotlight

Inkput

Inkput is a proof-of-concept software written by s12wu that allows the user to enter text using handwriting. Inkput uses PellelNitram’s handwriting recognition implementation to achieve this.

The program Inkput works by displaying on top of the user’s desktop, then the user will write something in the box, select a text input and press predict. This will drop the written text into the text input like in the image below.

Contributions and testing is very much welcome! You can find the Inkput source code on GitHub: https://github.com/s12wu/inkput

Pinescreen

Pinescreen is a software whose purpose is to implement the features found in the Gnome extension to configure the e-ink display. Pinescreen is targeted at improving use on KDE Plasma.

It’s currently in early development, testing and contributions welcome! You may find the software here: https://gitlab.com/Poundex/pinescreen.

InfiniTime 1.15

Author: JF

InfiniTime released InfiniTime 1.15 “Ribes rubrum” earlier this month! This release is packed with new features and improvements that we will take a look at in this section of the blog post.

This is the first release in almost a year and one might wonder why it took so much time to finalize this new version of InfiniTime. Remember that InfiniTime is designed, built and maintained by “normal” people working on the project with their free time. Maintainers get busy with other projects and changes in their lives. As an example, I became a father a few months ago, and as you can expect, this has had a huge impact on the time I can dedicate to the project.

The team also has a strong focus on reliability and stability: we decided to delay the release by a few weeks to fix a few stability issues and regressions that popped during our testing. This, together with the very limited resources of the PineTime hardware, makes the development of the firmware a bit more tedious (but it’s still a lot of fun :)).

Talking about the team: the core developers are happy to welcome mark9064 to the core developers team. Mark has been contributing to the project for many months now and among other things, made the Always-On feature possible in InfiniTime.

Now, let’s take a look at InfiniTime 1.15! A lot of users have been waiting for this feature for a long time now: the Always-On Display (AOD). Implementing this feature on the PineTime was quite a challenge, since the hardware is not designed for it. This is mainly because of the LCD display and its power hungry backlight. @KaffeinatedKat and @mark9064 however managed to make this possible by optimizing low-level drivers, fine-tuning some display settings and improving the state machine of the UI. Without going into too much details, the display is configured to use as little power as possible by reducing the number of colors that are displayed, by reducing its refresh rate and by driving the backlight using a PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) to its lowest visible level.

This was a complex feature to implement and review, but it was worth it: InfiniTime runs for 2 to 3 days in this mode! I’m honestly impressed by how comfortable the InfiniTime feels when this feature is enabled together with the Raise-to-Wake and Lower-to-Sleep features!

You can easily enable this feature in the settings (Settings → Display → Always On).

A new application was also integrated in InfiniTime 1.15: the weather forecast app. As you can expect, this app shows the weather forecast for the next 5 days in a nice and colorful way. This feature was contributed by @vkareh.

You’ll find it in the third page of the application menu.

The dice rolling app by @yusufmte is another new application added in this release. This app generates random numbers according to the number of configured sides. This app will come in handy for table-top players, among others.

It’s available in the 2nd page of the settings

Another highly requested feature is the persistent alarm. Previously, your alarm setting would be lost when the watch reboots, after an update for example. Thanks to @NeroBurner, the setting is now saved in the configuration file to ensure that the alarm will be restored the next time the watch reboots!

The list of changes is so long that I cannot detail all of them in this blog post. Let me just mention that the header README file was redesigned, the default year (in the date/time) setting is now automatically set to the current year of the build, the color inversion bug is now fixed and that the lower to sleep algorithm has been improved by checking the wrist angle. Please check the release note to see the complete list of changes and additions!

I would like to take the opportunity to thank everyone who contributed to this release of InfiniTime. It contains a lot of features and improvements that greatly improves the experience for many users!

Pinebook Pro

Author: Caffeine

The Pinebook Pro is no longer in production and will therefore no longer be stocked on the PineStore. This is due to the switch of focus to the PineTab and the PineNote line of devices.

There are plans to continue the Pinebook series, and it will return in the future when a suitable SOC is chosen.

Community content

PineNote CE first month review

Author: Caffeine

I recently received my PineNote at the end of November, it’s been really nice to use. This month, I wrote the blog post on the PineNote using my Logitech Bluetooth keyboard.

I managed to get everything to work well out of the box, the pen responsiveness is very good, I have had no trouble drawing or writing using the included Xournal++ application. The 4GB of included memory is enough to have many applications open, including a web browser, music player and my document opened in LibreOffice. The included software and changes made to the system help the PineNote to be a usable device. There is a Gnome extension for controlling the display and manually refreshing the screen, along with a custom shell theme to help with visibility. One thing I also noticed is how good the battery life is. I can have it sleeping for nearly a week and I can easily get around three days of usage out of it while writing and browsing the internet.

The big thing for me so far is the fact there is no MicroSD Card slot included with the device. The device has a very specific partition structure right now and I’m afraid to change anything. If I brick my device I feel like I would need a lot of help compared to something with the PinePhone which is easy to flash. The part that makes it difficult is that a user must use the included magnet tool or serial adapter, then flash the device and find the waveform files for your specific PineNote batch. Both devices have different waveform files due to different displays. These are not included in the Debian images if you want to re-flash, so you’re required to download them. I’m sure things will get better in the future for PineNote recovery, but right now I’m afraid that I’ll eventually brick the device.

Overall, I am happy with the experience of my PineNote so far. The performance is good, the screen is nice and I haven’t faced any major issues (that haven’t already been fixed ;) ). I will likely be back with a more thorough review in 6 months after I have discovered the quirks of the device and using as my primary note-taking device for a while.

Want to contribute to the next community update?

Camden/CarbonatedCaffeine:
- @carbonatedcaffeine (Discord)
- @endernightlord:matrix.org (Matrix)

Please refrain from installing WASP-OS on new PineTimes for the moment

Sun, 29 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In July 2024, PineStore notified the community that a small hardware change was needed on the PineTime: the current flash chip was end of life (EoL) and needed to be replaced by a new one. From the software point of view, the new chip behaves exactly like the old on so very few code changes were required to support it.

The new chip exposes different identifiers (manufacturer ID, for example) than the previous one. Which means that if the software checks those IDs, it would need to be updated to take the new ones into account.

No change was needed in InfiniTime, but we however added a new field in the SystemInfo app to display the IDs of the chip. We figure this could be useful in the future.

The bootloader does check against those IDs so we released a new version of the bootloader (v1.0.1) as well.

We provided the new software to PineStore so they could test them and use them to flash the new batch of PineTimes at the factory.

Everything went well and PineTimes equipped with the new memory chip and software are being delivered to happy users.

Everything? Well, not really: a few users reported soft-bricked PineTimes after switching to WASP-OS and then reverting to InfiniTime again. This is a bummer: the “reloader” tool that reinstalls the InfiniTime bootloader also needed to be upgraded to support the new memory chip!

An issue has already been opened on the WASP-OS GitHub repo and a new reloader tool will hopefully be released soon to tackle this issue. We also added a big red warning on the documentation page that explains how to switch to and from InfiniTime and WASP-OS to ensure that users won’t try to switch OS until the issue is fixed and the documentation updated.

Warning

In the meantime, do not try to install WASP-OS on your PineTime if it’s running bootloader v1.0.1 from the factory (unless you know exactly what you are doing), this WILL brick your PineTime!

Be sure that the community will try to fix this as soon as possible, but please remember that developers, like mostly everyone, are a bit less available during this period of the year. ;-)

We are really sorry for the inconvenience caused by this issue, and we wish everyone a happy holiday season!

November Update: Something Borrowed Something New

Thu, 21 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome back to a new monthly Pine64 community update! This month we are announcing a couple of new products including a SBC and a successor to the PineCube. We have updates to share about the PineNote and the PineDio USB adapter this month along with a talk by one of our community members Dsimic.

PineCam

Authors: Lukasz, Caffeine

The first new device we will be introducing this update is the PineCam! The PineCam is a successor to the PineCube IP camera, but with a much more polished design, better specifications and more features. While the PineCube didn’t achieve the success the project had hoped for, we believe it wasn’t due to a lack of interest in such hardware, but rather the way it was executed. We’ve gathered feedback, learned from what went wrong, and have gone back to the drawing board. This time, the PineStore have decided to take a different approach, using a System-on-Chip (SoC) already in our hardware lineup. The device includes more RAM (compared to the PineCube’s 128MB), and utilizes a camera interface that “just works”.

The PineCam is based on the oz64 single board computer which is powered by the SG2000 system on a chip found in the new Oz64. The SOC includes two RISC-V cores (C906 @1Ghz + C906 @700Mhz) and one ARM core (Cortex-A53 @1Ghz). You can find more information on the specifications of the Oz64 and the SOC it’s using here. The device features 512MB of RAM, providing just enough memory to run a full Linux-based OS such as MotionEyeOS, a popular surveillance camera operating system.

Specific to the PineCam now, the device includes a 2MP camera module which is the same one found in the PineTab 2/-V (the GalaxyCore GC02M2), it is connected via a MIPI CSI connector. Additionally, the camera and body can be separated from each other to be used as a USB-C UVP wired camera, so it may be used as a desktop webcam. The camera’s PCB also comes equipped with IR LEDs for low-light application use-cases. The mainboard is equipped with GPIO, a microphone, speaker, and USB-C power input located on the right-hand side of the device (when viewed from the front). The GPIO pins share Oz64’s layout and can be accessed by removing a small flap at the front of the PineCam. If you don’t need to tinker with the GPIO, the flap can be reinstalled and screwed in place permanently. The PineCam comes with a convenient tripod, which can be folded or removed from the body of the device.

The PineCam is currently in early prototyping stages, with the plastic body and final PCB having just arrived in recent weeks. However, the hardware is taking shape quickly and the printed circuit board assembly stage is currently on track for around the end of October. The first batch will be making its way to developers soon.

I can see the PineCam being used in countless scenarios, ranging from a truly private nanny or security camera, to a 3D print or drone camera. I’m sure you can think of your own, better use-case examples for the Pinecam. The PineStore hasn’t zeroed-in on a price point just yet, but the device will cost less than $30 upon release.

Yuzuki Avaota-A1

Author: Caffeine

The second device we will be announcing this update is a collaboration between PineStore and hardware manufacturer Yuzuki, the Avaota-A1.

The device includes an Allwinner A527 SOC with 4 cores @ 1.8Ghz and 4 cores @ 1.42Ghz, a Mali-G57-MC1 GPU that supports the open source Panfrost driver, supports a 4K 60Hz display via HDMI as well as a 2.5K 60Hz display via DisplayPort, 802.11 B/G/N/AX WiFi (Wifi 6) and BlueTooth 5.4 connectivity.

You can purchase it in a 4GB of memory and 32GB of storage configuration or a 2GB of memory and 16GB of storage configuration.

You can find more information about this device on Yuzuki’s website for schematics and OS downloads and on Pines store listing. We plan on continuing this relationship with Yuzuki with another board in a couple of months, so stay tuned!

PineNote

Author: Caffeine, Lukasz

Attention to all users who have ordered/received a PineNote

The version of Debian-based Linux distribution shipped with the second PineNote batch contains some issues that prevent suspend-to-RAM from working correctly and make entering MaskROM mode using a magnet not possible. This was caused by the unfortunate timing, so the factory ended up installing version of the operating system image that contains these issues. The required fixes are already available in the shipped Linux distribution, but they need to be installed manually by the users.

For general users wanting to purchase a PineNote

We would like to affirm that the PineNote Community Edition is still aimed at Linux developers with an extensive knowledge of embedded systems and/or experience with mobile Linux. Although the software has improved, we still want more testing done with this new batch to make sure we can start to aim this at general users. Now back to the blog post.

PineNote News

The PineNote is one of the more ambitious projects undertaken by PINE64 and the PineStore since the original PinePhone. The main goal behind developing the PineNote was to create an open-source alternative to popular e-paper readers and note-taking devices, with nearly infinite software customization, free from advertisements and subscriptions. It runs standard Linux, adapted for a grayscale display, with preinstalled tools and extensions included to help make use of the device easier. From the outset, we understood that software would be key to building a true alternative for the FOSS community, and that achieving this goal would take time. This was a project we chose not to rush.

The groundwork for the PineNote as well as the PineTab2 began with the Quartz64 single-board computer, followed by a three-year development period for the PineNote itself. The last thing we as a project wanted was to release a half-finished piece of hardware that might dissuade people from embracing an open e-paper reader and notepad.

Delaying the PineNote’s broader release has proven worthwhile. The factory image is based on Debian Trixie and includes the GNOME desktop by default. While the software is still best described as a “beta,” it’s already quite impressive and will further improve with time as more people get their hands on the device. As things stand, all core functionality of the device has been implemented and enabled, with nothing missing, and each feature has been integrated thoughtfully. This includes everything from a custom grayscale GNOME theme to convenient quality-of-life features, like the ability to control both blue and yellow backlight under brightness settings, a widget that allow users to refresh the display on demand, and even a quick drop-down in the task-manager panel to adjust the drawing mode. I should also mention that there is an initial boot screen with documentation included in GNOME’s Help app, which opens upon first boot. All this, running on mainline Linux.

Maximilian and other contributors have done an incredible job, making the PineNote feel like a true FOSS counterpart to established commercial platforms.

The PineNote production and flashing stages have finished and we are currently shipping to users (some are even receiving them as we speak!). The PineNote retains its initial price of $399 from the developer batch, with no major hardware changes; the only difference being a change from an active to a passive stylus, so it no longer requires charging, and yet the buttons on it remain functional (pretty cool right?).

The PineNote’s potential is substantial. It shows that an e-paper device running Linux and open software can meet the needs of the enthusiast community—and, in some respects, even rival or surpass more mainstream devices that often lock users into proprietary ecosystems or subscription models. More importantly, it demonstrates that existing software can be adapted to work seamlessly on a grayscale e-paper display. We’re excited for tinkerers and developers to finally get their hands on the PineNote and the e-paper technology, which offers a fantastic experience for reading, note-taking, and the benefits of better battery life thanks to the e-ink display. We will be looking forward to your feedback and are keen to see how you use, change and improve the PineNote over the coming weeks, months and years. As always, we encourage you to contribute to the development process; you don’t need to write code (although, this is also obviously welcome) as testing, writing or translating documentation or even just offering feedback to developers means a lot to all engaged in the project.

PineTab-V

Author: Caffeine

Last month the PineTab-V part was completely missed on accident (whoops, sorry :<) and missed some important details for the new batch.

The hardware changes made to the PineTab2 will be trickling down the the PineTab V as well in this new batch. After listening to community feedback we added an accelerometer along with a status LED for notifications and charging (similar to the PinePhone) to the Pintab2/PineTab-V. Some fixes were also made to resolve the slow charging issue while the device is turned off and a proper PineTab-V ID was added to the EEPROM.

This is a great revision with fixes and new hardware features, the device is currently in production and should hopefully be available in the next month.

BarCamp Talk About Pine64 and Ox64 Handout

Author: Dsimic

Almost exactly a year ago, I delivered a talk about single-board computers and Pine64 at a local BarCamp. One of the intended goals was to produce a write-up for one of the Pine64 monthly community updates, which is obviously long overdue, but better late than never.

The primary goals of the talk were to raise the awareness of the local people about single-board computers in general, and more specifically about the Pine64 community and products. Both areas are rather blurry to the proverbial Joe Average, so providing some kind of an introduction can only be helpful. Alas, it turned out that the things were much more blurry than expected.

The intended talk audience consisted of, in general, software developers of all kinds, with various levels of knowledge and skill. There were about 50 people attending the event; we’ll need this number later, while drawing some of the conclusions.

A few weeks before the talk I reached out to TL Lim, asking if he could donate a few Ox64 128 Mbit boards, with the intent to hand them out right after the talk. To my delight, TL Lim responded with great news: a total of six Ox64 128 Mbit boards were on the way for my doorstep! Thank you once again for that, TL, I really appreciate it! It goes without saying that I was really happy to hear that, and I imagined happy people receiving the free Ox64 boards and enjoying them, while also contributing in different ways down the road. Oh, was I wrong. :(

Six Ox64 128 Mbit boards received from TL Lim

Unfortunately, the Ox64 boards didn’t arrive before the talk, missing it by just a few days, so I was unable to hand them out exactly at the end of the talk, as planned originally. Instead, I intended to collect the contacts of the lucky winners and deliver the boards later. I thought that would make the talk audience a bit impatient, maybe even a bit sad, but as it turned out, I was wrong once again.

The talk itself, whose slides in English are available for download, unfortunately went without sparking particularly strong excitement among the audience, despite even being the opening talk, and despite the clearly mentioned handout of free Pine64 hardware. I didn’t want to make some kind of a lottery out of the handout, so I just asked that anyone who wanted a free Ox64 board had to describe briefly what they would use it for. Thus, someone basically had to produce a couple of meaningful sentences, and a free Ox64 board would’ve been theirs. Such an approach seemed fair to me, because the intent was to put the donated Ox64 boards into good use, but to my surprise and despair, when it was the time to hear the use-case proposals, all that was audible were the proverbial crickets. Believe it or not, nobody proposed anything, while I expected at least a few people out of about 50 BarCamp attendees to be interested in the whole thing, and to come up with some interesting uses or projects. A couple of people asked for some more details about the Ox64, but that was it. It was satisfactory to at least see that the talk audience weren’t greedy, so they didn’t ask for something they wouldn’t actually use.

Obviously, the outcome made me rather disappointed, but as always, there’s something to learn even from the things that turn out really bad. Quite importantly, I was left with the Ox64 boards that I promised to hand out, but surprisingly, nobody wanted. Thus, I had to “force feed” the boards to a few friends of mine, who actually didn’t ask me to receive them. Luckily, one of them eventually expressed some interest in using his free Ox64 board for some project in robotics, but sadly, his enthusiasm eventually proved not to be strong enough. To my unpleasant surprise, I’ve heard back nothing about the handed-out Ox64 boards in the last year or so, which presumably means that the above-mentioned friends of mine haven’t done much with them, including the one who had some robotics project in mind. Such an unpleasant and truly unexpected outcome may make the whole talk endeavor look muck like a total waste of time, effort and money, but I think we should actually try to learn something from this failure, which is sometimes the best way to learn.

After thinking a lot about the whole thing, and after talking a bit to one of my friends, who received the last of the donated Ox64 boards a few months ago (for the record, I kept one out of six boards for myself), my conclusion is that much more “built-in” user-friendliness is required to make the Pine64 products understood better and, hopefully, more widely accepted. To put it simply, we need to make blinking the proverbial LED very easy, which hopefully can we make some people interested to learn and do more. Though, we shouldn’t fool ourselves by expecting huge numbers of new people to suddenly become low-level software developers, because that’s simply not realistic. Very few people are interested in that, and out of those who show some interest, very small percentage is actually willing to put some effort into it. It’s just hard and mentally not rewarding enough to most people who are already software developers of some kind. Not to mention that most people just want to repeat some “cookie cutter” recipes found in various tutorials, which is absolutely fine, but such an approach unfortunately doesn’t bring a lot of new value to the Pine64 community and its members.

I’ve already got some plans about how to make the Pine64 products more user-friendly, and only time (and some future community updates) will tell how much I’ll actually do about that.

PineDio

Author: Caffeine

Things have been moving quickly in the PineDio space as of late. Community manager Gamiee has been working with developers over at Meshtastic to get the PineDio USB adapter working with the Meshtastic firmware. Work has been completed to port the SX1262 to RadioLib which is a requirement for the firmware.

At the moment, support for Meshtastic is seeming likely, but some issues could be attributed to hardware faults and it’s possible a small hardware revision could be made sometime in the future. The issue has been found to be attributed to the TXCO, this issue stops the device from sending long packets via Meshtastic.

We would like to personally thank the people over at Meshtastic for the work they have done for the device so far. We have interest to continue collaborating with the Meshtastic project and we hope to work together to make new devices in the future.

Community content

Monthly community updates

Author: Caffeine

As most of you know, the past two years has not been the best for community updates as nobody has been able to write consistently. I am happy to announce that I will be stepping up to continue producing community updates monthly alongside our community members and developers.

Last months post was a bit of a doozy to write due to the 6 months of information needed to be inquired and written about, originally the update was slated for August, but unfortunately that never happened. For that I’d like to thank everybody’s patience with our updates, things should be easier now that the last update is out of the way, so expect updates every month starting from now.

Thanks again, Camden.

Want to contribute to the next community update?

Camden/CarbonatedCaffeine:
- @carbonatedcaffeine (Discord)
- @endernightlord:matrix.org (Matrix)

September Update: Check Your Notes

Wed, 02 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Hello and welcome back to another Pine64 community update! The community has been hard at work behind the scenes with development of new hardware along with bringing back some previously manufactured products. Of course, we will also go over the current state of our devices as well. And just before you ask, yes it is October. Most of the work for this update was done last month.

We’d also like to thank you for your patience, it’s been difficult with a most of us having limited time to work on these updates. We will continue to write and release these updates as fast as we can and continue to become more consistent again like we used to be.

Thanks!

Updates

New products announcements

StarPro64

Author: Lukasz

The PINE64 project and PineStore have been committed to bringing more devices based on the RISC-V architecture since three years ago. Since 2021, several devices including the Pinecil — PINE64’s most popular hardware — have adopted this architecture. While the Ox64 may have been the first Linux-capable single-board computer (SBC) technically, the first full-fledged PINE64 RISC-V SBC was the Star64, which laid the foundation for the PINETAB-V tablet introduced last year alongside its ARM sibling, the PineTab2. Although significant development is still needed for the JH7110, interest in the platform and RISC-V development in general remain strong, with new releases from projects like DietPi and NuttX.

However, PINE64 and PineStore’s commitment to the RISC-V platform goes far beyond existing products. As a testament to this, we are thrilled to introduce you to the newest RISC-V family member in the PINE64 hardware line-up – the StarPro64. Following the convention of more capable hardware in the PINE64 catalog, the StarPro64 boasts a more powerful system-on-chip (SoC) at its core than its non-Pro older sibling. It is based on the EIC7700X, an upgraded version of the EIC7700. The CPU speed has been increased from 1.4 GHz to 1.8 GHz, while the NPU performance has been boosted from 13.3 TOPS to 19.95 TOPS.

The StarPro64 uses the model-A board format, seen in earlier products such as the Pine A64, the popular ROCKPro64, and indeed also the Star64. The layout of the StarPro64 is very similar to the Star64, with all key I/O ports in the same positions. This includes the dual Ethernet ports, digital video output port, and 12V power input at the rear of the board. The front features a power button, as well as USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports, in their usual model-A positions. Additionally, the board has a full GPIO header, a 4x PCIe lane, an eMMC slot, onboard WiFi/Bluetooth, and heatsink mounting holes matching the layout of the ROCKPro64 one-for-one.

The StarPro64 will be available in three memory configurations: 8GB, 16GB, or 32GB of LPDDR5 RAM. While a firm availability date has not yet been provided yet, it is expected to reach the PineStore sooner rather than later. The first prototype, featuring 32GB of RAM, arrived in late September and we’re pleased with how it turned out. If the early evaluation board passes testing, developers will start receiving their units in the coming weeks. While we’re keen to get production going so you can get your hands on a unit, we’ll patiently wait for developer feedback - positive feedback from the community will lead to full-scale production.

The StarPro64, and more specifically the Eswin EIC7700 SoC, is an exciting platform that may become a foundation for future devices. PINE64 hopes that the development and enthusiast community will embrace this SoC and the StarPro64, as it could be a gateway to a range of affordable RISC-V devices that many of us are eager to see. For instance, you can even connect a PinePhone Pro LCD and touch panel to the StarPro64 — pretty cool, right? For those interested in a deeper dive into the SoC, I encourage you to check out a detailed article on CNX Software.

The StarPro64 board PCB has already been sent out for fabrication along with the prototyping board back in September.

Oz64

Author: Lukasz

The StarPro64 is, however, not the only SBC introduced this month. The Oz64 is a development board based on the SG2000 MCU and equipped with OIC8800 Wi-Fi/BT chip. It’s an interesting chip that embeds multiple cores: two main cores (T-Head C906 64-bit RISC-V cores and an ARM Cortex A53 64-bit RISC CPU, only one of them can be used at a time), another T-Head C906 RTOS core and a 8051 8-bit core. They are supported by 512MB of RAM. The board also provides a microSD card slot, an eMMC connector and a USB2.0 type-A host port. It is important to note that the Oz64 is not a replacement for the Ox64, which has proven itself to be popular and will remain in PineStore’s hardware line-up for the foreseeable future. Production of the Oz64 is already completed and it is currently undergoing Q&A testing. Once testing will be completed the SBC will find its way into the Pine Store in the coming weeks or months. Expect an announcement on social media platforms and in the chats.

The Oz64 is expected to be available in the next few weeks or months.

Quartz64-Zero

Author: Lukasz

Following the two RISC-V centered SBCs there is also an announcement pertaining to our Arm Quartz64 device-line. The Quartz64-Zero is a lower cost version of the Quartz64 that is based on the RK3566T (Quad A55 @1.6Gh) and comes with 1GB memory.

All Quartz64 software options should work right out-of-the box on this board without any major optimizations. Noteworthily, the PCIe port on the Quartz64-Zero is the same as the one on the Raspberry Pi 5. As such the PineStore sees this low-cost board as suitable for commercial project applications and guarantees the availability of the board until at least 2028. It is hence an LTS board.

The Quartz64-Zero is already available for $15 on the store.

PineNote

Authors: Ralim, CarbonatedCaffeine

The PineNote is coming back; there are now plans formalized for a production run of these units. I do not (yet) have a launch date target as behind-the-scenes the Pine Store team are still working on all things production.

What has happened behind the scenes has been a very long discussion with TL around if a new batch can happen. There has been huge amounts of work done by Maximilian tireless working away at making a stable Debian distribution to run on these devices. I’m very acutely aware of the silence that has surrounded this device, this was not by design but rather due to lack of updates to share publicly as things slowly progressed. I took my unit to FOSDEM this year to be able to show of the progress that has been made on the OS front, and to be able to talk about the product still continuing.

The PineNote was stuck in a chicken-and-egg situation where because of the very high cost of manufacturing the device (ePaper screens are sadly still expensive), and so the risk of manufacturing units that then didn’t have a working Linux OS and would not sell was huge. Maximilian’s work in the background has pushed the envelope on this and resulted in not only a bare-bones capable OS but a genuinely daily-usable system that “just works”.

This is excellent as it also moves the target audience from developers to every day users. You should be able to power on the device and drop into a working Gnome experience.

The hardware of the PineNote has taken some feedback from the early developer units, we are aiming to have the old pen replaced by a passive (no charging) unit that still features the same buttons.

Operating System Progress

Currently the PineNote firmware is being developed by Maximillian and is based on Debian.

The images are using the Gnome desktop and includes some extensions specific to playing well with e-ink displays.

If you currently own a PineNote, you can find these images here. If you have time, any testing and feedback on these will be valuable.

Mobian

Julian Fairfax has created an initial port of Mobian for the PineNote. It currently boots, but it isn’t as usable as it could be using Phosh. It’s a good starting point.

PostmarketOS

“There were also attempts to port PostmarketOS to the Pinenote. The current state needs to be tested:” https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/PINE64_PineNote_(pine64-pinenote)

Call For Contributors!

We need help getting the Debian image into best shape for the release.

Issues: https://github.com/PNDeb/pinenote-debian-image/issues
Nice videos would be very appreciated
Join/ask in the PineNote chat if you are willing to help!

PineTab-V

The PineTab-V is returning for another production batch in October similar to the PineNote.

In this new batch, there are some notable hardware revision changes:

An accelerometer was added to the device
Resolved slow charging while the device is turned off
A LED status indicator light has been added to the device
Added a proper ID of the PineTab-V in the EEPROM

The device will be in stock around mid/late October. An announcement will be made when it drops in the store.

PinePhone Pro

Author: CarbonatedCaffeine

The PinePhone Pro switched its default operating system from Manjaro at the end of 2023 to Adam Piggz’s port of Sailfish. There have been a number of updates since the PinePhone Pro was mentioned in a community update.

During the end of 2023 commits were made to add functionality to wake the phone using the modems RI pin. In addition to adding the config to support usage of Waydroid. Then recently in early 2024 Adam fixed call audio routing.

PinePhone

Authors: JF, CarbonatedCaffeine

Good news for PinePhone users!

The WiFi chip used in the PinePhone (rtl8723cs) recently got mainline support in early 2024.
Dsimic added trip points for the GPU to the SOC DTSI into mainline, preventing possible but unlikely overheating damage to the A64.

Another patch added a mount-matrix for the accelerometer into mainline, which fixes inverted accelerometer behavior.

Pinecil / IronOS

Author: Ralim

Stability
Timer weirdness
BLE quirks
New screen driving / GUI handling

Stability

IronOS has had a rather slow development cycle on my side of things due to lack of time. The community around the project has been helping immensely however, which has kept things going. One aspect of this for the Pinecilv2 is that the newer release and onwards should have improved stability for the temperature regulation.

Timer weirdness

There is a bit of a trifecta of issues going on that caused some of the temperature issues; the timer hardware in the BL702 chip being used occasionally doesn’t trigger an interrupt. This causes things to go out of whack as the temperature sensing and the tip drive get out of sync. In the prior release these were occurring fairly frequently but after adjusting some of the timer settings they were reduced.

When investigating this, one of the issues uncovered was that it appears to be related to BLE support, as removing BLE entirely from the firmware does prevent these issues from showing up. I can’t conclusively say that the BLE firmware is to blame as there is a fair bit of churn when that is toggled on/off when building the firmware. However its likely something to do with its hardware or software requirements that was the root cause here.

The newer IronOS software detects when this has occurred and recovers more gracefully, so there shouldn’t be any real impact to tip temperature.

New Screen Driving / GUI Handling

In additional news, this will not effect any users, but the entire UI rendering code has been updated. The code is moving to being a non-blocking style of rendering to allow separating any logic around what is going on from drawing the display. The goal is that this will allow for full bluetooth remote control of the device if desired (will be Opt-In of course due to safety). This could be used for other devices to be used as a larger display, and using them to start/stop the device.

New from Ralim

Author: Ralim

While I do not have much to say about things I’ve been working on yet I do want to note that there are projects that I’m working with Pine Store to see if they are viable. Nothing concrete yet as still unsure on financial & technical viability yet but some things are taking shape.

Quartz64/RK3568

A few patches from dsimic are now merged in Linus’ tree:

arm64: dts: rockchip: Fix the DCDC_REG2 minimum voltage on Quartz64 Model B

Correct the specified regulator-min-microvolt value for the buck DCDC_REG2 regulator, which is part of the Rockchip RK809 PMIC, in the Pine64 Quartz64 Model B board dts. According to the RK809 datasheet, version 1.01, this regulator is capable of producing voltages as low as 0.5 V on its output, instead of going down to 0.9 V only, which is additionally confirmed by the regulator-min-microvolt values found in the board dts files for the other supported boards that use the same RK809 PMIC.

arm64: dts: rockchip: Add GPU OPP voltage ranges to RK356x SoC dtsi

Add support for voltage ranges to the GPU OPPs defined in the SoC dtsi for Rockchip RK356x. This is, for example, useful for RK356x-based boards that are designed to use the same power supply for the GPU and NPU portions of the SoC

arm64: dts: rockchip: Update GPU OPP voltages in RK356x SoC dtsi

Update the values for the exact Rockchip RK356x GPU OPP voltages and the lower limits for the GPU OPP voltage ranges, using the most conservative values (i.e. the highest per-OPP voltages) found in the vendor kernel source

PineTime

Author: JF

When I’m browsing the web or reading chat rooms, I often come across interesting posts and messages: a new version of a PineTime related project, a nice blog post or social media post, a new idea, etc.

I’m happy to share in this post some of the links and information I’ve curated over the last few months!

PineStore announcement: small hardware change

TL informed us recently that the SPI flash memory chip installed in the PineTime (XTX XT25F32B) is EoL (End Of Life) and that it will be replaced by another chip (BY25Q32ESWIG) for the next production batch of the PineTime.

This new chip behaves exactly the same than the old one, so very few code changes are expected. The most obvious change consists in supporting the chip IDs of the new module that are different from the old one. Other than that, both the new and old chip support the same command over the SPI bus.

We’ve already implemented those changes in the bootloader v1.0.1 and in InfiniTime v14.0.1.

I’ve already provided these versions to the factory so they can start producting PineTime based on this new hardware. Note that you don’t need to update your current PineTime to those patch versions since they only bring support for this new chip.

I strongly suggest developers from other PineTime firmware to check if their code need some changes to support this new hardware revision!

InfiniLink

InfiniLink, the companion app for iOS made a lot of progress since Liam took over the project a few months ago.

InfiniLink now provides a new improved UI and supports the external resources (that contain fonts and pictures for watch faces in InfiniTime) and the weather and also integrates with Apple Health.

InfiniLink 1.0.2 is available on the App Store and the newest version 1.1 is available on Testflight, the platform that allows iOS developers to publish beta versions of their software. It’ll be made available in the official App Store when a few bugs and crashes will be fixed.

Liam told me he doesn’t have specific plans in mind for the future, but definitely would like to create a macOS app that runs on both Apple Silicon and Intel Macs. To be continued !

Blog posts about the PineTime

While browsing the web, I sometimes happen to find blog posts about PineTime and its ecosystem. Here are the posts that I would like to mention.

The first one titled “Programmable watches” details a few smart watches that can be reprogrammed by the user. The PineTime is mentioned among other hackable smart watches like the Lilygo TTGO T-Watch and the Bangle.js. It’s great to see that there are many options when it comes to hackable and open source smart watches!

In second one titled “Fun with PineTime Smart Watch” Julian reflects on the idea to use the PineTime as a fun and educative way to introduce children to programming and to FOSS ideas. He also provides many ideas of customizations and applications in which children can participate.

Rework of ITD

Elara applied a complete rewrite of the InfiniTime abstraction layer in ITD. It’s based on a different Bluetooth library and allowed to integrate the new weather functionality. This rewrite will also allow to make ITD cross-platform in the future.

Let me also take the opportunity to mention that Elara accepts donations on Liberapay for their work on ITD and many other FOSS projects!

Flatpak package for Amazfish

Jozef, a great contributor to InfiniTime and Amazfish (among other projects) created a Flatpak package for Amazfish. This will make the installation of this Linux companion app much easier for many users!

The package is available on Flathub.

PineTime integration in MyGnuHealth

MyGNUHealth is a Personal Health Record (PHR), an application that records and stores the health data and other information related to the care of a patient. MyGNUHealth is open source (GPL) and respects the freedom and privacy of the individual.

Luis recently announced they were working on integrating the PineTime in MyGNUHealth. Since this post on Mastodon, the pull request was merged in the development branch and released in MyGNUHealth 2.20.

The super-power of open source

What is open source? Why does it matter? Those are easy questions, but I honestly have a hard time answering them, especially in English which is not my first language.

Julian (the author of one of the blog post mentioned above) sent the following message in the PineTime chat room which provides a very simple yet accurate answer to them by describing the super power of open source:

“Having the power to customize is the super-power of open source and I want to be able to demonstrate that to everyone who sees the watch. (And I think we should work on making customization easier, so everyone can do it.) Awesome to be standing on the shoulders of those who made this possible. Thank you!”

I think this is a really nice way to define the open source philosophy: users are empowered to customize the software they are using!

Here are the picture JulianF posted in the chatroom to demonstrate that super-power:

In this case, the customization consists in adding the owner name (“pine time”) to the watch faces. It’s simple but effective!

Feel free to have a look at his repo and his website. Thanks Julian for the kind words and for reminding us why open source is important!

InfiniEmu

Felipe introduced InfiniEmu a few weeks ago. InfiniEmu emulates an ARM Cortex M4 CPU capable of running InfiniTime.

It basically emulates the hardware of the PineTime smartwatch (the MCU itself - the nRF52832 and its ARM Cortex M4 core and peripherals - the accelerometer, the touch screen controller, the heart rate sensor, the display and the SPI flash) to run the unmodified InfiniTime firmware on your computer and even in your browser.

I’m really impressed by this project and, even if its description says that it isn’t production ready by any means, and the emulation almost definitely doesn’t completely match a real device, it’s already very usable.

To be honest, I don’t know how this project achieved such a feat! But it’s a great opportunity to learn new things!

Now that I see it running, I can think of many use-cases for InfiniEmu: it could be used to add automatic testing, to provide more runtime information about resources (CPU and memory) usage, help with low level debugging,…

To my knowledge, InfiniEmu is the 2nd project that allows running InfiniTime on other targets (mostly development computers) than the actual PineTime. This is really interesting because both projects follow different approaches.

InfiniSim rebuilds most of the InfiniTime code and replaces a few parts so that it runs on a Linux desktop. It’s very easy to build and use, and allows developers to very conveniently build new applications and UI elements for InfiniTime.

On the other hands, InfiniEmu emulates the whole hardware so that it runs the very same binary file than the PineTime (it does not need to be rebuilt to target the x86 architecture, for example).

InfiniTime Status

Core developers of InfiniTime are quite busy with their private life, family, work on other projects right now, which is probably the main reason why InfiniTime haven’t released a new version these last few months. But don’t worry, they are still working on the project, reviewing pull-requests and fixing bugs!

I would like to highlight the feature I (JF002, the original author of InfiniTime) am focusing on right now: the always-on display. This feature, contributed by John Crawford (KaffeinatedKat) and mark9064 implements a new always on display mode, which, as the name implies, keeps the display always on. In “sleep” mode, instead of fully switching it off, the display is kept on with a very low brightness. This allows you to have a glance at the time much more easily and reliably than when using other wake options like pushing the button or raising the wrist.

This feature obviously comes with a trade-off: the battery life is significantly reduced. According to Mark9064 and to my own tests, it lasts for 2 to 3 days in this mode, which is, in my opinion, quite reasonable knowing how much current the display uses when it’s powered on!

I can’t thank Mark9064 enough for their work and patience during the review process: the always on feature is actually the tip of the iceberg. In order to make this feature possible, a few changes in low-level drivers (SPI, display, brightness management) and InfiniTime (refresh management of the UI) along with a few other improvements were needed. All those changes needed to be carefully reviewed and tested. We also experimented with multiple implementations of some changes to pick the one that would use the least power possible.

All those required changes are now integrated in InfiniTime. So now, all we have to do is to review the last pull-request: the one that actually adds the always-on feature!

Stay tuned for InfiniTime 1.15. ;-)

PineDio

Author: CarbonatedCaffeine

Pine64 has a line of LoRa boards under the “PineDio” name which unfortunately launched at a bad time as the Meshtastic project was in it’s infancy at that point around 2020-2021. Now it has become a much bigger project and we have interest in improving support for the PineDio USB adapter on Meshtastic.

We are looking for people interested in Meshtastic and LoRa to help with the PineDio USB Adapter as it needs a stable driver for users to easily use the device.

If you’re interested please come visit the Pine64 LoRa channels or join the Meshtastic Discord server.

Community Updates

Infrastructure and Moderation

For a while now, our community manager Gamiee has been taking on the work of keeping all of the community servers an services up and running as well as trying to moderate the online chat’s. Due to increased his day-job workload he is handing over the mantle of the community moderation to some others of the community. Namely our new community committee who are slowly transitioning to help look after the community. Gamiee will continue to look after the infrastructure of the Pine64 website and services.

Lomiri on PostmarketOS

Author: CarbonatedCaffeine

Community member Blume has been building PostmarketOS images with Lomiri for various devices like the PinePhone and PineTab and would appreciate feedback and testing. You can find his images here.

GTK3 inspired watchface

Author: CarbonatedCaffeine

Community member MorsMortium designed and created a series of watchfaces inspired by the GTK3 interface style. It includes widgets for the weather along with days of the week and numbered battery status among the rest.

You can check it out here along with instructions on installing it on your PineTime in the README. Contributors welcome!

Want to contribute to the next community update?

Do you have a cool project that you’re working on you’d like to be mentioned? Is there something you’re interested in that you’d like to write about related to Pine64? Something we’ll be doing going forward is a spotlight for projects within the Pine64 community. If you’re interested please contact us!

Camden/CarbonatedCaffeine:
- @carbonatedcaffeine (Discord)
- @endernightlord:matrix.org (Matrix)

March Update: Making waves

Sun, 17 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Banner artwork: Caffeine

New products in development

Authors: Ralim, gamiee

As probably one of the most anticipated sections of the blog, we can confirm that there are more new products in the pipeline.

The first two were shown at the FOSDEM table in Feburary.

PineVox - Virtual assistant

The PineVox is a BL606P based home assistant smart speaker. Designed to help build a good community option for voice interactions with software such as Home Assistant.

Currently a small number of developer seed units have been given out. Work is ongoing by Ralim & Gamiee to get a minimal firmware image ready to allow for demonstration and to prove all hardware fully functional etc.

More information on the unit should be available soon on our new documentation page. Features of note include the hardware microphone kill switch, and the ability to debug the unit externally. The hardware microphone killswitch allows the software to mute the microphone but unmuting has to be performed using the button on the device. Muting the microphone disables the clock connection to the microphone, giving peace of mind that it really, really isnt listening to you.

Giving users control of the smart devices in their home and allowing for you to control the security is important, and we are working on the PineVox to help enable that future.

Another notable aspect worth mentioning is the speaker. Designed specifically for voice applications rather than music playback, it ensures clear and high-quality voice audio reception.

Bone conduction headphones

These are a set of bone conduction headphones using the same BES2300 chipset as found in the PineBuds Pro. The plan is to expand OpenPineBuds project with support for these before they enter manufacturing. Currently there is amazing work going on to sort out licencing of the BES2300 codebase; so work to support these is being done carefully to minimise impact on the code base.

The enclosure design is not final yet, nor is the software complete. However in the interests of being open, this is the current design.
I am hoping that we will be able to post another update soon once the hardware in finalized, we’re really excited to show off the final project.

We need a name!

As you might have noticed, there is no name for this product, so we’re reaching out to the community for suggestions! Share your name ideas on Reddit and Mastodon. In the next update, we’ll select the best one, and the author will receive a free unit!

It’s been a while… Allwinner

It has been a while since we have released a product with an Allwinner SoC, the last one was with the PineCube that released in 2020. But that’s going to change soon, as PINE64 is collaborating with YuzukiHD, an organization who have made several SBCs, such as the Yuzuki Chameleon (Allwinner H616) and Yuzuki Lizard (Allwinner V851S). So in the upcoming months, the Pine Store plans to manufacture and sell new YuzukiHD’s SBCs with the Allwinner H618, V851S, and a brand new SoC, the Allwinner A527, which is looking very promising. The A527 is finally using a more modern ARM CPU core Cortex-A55, in cluster 4xA55@1.8GHz + 4xA55@1.4GHz. The GPU is has also been upgraded to an ARM Mali-G57 MC2. A suprising addition is an eDisplayPort, along with a single-lane PCIe 2.1 controller, but sadly, it’s shared with the USB 3.0 controller, so we can’t have both at same time. The main down-side is that we are still limited to only 4GiB of RAM. Still, this SoC is very promising and it will find it’s usage. For more information, take look at linux-sunxi.org A523 SoC Page.

IronOS

Author: Ralim

Hello,

IronOS released 2.22 as the last majour release since the last blog posts. Work has of course started on 2.23, though this is still ongoing.

The two large improvements for the Pinecilv2 are improved temperature stability as well was support for boot up logos.

These both have been a bit long time coming but are finally here; boot up logos can now be generated using the tooling in the Meta repository using the instructions on the main docs page.

The blisp command line tool for flashing buffalo devices was updated to support .dfu files to enable this, as due to the way logos are programmed to the device partial flashes are required.

A small note about the boot up logos

In order to keep the code base for IronOS easier to maintain, so far I have not implemented USB support on any of the devices.

This was originally fueled by not having a huge amount of flash space on the first generation devices (Pinecil V2 is the exception here), however it is now largely to reduce complexity.

This is the root cause of the boot up logos requiring a custom conversion tool; the tool is actually converting the image you pass into the flat binary representation the device’s OLED screen uses. This means that the device does no image processing, but just pushes this binary buffer directly to the screen.

A later edition was to support animated boot up logos as well; this expanded the logic to allow for multiple frames which are either encoded as entire images or delta encoded (which ever results in smallest code).

The binary blob of data that this process emits is then flashed near the end of the flash on the device. This is why blisp had to be updated to allow for partial flash operations. I added .dfu files as they are very trivial format, and simple to add handling for them into the code base.

The logo generation has been expanded to support the Pinecilv2 model, which will cause a .dfu file to be generated at the correct offset for the large flash fitted to the Pinecil V2.

Huge apologies for the delay this took getting fully functional, but its here now to stay; and blisp is all the better for more support.

The flashing tool Pineflash by Spagett1 has already been updated to support flashing these files.

Tuning the tip temperature control

After some earlier fixes to how the temperature regulation code was run on the Pinecil v2; there was the unfortunate outcome that this de-tuned the tip temperature control. After a bunch of testing different tuning profiles and none being consistent across all tips I’ve gone back to the roots of the code and pulled back in the old PID controller. This has now been tuned to work fairly well on all the tips I have here.

This means that 2.22 should bring us back to nice; clean temperature control of the tip. Of course if you find any instability I’d love to hear about it as an Issue or discussion on GitHub.

Desktop & Mobile apps

I take no credit for the awesome BLE enabled apps in our community; but huge shout out to them.

We have new multi-platform app (currently Android & iOS) made in Flutter by amazing Aguilaair, and thanks to the Pine Store providing us developer accounts for both platform stores, you can download the apps right now from App Store and Google Play.

If you prefer native apps, there is native app for iOS PineTool from Lachlan Bell.

For desktop, you can use PineSAM by Builder555, and BLE browser API by Joric.

These are amazing resources to use when tracking down issues, but are really aimed at giving you remote control and a second screen for viewing the status of the device.

For those of us (myself included) that love to integrate everything into Home Assistant, T3chguy has gone the extra step and made an integration that can be enjoyed as well.

PineTime

Author: JF002

As always, FOSDEM was a nice opportunity to meet with community members, users and contributors of the PineTime project. And just by looking at the number of people proudly wearing their PineTime on their wrist, I can safely say that the PineTime project is still very popular, more than 3 years after it was created!

I had a lot of interesting discussions with many many visitors on the stand. People would explain how they use their PineTime (and the Navigation app) for biking, how they would like to modify InfiniTime to use it for sailing, ask question to use it on a university course and many other things. All of this is made possible by a nice hackable device and an awesome open source community

Users are mostly happy and thankful regarding InfiniTime : it works, it fits most of their needs, and they enjoy discovering the improvements that are added releases after releases. Regarding feature requests, I noticed 2 main trends. On one side, users want more advanced features like health and activity tracking, and on the other side, they would like to see some quality of life improvements integrated in InfiniTime.

InfiniTime also received some fair criticism from contributors : they feel frustrated by their PR that are sitting there with no comment or review for a long time. The lack of clear roadmap was also mentionned.

One more thing about FOSDEM : this year, two talks about the PineTime were organized : PineTime: A Programmer’s Toy and Beyond and Smartwatch firmware… in Go? On TinyGo, small displays, and building a delightful developer experience.

At the beginning of the year, the InfiniTime team released InfiniTime 1.14. This new version brings among other things new memory optimizations, improvements to the raise-to-wake algorithm and a new lower-to-sleep algorithm.

The team also worked on a new implementation of the weather feature : the Simple Weather Service.

This re-design of the feature was necessary to fix some issues of the original one : it would use too much memory, it would crash under certain conditions and the integration was not easy for companion app. This new implementation is the result of the collaboration between developers from InfiniTime and from companion apps. We tried to define a new BLE protocol that would fit our need and then implement it in InfiniTime and companion apps. To my knowledge, it’s currently integrated in Amazfish and Gadgetbridge, and we hope that it’ll be integrated in other companion apps soon!

InfiniTime is a monolithic firmware : everything must be built into it at compile-time. Support for “dynamic applications” that can be installed at run-time is a long term goal, but we’re not there yet. In the meantime, we introduced the compile time configuration of applications and watchfaces. Developers can now easily specify which apps and watchfaces will be built into the final firmware image. We might use this in the future to add more appliations and watchfaces to InfiniTime, and maybe provide multiple variants of InfiniTime, each with a different set of applications and watch faces.

On the InfiniSim side, Victor added support for the weather feature. This feature generates random weather data and forecast in the simulator to help testing the weather integration in InfiniTime. Good job!

InfiniLink, the iOS companion app found a new maintainer : Liamcharger took over the project and will continue its development. This is a very great news for PineTime users using Apple device. They can expect InfiniLink to receive update and new features in the near future!

Liam has already done some work on the project. For example, he re-designed and improved the UI, added support for the weather and for the external resources.

Finally, I would like to mention GopherWatch, the PineTime firmware written in Go. I had to chance to talk with Ayke, this author of this project, and to see the firmware running on the PineTime and it’s very nice!

The font rendering on the display is very nice, it features very smooth scrolling animation, supports display rotation, and allow a month long battery life, which is absolutely amazing!

PineTab2

Author: Caffeine

For this month’s community update I talked to Danct12 from the Danctnix project concerning the current state of the device.

Hardware/software status

At this stage the camera is nonfunctional due to support for Rockchips ISP (Image Signal Processor) not being in mainline yet.
There is no USB-PD driver yet.
A new BES Wi-Fi/Bluetooth driver is now included in the kernel.
H.264 video encoding/decoding driver isn’t in the kernel yet.

Since the last update on the PineTab2, Danct has been planning to send a new updated Arch image to the factory along with starting work on a first-time setup screen which will allow users to set a user and password.

Also, for current users of Danctnix/Arch Arm, an issue has been discovered with the pacman db lock file which has been stopping users from updating their system using Discover. If you are are having trouble with using Discover to update your system, try deleting /var/lib/PackageKit/alpm/db.lck.

Wifi/Bluetooth driver

BES have been working on an improved driver for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth stability. It is currently in the kernel, but is disabled by default. PLEASE NOTE: At this stage the driver is in beta, it cannot handle sleep/suspend modes and will hang if you do not turn Wi-Fi off before shutting down. Proceed with CAUTION.

You can enable the beta driver by typing sudo modprobe bes2600 in your terminal. If you wish to turn off the driver again you can use sudo modprobe -r bes2600.

Conclusion

We are hoping that support for the Rockchip ISP and H.264 driver will land soon and we’re glad to see the situation with the Wi-Fi driver is improving. Overall, the PineTab2 is shaping up to be a solid device in the Pine64 hardware lineup.

PineNote

Author: Ralim

Please note that this section is written by Ralim. I am not a staff member of Pine64, but I want to represent the state of the Pinenote as best to my knowledge.
During FOSDEM the current state of the Pinenote was available for people to interact with (and also to show the device does exist).

A huge amount of work has been done by Maximilian to bring up a working Debian/Gnome environment and continued refinement has seen this software maturing significantly. Currently a lot of work is being to track down and resolve artefacting issues that have been cropping up on the open source driver. Recent efforts have reduced these significantly however some work remains.

The OS image has also been updated to build upon Debian Trixie, this has improved the situation with bluetooth along with the update.
Currently more testing is desired to help find remaining bugs and resolve first-use bugs with the OS. If you have one of the earlier developer batch units, it would be highly appreciated if you could help out Maximilian with testing the images.

What exactly happened with the cluster

Author: gamiee

On the 20th of January 2024 at 10:30 PM CET, most of the DB based services went down and started throwing errors when attempting to connect to the MySQL databases. After some analysis, all of the nodes in the cluster had failed, making the rootfs mount as read-only. In the current cluster setup every node has its rootfs mounted over the network, this leads to one likely culpret, that something had gone wrong with the storage node. I wasn’t able to connect to the storage node, so I went to the datacentre where the cluster is hosted. Once on site, I found that the storage node’s SSD (which hosts all of the data for the other nodes) had switched to read-only mode reporting issues about writing to SSD. Thankfully as the temporary cluster is only a small number of nodes, I took it home so I could recover the data. Before the shutdown of remaining cluster nodes, I took a moment to make a screenshot of the main node’s (gateway & firewall) uptime:

2 years and 4 months of non-stop service, handling all the traffic of PINE64 community services. One of the reasons behind having a custom cluster was to show-off the stability and reliability of PINE64 SBCs, and I think the cluster fulfilled this perfectly.

The next morning (21st of January 2024), I prepared a new VPS and got Matterbridge running, which is the service that bridges between Telegram, Discord, Matrix and IRC. Afterwards, I wanted to have at least the main website working, and as the new website is based on the Hugo framework, which generates a static website, I deployed it on the new VPS (Thanks to Funeral for all the help). This was significantly faster to get set up for hosting than to bring up the old website. But since we also self-host IRC, the next step was to get IRC back online as soon as possible.

As we are rebuilding the large cluster, we are planning to use Kubernetes to manage scheduling the workload across all of the nodes. To help with the future migration of services to the new cluster, I decided that as I restored all the services, I would set them up to run in Docker containers. So 3 days later, I managed to bring the whole IRC server online with data from the latest backup (which was from December). This took longer than I expected, as I had a lot of work at my daily job. I also needed to create my own Docker image for unrealircd, as there isn’t any good one (Thankfully, anope have official Docker container).

The following days were all about analyzing what happened with the SSD and how to recover the data, rather than relying on stuff from backups. But this took longer than I expected, due preparations for FOSDEM and also more work at my daily job. Thankfully, I was able to restore the data from the SSD, the wiki, forums and files were then restored 31st of January 2024.

Current state of services

Main community website (www.pine64.org): Since the new Hugo website seems to already be in a good shape, we decided to keep it as our main website. Some things are still missing or unfinished, such as the newsletter, comments, and some pages still need more polishing, but we will work on all of this in the upcoming months.
Wiki (wiki.pine64.org): After the wiki was recovered on the new machine, it started to misbehave, throwing weird errors on some actions. Because of this, we put the wiki in read only mode. The decision of what will happen to the wiki is still unknown, since we have a replacement (www.pine64.org/documentation) which is part of our statically generated Hugo website.
Forums (forum.pine64.org): Thankfully, the forums weren’t problematic and work very well, although, emails are not working, but we will try to get emails up and running as soon as possible.
Files: Essential files such as schematics and documents were recovered, although, big files such as images and SDKs, are still not available. We are working with the Pine Store to bring them back in following months.
Chat Bridge: Bridge (Matterbridge) Works as it did before.
Pinecil Verify website (pinecil.pine64.org): Works as it did before.
IRC Server: With IRC it was complicated, mainly because of the flood of spam messages and Docker network misbehaving between UnrealIRCD and Anope. Anope was configured to save data into flatfile, so the IRC configuration was lost multiple times. We migrated to db_sql_live together with MySQL DB Backend, and applied a rate-limit to fight with spams (thank you Danct12!). Although, since the spammer always finds a way to bypass our limits, in every channel except main one (#pine64) you need to be registered to send messages, and registrations are manually reviewed. If your account is not confirmed within few days, please ping me (@gamiee) on any platform.
CedarSentinel (Anti-Spam system): CedarSentinel is a service, which was created by (currently retired) PINE64 Sysadmin fire219 to detect and remove “casual” spam, such as crypto offers from Telegram, with the help of Machine Learning. Thanks to the community member kj7rrv, CedarSentinel is being re-trained and it’s already deployed on new VPS. By the way, CedarSentinel is open-source, and you can check it out on Github!

Moment for appreciation

As it was mentioned earlier, community services are now up and running on a VPS to keep everything stable until I have some time to finish getting the main cluster working again. While choosing where to purchase the new VPS from, I recalled a host that is very similar to our community, they are community driven by Linux enthusiats.

I looked into VPSfree.org, a non-profit association located in Czechia, which provides their members virtual servers for a great price. They are using their own operating system for virtualization vpsAdminOS, together with many other tools, which are all open-source. I have been a very big fan of them for several years, and I am very thankful for the help and support that they have provided us. So, if you are looking for a cheap and good VPS, consider taking a look at their offerings.

I want to say a huge thanks to fire219 for all the hard work he’s put into PINE64 Community Services, as he stepped down as sysadmin in August 2023. fire219 has been part of our community for many years – even before I joined in 2018! He’s been taking care of things like the Forums, Wiki, IRC, CedarSentinel, and a bunch of other stuff. Thanks you for everything, and best of luck with whatever comes next!

Also, I want to give a big thank you to all who have helped with our community services in the past. Special thanks to Danct12, dsimic, Funeral, kj7rrv, PaulFertser, Phiten, and Ralim for all their contributions.

What’s next

We still plan to host our services on the cluster, but before that, we need to fix some issues, which the previous cluster had. But for those who are only just learning about the cluster for the first time, let me start from the beginning.

In 2019, we received from the Pine Store a custom-built cluster, which consits of a server case, TP-Link switch, server power supply, 24x RockPro64s and 3x special PCB for node power control.

In September 2021, I wrote the blog post, about building the new “temporary cluster”, and exchanging it with the “final one”. I recommend reading the blog post, it explains a lot about the cluster and the reason we moved to the temporary cluster. In short, unfortunately, the cluster was deployed in a hurry, and things like power management for the nodes were not finished. For proper implementation, it would have been best to have had the cluster at my place, so a temporary cluster was built. (The temporary cluster was in the server housing until the failure)

Sadly, life got busy, and there was not a lot of progress on the cluster until 2023. Me and Ralimtek started working on a new PCB, which will serve as the “motherboard” of the cluster. This is for managing the power supply, communication with power management boards and a UART output logger for all nodes. For the first revision, this board was designed as a daughterboard for SOPine A64 Baseboard, the final version will be a PCB that will house a SOPine A64 module. A few weeks ago, I managed to assemble the daughterboard and perform some tests. Aside from some very minor issues, the board works pretty well!

In the following months, we will start work on the software side, which will be a buildroot filesystem with software for remote access of the cluster. We will provide more information about this effort, most likely in a separate blog post.

Future of community updates

Author: gamiee

Monthly updates were an essential part of the community for a very long time, so not having them was indeed very damaging. That’s why it was priority #1 on our topics to discuss at FOSDEM 2024. Thankfully, we have a new plan with getting updates released again. We still aren’t sure if it will still be on a monthly basis like it used to be, but it will be periodically released. Not only that, we are planning on improving community engagement and moderation. We will explain our plan further in following updates.

Let’s do an Q&A

As it has been a very long period without any updates, along with proper community engagement, we have decided to organize a Q&A! The community is free to ask any question that they may have! As in previous times, we will be using Discord Stage to host the Q&A, which will be streamed to YouTube and (hopefully) PeerTube. But this time, the place for asking the questions will be on Reddit and Mastodon. When we used Discord, Telegram and IRC for questions, there were many duplicates, it was hard add reply to the questions (like a link to stream with timestamp) and it was impossible to sort through. So before asking any questions, please take look if your question has been asked already, and up-vote questions you would like to be answered! So see you there at 22th March 2024 at 7:00 PM CET (10:00 AM PST, 1:00 PM EST). You can ask questions here on Reddit and Mastodon.

Outage January 21st

Sun, 21 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We regret to inform you that we are currently experiencing an outage in our main cluster. We are currently actively investigating the cause of this issue. We understand the inconvenience this may cause and appreciate your patience during this time.

In the meantime, we have deployed a beta version of our website to ensure that information are still reachable for the community. Please note that this is a quick and temporary solution - bugs are expected and the documentation pages are not structured yet and might be outdated and not reflect the current state of the wiki, which is affected by the outage as well.

Thank you for your understanding!

August Update: Kept You Waiting, Huh?

Tue, 15 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We apologize for the lack of regular community updates during the past few months. In short, the people who usually wrote them became very busy. However, we have a new way to write and publish these updates, involving you: the community.

Let’s talk about it, and about so much more of what’s been happening.

This community update consists of contributions by Caffeine, CounterPillow, Funeral, gamiee, JF002, and mpreditor.

N.B. Comments on the blog post need to be in English and follow our Community Rules and Code of Conduct.

TL;DR

Housekeeping
- Community updates are now written collaboratively by several members of the community
- The public is invited to contribute to the monthly update posts
- Rework of the community website and logo
Newsflash
- megi released rk2aw: a loader for your bootloader
- Progress on the PineTab2 and PineTab-V
- A PinePhone Pro connected to a thermal imaging camera
- Oren Klopfer’s progress on Ubuntu Touch
Quartz64 and SOQuartz
- U-Boot improvements thanks to Kwiboo and CounterPillow: USB, NVMe, and soon PXE
- Improved SOQuartz CM4 baseboard compatibility
- Improved PCIe devices compatibility
QuartzPro64
- What it means to “mainline” things, and why it takes time
- Things that have been mainlined: SATA, PCIe, USB, AV1, and more!
- Things still being worked on: cpufreq, GPU, video output
InfiniTime 1.13 and other PineTime news
- Heart rate monitoring improvements thanks to Ceimour!
- Did you know that InfiniTime has a BLE weather service feature?
- Improved memory management
- Huge improvements to battery life (with help from Ayke!)
- InfiniSim UI update
- Improvements to ITD, the InfiniTime daemon
- Ayke is developing a brand new firmware for the PineTime

Housekeeping

You might have been wondering why nothing new has been posted on the PINE64.org community blog in quite a few months. As was already revealed in the opening section, the reason is that previously blogs were mainly authored and edited by one person (Lukasz) and said person is extremely busy these days.

Going forward, these monthly community update posts will be written collaboratively by the community for the community. To that end, there is now a Git repository through which this work happens. You don’t need to be a good writer to contribute, you can submit links or short bullet lists and the editors will take care of the rest.

The plan is to have a post out on the 15th of every month. Whether or not this deadline will be met each month is another question, but now you can keep an eye on what’s happening behind the curtains and help out if necessary.

Speaking of deadlines, this update didn’t have a very long time in the proverbial oven despite the long period of silence preceding it, so it may be a little short or not cover all developments in the community equally well. Just because something is not covered in this post doesn’t mean it hasn’t been worked on.

Rework of the community website and logo

If you missed the announcement, an initial rework of the community website was announced. The announcement blog post can be read exclusively on the new beta site.

The overall idea of the reworked community website is to move away from a WordPress site and to open up the site to contributions from all community members. This is done by hosting the website on Git and by generating the contents using the blazing-fast framework Hugo. Large parts of the website are created from simple markdown files, which are easy to understand and to edit. Alongside the rework of the community website, there was also a challenge launched, which has the goal of improving the appearance of the community logo. The details can be read under the logo challenge. Bring in your best ideas if you haven’t done so yet. Ideas are best submitted to https://github.com/pine64/website/issues/12.

Since the last blog post, there has been various improvements made to the beta community website. The improvements include changes to the style of various sites, improvements to the front site slider and inclusion of more slides, rewrite of pages as markdown files (such as the index page), creation of more board graphics and many more changes.

The documentation for all PINE64 devices is also constantly improving. While there are large construction zones left, the overall look of the documentation is already quite clean and constantly improving:

The changes can be viewed on the repository under https://github.com/pine64/website. Give it a try by cloning the repository and previewing the page using Hugo:

git clone https://github.com/pine64/website.git
cd website
hugo server

Newsflash

megi released rk2aw: a loader for your bootloader

First up, long-time contributor megi has released rk2aw, a sort of bootloader for your bootloader on Rockchip-based platforms. Instead of having to deal with the default boot order of SPI to eMMC to SD, rk2aw sits in your SPI flash and changes the order to prefer the SD card for booting from first, which is more tinkerer-friendly. Additionally, a simple LED flashing and button interface allows the user to choose which storage device the bootloader should be loaded from. The software also comes with some nifty additional features, like suppressing power-on when the PinePhone Pro is plugged in.

Of PINE64’s devices, rk2aw supports the PinePhone Pro, Pinebook Pro, PineTab2, QuartzPro64, Quartz64 Model A and ROCKPro64, though it can theoretically be made to work on any RK3399/RK3566/RK3588-based device.

Progress on the PineTab2 and PineTab-V

Since the PineTab2 and PineTab-V tablets have been shipped, the community has been tirelessly at work, propelling the software landscape forward and unveiling an array of new software and bootable images for both tablet models.

The software releases section of the PineTab2 already lists Arch Linux ARM, Mobian, NixOS, postmarketOS, Rhino Linux, Ubuntu Touch and others, with more to come. The software releases section of the PineTab-V lists a Gentoo overlay, as well as a KDE Plasma Yocto build from the community member Fishwaldo, with even more in the pipeline.

There is also progress on the WiFi driver of the PineTab2. Some releases already ship with an initial support for the on-board WiFi chip. It is however important to note that the work on the driver is ongoing and has not reached a software maturity yet.

These software releases are a testament to the vibrant collaboration within the PINE64 community. Developers, enthusiasts, and users alike have come together to cultivate a thriving ecosystem that empowers PineTab2 and PineTab-V users with an array of choices.

A PinePhone Pro connected to a thermal imaging camera

The user yomboprime coupled a PinePhone Pro with the thermal imaging camera Topdon TC-001. Check out their nice video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJhgZve9xSA

Oren Klopfer’s progress on Ubuntu Touch

Another mention deserves maintainer Oren Klopfer, who is working on Ubuntu Touch support on numerous devices, including the PinePhone and PinePhone Pro, the PineTab and PineTab2.

Check out the supported devices under https://devices.ubuntu-touch.io/.

Quartz64 and SOQuartz

The RK3566 SoC that’s on the Quartz64 and SOQuartz line of PINE64 devices hasn’t had great mainline U-Boot support for the longest time. Technically, there was some vestigial support and an EVB (evaluation board) device tree, but it was far from optimal.

For those not in the know: U-Boot is somewhat of a mix between platform firmware (“BIOS” on your common x86 PC) and bootloader. It initializes the device’s hardware, and loads a kernel (usually Linux, though not necessarily so) to which it then hands control off to.

Kwiboo took it upon himself to improve the situation. Over the past few months, he’s enabled U-Boot on the RK3566 and RK3568 SoCs to load kernels and device trees off USB2, USB3 and NVMe. While U-Boot itself still has to be flashed to either SPI, eMMC or SD, it can now load your kernel and device tree from a wider range of storage devices.

He also submitted device trees and board configurations to mainline U-Boot for, among other things, the Quartz64 Model A, Model B, and SOQuartz. This will land in U-Boot version 2023.10, meaning with the next stable U-Boot release, distributions no longer need to carry around their own forks (unless they want to.)

Meanwhile, CounterPillow has submitted an U-Boot driver for the YT8511 ethernet PHY that’s present on the Quartz64 Model A and SOQuartz. This, together with work Kwiboo is doing on a GMAC driver for the RK3566 and RK3568 SoCs, will allow users to PXE boot operating systems over the network. U-Boot’s default boot flow for these boards already tries PXE, so provided you have an U-Boot flashed to one of the supported storage mediums with all the moving pieces (GMAC and PHY driver) in place, PXE will work out of the box.

There are still some small changes needed to make U-Boot initialize a random seed for KASLR on these boards. KASLR (Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization) is a security hardening technique that randomizes the locations of code in memory, making it harder for attackers to execute a successful exploit. For this to work, kernels such as Linux require that the firmware passes it an initial source of randomness. The hardware random number generator on RK3566 already has a driver in U-Boot, it just needs to be enabled for all the boards.

It’s also worth pointing out that there is now improved compatibility on two fronts: CounterPillow wrote about fixing SOQuartz compatibility with some CM4 boards, and furthermore finally submitted a small fix to Linux to improve the RK3566 and RK3568’s PCIe device compatibility. There is some work left to be done, but many devices should just function as expected now.

One of the benefits of all this work is that if you’ve got U-Boot installed on your board, you can now simply boot generic aarch64 UEFI Linux distribution installers. Consult the wiki for more information if this piques your interest.

QuartzPro64

There hasn’t been much talk of the QuartzPro64 on update blogs since it’s been sold to developers, but that doesn’t mean developers haven’t been busy. The SoC used on the board, the RK3588, has been making waves in SBC communities for its performance; CounterPillow can say from personal experience that it compiles Linux kernels 7 times faster than the Quartz64’s RK3566 processor.

The entirety of the work has in fact been focused on the RK3588 SoC (and associated chips, such as the RK806 PMIC), rather than the specific board PINE64 produced for developers. One of the main drivers of development are Collabora, a contracting firm specializing in open-source development. But you might be wondering what there is to even do, surely Rockchip did all the work, right?

Not quite. There’s two different kinds of kernels, downstream vendor kernels and the upstream mainline kernel. The mainline Linux kernel is the Linux that sits in Linus Torvalds’ git tree. Patches landing in this tree need to undergo code review by the respective subsystem maintainers, and rarely is a new driver merged without a few iterations of reviews and changes. Meanwhile, a downstream vendor kernel is (usually) forked off an LTS (Long Term Support) kernel release, and the hardware vendor then piles on patches to add hardware specific drivers and hacks. These vendor kernel change sets don’t undergo the upstream kernel’s review.

As you might have guessed, this often leads to less-than-ideal code being present in vendor kernels, not to forget they often don’t port it to newer LTS kernel releases as they become available. So what contributors like Collabora et al do is pick up code from the vendor kernels, clean it up (or write new code entirely, as is the case with multimedia or the GPU) and submit it to mainline Linux for review and inclusion. This takes a lot of work and a lot of time, as solutions only acceptable for vendor kernels often have to be generalized into solutions that work for all sorts of systems.

Despite the odds being stacked against mainline contributors in this, significant amounts of work have already been completed. Today a mainline Linux kernel can be booted on RK3588 hardware with all 8 CPU cores (4x Cortex-A76 + 4x Cortex-A55) working, though not at their maximum frequency. Serial output works, as does the SD card thanks to new support for the often accompanying RK806 power management chip. eMMC has been working for a while, however new additions are SATA, PCIe2, PCIe3 and USB2. USB3 support is still undergoing review as of the time of writing. Smaller but still noteworthy recent additions are support for OTP (reading of one time programmable values fused into the silicon at the factory) and ADC (analog-to-digital conversion).

The most high profile recent addition would be the new driver for hardware video decoding of the AV1 video codec, of which most has been merged in Linux 6.5-rc1. This is an entirely from-scratch driver, implementing the v4l2-requests userspace API. The hardware implementation on the RK3588 processor supports decoding of up to 3840x2160 pixels in resolution video for this codec at 60 frames per second. With AV1’s complexity making software decoding strenuous on CPU resources, a hardware decoder driver for this more and more widely adopted codec is essential for multimedia capabilities for future Pine products potentially based on the RK3588 System-on-Chip.

Speaking of such products, the reason why we haven’t seen a consumer version of the QuartzPro64, or another RK3588 based Pine Store product, has likely been all the things missing from mainline Linux still. As already mentioned, the CPU cores with mainline Linux currently don’t run at their full potential. This is because no cpufreq driver has been submitted to mainline yet, which is required for reclocking the CPU. Unlike with some green colored products however, there is no technical reason as to why reclocking wouldn’t be possible, it’s just a matter of someone having to do the required work to create a driver that’s up to mainline’s standards.

Also missing is support for video output. This is separate from the 3D GPU, as the video output processor is a Rockchip-specific hardware implementation. This means that for the time being, serial and networking are still the only ways to interact with the board.

Speaking of the 3D GPU though, the RK3588’s GPU is a licensed design from Arm. Collabora is working hard on adding support for it in an open-source driver in Linux, which includes writing a new kernel driver. You can read about this driver, called pancsf, in Collabora’s blog post on the matter. The new architecture of the Mali-G610 GPU will allow for a fully featured Vulkan driver to be written for it in the future, something older generations of Mali GPUs had to awkwardly emulate parts of.

InfiniTime 1.13 and other PineTime news (by JF)

The InfiniTime team released InfiniTime 1.13 at the end of June. If you haven’t updated your PineTime yet, I strongly suggest you do it ASAP since it brings many nice features: a new heart rate algorithm, weather integration in PineTimeStyle (PTS) watch face, new memory management, and a (much) improved battery life! Let’s dive into the details of this release!

The heart rate sensor is integrated in InfiniTime for quite some time now (since 0.11.0, actually). It worked but fine but… we had the feeling that it could work better if someone had the opportunity to have a look at the code. Ceimour did a great job redesigning and mostly rewriting the whole heart rate processing algorithm. I’m not experienced enough in digital signal processing to explain all the internals of this new algorithm, so, if you are interested in the details, please see the explanations Ceimour provided in the PR here and here. All in all, it now takes less time to display the first measurements, and they are now updated much faster than previously.

Here’s a video I shot when I was testing this PR. It compares the HR implementation of InfiniTime 1.11 (sealed PineTime on the left) with the new one (devkit on the right).

Did you know that InfiniTime implements a BLE weather service since InfiniTime 1.8.0 ? This service allows companion apps to send weather forecast to the watch. Since then, all we were missing was a nice UI to display those information. Thanks to Kieran, the author of the PineTimeStyle watch face, weather forecast can now be displayed in PTS.

This integration currently works with Gadgetbridge and ITD. You’ll find documentation about the PTS watchface here and about the weather integration here.

However, since the release, several users reported that the new weather feature might cause some instabilities in InfinITime: crash, unexpected reboot and font corruption. You can read more about this issue here. If you are impacted, I would suggest you disable the weather feature from your companion app until we implement a fix.

Memory management is a important topic for the InfiniTime developers. The PineTime only has 64KB of RAM memory available and we have to use it wisely. We also try to optimize the memory usage of the firmware so that we can continue to add new features in InfiniTime. And the new memory management aka “the heaps unification” is one of these optimizations.

Without going into too much details, we figured that the RAM memory in InfiniTime was split into 4 parts: the memory that is statically allocated at build time, and 3 regions that are used to dynamically allocate memory at runtime. Those 3 regions (or heaps) are managed by LVGL (the UI library), FreeRTOS (the OS InfiniTime is based on) and the standard C++ library. The goal of this change was to unify those 3 heaps into a single one (the one managed by FreeRTOS). This allows to reduce the overhead generated by those 3 heaps and it also give us a better overview of how the memory is actually used and how much memory is still available.

PINE64 advertise the PineTime with a “week-long battery life” and they are correct: the hardware is perfectly capable of achieving that. And InfiniTime isn’t too far off the mark: in my use case (BLE and wrist wake option enabled), I usually need to recharge my PineTime every 3 to 5 days, and the battery life can be extended by disabling wake options and BLE.

We were however pretty sure that we could achieve better results with some optimizations that consist mostly in disabling most of the parts of the MCU when it’s idle.

Recently, Ayke (GitHub, Mastodon) shared their findings and measurements regarding power usage of the PineTime on the wiki and with the InfiniTime community on GitHub: they optimized their firmware to reduce the power usage down to 66µA. With such power usage, the PineTime could run for more than 3 months on a single charge! Obviously, to reach such power consumption, most of the device is put in sleep mode, but that’s a great achievement knowing that, for example InfiniTime uses 1.1mA in sleep mode with BLE enabled!

So we tried to apply Ayke’s suggestions in InfiniTime, and the results were also really good: we went from 890µA in sleep mode down to ~200µA with BLE enabled! And a bit less with BLE disabled!

Most of those changes are now integrated in InfiniTime 1.13, and a many users have already reported between 10 days and nearly 20 days of battery life (depending on the features that are enabled: wake up options, BLE, display timeout,…)! My PineTime worked for just over 16 days in my normal use! I’m honestly impressed by those results, and I hope you’ll also notice an nice increase in the battery life of your PineTime!

Other news from the PineTime community

Since we haven’t been able to publish a PINE64 community update for quite some time now, let me share a few other news from the PineTime community!

InfiniSim, the InfiniTime simulator, recently got a UI update that makes the status window much easier to understand: it displays the status of the (simulated) BLE connection, display brightness, charger, battery and alarm.

ITD, the InfiniTime daemon also got a nice update in version 1.1.0 which, among other things, brings a new UI theme, an improved protocol between the daemon and the clients and the support for FUSE. This new feature is quite amazing in my opinion: it allows you to mount the file system of your PineTime into your computer file system. You can now browse the content of the 4MB external memory using your file explorer, for example!

Ayke is not only working on power optimizations : they are building a new firmware written in Go. They focus on power usage obviously, and also on fast and responsive UI. The project is at its very beginning, but it’s already very promising!

Quick update: What’s going on?

Sat, 12 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to our long-awaited community post, where we aim to address the most commonly asked question while also unveiling some more news. Let’s get started!

Why hasn’t there been a community update for the past few months? Is PINE64 dead?

As you may have noticed, there haven’t been any community updates as of late, and we are sorry for the prolonged silence. This isn’t because the community hasn’t been busy, quite the opposite is true. Instead, the problem is that the usual community update authors are too busy with their daily jobs and other tasks around the community. Although thanks to some community members who have shown interest to participate, we are working on a new community update and we hope we will publish it soon!

Pine Store now accepts payments in cryptocurrency.

The community has consistently expressed interest in paying on the Pine Store with cryptocurrency, and despite several previous attempts to find a suitable crypto payment service, the process has proven challenging, leading to eventual failure. However, we are happy to announce that Pine Store now facilitates payments using USD Coin cryptocurrency via Coinbase!

Talk to us at our upcoming community meetup in Warsaw!

We always attempt to meet in person at least twice a year. For reasons that ought to be obvious to everyone, this wasn’t possible these past few years, but now that travel is once again viable we’re returning to a bi-annual meetup schedule. We always meet at FOSDEM in February followed by a meeting halfway through the calendar year. While FOSDEM primarily serves the function of interacting with the broader Linux community and members of other projects as well as product announcements, the second yearly meetup aims at evaluating the project’s progress, identifying issues, and creating a roadmap for the coming months. This year we’re holding the second meetup in Warsaw. TL, Ayufan, Lukasz, and I will be having lunch in Hala Gwardii on Sunday, August 20th at noon. The place offers a wide variety of foods from around the world and is a short walk from Ratusz Arsenał metro station. You can also reach the place easily from every corner of Warsaw via all the public transport the city has to offer. So if you’re in Warsaw or can travel to see us on this date, then consider yourself invited. We’ll be keeping an eye on the #offtopic chat on the 19th so let us know when you’ve arrived and one of us will let you know where we’re sitting. Looking forward to seeing you there!

That’s all for this quick update about what is going on. I hope that we will see you soon on the next community update!

(Big thanks to CounterPillow, Funeral, Lukasz, JF002, Ralimtek, CarbonatedCaffeine, and MPReDiToR for help with this and future updates!)

A new design

Thu, 13 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

As it was teased with the March update and the December blog post of last year, there is a community website redesign being worked on. Launched at beta.pine64.org we’re proud to give a very early insight of what the redesign currently looks like.

To give a warning in advance, in this preview of the redesign, you will find a lot of unfinished parts, run into issues and maybe there are things you liked at the old (current) page more. That’s what the beta launch is for. While the old website was run on Wordpress and maintained by a handful of people, the idea of the new community website redesign after being started as a project of a single person is, that everyone can contribute to the community website. That’s why the redesign is launched early: to gather feedback, to gather ideas and to involve everyone interested in contributing so that there will be a nicely working website available later.

Some technical details

To give an insight into some technical details:

The former website was running on Wordpress. While easy to use, this also means there was a lot of heavy Javascript, connections to third-party websites (like Google fonts) constantly had to be prevented by adjusting site settings and if people found typos in the blog post then admins had to be asked to fix them.

The redesign tries to go a different way. It uses Hugo (“The world’s fastest framework for building websites”) and it creates static html pages from content formats such as Markdown, Pandoc and AsciiDoc (see Hugo - Content Formats for the supported formats). In fact this blog post you are reading is written in Markdown - show and edit this blog post under a_new_design.md.

The redesign tries to avoid using Javascript as much as possible. Javascript is currently only used on the front page to click between the slider images, as well as the YouTube preview (more about this below). The slider will work just fine with disabled Javascript.

There are no CDNs used in the redesign. No Google Fonts, no externally hosted podcast player, no analytics, no non-sense. The author also wrote a two-click solution for YouTube embeds. This means there is no longer a YouTube iframe directly in the blog post, which connects to Google as soon as opening the blog post even without watching the video. Instead there is no connection made to Google until the user clicks on the video preview. The video preview is generated and stored locally on the server.

Try it in the blog post “March Update: Tablet Bonanza!”.

The logo challenge

Together with the beta redesign, there is also the logo challenge started to get input from everyone regarding a new logo. The logo you see here is a preliminary draft to show, how the logo could look like. On top is the current logo, on the bottom is the new draft.

Please read the thoughts in the logo challenge and bring your best thoughts and ideas.

Documentation

There is also a documentation tab added in the navigation menu above, as you might have noticed. The documentation pages are currently all PINE64 wiki articles parsed into AsciiDoc files. AsciiDoc is used due to the greater flexibility than Markdown but both or any of the above mentioned content formats can be used and even mixed. The documentation pages are currently in early alpha.

To not get into the boring details too much, the Mediawiki articles from https://wiki.pine64.org are basically getting parsed and written into AsciiDoc files without too many changes. Most of the current issues in the documentation pages (wrong order of articles, non-working links, missing templates, broken tables and more) can be fixed easily. The reason why they are not fixed yet is because it is hard to maintain two documentation pages at the same time, the docs and the wiki. Especially while working alone on the redesign it was decided to dynamically parse the wiki instead for now, so that the author does not have to manually apply every change made to the wiki to the docs as well.

To give some numbers, the custom parser alone is curently almost 500 code lines long, the rule yaml to write the documentation targets is another 500 lines and the rule yaml for separating long articles into multiple documentation pages is over 1500 lines long. So it would be very surprising if everything works flawlessly. There are currently over 250 documentation pages written. The issues in the docs will all be ironed out before a launch.

For the docs there are new shiny board images created and they will be used everywhere to make explaining hardware functionality easier. Here is for example the Ox64 pinout image as created as part of the docs:

As part of the new documentation, the author also made a lot of changes to many wiki pages. Updating old information, simplifying old structures, writing new articles, to bring everything information in a more up-to-date and modern state. The author wants to underline that users should not be worried, the wiki doesn’t go away. In fact it is a great place for users to document their projects, bringing a strong tie between the community members, the community website and their contributions.

Contributions made easy

Hugo also has one nice advantage. Changes to the website can be previewed easily on your computer, making it very easy for new contributors to find out how everything is working and if their changes work as intended. To give a short overview of the steps:

Clone the repository of the website:

git clone https://github.com/pine64/website.git

Then change the directory into the folder:

cd website

And then preview the website using:

hugo server

It’s super simple!

The complete process is explained in details under https://github.com/pine64/website/ and we’re happy to help in the community chat.

The project is structured the following:

website/
├── archetypes/
│ └── default.md
├── assets/
├── config/_default/
│ └── config.toml [site configuration]
├── content/
│ │── blog/
│ │── community/
│ │── contests/
│ │── documentation/
│ └── podcast/
├── data/
├── layouts/
├── public/ [contains the html files]
├── static/
└── themes/pinetheme/
 │── archetypes/
 | └── default.md
 │── layouts/
 │── static/
 │ │── artwork [background artwork]
 │ │── css [css files]
 │ │── img [static images]
 │ │── js [static javascripts]
 │ │── podcast [podcast episodes]
 │ └── podlove [podcast player]
 └── theme.toml [theme configuration]

For an explanation of the folder structure see https://gohugo.io/getting-started/directory-structure/.

Outlook

With the upcoming redesign of the community website and the possibility for everyone to contribute to it, the community is going the next step and it ultimately becomes one step more open.

The Hugo framework opens us up a lot of different possibilities, including multi-language pages. If community members are interested in this any many more features we’re eager to see the ideas and your contributions!

PineTab-V and PineTab2 launch

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The PineTab2 and PineTab-V pre-orders begin on April 13th. Both tablets feature a 1200x800 10.1” IPS LCD panel with wide viewing angles, a sturdy metal metal chassis, two USB-C ports (1x USB 3.0, 1x USB 2.0 with charging), a digital video out port, a front 2MPx and rear 5MPx camera as well as a 6000mAh battery. Both come bundled with a magnetically fitted detachable backlit keyboard (connecting via pogo pins using USB 2.0 protocol) that doubles up as a carry case, and are available in two hardware configurations: 4GB LPDDR4 RAM / 64GB eMMC 5.1 flash storage and 8GB LPDDR4 RAM / 128GB eMMC 5.1 flash storage. Finally the PineTab2 and PineTab-V both start at $159.

On the outside the only thing that differentiates the two devices is the color of the chassis: the PineTab-V is deep matte black while PineTab2 is silver-gray. But the real difference between the two resides on the inside. The PineTab2 features the well supported RK3566 64-bit Arm SoC, which has been a part of our line-up for over a year, and the tablet ships with a build of DanctNix Arch Linux for Arm. The software can be best described as early but very serviceable, and there is little doubt that before long improvements will be made and additional functionality enabled. Like the PinePhone and PinePhone Pro before it, the PineTab2 will reach a high degree of functionality in time and make for a great work or entertainment travel companion.

First image: PineTab2 PCB with RK3566. Second image: PineTab-V with JH7110

Unlike the PineTab2, the PineTab-V is based on the JH7110 64-bit RISC-V SoC. In late 2022 we announced our plans to help grow the RISC-V hardware ecosystem alongside our existing Arm-based device line-up (see 2023 Sneak Peek section in December Community Update) – to this end the PineTab-V is to the Star64 single board computer released earlier this month what the PineTab2 is to the Quartz64. The JH7110 RISC-V SoC, and the RISC-V architecture in more general, is currently best described as having limited Linux support. The PineTab-V is therefore an experimental device, which ships without an OS and without any promises. You can think of it as a convenient development platform targeted at those of you interested in bringing Linux support to JH7110 and, by extension, the entire RISC-V ecosystem.

To sum it up, the two tablets launching on April 11 look near-identical but in actuality are very different devices. The PineTab2 is Arm-based, ships with working software, has solid Linux support that will only get better with time, and has an already-established community of developers waiting for their units to arrive. The PineTab-V is built upon a RISC-V SoC and holds much promise but comes without working software. The PineTab-V is an experimental device geared towards developers and those who wish to explore the architecture. The open source community surrounding RISC-V is just taking shape and still growing, and we hope that the PineTab-V will further solidify this community and help accelerate development.

Go to Pine Store

* PineTab2 and PineTab-V pre-orders will be available under the ‘Tablets’ category (drop-down) starting Thursday, April 13th

March Update: Tablet Bonanza!

Sat, 01 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We end the first quarter of the year with news that Star64 will be available for purchase on April 4th and that the PineTab2 and PineTab-V(ery good!) will launch the following week on April 11th. In this month’s update we also cover PineNote development (I know many of you have been waiting for this) and discuss how software on the device has really taken off in recent months. Finally, CounterPillow - a key RK3566 community developer - sets the expectations for the PineTab2 with some real-life performance examples. Strap on your unicorn horns because there’s much ground to cover this month - let’s get to it.

You can watch the synopsis of this month’s community update on YouTube (embedded below) as well as on Odysee and PeerTube. To stay up-to-date with PINE64 news make sure to subscribe to this blog (subscription widget at the bottom of the webpage), follow the PINE64 Telegram News channel, the announcements channel in Discord as well as our Twitter and Mastodon.

I’d like to thank Alex (clover), CounterPillow and Maximilian Weigand and PizzaLovingNerd for their contributions to this community update.

N.B. Comments on the blog post need to be in English and follow our Community Rules and Code of Conduct.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Video synopsis of this month’s update

TL;DR

Housekeeping
- We held our 5th community Q&A session mid-March; thank you to all those who showed up; you can watch the recorded live-stream on Youtube, PeerTube and Odysee
- The PineStore has been targeted by DDOS and hacking attacks recently, which caused page time-outs and general inconvenience; rest assured nothing was compromised
- The reworked community site is taking shape and its looking great - help us test it starting April 15
- PINE64 EU Pinecil restock on April 1st instead of March 31st
Newsflash
- Star64 will be available on April 4th in two configurations: 4GB and 8GB LPDDR4 memory for $69.99 and $89.99 respectively
- Spike in demand for Quartz64 model-A led to temporary lack of stock; more is on the way
- NotKamui is working on some sweet looking 3D printed back cases for the PinePhone (Pro)
- yaky-dev has created a 3D printed Samsung Galaxy S20 ultra adapter cover for the PinePhone allowing it to be fitted with a large external battery
- Despite there not being a dedicated PinePhone (Pro) section this month there are some interesting PP(P) news: QT6 on the PinePhone, Lup emulates the PinePhone and Ubuntu Touch is finally available for the PinePhone Pro
- delipunch fitted the Pinebook Pro with a Peltier module and saw some good results
- Salvador showcased old-school PC games running on the Pinebook Pro in BOX86; this included UnrealTournament 1999 - one of my favorite games
- Jedikaal has written up instructions on how to run Klipper - a popular 3D printing firmware - on the og Pine A64
PineTab-V
- PineTab-V launches at the same time as the PineTab2 - on April 11th
- Powered by unicorns and candyfloss
- Unicorn syncs seamlessly with pen and features intercompatible with both PineTab2 and PineTab-V
- V…ery good section - must read
PineTab2
- PineTab2 will be available for pre-order on April 11th
- Ships with DanctNix Arch Linux with KDE Plasma Desktop (software for early adopters)
- CounterPillow talks about PineTab2’s performance: video decoding, watching Youtube, browsing the web and working with PDF documents
- Tested on Plebian - a vanilla Debian for RK3566 devices
PineNote
- Linux is finally taking shape on the PineNote and flashing Linux OSes is now simpler than in the past
- There is now a dedicated Debian with GNOME image with tailored settings for grayscale
- Other OSes and desktop environments are being worked on too (SWAY and postmarketOS)
- The e-paper panel now performs well (still WIP) under Linux and Xournalpp has been worked on allowing for very good pen input
- No promises made at this time but certainly now it looks a viable Beta product for early adopters

Housekeeping

Earlier in March we held the fifth community Q&A session and I’d like to thank everyone who joined in asking questions in the chats. I felt like this was one of the best Q&As thus far, not in the least because we didn’t run into any major technical issues and managed to successfully stream to Peertube this time around. Following the Q&A, Marek and I spoke about extending the sessions up to 2 hours. As things stand, we usually end up running out of time and many questions remain unanswered. Let me know in the comments whether you’d like us to make the Q&A sessions longer. I am also interested in learning whether moving the Q&A session to the weekend - ideally a Sunday - would suit the community better. We currently don’t have a firm date for the next Q&A but it will likely be held at some point in June. That said, due to Marek’s and my summer vacation plans the Q&A may be moved to either late May or early July - we’ll let you know closer to the date. You can watch the last Q&A session below.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Community Q&A live stream recording

The Pine Store and community website have been targeted by DDOS and hacking attempts this past month, which resulted in the sites being placed in maintenance mode at times. A it will likely come as no surprise to the majority of you, both sites are frequent targets of malicious parties but this most recent attack has been the biggest to date. It has also shown signs of coordination, effort and skill. But you can rest assured that steps have been taken to cull the DDOS attack and that no data has been compromised. The reason why I’m mentioning this in the update is because the Wiki and forums were also affected, causing sluggish response times and server time-outs, and I’ve been told that users experienced problems accessing community services over the course of two days. Things should be working as normal from here on; we are actively monitoring both sites and cluster-based services.

Speaking of the PINE64 website, in December of last year I reported that we started on a complete community website redesign. This redesign is much more than a new coat of paint - in fact it takes this website in a completely different direction. The goal is to make the site a hub that ties together all the existing community services while simultaneously exposing key community-driven elements of the project. For instance, clicking the community tab presents you with all the relevant links to chats and other communication platforms, while new blog posts, podcast episodes and news take center stage on the main page. Another part of the redesign, and one that I absolutely love, is the incorporation of all documentation on the actual website. The page is also much cleaner and significantly more light-weight - it is really snappy and a pleasure to visit. We are planning on initially launching the site for testing alongside the current webpage - those willing to help us test and offer feedback are welcome to visit the site starting April 15, here’s the page: beta.pine64.org/.

Here’s a sneak peek at the upcoming community website

Lastly, the PINE64 EU store will be restocking the Pinecil V2 on April 1st instead of the planned March 31st. However, subsequent Pinecil V2 restocks in April will land on Fridays, with the first scheduled for April 8th. I also want to let you know that due to the upcoming Easter Holidays there won’t be any shipping from PINE64 EU between April 6th - 13th. The PinePhone BE2 has now also restocked. I also know that many of you have asked about PinePhone Pro’s availability in PINE64 EU - I currently hope to have a batch in the latter half of April. If you want to keep track of PINE64 EU’s hardware availability and restock then I invite you to follow Twitter, Mastodon and Telegram. And no, none of the above is an April fools joke :)

Newsflash

I come bearing great news for everyone waiting for Star64 - the SBC will be available for purchase on April 4th. Due to some last-minute logistics issues we failed to make the March launch date announced in February - our apologies for the slight delay. The boards have now finally been delivered and getting packaged and ready for dispatch. Let me just quickly reiterate the Star64 features: Quad core 64bit RISC-V, HDMI video output, 4x DSI and 4x CSI lates, i2c touch panel connector, dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, dual-band WiFi and Bluetooth, as well as 1x native USB3.0 port, 3x shared USB2.0 ports, PCIe x1 open-ended slot and GPIO bus pins (i2c, SPI and UART). The board also features 128M QSPI flash and eMMC and microSD card slots. The board will be available in two different RAM configurations - with 4GB and 8GB LPDDR4 memory for $69.99 and $89.99 respectively. The Star64 store page ought to already be live when you read this, but will be listed as out of stock until the 4th.

Star64 will be available in the Pine Store on April 4th, it will be listed as ‘out of stock’ until then

In other SBC news, we’ve seen an increase in Quartz64 interest recently (which is awesome!) - the model-A in particular - which caused the board to go out of stock temporarily. I wish to let you know that a new production-run is already underway and the next batch’s delivery is expected soon. Indeed, it may already be available at the time this community update goes live, but no promises. Please visit the Pine Store Quartz64 page to learn of the SBC’s availability.

User NotKamui in the Matrix PinePhone chat has been working on some incredibly cool looking back cases for the PinePhone. While there have already been many community-designed replacement 3D cases made in the past, this design stands out as one of the absolute best. Not in the least because the case is transparent and features an embedded Tux. NotKamui is currently traveling (at least from what I gathered) and hasn’t had the time to complete the design nor upload the STL files, but hopefully we’ll get a chance to print our own version of the back cases soon. Once files find their way onto an online STL repository I’ll make sure to revisit this topic and offer up relevant links.

These are some really awesome looking cases

Staying on the subject of the PinePhone and 3D printed cases for a moment longer, user yaky-dev created a 3D printed Samsung Galaxy S20 ultra adapter cover for the PinePhone. This adapter allows you to use S20 Ultra accessories with your PinePhone or PinePhone Pro. Most notably, you can outfit the PinePhone (Pro) with the S20’s battery case, which adds a whopping 7500mAh to your device. For those interested in the case adapter here is the link to the Thingiverse website - I think this is a very cool community project.

Has anyone ever said ’no’ to more battery life?

There is no dedicated PinePhone section in this month’s community update - instead I decided to squeeze the most noteworthy phone developments into the Newsflash section. The first piece of news relates to KDE Plasma Mobile: Seshpenguin tooted images of the PinePhone running QT6 which, at least according to them, may be the first instance of the software running on real hardware. This is obviously important news in light of KDE’s recent announcement that they’re gearing up to launch its next release with QT6 only. The second piece of PinePhone news relates to Lup’s efforts to emulate the Unicorn Emulator. His lengthy blog post on this subject provides a complete walkthrough of the process and includes very detailed information about getting started with emulating the platform. It is worth a read for those interested in alternative software development on the PinePhone, something which I touched upon last month. Last but certainly not least, we’ve received word that it is now possible to run Ubuntu Touch on the PinePhone Pro. Be warned, however, that this is an introductory build which has a number of PinePhone Pro-specific quirks, such as upgrading via apt. Some key features are missing in the build too (such as camera functionality). I am really happy to finally see Ubuntu Touch available for the PinePhone Pro and I’m sure many in the PINE64 community will be too - thank you UBports team!

QT6 on the PinePhone

Reddit user delipunch shared a cool Pinebook Pro mod, in which they replaced the default passive cooling solution used in the Pinebook Pro with a Peltier module. For those who do not know, the Peltier module achieves cooling by running current through a thermocouple rather than moving air or liquid over a surface to dissipate heat. Prior to the mod, with all cores under full load, the Pinebook Pro would throttle at 75*C, but with the new cooling solution it doesn’t. This is a very cool mod and while it does look rather complex, and thus unlikely as something many of us could attempt, I’m sure there are some in the community with the technical know-how who will attempt to replicate it.

Peltier module in the Pinebook Pro does appear to help with SoC throttling under full load

Salvador Liébana has showcased a number of popular retro-PC games running well on the Pinebook Pro using BOX86. If you don’t know - BOX86 allows you to run x86 Linux programs on 32bit and 64bit Arm systems. Some of the games showcased by Salvador included Miami Heat, Raptor: Call of Shadows and the legendary Unreal Tournament from 1999. It is impressive how far the open source driver has gotten since the initial launch of the Pinebook Pro in 2020. I have recently gotten back into retro-gaming as a weekend activity and will surely be testing this out.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

The year 1999 gave us the Matrix, Eminem’s ‘My Name is’ and Unreal Tournament

Lastly, Klipper - a popular 3d printing firmware - has been shown to run on the original Pine A64. The reddit user Jedikaal has written up a very comprehensive set of instructions on how to get the software running. While the instructions pertain to the Pine A64 in particular there is no indication that they wouldn’t also work on other PINE64 SBCs such as the Quartz64. I have recently seen a number of questions pertaining to PINE64 boards and 3D printing (I think I even answered one during the community Q&As), so I’m looking forward to seeing more contributions such as this from members of the 3D printing community.

PineTab-V

Here’s the big news: both the PineTab2 and PineTab-V will be available for pre-order on April 11th. ‘The PineTab-V, what?’ - I hear some of you asking, why yes, have we failed to mention that we’re working on two new PineTabs? What does the ‘V’ in ‘PineTab-V’ stand for? The ‘V’ stands for ‘very early’ or ‘vaguely functional’ and potentially even ‘Vociferously viperous’ (yeah, I bet you had to look it up even if you’re a native speaker, and no, it doesn’t make sense - I’m aware). Honestly, we haven’t decided ourselves yet. It was meant to be a surprise, but given the fact that the update goes live on April 1st and we’re only a few days away from the PineTab2’s launch, I figured I may as well just spill the beans. Those of you keenly following our project may already have guessed that we will be introducing a Linux device based on V(ery good!)-architecture at some point this year. I suppose you didn’t really have to guess, I spelled it out for you in December, so all you really needed to arrive at this conclusion was a pair of eyeballs and a rudimentary ability to read. In a nutshell, here’s what I wrote at the time: we’re very keen on creating new and innovative RISC-V devices as well as RISC-V counterparts to existing and upcoming Arm devices. Not sure if I could have written it any plainer than this.

Here’s a picture of the PineTab-V, seriously. Picture taken on January 2025.

So here we are - the PineTab-V is identical to the PineTab2 in all ways but the SoC. It features the same chassis, LCD panel, memory and storage configurations and even SKU price-points. Seriously, the picture I inserted above isn’t actually the PineTab-V, it’s the PineTab2. Hadn’t I said anything you would be none the wiser. Overall, It’s really low effort and truly as lazy as it gets. If you’ve read the December and February community updates, then you already know just about everything there is to know about the physical characteristics of the PineTab-V despite never actually having read a thing about the PineTab-V. Confusing, I know. Regarding the pricing: we did consider charging more for the PineTab-V, since it actually costs more to manufacture than the PineTab2 (seriously), but given that it is effectively a glorified paperweight at this point in time it just didn’t feel right.

Ok, so I suppose there is one more thing you should know about the PineTab-V after all - while it walks and quacks like PineTab2, it sure as heck isn’t an Arm machine. You are basically buying into an idea, a vision, a dream [note to self - insert more inspirational words here to motivate them to pick one up]. Indeed, unlike its Arm brethren it doesn’t even boot Linux as of today - at least not as far as I know. So if you are in the market for an open, high-quality and sexy looking tablet that doesn’t work since the software for it is a-way-of from pre-Alpha then you’ll be thrilled to know we’ve got you covered! On the plus side, it does come bundled with the unicorn with a mic stuck to its head we promised last year. The unicorn has already been confirmed to sync with the PineTab-V via BT LEL and interfaces directly with the PineNote’s pen. Top-tier stuff this, seriously. Ok, time to wrap this up - here’s what I want you to take away from this section: if you want a working Linux tablet then go with the PineTab2. However, if you already completed your Picasso collection and no longer take pleasure in neatly arranging your sports cars in the garage, but you have an interest in things ending with the letter ‘V’ and some money to burn, then I feel like the PineTab-V is a prime-candidate pick-up option for you. Go on, do it, I dare you.

PineTab2 (By Lukasz and CounterPillow)

Much of this month’s section on the PineTab2 has been written by CounterPillow who is one of the developers who tirelessly worked on the RK3566 platform since last year. I think that I have covered everything I wanted to say about the PineTab2 in the December announcement and last month’s update already, so it is for the best that someone working on the actual software gets a say now. There are, however, two bits of important information I wish to share with you before I hand this section off: firstly, the PineTab2 will ship with a build of DanctNix Arch Linux for Arm with KDE Plasma Desktop. Arch Linux is what we demoed at FOSDEM earlier this year and felt that it performed rather well for such early-state software. Obviously the build that ships with the PineTab2 will be newer than than the FOSDEM demo, but you should be warned that it won’t include any critical new functionality (at least not out-of-the-box - improvements and additional enablement are obviously possible, and even likely, between the time units get flashed at the factory and when end-users receive their units).

DanctNix Arch PineTab2 build in action

I chatted briefly with Danct12 earlier this week and he wishes for you to know that the PineTab2 software is still a work-in-progress, so you should always check for updates as things are likely to progress even quicker once people get their hands on the hardware. If you have any questions concerning the build and current status of the software then you are welcome to join the #archlinux-pinephone:kde.org channel on Matrix or @archmobile on Telegram. Danct12 also wanted me to let you know that the Wi-Fi is disabled on the PineTab2 by default due to driver stability issues, so you’ll have to run modprobe bes2600 to get it working. Now, the second, and perhaps the most important thing I wanted to write before CounterPIllow shares their insight is that the PineTab2 will be available on April 11th… bundled the unicorn with a mic on its head, of course.

[Quick note: I have taken the liberty to edit CounterPillow’s contribution for style solely - none of the written contents were altered. CounterPillow’s section starts below.]

I’ve seen some talk about how the RK3566 in the PineTab2 won’t perform well for its intended purpose. While it is true that the RK3566 system-on-chip is optimised for low power draw rather than raw performance, this does not mean it’s a bad SoC for a tablet. First off, yes, it is obviously slower than a RK3399 (Pinebook Pro, ROCKPro64) running at its full clock speed. The 4 Cortex-A55 cores in the RK3566 are in-order cores, meaning they do not reorder instructions for higher performance. This makes them comparable to the four Cortex-A53 cores found on the RK3328 (ROCK64) or A64 (PineTab1), but much faster and more efficient as it is a newer core.

But will it be enough for watching YouTube? Well, if we assume hardware decode is working and we’re rendering the video through hardware scalers, we can naturally reach the advertised 4K@30 video output. But on mainline kernels, i.e. kernels that are what sits in Linus Torvalds’ git tree, we’re currently missing a driver for the “rkvdec2” hardware decode block, and even if we had such a driver, the support for its v4l2-request user space API (the interface between programs and the kernel) is still not great.

So let’s look at pure software decoding. That is, video decoding performance without fixed function hardware acceleration, just what the CPU cores can do with their vector instructions. Anyone without a PineTab2 can do this, so long as they own some other RK3566 device. I ran these tests on a Quartz64 Model A, running Plebian. For this test, I kept things simple. I decoded 1080p and 720p videos fetched from YouTube with yt-dlp at the maximum speed the CPU could muster, using an FFmpeg build from Debian Bookworm’s repositories, also built against the libdav1d from Debian Bookworm. In essence, this means FFmpeg 5.1.2-3 and dav1d 1.0.0-2. The video used for the test were the various video streams YouTube offers for https://youtu.be/Lwk8e2q4qHo, a 25 fps video. Five minutes of the video were decoded as fast as possible with the command ffmpeg -i videofile -to 5:00 -f null - -benchmark and the achieved average framerate was calculated with 300 seconds / rtime * 25.

We arrive at the following results:

	av1 (dav1d)	h.264/avc	vp9 (ffvp9)
1080p	50.50 fps	75.34 fps	63.09 fps
720p	105.74 fps	200.16 fps	146.49 fps

Keep in mind that the PineTab2 comes with a 1280x800 panel, meaning you’ll be consuming 720p content unless you have an external monitor connected. For 720p content, we’re above real time speeds even for theoretical 60 fps content on the newest and most complex video codec (AV1). Even at 1080p, software decoding is still well in the realm of playable for most content, with just 60 fps AV1 not being real time. In short, from a decode perspective, the PineTab2 will play the youtubes fine, even in the absence of fixed-function hardware video decode acceleration. The performance for video rendering is another question however, and depends heavily on the indirections the buffers take before arriving at the display. From personal experience, I can attest that at 1280x720 even mpv’s gpu shading pipeline based video output will work fine for 60 fps content under kwin on Wayland. 1080p 60fps content is looking less rosy with mpv though, where the same configuration (kwin wayland, gpu shading pipeline rendering, software decode) is dropping frames. This may be avoided once we have a hardware decoder driver, as we can then pass the dmabuf buffers from the hardware decoder directly to the output with mpv’s new dmabuf-wayland video output.

A more common use case is web browsing. For this test, I used Chromium with a few flags enabled (wayland, experimental performance stuff) on a 1080p display on a kwin wayland plasma session, again on a Quartz64 Model A, which has the same SoC as the PineTab2. You can see that we get quite a smooth web browsing experience from this video capture (Ignore the crunchy looking text rendering, that’s an artifact of my $9 HDMI capture device’s 4:2:2 downscaling.):

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Here’s a glimpse at the type of performance you can expect from the PineTab2

Firefox will be slower as it really doesn’t want to do GPU rendering on Panfrost and its JS engine isn’t as optimised for ARM. Compared to PineTab1, this is a night-and-day difference. You can actually browse the web!

Another task many want to use a tablet for is to browse through documents like PDF files. One particularly heavy workload for this is tabletop gaming rule book PDFs. They’re usually richly illustrated, taking a few seconds even on x86 computers to do a page flip with some reader software. Out of curiosity, I tried the “Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay” 2nd Edition core rule book, which is my heaviest PDF file, on the Quartz64 Model A. I can’t show you an HDMI capture of the experience for copyright reasons (Games Workshop, if you wanna allow this use hit me up, I swear we’ll treat your IP with dignity, unlike some game studios), but I can describe the results in text form.

Using Okular to browse through the PDF was terrible. While Okular works fine for richly illustrated scientific papers and other such content, the might of Sigmar brought it to its knees, resulting in 5+ second page loads. MuPDF, a more minimalist document viewer, copes well however. Flipping to the next page takes about 1 second from key press to the next page being rendered. This is more than usable enough for quickly browsing to the right page during a sweaty tabletop gaming night.

The RK3566 SoC found in the Quartz64 and SOQuartz line of devices has gotten fairly good mainline support in Linux. To showcase this, me (CounterPillow) and diederik banded together to create Plebian, an installer- free Debian image for Quartz devices based on Debian Bookworm, using its unmodified kernel package.

PineNote

I know that many of you have been eagerly awaiting to hear news of the PineNote and I am happy to finally bring you an update on the device. Before I start, however, I should make it clear that everything I write regarding the software status of the device is based on information collected by Maximilian Weigand - a developer working on the PineNote, who was kind enough to detail all the information for me. Perhaps the biggest news about the PineNote is that finally, after many months of development, Linux on the device has reached a reasonably mature stage and there are even two sets of very promising and user-friendly software options being designed for it. In the words of Maximilian “the PineNote is now in pretty good shape for basic linux use; it can be flashed with only a USB connection, (…) the factory test Android is not required for any of the linux installation steps (…) [and] u-boot images can be flashed via rkdeveloptool with no UART debug connector required anymore (…)”. From the get-go, this addresses some of the biggest problems that the PineTab2 development faced from the start - it is now possible for end-users to flash OSes of their choice on the PineNote relatively pain-free.

Indeed the entire boot sequence has received major boons in recent months, making the process of powering on the device and starting an operating system much more streamlined. Originating in the downstream rockchip u-boot sources, an u-boot version is now available that displays pre-prendered images for boot entries and can be controlled using the power button, with touchscreen support for the u-boot menu in a proof-of-concept status. Importantly this u-boot version comes with an e-ink-enabled devicetree and does not require any android partitions or files anymore.

So then, what can the PineNote boot? For starters, thanks to the support by, and encouragement from, diederik there is now a working linux 6.2 branch for the PineNote, which is shared by those working on complete OS images of the device. One of the options now available, and one that ships with the above-mentioned u-boot, is a refined build of Debian with GNOME. This tailored build includes some modifications to the GNOME desktop environment and a custom extension to control epd display settings looks and performs well on a grayscale screen. It uses a theme developed by user MichiMolle. This theme removes shadows and animations, adds gray-scale icons and improves the performance of GTK 3 and 4 on the PineNote. However, this isn’t the only desktop environment option being currently developed - a comprehensive collection of configurations and instructions for using Sway with the PineNote was collected by user hmpthcs. I should also mention that a dedicated postmarketOS build for the PineNote is actively worked on by Phodina.

This is one of those instances where an image, or a video in this particular case, is worth a thousand words - so I invite you to marvel at the short clip showcasing Linux on the PineNote.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

This looks pretty awesome doesn’t it?

One of the biggest selling points of the PineNote is obviously its display. In the past I’ve reported on the iterative work that developers had to endure to reverse engineer and subsequently enable PineNote’s e-paper panel; we can now finally see what this painstaking work has resulted in. Much of the hard work on the panel was done by pgwipeout and smaeul - they did the majority of the hard upbringing and driver work, and hence it is largely thanks to them that the panel is now in a functional state. Thanks to a collective development effort the panel went from being buggy and very sluggish to really crisp, detailed and responsive. All this in just one year. Reading and browsing on the device is one thing but functional pen input is a whole different can of worms. To this end I hope you’ll be just as pleased as I am to hear that user hrdl has been continuously working on improving the drawing performance of xournalpp on the PineNote and shared a video of the pen’s input performance. While the pen’s input latency is certainly not perfect, it is nonetheless impressively fast and I could imagine myself using it without the input delay tripping me up while writing. Take a look for yourselves and let us and the developers know your impressions in the comments section.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

I don’t know about you but this looks pretty pretty smooth to me!

So, then, what does this mean for the future of the PineNote? - I don’t want to jump the gun and promise anything at this time. What I can say, however, is that I’ll talk to TL and Marek about these developments in the coming days and explore the viability of bringing the PineNote to more people. I also want to say that I am completely blown away by how much work has been poured into the device in the recent months. It is incredible to see all the passion and raw effort that has gone into making the vision of an e-paper device running full-fledged real Linux a reality. Thank you to all those who have worked on the PineNote for the past year, I take my hat off to you.

This is it for this month’s update, I hope you all thoroughly enjoyed it. I’ll catch you next month if the unicorn doesn’t get me in my sleep.

February update: things are taking shape

Wed, 01 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Let me start by apologizing to everyone for skipping yet another monthly community update. This has largely been my fault as I was rather busy in January and following FOSDEM at the start of February I found myself occupied with things related to the EU store. I hope for things to go back to normal now; you can expect future community updates at the end of each month as per usual. Again, I apologise, mea culpa.

I hope that this month’s update and the news it brings will more than make up for the wait: the Nestflash section is absolutely packed this month, we’re revealing PineTab2’s pricing and SKU variants (both of which I’m sure you’ll be pleased with), announcing that Star64 will be available in the next 6 weeks (or so) and report on all the work that has gone into PinePhone (Pros) development in the recent two months … and much more

Let’s get to it.

I’d like to thank Alex (clover), JF, Danct12, William Starkey, Alex Horner, River-Mochi, Biktorgj and PizzaLovingNerd for their contributions to this community update.

N.B. Comments on the blog post need to be in English and follow our Community Rules and Code of Conduct.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Video synopsis of this month’s update

TL;DR

Housekeeping
- FOSDEM was great - thank you to all who came and chatted with us at the stall
- Pine Store is getting back to normal following CNY
- Next quarterly community Q&A on 17 March at 20:00 CET - be there or be square
- PINE64 EU full restock on March 1st
Newsflash
- New release for R-Cade for Rock64, RockPro64 and Pinebook Pro is excellent - you need to try it
- PineSAM is a BLE app for the Pinecil V2 that allows you to change your Pencil V2 settings remotely!
- SOQuartz patches for PCIe2, video output, gpu, HDMI sound were merged into mainline kernel 6.2
- SOQuartz is getting popular - MC Server Hosting share their experience with the module and BLADE
- An awesome rugged 3D printed Pinecil case
- Issues with ANC in PineBuds Pro’s left earbud can be fixed by reflashing firmware; work on open firmware going strong & offers good sound quality
- Significant progress on porting Linux to the 0x64 & video with instructions on how to flash the board
- The new GAN 65W PinePower PSU now in the Pine Store
PineTab2
- PineTab will be available in two SKUs: 4GB RAM / 64GB eMMC & 8GB RAM / 128 eMMC
- Pricing: 4GB/64GB version USD $159 & 8GB/128GB version $209
- First impression of the PineTab2 - most refined Linux-capable hardware from PINE64; very high quality all around and a major step-up from the original
- PineTab2’s keyboard impressions - very good keyboard, sturdy and hefty stand and solid key backlight
- PineTab2 software more mature than many of you expect - thanks to the work on Quartz64 and SOQuartz by the community; only a few bits missing
- FOSDEM demo ran DanctNix Arch + KDE Plasma Desktop and was well received
- Launch window – sometime in April, but no promises
Star64
- We expect to have the Star64 available in March or beginning of April
- We had a working demo of Debian with XFCE at FOSDEM (thanks to ayufan)
- There is much interest in RISC-V platform and Star64 in particular
- The software on RISC-V is in early stages - I share my experience
- Star64’s significance: we believe that affordable RISC-V hardware will drive Linux development on the platform
PinePhone (Pro)
- So many PinePhone (Pro)s at FOSDEM!
- Megi’s newest keyboard firmware brings a 30 fold power reduction consumption, increasing standby time from 23 days to nearly 1.8 years
- Megi’s 6.1 kernel brings many improvements - notably 60Hz refresh-rate on the PinePhone Pro and keyboard driver improvements allowing phone to charge directly from keyboard’s battery
- Libcamera on the PinePhone Pro - a really promising experience & can now be installed on Mobian (and potentially also other OSes)
- Apache NuttX is being ported to the PinePhone - for now for educational reasons but looks very interesting
- First glimpse of Ubuntu Touch on the PinePhone Pro - a very smooth and positive experience
- Many new software releases, including DanctNix Arch, postmarketOS, Mobian and Manjaro bring benefits of Megi’s newest kernel
- SailfishOS is really taking off and newest release brings keyboard and camera support
- Version 0.7.3 of biktorgj’s PinePhone Modem SDK allows modem’s userspace to connect to the Internet even when the PinePhone is suspended
PineTime
- Many PineTime’s at FOSDEM and interest in the device is not waning
- more than 30 pull-requests merged since last release - you can expect better battery level monitoring and UI improvements
- A Windows companion app - InfiniWindows
- A more powerful replacement board compatible with existing firmware has been designed by community

Housekeeping

As you surely know we’ve attended FOSDEM in early February and had the opportunity to showcase many of our popular and upcoming devices. To me, however, the highlight was meeting members of the community and developers whom I rarely if ever get to see in person. While this FOSDEM wasn’t exactly smooth-sailing for us (Marek ended up in the hospital on day one and my kid got sick with a stomach bug the day we arrived), it was nonetheless a great experience to have the opportunity to speak with many of you. To this end I’d like to thank everyone who took the time to stop by, hang out and chat at our stall. As always our stall was bustling both days and kept us fully occupied for the duration of the conference. I always promise myself to spend more time walking around and talking to other projects and attend at least one talk - but as always I didn’t manage to find the time for either year around. Perhaps next year.

Pictures of the crowd and hardware at our stall :)

For the past month the Pine Store has been, for the lack of a better word, ‘recovering’ from the Chinese New Year backlog. As is the case every year, support staff have returned to a high volume of unanswered emails and the shipping department had to deal with pending shipments. This resulted in longer-than-usual response times for which I apologies; I am not aware of any delayed shipments, but if there were any then this too I am sorry for. The weeks following CNY are always somewhat chaotic, although my sense is that support and shipping have done a good job getting things back on-track quickly. February has also been a stressful period as production spools back up, factory floor time is being allocated and hardware delivery timelines are being finalized. So, what is the reason for me writing all this? - you’ve likely seen less activity on our end the past month but things should finally be returning back to normal in the coming days. Thank you for your patience.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

In case you missed it, here’s the last Q&A from November of last year

We’ll be hosting the Q&A on March 17 at 20:00 CET. The community Q&A is an opportunity for you to ask us questions and have them answered live. As always we’ll be taking questions from the chat and live-streaming to Youtube (as well as PeerTube if we finally can get it to work). You can join us and ask questions in IRC, Discord, Matrix and Telegram all of which are bridged, so there is no excuse not to participate. We’ll remind you of the Q&A ahead of time and once again on the day but it is probably a good idea to put the date in your diary now. The event lasts an hour following which we usually hang out for another hour in the voice chat, which you’re also more than welcome to join. For those of you who won’t be able to make it, the unedited Q&A session will be available for viewing on Youtube, Peertube and Odyssee. I hope to see many of you there.

Lastly, PINE64 EU store has now received a complete hardware restock. As always, you can expect to see the PinePhone, Pinecil V2, PineTime, PinePower and other usual suspects available for purchase. This month the PinePhone (Pro) keyboard case is also making a return alongside the PinePhone + keyboard case bundle. The EU store will also be adding the PineBuds Pro to its assortment - these will be a permanent addition to the store’s repertoire moving forward. If you’re in the EU I encourage you to follow PINE64 EU on Twitter, Mastodon and Telegram for announcements and hardware availability information.

Newsflash [by Lukasz, Victor TC, William Starkey, and MC Server Hosting]

We’ve got a new release of R-Cade for the Rock64, RockPro64 and Pinebook Pro and the experience is downright amazing. I tested the recent build on the RockPro64 and it must be one of the most well-polished, easy to set up and feature complete retro-game emulation software out there. It also happens to be optimised for the Rock64 and RockPro64, which results in nearly flawless emulation of nearly all included systems. I tested PSP and Dreamcast on the RockPro64 and the vast majority of games ran at full speed. Needless to say, older systems won’t pose any problem on either the Rock64 or RockPro64 (I know from past experience that Nintendo64 emulation on the Rock64 is also great). This is really an incredible job by mrfixit. If you’re into retro-gaming and seek the best possible experience out there then consider R-Cade highly recommended (by me - a person a bit nuts about retro-games).

https://youtu.be/N4gIxeddzNg

A (very poor) video showcasing performance of R-Cade on the RockPro64 running Dreamcast and PSP

PineSAM is a new Pinecil Settings And Menus BLE app for the V2 from Builder555. It works on Linux/Mac/Windows and any browser, and can work from Android, iPhone, iPad. This open source python app runs locally on your pc/laptop, to contribute to the development effort click here. It works like this: to quickly get it onto a phone on the same network, open web address http://:8080/settings.html where <ip-address> is the local ip address of the computer running the python app. It is currently actively updated so please check for the newest version. PineSAM allows changing most settings without using the Pinecil screen. A live “Work view” is coming soon which shows active live temperatures, watts, and volts to make it convenient to solder while monitoring & changing temperatures with a larger phone screen. For safety reasons, you have to start heating with the [+] button on the Pinecil, but after that you could work in the BLE app on a phone or PC screen. See the Readme if you have any install issues, or open a github issue ticket; Pinecil chat channel may also be able to help. It usually takes just a few minutes to get installed and running.

The PineSAM application looks incredibly cool

SOQuartz patches for PCIe2, video output, gpu, HDMI sound were merged into mainline kernel 6.2. This is very good news not only for regular end-users but also corporate customers already using a SOQuartz or looking to pick up a SOQuartz for their particular use-case. We’ve seen a major increase in the interest in SOQuartz in recent months so I’m sure this piece of news will be well received. I should also mention that new releases for Quartz64 and SOQuartz are now available from Manjaro and DietPi. Unfortunately I don’t have any experience with either build, so cannot report on how well the respective OSes perform - if you’ve had experience with either then make sure to share your thoughts in the comments.

Quantumworks cluster

MC Server Hosting have been working with Kubernetes and Pine64’s Single Board Computers (SBCs) for some time. They have tested various solutions such as sigmaris’s pxe ready uboot builds, jaredmcneill’s UEFI for the Quartz & Soquartz, and initramfs hooks + Empourus magic for cluster booting, and are constantly impressed by the power and support of the community.

They write: “recently, we had the opportunity to try out the SoQuartz Blade. We were delighted to find that it includes PoE and comes with a stable Manjaro image with a kubernetes arm package, ready for testing Rook Ceph network storage. Although these devices are PCIe gen 2x1 with a gigabit port, they are more than sufficient for small home or office setups, and their low power consumption (~10 watts per blade) makes them an economical choice for lab testing. In fact, we believe that a set of these blades and two PoE switches could even handle a large cluster with the proper Crush Map. Our testing showed impressive performance, with Random and Sequential read/write speeds in an optimal range.

Replicated x2 RBD-NDB w/ osd using all cores

Random Read/Write IOPS: 3077/2335. BW: 117MiB/s / 71.2MiB/s

Average Latency (usec) Read/Write: 3871.43/1620.43

Sequential Read/Write: 115MiB/s / 64.6MiB/s

Mixed Random Read/Write IOPS: 3500/1175

In addition to mounting etcd for kubeadm and mon/mgr data on the NVMe drives, it is also possible to run the entire runtime of containers on these devices for a significant performance boost. This is particularly useful for applications and libraries that would otherwise be limited by the iops of the emmc/sdcard. Overall, we have found the SoQuartz Blade to be a great choice for setting up a cluster. You can even use etcdadm to run the core of your cluster on three of these blades.”

Browsing the official reddit I came across a pretty awesome looking Pinecil case and I believe that it is an evolution of an already existing case that I featured in a Newsflash section a few months ago. This one, however, from what I can tell is built more rugged and holds more gear: there is space for the USB-C cable, an integrated soldering iron holder which uses a bearing (super cool), space for two additional tips and the thingy to clean the iron. If you happen to have a 3D printer and are looking for a next project this one should be high up on your list. The STL files can be found here.

Rugged Pinecil case by Piotr Strog

For those of you who already own a pair of PineBuds Pro and have experienced issues with ANC in the left earbud - I’ve been told at FOSDEM that reflashing the stock firmware fixes the problem. This has been confirmed independently by a number of people at this point so can be considered an established fix. Instructions concerning flashing the firmware and all other pertinent information can be found on the documentation pages. As a side-note, work on the open firmware for the PineBuds Pro is steaming ahead and I’ve been told that it sounds great, so consider giving that a go if you don’t need ANC (which is still WIP on the open firmware)- it can be downloaded from here.

Someone created a USB-C charger for the PineTime. While I can’t necessarily see a reason for substituting the existing cradle for one which accepts USB-C, this is certainly a very cool project from a repairability perspective. That is to say, if your cradle breaks for whatever reason there now is a proof of concept for how one would go about creating a substitute charging solution. Check out the original post and discussion here.

Not sure what I make of this one - but it is undeniably cool - image by reddit user PleasentEnd7990

The OX64 has now been on the market for two months and it already is one of the best selling PINE64 devices. Who would have believed that an inexpensive Linux-capable RISC-V board would garner so much interest? Some early adopters have however complained that the OS flashing process is unclear and undocumented. One of the early adopters going by the handle Platima Tinkers has thankfully put in the effort to document the process in the form of a video. The 15 minute-long video is truly great and gives anyone already owning or interested in getting the Ox64 a crash-course in getting it up-and-running. I am including the video below for your benefit.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Instructions on flashing Linux on Ox64 by Platima Tinkers

On the subject of Ox64, there has been significant progress on porting Linux to the 0x64 since our last update. Several drivers have been added, and we’re getting closer to having the 0x64 as a viable linux device for your projects every day. A buildroot configuration has been made, enabling easy creation of images to flash to the 0x64. Linux drivers have been added for the SD card slot, removing the tight storage space limitations of the spi flash, and we have basic drivers for GPIO and parts of the hardware cryptographic acceleration. Outside of Linux, we have managed to get code running on the LP core for the first time, quite a feat since that core isn’t even properly supported by the official SDK yet. The official SDK has also been updated recently along with new documentation released, making the BL808 an even better MCU platform.

Lastly, since we’ve been asked countless times about when the 65W portable GAN PinePower will be back in stock, I’d like to point out to everyone reading that the redesigned PSU is now available in the Pine Store. It comes with adapters for all regions and fixes a key problem with the original - namely, it no longer falls off from your wall socket, which was an issue for US customers. You can pick one up here if you’re interested.

PineTab2

Let’s start with the big news which many of you have been waiting for - pricing and expected availability. The PineTab2 will be available in two hardware configurations: with 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM and 64GB eMMC flash and 8GB LPDDR4 RAM and 128GB eMMC flash storage. The 4GB/64GB version will be priced at USD $159 and the 8GB/128GB version at USD $209. Aside from the RAM and storage configuration both versions are identical and come with the detachable keyboard by default. The PineTab2 hardware review finished earlier this month and we expect that both hardware versions will be available simultaneously in the Pine Store - likely sometime in April. Obviously there is much that can go wrong during production (as it has with many devices in the past) and delay the delivery date so please consider this availability window tentative at the time being. Marek or I will notify you in the event of any setbacks and obviously also once a precise launch date has been set.

Here’s a picture of the PineTab2 FOSDEM demo

I covered all core hardware specifications of the PineTab2 in the last community update of last year, so this month I’ll instead focus on sharing my impressions of the hardware, now that I’ve had some proper hands-on time with it. If you’ve missed the last community update then I encourage you to read it before continuing with this section. At the start of February I spent the better part of two days with the PineTab2 at FOSDEM demoing it for other people and showcasing its features. You’d be surprised how much you can learn something while being put in a position of showcasing it to others. This is in part because people are interested in different aspects of the device - so my attention was drawn to things I’d otherwise overlook - and partly because explaining things to others forces one to explore a device in-depth in anticipation of inbound questions. I therefore feel I’ve got a more complete picture of the device than I usually do after only having short hands-on time with it.

Mandatory disclosure first: my experience is based on a pre-production prototype and anything and everything I share in the post below is subject to change. With that out of the way, here is what I can say with the PineTab2: for starters, the hardware’s construction is truly next-level. I don’t want to give you a false impression that the PineTab2 is impeccable or somehow on par with the fruit tablet for this isn’t the case, but it is certainly the most refined PINE64-branded Linux device thus far. The metal construction in conjunction with the fused tempered glass LCD panel results in a very robust and sturdy build that I cannot see anyone complaining about. There’s no creaking, no bending, no rough edges and there’s no doubt in my head that the PineTab2 could easily be passed off as a device twice the price. I should also mention that the finishing on the metal and the assembly fit is downright perfect.

As for the rest of the construction - the rear camera cut-out is unobtrusive, sits flush with the case and is covered by tempered glass. The power-in USB-C and OTG USB-C ports offer a nice positive fit when a cable is inserted; there is no looseness or cable-wiggle to speak of and the ports are clearly labeled. The power and volume up and volume down buttons don’t have much travel but offer a satisfying actuation feedback when pressed. I honestly haven’t noticed the front-facing camera under the bezel so I have nothing to report about it, perhaps aside from the fact that you’re also likely not to notice it either (which is a good thing in my book). The bezels around the LCD aren’t super thin by any stretch of the imagination but they are certainly not thick or obtrusive either. I find them perfectly adequate and obviously a massive improvement over the original PineTab’s design.

Close up picture of PineTab2 ports - via Jozef Mlich

The LCD panel does get both bright at the highest setting and very dim at the lowest setting, although, in the very brightly lit corridor where our stand was located, it was a bit difficult to judge the actual brightness levels. It is less bright than my 2020 Pinebook Pro at max settings (these early Pinebook Pros had very bright screens) but at 75-to-100% brightness I think you’ll get work done in very bright environments without any issue. I can’t speak to the dimmest setting because I only tested the device in very bright conditions; at 10% brightness, in a bright daylit room, the image was very dim. The LCD offers very good viewing angles and natural or perhaps even slightly muted colors. I need to once again underline that I had my hands-on prototype and that the LCD’s cool color reproduction may have been down to this particular unit’s calibration, the software settings, my objective perception or something entirely different. What I can say is that the display’s color reproduction did seem cool to my eyes.

I won’t be able to tell you anything about the PineTab2’s audio because, despite getting it working on the second day of FOSDEM, the venue at the conference was so loud that even a high-end laptop would be barely audible on the premises. But what I can say is that the sound now works - I’ll speak more on software further down in the text.

The other critical part of the PineTab2 is the keyboard which doubles up as a protective cover. I am happy to report that, similarly to the device itself, it is constructed really well. It is sturdy, the keys have a lot more travel than you’d think, the trackpad works well and attaching / detaching the keyboard from the PineTab2 is a seamless experience (thanks to the USB 2.0 protocol on the pogo pins). The backlight has two brightness settings and works well too - although, admittedly, I haven’t had an opportunity to test it in a dim environment. The backlight is visible in a well lit room so one stands to reason that it will be perfectly legible in the dark too. The keyboard is nearly as heavy as the actual tab, or at least so it feels. The reason for this is the construction of the stand which is a solid piece of metal attached to a solid metal hinge. When open, the PineTab2 isn’t going anywhere - the stand’s construction is rock solid. There is a cutout for the rear camera and all buttons and IO are unobstructed when the device is mounted in its case. The last things I’d like to mention about the keyboard are: it doesn’t feel particularly cramped, the material it is made of has a nice soft-touch feel to it and it holds the PineTab2 securely in place.

**Being the genius that I am, I completely forgot to take pictures of PineTab2’s rear - you can kind-of make out from the picture above
**

The other important component of the PineTab2 is obviously its software. Here too I have good news to report. At FOSDEM we demoed a custom build of Arch with KDE Plasma Desktop and I’d describe the experience as very positive, especially given that Danct12 didn’t exactly have much time to generate the demo build. To be precise, there are currently only three ‘significant’ things that do not work: USB3.0 (it is being actively investigated), cameras and Bluetooth. The USB3.0 not working is a bit of a mystery, but it will be worked out in the end, the cameras will take time to implement as they have on the PinePhone and PinePhone Pro, and finally the Bluetooth functionality will require some driver-work. I need to mention that we can thank Segfault, DieselNutJob, Danct12, Neggles, as well as many other contributors who previously worked on Quartz64 and SOQuartz for the relative maturity of the software even before launch.

I’d describe interacting with the desktop environment as a good experience and on par with the Pinebook Pro or a higher-end Single Board Computers. It is certainly good enough for terminal tasks or running an office suite for work, browsing the web, watching local or online videos, playing FOSS or retro-games and even light photo editing in GIMP. For practical reasons we ran the OS from an SD card at FOSDEM, which resulted in slow(ish) opening of applications and it certainly also had a negative impact on application’s performance, in particular if said application requires frequently loading assets from or caching to storage. From my experience with the PinePhone (Pro) and Pinebook Pro, I expect that the performance will be greatly increased by running the OS from inbuilt flash.

This is the demo build that we were running at the stall

Despite being in use all the time, for hours on end, and being continually charged and discharged, not to mention having the LCD brightness set to 75-100% for much of the time, at no point did I experience the PineTab2 getting hot or even excessively warm. In all fairness, no one fired up a taxing application or a complicated benchmark on the demo machine but hundreds of people toyed with the PineTab2 at the booth, and a handful of applications ran open at all times. I cannot see thermals being an issue on the PineTab2.

In summary, the PineTab2 is in all likelihood the most refined PINE64 Linux device yet and one that will offer a moderately mature software experience out of the box for early adopters. I suspect that the PineTab2 will prove a very popular device and I hope that the remaining software quirks will be ironed out and missing features will be added swiftly; perhaps even before it ships. I am personally very much looking forward to the PineTab2 as it is exactly the type of device I am currently in need of. I’ll make sure to keep you updated on any and all PineTab2 news in the coming weeks as we get closer to the launch window.

Star64

We were thrilled to be able to demo the Star64 running desktop Linux at FOSDEM. Ayufan, one of our longest-standing contributors whom many of you will recognize from his work on the Pine A64(+), the Rock64, Pinebook Pro and RockPro64 (just to mention a notable few) managed to put together a demo build of Debian with XFCE for our stall. I should also mention that he put the build together in a record time, in about a week, and managed to set it up on-the-spot on the day of the first day of the conference. The demoed build was fairly rudimentary, in terms of both scope and function, but nonetheless it achieved its core goal: it showed off full-blown Linux running on the RISC-V SoC beating at the heart of the Star64. The setup was pretty cool, featuring a 1080p touch panel which worked remarkably well, as well as a more traditional keyboard and mouse input. I’d say that bar the PineTab2 and some of the very popular devices - i.e. the Pinecil V2 and PineTime - the Star64 was one of the most closely scrutinized pieces of hardware at the stall.

Here’s ayufan setting up the demo live :)

People were able to browse the web in Firefox (WiFi works), edit documents in LibreOffice, poke around in the terminal and do a wide-variety of simple desktop-oriented tasks. Many were impressed by the board despite some of the sluggishness caused by software rendering and running the operating system from a SD card, which resulted in long loading times. To many I spoke with, this was the first time they saw Linux running competently on a sub $100 RISC-V development board. I should also mention that the demo ran remarkably stable throughout the two days, with people opening dozens of Firefox tabs, attempting to find and install applications they use (a bit more on this later) and stressing the system. I think that the hacky and cobbled-together build only crashed twice over the course of the two days.

As cool as this is, there isn’t a way to sugarcoat it, and it needs to be said the Linux experience on the platform is in its early stages. Indeed, Linux really is in its infancy on the RISC-V. And I’m not even talking about complicated things, such as driver-work or enablement of some particular kind - I am talking about Firefox not being present in the stock Debian repo and having to be installed in a round-about way or compiled from source. Alas, interacting with the Star64, as cool as it is, reminds me of running Linux on Arm in 2013-2016. It is instantly apparent that much work is still needed for parity to be achieved with other Linux-capable platforms. All this may sound like I am being negative about Star64 or RISC-V but nothing could be further from the truth - let me explain.

For Linux to truly take off and grow on RISC-V there is a need for easily accessible and affordable hardware. Unlike other full-blown SBCs in our stables - most of which can be used by businesses, enthusiasts and regular end-users out-of-the-box - the Star64’s purpose, at least presently, is to lower the entry barrier to obtaining a competent RISC-V development platform. I see it as an important platform for developers already interested in RISC-V wishing to explore the architecture. No matter the product, be it a pie, pencil set or a piece of electronics hardware, there are always three fundamental conditions that need to be satisfied to drive adoption: 1) an existing customer interest or a gap in the market; 2) ability to deliver abundant availability of the product and 3) fair pricing making said product accessible. I think I don’t need to convince you that there is an existing interest in the RISC-V platform already, but what I do want to underline is that we’re committed to Star64 and will strive to make it an amazing value-proposition that anyone can pick up.

Star64 running Debian with XFCE desktop at FOSDEM

Finally, I am happy to let you all know that Star64 has finally completed its review and entered production. I do not have a firm availability date to share just yet, but you can expect units from the initial production run to become available at the end of March or beginning of April. I will, of course, make sure that those of you aching to get their hands on our first RISC-V board get notified of availability.

PinePhone (Pro) [by Lukasz & Biktorgj]

It has now been quite some time since I had a chance to report on the PinePhone and PinePhone Pro, and boy oh boy has there been much work done on both devices in the past two months. I should also mention that I learned of some developments in-person at FOSDEM. As a side-note, it was amazing to see so many people approach our stall, pull out their device and share their (overwhelmingly positive) stories of using the PinePhone or PinePhone Pro. The last time I attended FOSDEM was in 2020, when the volume of PinePhones was still relatively low and I had not been to a conference since, so it was truly a humbling experience to see so many PinePhone and PinePhone Pro owners gathered in one venue.

Before I get down to reporting about the software developments on the actual PinePhone and PinePhone Pro devices, I first want to cover developments concerning the PinePhone (Pro) keyboard case. Many of you will be thrilled to learn that Megi released version 1.3 of his open firmware. The firmware brings a massive improvement to the phone’s battery life when connected to the keyboard - to be precise, the new firmware brings a 30 fold reduction of power consumption, thereby extending the theoretical standby time from 23 days to nearly 1.8 years. Megi explains that previously a bug caused the MCU to “(…)never [get] to that original 9 mW powerdown mode power consumption level […] and it was just constantly consuming 20 mW. This was the cause of unexpectedly fast battery draining.” He concludes his post by writing that it is now possible to leave the phone connected to the keyboard without worrying about the phone’s battery draining - at least not in a tangible or meaningful way and under normal use. You can read the detailed post here; the post also details how to upgrade your PinePhone (Pro) keyboard with firmware 1.3.

Staying with Megi’s development (b)log just for a second longer, I should also mention that Kernel 6.1, which has found its way into some of the more popular PinePhone (Pro) OSes, brought a fix to the PinePhone Pro’s LCD display. The display now runs at the correct 60Hz whilst in the past it was limited to a suboptimal 53Hz refresh-rate. Speaking from experience, the 53Hz refresh-rate caused a variety of problems including but not limited to stuttering, which was evident even in the system UI. Ultimately this made the phone feel more sluggish. Megi’s Kernel 6.1 also brought an integration of the power manager for the PinePhone (Pro) keyboard. This driver has a handful of improvements in its newest iteration, including better battery power reporting and higher power efficiency. The phone now uses the keyboard’s battery directly without needlessly having to recharge the phone’s internal battery first. Megi’s newest kernel also brings a number of other smaller improvements, which I invite and encourage you to read about on the author’s blog.

In other welcome software news, the PinePhone Pro has now received support from Libcamera. While the application is certainly at an earlier stage than Megapixels on the PinePhone Pro, it does look extremely promising. With the PinePhone Pro’s camera sensor drivers now being upstreamed, and expected in mainstream kernel 6.3, support for the device has been merged in v0.0.4 of Libcamera. The application apparently features colour correction (which, to my eyes, is very evident on the rear camera) and either already has or soon will incorporate auto-focus. For those of you who wish to give it a spin you can now install the application on Mobian - I do not know whether other OSes have it already available in their repos. Ultimately, it is nice to have options, and whilst Megapixels is undeniably a great project I can see some end-users eventually settling for using Libcamera on their PinePhone Pro. In summary, Libcamera looks very promising and I am happy to see so much development happen around the PinePhone Pro’s cameras in such a short period of time.

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Video of Libcamera on the PinePhone Pro via Libramera’s Youtube

Another development worth highlighting concerns Apache NuttX being ported to the PinePhone by Lup Yuen. For those of you who may not be in-the-know, NuttX is a RTOS system - primarily used on microcontrollers - which places an emphasis on standard compliance and a small footprint. The latter of which is highly beneficial to the original PinePhone, which benefits from running light-weight OSes. I haven’t had the opportunity to try out the OS myself but from the few glimpses I caught of it I’ve been impressed by the fact that the screen and touch input seem already to work. Lup has publicly stated that, at present, NuttX isn’t an alternative to Linux on the PinePhone, since many drivers are still missing and hence the functionality of the device is very limited. He does, however, see the value of the port for educational purposes. Regardless of whether NuttX will see further development, growth and eventual adoption, I must say that it is nice to see yet another FOSS operating system on the phone.

NuttX running on the PinePhone - photo from Lup Yuen’s blog

At FOSDEM I caught the first glimpse of Ubuntu Touch on the PinePhone Pro. Indeed, our friends from UBports borrowed a unit for the purpose of demoing the build at their stall. I had the opportunity to toy around with the demo at UBports stall and I was very impressed with what I saw. The performance of the PinePhone Pro running Ubuntu Touch is indistinguishable from other mid-to-high-tier that were on display. To say that it runs Ubuntu Touch well is an understatement: the UI is perfectly responsive, applications launch fast (running from internal flash) and all this atop of mainline with open source GPU drivers. From what I could tell WiFi, Bluetooth and even the modem were all recognized on the current build - although I don’t have a complete overview of how (in)complete the demoed build is. Speaking of the build,I should also note that presently this isn’t an official port nor is it known whether UBports expect to keep on working on the device, although I certainly hope so since what I experienced was very promising to say the least. I captured a quick video, which I am including below.

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Ubuntu Touch on the PinePhone Pro - how awesome is that?

Just in the past 2 days we’ve seen the release of a new Manjaro beta (version 29) for both the PinePhone and PinePhone Pro. Most notably, the new build brings Megi’s kernel 6.1, some of the benefits of which I described earlier in this text section. I’ve given the Beta a go on my PinePhone Pro and must say I was very impressed with the out-of-the box experience. In particular, for the first time I had no issues with plugging in the device, with the keyboard case connected to a dock and having all peripherals, including an external high-DPI monitor, just work. I feel that the PinePhone Pro has really received a lot of development in the past two months, which consequently has brought it much closer to feature parity with the original PinePhone, and Manjaro’s latest build truly manages to illustrate the scale and breadth of development. You can download the most recent Beta build here.

I should also mention that, similarly to Manjaro, a number of other OSes have received updates in the past few weeks, including DanctNix’s Arch, postmarketOS as well as Mobian. I haven’t had the opportunity to test out all these builds, although I did install Mobian to try out Librecamera earlier this month, but I believe that all of them have now moved to Megi’s kernel 6.1.X which I already discussed. That is to say, most if not all the aforementioned OSes should now have a 60Hz refresh on the PinePhone Pro and the keyboard case driver optimizations. It is also worth noting that postmarketOS has received an update to SXMO, which is now on 1.13.0 release and includes a number of improvements and refinements.

I would be remiss not to highlight some of the work that Adam Pigg and contributors have done on the PinePhone (Pro) SailfishOS port. I should also add that this is the nth year in the row that the PinePhone port of SaiflishOS tops the chart of unofficially supported devices - much thanks to the ongoing work which I’m about to highlight. SailfishOS now has support for both the keyboard case and both cameras. Adam demoed the camera and keyboard functionality recently and from the looks of it both are very functional on the operating system. The Pinhole camera application even offers support for different pixel formats and resolutions. Late last month I was also told that telephony on SaifishOS is now in a good state on the PinePhone - which includes receiving inbound calls when the device is suspended. Overall, I think it is fair to say that SailfishOS on the PinePhone is shaping up really well and that it may become a daily-driver candidate sooner rather than later. Wrapping up this section, I should also note that a new build of Nemo Mobile,which is based on SailfishOS, has recently become available. I do not know how much of the work on the SailfishOS port carried over to Nemo mobile, but I’d be very glad to hear about your experience with this operating system on the PinePhone.

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SailfishOS now works with the keyboard case and the camera works too! - via Adam Pigg’s Twitter

Lastly, I need to mention Biktorgj’s work on the PinePhone (Pro) modem. The recent testing release in the version 0.7.3 of biktorgj’s PinePhone Modem SDK allows the modem’s userspace to connect directly to the Internet even when the PinePhone is suspended. It is the biggest release of the PinePhone Modem SDK yet. I’ll let Biktor explain what this means in practice: “This week I released a new firmware update for the Pinephone (and Pro) modem. I’ve had a lot of fun coding this, and while it isn’t perfect (and has a small yet annoying bug that will be fixed soon), it gives new options to both users and tinkerers: 1) the ability to keep your network a bit more under control and 2) support for connecting to the internet from the modem’s userspace, and then use the modem as a router.

Tracking your network: the modem can now periodically read the current network data, save all the data provided by the baseband about it to disk (so you can later examine it, put it into a database etc.) and check that data against the OpenCellid database, and even shut itself down if it connects to a cell that it doesn’t know about. While it’s not foolproof against a modern IMSI Catcher, it can warn you and take action if it finds something out of the ordinary, which is already way more than what any other phone can provide.

Internet on the modem itself: one of the big problems with notifications in the Pinephone is that when it suspends, the only way to wake it up again is from a call, a message or from a button press. Having the data session running directly from the modem’s userspace allows it to stay always on regardless if the Pinephone is awake or sleeping. This first version is basically a PoC to allow us to know what else we need to fix, but the idea is to try to integrate something like UnifiedPush into the firmware… but that will be a story for when it’s all done and working”. These features obviously bring some incredible possibilities down-the line and I cannot wait to see how the community can make them work to the advantage of us all.

Pinetime [by JF]

This year, I attended both days of FOSDEM (4th and 5th of February) and it was a nice opportunity to meet TL, Lukasz and Gamie from PINE64, as well as many PINE64 community members and users. With me I brought a few Pinetimes flashed with InfiniTime 1.11 FOSDEM Special Edition (this special edition displays the FOSDEM logo as a background for the Digital and Analog watchfaces) to showcase them at the PINE64 stand.

FOSDEM special edition watchface

To be honest, I did not expect the PineTime to have so much success on the stand, knowing that it was competing with other PINE64 devices shown (PinePhone, PinePhonePro, many SBCs, Pinecil, SoQuartz Blade,…) and 2 great demos - the PineTab2 and Star64!

I spent most of the time at the PINE64 stand. I had the opportunity to meet many visitors, users, community members and even some developers working on multiple projects around the PineTime and InfiniTime, most of them proudly wearing their own PineTime on their wrist! If someone had told me in 2019, when the project started, that I would see so much PineTimes in one place I wouldn’t have believed it.

So many PineTimes at one table!

The feedback was very interesting - we talked about the history of the project, use-cases I would’ve never imagined, new features that could be added to the project, how we would like to see the project evolve, and much more. In many cases, feedback was very positive, and I would like to pass all the ’thank you’ and ‘congratulations’ I received those 2 days to everyone involved in working on the PineTime and InfiniTime!

Let’s continue this update with some news related to InfiniTime and the PineTime ecosystem!

We haven’t released a new version of InfiniTime for some time now. This is mostly due to me having not so much time to dedicate to the project right now. We also want to focus a bit more on the maintenance of the project - to add more automations, refactor some parts of the code, optimize the memory usage and more. But that obviously doesn’t mean that nothing happens in InfiniTime. Indeed, more than 30 pull-requests have already been merged in the development branch since last release. Among other things, you can expect better battery level monitoring and a few UI improvements in the next version. We are also reviewing changes that will improve the heart rate measurement, the addition of weather information in PineTimeStyle, and many other things that might be reviewed and merged in the future!

I’m happy to announce that we now have a Windows companion app! TailyFair started working on InfiniWindows since they couldn’t find any solution that would work for them on Windows. I really hope this project will grow and become a part of the PineTime ecosystem!

Watchmate allows you to flash firmware onto your PineTime

The PineTime has always been intended to be a hackable smartwatch, and Joaquim proved to us that it’s true with this amazing project. Joaquim, who has already contributed to InfiniTime especially with a nice overhaul of the UI, designed a replacement board for the PineTime based around the NRF52840 microcontroller. It provides more performance and memory than the NRF52832 from the original board. He also developed a custom firmware that runs on this board which looks really great. Have a look at the video he published on his website!

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PineTime with nRF52840 board running Joaquim’s firmware - pretty awesome!

That’s it for this month, catch you all in March!

December Update: Merry Christmas and Happy New PineTab

Thu, 15 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Merry Christmas, happy holidays and a Happy New Year to you all. This month’s update has a different formula from the usual - aside from the announcement of the PineTab2, most of this month’s content is dedicated to looking back at this year and taking a sneak peak at what’s to come in 2023. I think that if you read between the lines, even poorly, you’ll get a good idea of what we’ll be up to next year.

We have a lot of ground to cover in this update so let’s get to it.

I’d like to thank Alex (clover), Gamiee, Danct12, Pillow, Thanos, Immy and PizzaLovingNerd for their contributions to this community update.

N.B. Comments on the blog post need to be in English and follow our Community Rules and Code of Conduct.

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Video synopsis of the December community update

TL;DR

Housekeeping
- Thank you for 2022 everyone!
- November community Q&A is now on Youtube and Odysee if you missed it
- We’ve got a FOSDEM 2023 stall - we’re on the floor both days, come and see us
- Work on the new website is coming along
- PINE64 EU store restock before Christmas
- We’ve had an incident in #off-topic channel - we’re on it and working towards better moderation of all chats
Newsflash
- Star64 launch delayed due to review; striving to make it available before CNY
- Ox64 among the fastest selling PINE64 hardware
- Pillow has done much work on the Quartz64, SOQuartz and QuartzPro64 in the past month; much work has gone into mainlining and critical bug fixes - significant progress
- Much Pinecil V2 news and showcases: new Pinecil V2’s ship with firmware v2.20, Bluetooth functionality casting telemetry to computer, transparent Pinecil mod with LEDs, a nice 3D printed carry case and more
- New DietPi release brings many important improvements to the Quartz64 and SOQuartz
A look back at 2022
- A review of the year 2022 with an explanation of its significance moving forward: launch of the PinePhone Pro and keyboard case; introduction of the QuartzPro64 for devs; launch of Pinecil V2 and PineBuds Pro; and finally our first RISC-V SBCs
2023 sneak peek
- A look at where PINE64 and in the year 2023 and beyond: focus on RISC-V alongside Arm with potential RISC-V based hardware in the coming year
PineTab2
- An explanation of what happened with the original PineTab; in a nutshell, it fell victim to pandemic and post-pandemic production issues and other project priorities
- Sports a metal case which is easy to disassemble for repair and hardware hacking
- Features the RK3566 - a great SoC for a tablet due to low power consumption and low thermals
- Two USB-C ports - USB 3.0 other USB 2.0 speeds and dedicated for charging; micro HDMI port for video output; microSD slot & headphone jack; a 2MPx and 5MPx camera
- Will be available in 2 configurations: 8GB RAM / 128GB flash & and 4GB RAM / 64GB flash storage
- Launch and price point not known yet - expected sometime after CNY
- Dev units available soon (prior to CNY)
PinePhone (Pro)
- Major SailfishOS developments; sensors now work properly as does audio and calls work
- Expectation that receiving calls in suspend will be possible soon on SailfishOS
- Megi’s newest kernel brings countless improvements; improvements includes 60hz refresh for PinePhone Pro, complete CSI driver rewrite and DRM improvements on OG PinePhone
- Better support for the PinePhone (Pro) keyboard case
- Kali Linux launches Nethunter Pro with official support for both the PinePhone and PinePhone Pro

Housekeeping

I’d like to start by thanking Marek (Gamiee) for his incredible work in the past year steering this project. Marek has done an incredible job taking over from me and I see how much thought and heart he puts into this community. We also need to thank Matthew (fire219) and all the moderators for maintaining our communications channels and keeping the community orderly. We all also much acknowledge the work by contributors and our partner projects - without them and their hard work there would be no PINE64. I also want to express gratitude to those working on the community update each month - in particular PizzaLovingNerd, Alex (Clover) and JF. You’ve all done an amazing job this year. Last but certainly not least I also want to thank all of you who support us - your support for the project and, by extension, the Pine Store is what pushes us to explore new avenues, create new hardware and foster a great community. Thank you everyone for 2022.

We had a great Q&A session in November with countless questions being asked and answered. Thank you to everyone who joined us in the chats, asked questions and listened-in on Youtube and the Discord stage. I think that the Q&A is a really great way for the community to come together and interact with people shaping the project. I am aware that we ran out of time and some questions remained unanswered at the end of the event. And I know this isn’t the first time it happened. This leads me to think that it may be a good idea to make the Q&A session a bit longer to accommodate more questions - although, there is a limit to how long Marek and I can talk aloud and provide focused answers. I am also considering allowing people to post questions in the chat a day or two prior to Q&A. Feedback regarding these ideas is welcome - after all, this session is meant to benefit you. So please leave your thoughts on the Q&A and how to make it a better event for the community in the comment section below. It is a bit early to plan the next Q&A right now but it will be held at some point either in late February or early March next year.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

November community Q&A live recording

We got a stall at FOSDEM! I cannot overstate how happy to once again attend the event in-person, meet members of our community and man the stall. We have a huge number of things prepared for the meetup and there is at least one important announcement we’ll be making on February 4th. Mark the date in your diary. If you are in Europe and able to travel then make sure to pop by our stall and say hello - there’ll be plenty of gear to check out and discuss. The exact location of the PINE64 stall hasn’t been made available yet on FOSDEM’s website but I suspect that by January 15th and the next community update. I have also been toying with the idea of live-streaming or recording videos from the stall so that people from the community who cannot travel can virtually ‘visit’ check out some of the things we’ll be showcasing. What do you make of this idea? - let me know in the comments.

Work on the new PINE64 community website is ongoing and, while we don’t really have an ETA for the new page’s launch, it is shaping up really nicely thanks to the work by a handful of community contributors, including Vincent who’s in charge of layout and assets. I am including a few snapshots below so you get a general sense of where the redesign is heading; the new website will focus on the community, giving this blog more of an exposure and allowing quick and easy access to all available documentation as well as chats and forums. I also hope to have some sort of exposure of community projects - perhaps something to the effect of the #community-content channel or the newsflash section in this blog. I really like the direction this website rework is heading and will be bringing you more updates on it in the near future.

A peek at the new website (work in progress)

PINE64 EU is receiving restock shipments soon. I am mentioning it in this month’s update for two reasons: i) it may take time for the shipments to clear customs due to the high volume of work at both the customs and the proxy customs agencies. It usually takes 7-9 days for a shipment to clear customs (following the mandatory harmonization process) but this time it may take much longer. Regardless, I hope stock will be received before the holidays ii) Shipments during the holiday season and in the weeks following it may take longer to arrive at their destinations - just a heads up. To stay up-to-date, follow the EU store’s Mastodon, Twitter and Telegram news channels.

Lastly, I want to spend a few lines explaining the situation regarding a temporary closure of the #off-topic chat, the consequences of the closure and what steps we’ll be taking in the coming weeks to deal with the situation. The #off-topic chat was temporarily closed by Matthew (fire219) due to an - apparently on-going - clash between multiple members of the community. Let’s just say that some of the topics discussed in #off-topic (which should have never been discussed in the first place) led to very heated discourse. Internally this raised a question of whether the current code of conduct is sufficient for consequential moderation and if we should create a moderation guideline for the mods. People from different walks of the internet and of various sensitivities have been employed to help craft better community guidelines and patch holes in the existing code of conduct. I want everyone to know that we’ll be taking steps to make the community free of unnecessary conflict by working towards a more active and balanced non-intrusive moderation. The #off-topic channel has now been reopened for everyone to enjoy non-PINE64 specific conversations.

NewsFlash [by Lukasz and Pillow]

Let me start by writing a few words about Star64. Last month I warned everyone that there is a very real possibility of delays in production of the PineBuds Pro, Ox64 and Star64. While the delays of the PineBuds Pro and Ox64 were relatively minor the delay of the Star64 may be considerably longer. To be clear, the Pine Store is still very intent on releasing the board prior to the Chinese New Year (which starts on January 22) but a firm release date isn’t known as of yet. At this point the board is undergoing an additional review process and, due to various external reasons, it is hard to predict with complete certainty when the review will be finished. I’ll update you on social media when more information is available.

The Ox64 is now one of if not the fastest selling PINE64 SBC. To be fair I don’t really remember nor have direct access to the data of other other popular SBC launches, but this is certainly a really good start with strong community interest in the device. The December batch sold out very fast but rest assured that more Ox64s are on the way and a restock is currently scheduled for January of next year, before CNY. I am looking forward to hearing people’s early impressions from the first Ox64 boards.

The past month Pillow has been busy mainlining some more SOQuartz devicetree bits. GPU, HDMI (including audio) and PCIe should work starting with kernel 6.2. Based on work neggles has done, Pillow also mainlined the device trees for the “Blade” and “Model A” baseboards for the SOQuartz. This work should also be in kernel 6.2, which is currently in its merge window phase. wifasoi from the PINE64 chats is working on a driver for the GP7101 PWM controller that controls the fan speed on the SOQuartz Blade. Pillow is working on a set of automatically generated Debian-based live OS images for the Quartz64 range of devices including the SOQuartz. More information about these builds will be available when they’re ready for public use. The goal is to provide a smooth out of the box experience for Quartz64 devices.

For the QuartzPro64’s RK3588, Pillow’s work to make audio output work on it was merged for the 6.2 release cycle. The changes needed were minimal as the I2S controller hardware is mostly the same as the RK3566 one. Attempts to get USB 2.0 to work ran into weird issues with the SoC locking up when it touched the right registers at the wrong time. There’s probably some power management or clock gating stuff missing from the mainline kernel at this stage, so it was put off for later. As for what other people have been doing, Collabora has been incredibly busy getting the mainline kernel into shape for RK3588. This includes basic SoC support, power regulators, and so forth. They’re also working on Mali G610 GPU support both in the kernel and in upstream mesa. neggles has also written a basic mainline targeted QuartzPro64 device tree that hasn’t been submitted upstream yet. As for u-boot, we’re still relying on vendor u-boot and closed-source TF-A and ram init binaries there.

Some awesome initial work on Pinecil V2 Bluetooth has been showcased earlier this month by Joric. Joric’s video shows Pinecil V2 connecting via Bluetooth to a PC and projecting key stats in a browser. This is a much requested feature and one that holds a promise of much more functionality in the future. River has also uploaded a video - of what I imagine is a newer build of the web app - which casts the temperature on a graph alongside Wattage, Voltage and even the handle’s temperature. At present this web application serves effectively as a large display for the Pinecil V2 projecting all the telemetry on a large screen, but it doesn’t allow for any control input. This, however, may be a feature in the future.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Video showcasing the Pinecil V2 connected to a PC via BT - via Joric

The newest batch of Pinecil V2 (now in production) will ship with firmware v2.20 and its numerous improvements. Aside from a fair collection of bug fixes it also includes Cold Junction Calibration which was reworked - it now takes place on each boot when the device is cold. Moreover, it also comes with a language pack, which covers most major European languages. If you already own a Pinecil V2 then this is a firmware to look forward to - you can read the complete release notes here.

We’ll be staying on the subject of the Pinecil for just a second longer, since I want to highlight two more Pinecil-related user projects. The first of which is a highly modified Pinecil V2 - as you can tell from the attached picture, u/malimaru added two LEDs to the device - one in the front and one in the back of the transparent case. This obviously doesn’t really improve the iron’s usability - if anything, it may be quite distracting I imagine - but it sure does look pretty awesome.

**Blink blink - via reddit
**

The second Pinecil maker project that caught my attention is a carry case designed by a community member by going by the handle u/Pegor. To date I’ve seen countless carry cases crafted for the Pinecil, many of which are 3D printed, but this particular design stood out to me from the crowd due to its elegant simplicity. Unlike many cases which aim to pack as much functionality as possible into a very confined space, this carry case is just and only that - a carry case. You can pack the iron and a tip of your choice and that’s it (perhaps a cable would fit too - although I’m not sure). The lid is held in place with magnets and features a nifty PINE64 pine cone logo. I’d really like to have one to be honest - so if you have a 3D printer, some spare time and will be attending FOSDEM, then print it for me and I’ll trade you something cool in return for it. For those interested in this case, u/Pegor uploaded the STL files here.

**I really like the look of this Pinecil carry case - via reddit
**

DietPi now offers significantly improved support for Quartz64. The most recent release of the popular SBC OS ships with Linux 6.1.0-rc1 which features support for model-B onboard WiFI. Moreover, the build comes with mainline u-boot which resolves issues with certain types of SD cards as well as eMMC modules. An issue which caused Docker to fail to start has also been resolved - the issue was caused by missing support for a BPF cgroup. If you’re already running DietPi on your Quartz64 then this is a release well worth upgrading to; you can read the complete release notes for DietPi v8.11 here.

A look back at 2022

January saw the launch of both the PinePhone Pro and the PinePhone (Pro) keyboard case. As far as PINE64 devices go, there haven’t been many hardware launches that drew this much attention from the press and the Linux community as that of the Pro version of our Linux smartphone and the accompanying keyboard case. I think it will go down as one of the biggest and most well-managed launches that the Pine Store and PINE64 community executed. The PinePhone Pro and the keyboard case have become very popular and, judging from community feedback and the ongoing development (see this month’s PinePhone (Pro) section), these devices bring end-users and developers not only challenges but also joy of use. The PinePhone Pro will remain the flagship PINE64 mainline-based smartphone for a long time to come and I am thrilled to see so much work and development that gradually matures the software on the platform. I hope and trust that by the end of 2023 the PinePhone Pro will reach software parity with the original PinePhone.

March saw the introduction of the QuartzPro64 development board, the first board in our lineup to feature the RK3588 SoC. As a platform the RK3588 may prove to be an important Arm SoC for PINE64 and one that, in time, will find its way into our range of devices. At present, the decision was made to release the QuartzPro64 to developers only. The rationale behind this is to take it slow and explore the silicon and its possibilities. We wanted to get a sense of the SoC and its characteristics prior to settling on a future Pro-grade SoC; while the RK3588 may seem like a natural continuation from the RK3399 nothing is written in stone as of today. We’ll keep working on and with the RK3588 while keeping our options open.

As I stated at the end of last year, we wanted to make 2022 all about smaller and perhaps less ambitious undertakings than phones and laptops. As exciting as such flagship devices are, their development is a major undertaking, which in turn requires time, resources and complete commitment to this particular hardware. A major hardware project is, in a sense, all-consuming and frequently dominates the direction of the project for months or even an entire year. Therefore 2022 was meant as a way for us to reset our headspace and explore other fun side projects that have been shelved for some time. One such project are the PineBuds Pro, which were introduced as a part of this year’s April fools joke. The buds landed earlier this month and we hope to see much development around them in the coming months - as I mentioned in November we’re waiting for Ben (Ralim) to release his Linux firmware flashing tool. The PineBuds Pro holds the promise of a device similar to that of the PineTime and Pinecil - something that anyone can pick up and use while also providing tinkerers and developers with an open playground.

In July we launched the Pinecil V2. In the spirit of ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ the Pinecil V2 is an iterative improvement over the original. The new silicon brings with it Bluetooth connectivity and improves the soldering iron’s performance, which has landed it the top spot on Tom’s Hardware best soldering iron list. With recent developments enabling Pinecil’s connectivity (read the Newsflash section if you haven’t done so yet), I can see the iron becoming an even better device than it already is. Pinecil’s success is also enticing us to probe what other maker devices we could create or make better versions of. I think there are many possibilities in this regard, but I’m genuinely interested in what device in the vein of the Pinecil you’d like to see us make; leave a comment under this blog - I’ll read it, I promise.

August and October saw the introduction of the Star64 and Ox64 respectively - our first RISC-V Linux-capable boards. While these are our first RISC-V SBCs they certainly aren’t our last; to the contrary, they are just the beginning of a much bigger trend within the PINE64 project. I’ll write more about this in the 2023 sneak peek section of this update. As I already mentioned, the Star64 has been delayed due to a review process and is due to launch sometime in the coming weeks, but the Ox64 has been out for a few weeks now and has been met with much positivity. Indeed, the Ox64 is probably one of the fastest selling items in the Pine Store to date. This shows both an interest in RISC-V architecture and a need for inexpensive boards such as the Ox64 on the market. The SoCs powering the Star64 and Ox64 hold much potential and I would count on seeing them utilized in future PINE64 devices.

As a whole, this year was dedicated to exploring and setting a course for the future. Within the PINE64 project’s structure SBCs and devices are a part of a larger whole and tightly intertwined. SBCs often act as the means for a selected SoCs initial bring up, making it accessible to the development community, to be later transformed into a development platform for future PINE64 devices. To be more precise, ideas for devices such as Pinebooks and PinePhones emerge once a SoC shows promise and core software support becomes firmly established. I think that we now have a handful of very interesting SoCs on our hands - the RK3566 and JH7110 in particular. The coming year will see much development of these platforms and I foresee great things built upon these two SoCs - the PineTab2 being one of them.

2023 sneak peek

As I wrote at the end of last year, and as it should be evident from what I wrote in the previous section, we’re very interested in the RISC-V architecture. As such, the much anticipated Ox64 and Star64 are merely early manifestations of our overarching plan for years to come. I should at the same time reiterate what I wrote in December of last year; while we have a strong will to explore, innovate and drive the RISC-V hardware space, this doesn’t mean we’re saying farewell to Arm as a platform. All it means is that you can expect us paying more attention to RISC-V this coming year and in the years to follow. As we see it RISC-V holds a huge promise for the community and for the Pine Store as a hardware manufacturer - a win-win situation. We believe that a few years down the line RISC-V will be able to offer more versatility and raw power at a lower price-point than Arm counterparts. It is also likely to benefit from fewer manufacturing restrictions and a higher degree of general configuration options.

But that’s the future. As things stand, Linux and other FOSS systems have much catching up to do on RISC-V. I recently spoke to an authority (who doesn’t wish to be named) in the field of benchmarking and Arm SoCs in more general. Said person benchmarked a Star64 against the Quartz64, which resulted in the Quartz64 scoring much higher than one would expect against the Star64 (approx 30% better or so). During our email exchange I was told that while the Star64’s CPU may indeed be slightly slower than the Quartz64 in certain computational tasks, the benchmarked gap in performance is due to Linux’s software (im)maturity on RISC-V and not the hardware per se. If anything, this acts as an incentive to us. To develop FOSS OSes on RISC-V we’ll need inexpensive, well built and popular devices with an established community base. This means that some existing PINE64 Arm hardware will see RISC-V counterparts in the future. Indeed, future Arm devices will also, at least in some instances, be released alongside RISC-V counterparts moving forward.

For now our plans concern non-Pro devices, in part because no Pro-grade RISC-V chip has been settled on yet. Before you get too excited - no, there are no plans for a RISC-V PinePhone at this time. We do, however, have some very exciting news in the pipeline that we’ll be sharing with you in a few weeks time. But as I already mentioned, we’re not in a rush. To the contrary, the primary goal at this point is to make sure that our first entry into the RISC-V device space is a solid offering. We’re working on something that developers and the core community will appreciate. If you happen to be at FOSDEM then make sure to stop by and say hi - we’ll show you what we’re working on and your socks will be blown off.

PineTab2

Before we get to discussing the new PineTab2 let me first explain what happened to its predecessor. The original PineTab was conceived alongside the PinePhone in early 2018 at a small pub in Brussels, and a little less than 2 years later the PinPhone and PineTab became available for order. At that time a global pandemic was something that could only be experienced through the medium of film. I think it is fair to say that none of us could have truly imagined what a global pandemic would entail for the entire world, let alone understood the consequences it would have for hardware production, electronics supply chains and global economics. There is no need for me to recap how the pandemic unfolded, what effect it had on production in mainland China or explain the hardships businesses had to endure as a consequence of this, but suffice to say that the original PineTab was a victim of COVID and its fallout. For those interested in the details, I encourage you to browse the blog’s PineTab tag– I did my best to keep the community updated on the original device’s status throughout 2020-2021. In all fairness I should also make it clear that PineTab’s death was, in some part, a choice on our part as decisions were made to allocate resources to secure PinePhone’s availability throughout late 2020 and early 2021.

A look at PineTab2’s PCB

By the time production of the PineTab became viable again we felt that the original design could and indeed should be improved on. By late 2021 there was also a great candidate SoC for a second generation PineTab – the RK3566. I have written extensively about the RK3566 in recent months in the context of the Quartz64, but in a nutshell, it is a modern mid-range quad-core Cortex-A55 processor that integrates a Mali-G52 MP2 GPU and supports up-to 8GB of RAM. It is a dream-of-a-soc for small form-factor devices with space-constrained chassis since it runs cool, offers a wide variety of modern and fast IO, has a solid price-to-performance ratio and is genuinely future-proof. The one thing that the SoC didn’t have for a time was mature Linux support – but this is no longer the case (see Newsflash section). Software development for the RK3566 platform is booming and Linux has now reached a high level of maturity with both mainline and BSP Linux supporting nearly all core functionality of the chipset. I feel it is fair to say that it is now a prime candidate for porting mobile OSes to.

PineTab2 prototype with metal back removed

But the PineTab2 is much more than a spec-bumped version of the original (more on the specs later) – it is a complete physical redesign: you’re getting a metal chassis that is very sturdy while also being easy to disassemble for upgrades, maintenance and repair. Taking the PineTab2 apart is as simple as undoing a set of snap-tabs and removing the metal back chassis. As is the case with the Pinebook Pro, the PinePhone and the PinePhone Pro, we’ll be offering replacement parts for the PineTab2 down the road. To make the device end-user serviceable we’ve made the PineTab2’s guts modular. This extends to the tiniest of parts, including the eMMC which sits on its own little PCB, like on the Pinebook Pro or our SBCs. Indeed, most parts are easy to reach and replace in a matter of minutes – the camera modules, the daughter-board, the battery and USB keyboard connector can all be replaced in under 5 minutes. I’d also like to mention that the LCD can be replaced without any specialist tools, although it will require a bit more time and effort. If you are a Pinebook Pro owner and have ever taken it apart out of curiosity or for repair, then you’ll feel right at home with the PineTab2. Speaking of the display panel, we’re still evaluating our options, but it will feature a tempered glass 10’1 IPS screen with modern and reasonably thin bezels.

It is looking pretty good, isn’t it?

Let’s talk about IO, components and connectivity. The PineTab2 has two USB-C ports, one of which is USB 3.0 and the other is intended for charging. The latter port features USB 2.0 speeds when it isn’t used for juicing up the PineTab2. There is also a dedicated micro HDMI port for video output and two cameras on the V2 – a front facing 2MPx camera and a rear facing 5MPx one. We haven’t settled on a WiFi/ Bluetooth module yet but two are being tested right now - I’ll let you know which one fared better in testing and was chosen for production. PCIe is exposed on the PCB but I wouldn’t expect most NVMe SSDs to fit inside the chassis. However other peripherals may fit the 9mm-thick envelope of the PineTab2. This won’t be an advertised feature – consider it a nod to hackers who may be able to make use of it. A micro SD slot and an audio jack port are also present and can be found on the leading edges of the chassis. The current prototype has been fitted with a 6000mAh battery but this may change in the future. Indeed, I should make it clear that we’re still at a prototyping phase and all spec’s I’ve listed above may change before the PineTab2 finds its way into the Pine Store.

One of the things that the original PineTab had people excited about was its keyboard, which doubled up as a protective carry cover. We know that a detachable keyboard is a feature most of you want, so it is making a return with the introduction of the V2. And yes, we’re making sure that it will double-up as a protective case too. Unlike the original, all SKU variants of the PineTab2 will include the keyboard by default. Including the keyboard by default opens up the possibility of running convergent and dedicated desktop OSes – and I know a subset of the community always prefers to use a traditional desktop UI over a mobile counterpart. It is a bit early to discuss the specifics of the keyboard at this time – as we’re still exploring what is possible and feasible – but we’ll do our best to meet, and hopefully exceed, the original PineTab keyboard’s design. What it will have, however, is the same chipset as the Pinebook Pro, which means that it will be flashable with open firmware. It also features a backlight and the vendor has worked with us to reduce the reference keyboard’s weight and make it slimmer; this was achieved by using fiberglass panels.

On launch day there will be two PineTab2 variants available – with 8GB RAM / 128GB flash and 4GB RAM / 64GB flash storage. We’re currently hoping to bring the PineTab2 to the market sometime after the Chinese New Year, but it is too early to offer a firm date yet. A price point for either of the variants hasn’t been settled on yet either but I can promise that it will be affordable regardless of which version you’ll settle on. Developer units have just come in the other day and will be distributing them in December and January. I hope that you’re as excited about the PineTab2 as I am and you too are looking forward to seeing the PineTab vision realized in its full potential. Those of you who will be attending FOSDEM early next year - make sure to come and see us to check out the prototypes.

PinePhone (Pro) [By Thanos]

In the past month, SailfishOS on the Pinephone and Pinephone Pro have improved significantly, and the operating system is actually getting very close to being in a daily-driver ready state on the original Pinephone. Affecting both devices are some backend improvements made in the driver for the Pinephone modem, which should significantly reduce issues with the modem not working properly after the device wakes up from deep sleep. This improvement has been merged into the Megi kernel, so it will apply to all distros for the Pinephone that use it. Both the Pinephone and Pinephone Pro ports of SailfishOS have been updated to the latest 6.0 version of Megi’s kernel. Sailfish has the device able to wake from deep sleep on an incoming call, however the driver still has an issue preventing the call from being received. This is being worked on, and is the last major barrier from SailfishOS working extremely well on the original pinephone.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Keyboard working with SailfishOS - video via Adam Pigg on Twitter

As for the Pinephone Pro, all sensors are now working properly under Sailfish. An audio configuration is in progress, but not ready yet. The SailfishOS team does believe that the pinephone pro has potential to work extremely well with SailfishOS, but the port is not quite ready yet. Overall, the SailfishOS team has made some incredible progress, meaning we have another solid option for a potential daily driver OS for people wishing to make the switch to mobile linux. The SailfishOS project is looking for contributors right now, so check them out at https://github.com/sailfish-on-dontbeevil/, or in the SailfishOS porting groups on matrix and telegram.

[edit] Since the publication there have been further developments on the SailfishOS port. SailfishOS and ofono now work much better form suspend, and could be used as a reliable phone. Both call and sms are handled from deep sleep with work done over the last week. Check out Adam’s post on Twitter.

Megi has a new version of his Pinephone and Pinephone pro kernel coming soon, and there are some major improvements coming. The camera support patch for the original Pinephone was completely rewritten for the latest version of the CSI driver from mainline. A bug where sometimes the power button would appear to still be held down when waking up from deep sleep has been patched. The DRM driver was improved on the original Pinephone. The Pinephone Pro’s display driver has also been patched to support a full 60hz refresh rate instead of the 53 it was getting before.

There is some important information regarding the Pinephone keyboard accessory. For good news, the power management driver for the keyboard has been merged into the kernel and should work a lot better now. The improvements made should result in much better battery life as a result of it using an algorithm optimized for maximum efficiency using strategies that minimize charging of the pinephone’s internal battery. For the bad news, a firmware bug has been discovered on the Pinephone keyboard that causes it to draw more than twice the expected amount of power while in standby. This means that it can fully undercharge your Pinephone’s battery in about 3 weeks if left unattended. As a result of this issue, it is highly recommended that you store the phone and keyboard detached from each other if you do not plan on using the device for more than a week.

Kali Nethunter Pro on the PinePhone Pro - via Hackerfantastic on Twitter

Lastly Kali Linux released a custom build of their offsec distribution which officially supports the PinePhone and PinePhone Pro. This mobile-friendly version of Kali Linux is called Nethunter Pro - a bare metal installation of Kali Linux with Phosh desktop environment optimized for small-screen devices. As with any other PinePhone OS, you can boot it from a SD card to dual boot Kali alongside the main OS on the phone’s internal flash. This is obviously very useful in this particular case because Kali is a purpose built OS that isn’t meant to be your daily driver. That said, for those who only wish to use their PinePhone (Pro) for this one purpose, Kali Linux announced that they will soon release an alternative version with Plasma Mobile as well as installers allowing installation of Kali NetHunter Pro onto the internal flash memory. It is awesome to see non-mobile-Linux specific projects picking up the PinePhone and PinePhone Pro and using the devices in really exciting ways. You can download Kali NetHunter Pro here.

That’s all for this month, I’ll catch you all in January.

November Update: Tune(d) in

Tue, 15 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We’ve got three key hardware availability announcements this month: for the PineBuds Pro, the Ox64 and Star64, all of which ought to be available in the coming weeks. However, reading this update I’d like you to keep in mind that Chinese factories and logistics are currently experiencing significant restrictions due to the zero-COVID policy. This means that some of the predicted availability dates may change. That aside, we’ve got a great update for you this month, so tune in and let’s get to it.

I’d like to thank Alex (clover), Gamiee, Danct12, mothenjoyer69 and PizzaLovingNerd for their contributions to this community update.

N.B. Comments on the blog post need to be in English and follow our Community Rules and Code of Conduct.

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Synopsis in video format

TL;DR

Housekeeping
- Community Q&A November 25th 20:00 UTC; your chance to ask us questions live in the chat
- We’re reworking the main PINE64 website to better reflect the community aspect of the project; we can’t til you see it
- PINE64 EU restock of most hardware; Pinecil V2 available on Nov. 14, 19, 24, 29 an in December
Newsflash
- Newsflash - new segment of the update focusing on shorter stories focusing on community projects, software development and smaller announcements
- Pinecil mod adds LED lights powered from the iron
- A DIY LiPo battery pack for the Pinecil (V2)
- An awesome PinePhone (Pro) keyboard case adds RGB backlight to the keyboard
- Roshambo retro-game console case with matching controllers and carts available in Pine Store soon
- PineDio LoRa gateway will be available in the Pine Store soon; already has a feature complete OS
- DSI LCD output works on the Quartz64
- An article by dsimic about the Pinebook Pro
PineBuds Pro
- Available this month for $69 [last min edit - available in Pine Store Dec 2nd]
- PineBuds Pro Wiki is being built up with resources - you are welcome and invited to contribute
- Will ‘just work’ for people people who want wireless IEMs; world of hacking opportunities for tinkerers - UART exposes both buds
- 3 Pieces of software: closed firmware, open firmware and open SDK; Ben (Ralim) working on Linux flashing tool - available in ‘few weeks’
- Extensive tuning of the hardware for sound quality - favorable performance compared against competing products; Ben impressed by the buds
Ox64
- A lot of excitement for the Ox64 in the community
- Already in production and we expect to be delivered soon; in-store availability very soon, perhaps this month
- Two versions - $6 and $8
- Linux booted on the Ox64 by Marek
- Add-on boards planned allowing connecting camera, LCD, audio out and Ethernet
Star64
- Available soon, likely in December before next community update
- Two hardware configurations: 4GB and 8GB of RAM for $69.95 and $89.95 respectively
- Linux at a good starting point with solid early support of most core features of the SoC
- Expect support announcements for the Star64 soon after the board launches
PineTime
- InfiniTime 1.11 released; read the dedicated post if you missed it
- Resource package containing data is needed to enable the 2 new watch faces in InfiniTime
- Currently supported companion apps that can upload resource packages are Amazfish and ITD
- Devs already taking advantage of the new InfiniTime feature - pull request for new watch face and a gallery application to display text & QR codes

Housekeeping

Let me begin by reminding you that we’re holding the community Q&A this month, November 25 at 20:00 UTC. This is your chance to ask us questions live in IRC, Matrix, Telegram and Discord. We’ll be streaming the Q&A session on Youtube, Peertube as well as on the Discord live stage. We usually issue a reminder via social media and in the chats some 15 minutes prior to the event starting. The Q&A takes an hour and we do our best to answer all incoming questions during this time. Following this, however, we usually hang out in the voice chat and keep answering questions over a beverage for another hour - we encourage you to join in. In case you won’t be able to make it, the Q&A sessions are recorded and uploaded in an unedited state to YouTube, Odysee and PeerTube. I hope to see many of you there.

You may have noticed that the PINE64 community website hasn’t received an update since early in the year. There is a reason for this, namely we’re working on a complete redesign. And this is a deeper-going redesign than just a page overhaul - we’re working towards separating out, and setting boundaries for, the PINE64 community and the Pine Store’s competences. To this end the .org website will now focus on the community aspects - the individual projects, this blog, the PineTalk podcast, in-person meetups, virtual hang-outs and everything else you can think of that is directly related to the community. In turn, anything and everything related to PINE64 hardware will be moved to the Pine Store’s website, which too will be receiving an overhaul at some point later in the year. We’re still working out the details but the new site is already starting to take shape - we can’t wait to show it with you.

Pinecil stock will regularly be added throughout November and December

PINE64 EU is having a full restock this week, with PinePhone, PinePhone Pro, Pinebook Pro PinePower, PineTime, the Pinecil V2 and various accessories available again. The reason why it took longer to restock than in the previous months is related to changes in the customs process - more specifically, the paperwork related to the Low Voltage Directive and Radio Equipment Directive is now more complex. I’ll compensate for this in the future to avoid periods where multiple items are out of stock. The good news is that the store’s stock, bar the Pinecil, should last until Christmas. As for the Pinecil, the first sub-batch will be available immediately on the day of the restock (it is difficult to provide an exact date as I am writing well in advance, but likely on November 15th) following which additional stock will be added on the following dates: November 19, November 24, November 29, December 4 and December 9

Newsflash

Foreword: This is a new section of the community update and one I’m particularly happy about. Newsflash is effectively a quick descriptive summary of things happening in the project - things which would otherwise not get exposure on the monthly blog. These are often developments which are either too small to warrant their individual section, simply do not fit an existing part of the update, or are not a natural fit for housekeeping. Until now, omission of such news was effectively dictated by the scope and time-constraints of the monthly update. Writing the update takes approximately 5 evenings from start to finish, and this is all the time that can realistically be allocated to the writing process. It is simply impossible to report on everything in the PINE64 realm during such a short time span. As a result, many cool projects and information pertinent to the community was lost in the past. The contents of Newsflash will range from cool community projects and interesting software developments to small announcements by the Pine Store or partner projects. On occasion, I may also include commercial products designed for PINE64 hardware if I find them particularly interesting (as I did this month). Anything goes really, and there is no strict structure or order to this section. I should also mention that we’re really happy to accept contributions to this section - all it takes are a few short lines about what you want to report on and links to further reading. Please ping the mods to have the content spotted and delivered to Marek or me

Community member Andrew, going by the handle RuShan on Twitter and @ahall#7894 on Discord, created a light attachment for the Pinecil V2 allowing you to work on projects in dim environments. The ring attachment is fitted at the base of the tip’s shaft where it meets the body of the iron. The ring features two little LEDs which are powered directly from the Pinecil V2 - more specifically from the 4.6V source on the PCB. It looks like a really fun project that could prove quite useful to many in the community - especially those who sometimes use their iron on-the-go. Andrew writes that the light will work with the V1 and V2, albeit the implementation differs on both models. If you want to make this modification yourself then head over to Andrew’s GitHub and download the KiCad file. Be warned, however, this voids your warranty. Andrew wrote a very detailed article about the process behind creating this mod, which I am linking here and I encourage you to have a read.

Could be used as a flashlight in a pinch ;) - images via RuShan

A Pinecil accessory I came across and think is pretty cool is a dedicated external DIY battery, the components for which are detailed and available in a small online store. What I like about this battery pack, aside from the 4 cell 14.8V LiPo 1300mAh battery with a high discharge-rate, is the custom designed holder for the Pinecil for when you travel. I don’t really have much more to say about this one as it is what it is - a DIY battery - but I find the execution and compact size of this dedicated Pinecil battery rather nifty.

Pretty cool little battery pack via - Not Your Average Shop

Another mod that has completely blown my mind is a custom PCB for the PinePhone (Pro)’s keyboard case. This mod comes from Adam Honse, perhaps better known to some of you as CalcProgrammer1. In short, Adam transformed the keyboard case into a per-key RGB backlit keyboard with OpenRGB compatibility. I must admit that every aspect of this modification is downright awesome - indeed, this may very well be one of the coolest PINE64 hardware hacks I’ve seen to date. It is an extensive modification which requires a new PCB and will likely need multiple parts to be replaced; I should mention that this is an in-progress project, at least from the looks of it. I am linking a video in which CalcProgrammer offers detailed information about the modification - including the custom PCB - and discusses some of the design process. I strongly encourage you to watch this one. More information can be found by following this link.

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A comprehensive overview of the mod by its creator - by CalcProgrammer1

The Roshambo retro-game console case capable of housing PINE64 SBCs will be making its appearance in the Pine Store in the coming weeks. If you’re into retrogaming, then the Roshambo case features fully functional on/ off and reset switches, a SATA disc connector, and IO pass-through. You can also pick up a pair or matching controllers and a 128GB SSD that imitates a cart.

I can attest that these SSD carts and the controllers are really cool

The PineDio product-range has been long in development and pushed back on more than two occasions for a variety of internal and external reasons. I am therefore glad to announce that the first and arguably most important part of the PineDio ecosystem will be available in the Pine Store this week. The PineDio gateway will be available later this month and is now fully supported by a custom Armbian-based OS. The PineDio Gateway is based on the Pine A64 LTS V2 and a RAK5146 from RAK Wireless and the documentation for the gateway on the Pinedio documentation is already very extensive. You can also expect other PineDio hardware, such as the USB adapter with CH341 chip, to follow soon. To learn more about PineDio hardware I suggest you read the dedicated post I wrote about it last year.

I don’t have a dedicated section on the Quartz64 this month (and for good reason, as there are some things in the works which I’m sure you’ll be excited about in December), but one development I felt needed highlighting this month is that DSI video output now works on the Quartz64 model-A. This news comes via DieselNutJob on Discord, who’s picture of the default 7” PINE64 LCD panel running on the Quartz64 I am linking below.

LCD connected to the Quartz64 model-A - image via DieselNutJob in the chats

Lastly, Dragan (dsimic) whom many of you know from his work on both the PinePhone and Pinebook Pro - as well as peripherals for both of these devices - has written an article about the new production run of the Pinebook Pro for a long-standing computer magazine in Serbia. I’m attaching an automatically translated version of the article for you to read.

PineBuds Pro

The PineBuds Pro were first revealed in an April fools joke earlier this year - they are a pair of wireless in-ear headphones with ambient sound passthrough (sometimes also called transparency mode), environment noise cancellation and a long battery life. Each bud has a two-tone black finish, 3 microphones on each bud, a set of replaceable silicone tips and features touch controls. They also sport a small PINE64 pinecone logo on the touch-control surface, which we hope strikes a balance between being discrete and giving the buds a sense of belonging in the PINE64 product-line. The charging cradle features a two-tone finish similar to the one of the buds, a sliding cover, a LED battery status indicator as well as a USB-C port. The outer portion of the chassis is glossy while the inner part is more matte. The top of the sliding cover features PINE64 branding, while detailed product information can be found on the bottom of the cradle’s lid. I think that the pictures linked below speak for themselves.

Thanks to Ralim for the pictures :)

The PineBuds Pro have been designed to ‘just-work’ for those who simply want a pair of wireless IEMs while, simultaneously, offering hackers and tinkerers everything they need from the get-go. The cradle has a built-in throughpass for UART used for firmware flashing. Each of the buds is exposed individually so two UARTs are present when the cradle housing both buds is connected to a computer. There will be three different SDKs available for you to play with - one of which should already be available for download. The SDKs have already been tested and I’ve been told they work - more on this later. In time, we should see community firmware that allows for altering the touch controls, buds core behaviour and possibly also allowing for inclusion of new features. Most importantly, however, custom firmware will allow you to flash custom sound signatures adjusted for your individual ear canal resonance frequencies. The BES2300 - the chips at the heart of the PineBuds Pro - was seriously considered for hearing-aids, so there is a potential that the PineBuds Pro could serve as over-the-counter (OTC) hearing-aids for people with very limited hearing impairment.

I should also mention that the PineBuds Pro Wiki is already up, with datasheets and schematics. In the coming weeks the Wiki will be edited to include other pertinent documentation and resources; you are welcome to contribute content to the Wiki - indeed, you are asked to do so if you’re an early adopter of the hardware.

Contribute to the Wiki if you’re thinking of tinkering with the PineBuds Pro

I managed to get hold of Ben (Ralim), known for his work on IronOS powering the Pinecil, who just received his early production PineBuds Pro units earlier this week. Ben has been a part of the project since its inception, so I reached out to learn more about the software status. There are currently three pieces of software for the PineBuds Pro: closed firmware that ships with the buds by default, open source firmware (that has some bugs at present) and an open source minimal SDK. I should make it clear that ‘open’ in this context doesn’t mean that the firmware is completely blob-free, as there are closed-source components for parts of the hardware and radio. Ben says that some of these components will be rewritten or simply removed. Ben is also actively working on a Linux programming tool, which he’ll likely also port to Windows and MacOS in the future - he found the default programming tool somewhat clunky. He hopes to have a tool ready in ‘a week or two’.

Aside from the software status information, Ben also offered up some early impressions of how the hardware actually sounds. I’ll quote much of what he wrote verbatim - “In terms of performance of the headphones, I’ve only used the shipping firmware so far, (…) but performance is very good to my ears [although] I’m not a professional audio user” He adds that the “ (…) the audio response feels fairly ‘normal’ without excessive EQ being used on the base.”

I also had an opportunity to ask Ben about the function of the ANC and passthrough mode on the PineBuds Pro running the default firmware - “The ‘normal’ ANC is great for general use reducing most ambient noise below what I notice but not being as aggressive as some headphones where it can cause headaches. The higher powered ANC definitely blocks more noise but I find it can cause slight headaches/discomfort similar to some other ANC headphones.” This is obviously something subjective - I too am very sensitive to ANC and quickly get a sense of pressure in my ears with ANC IEMs, but I suspect that many may find the stronger ANC setting perfectly fine in noisy surroundings. Ben also writes that “the passthrough mode works noticeably better than other headphones [he has], with sound passing through without sounding like it’s a phone call”.

I should mention that the PineBuds Pro had extensive sound tuning - the hardware was tested and molded to provide the best-possible sound. We reached out to professionals in the field to tune the plastics and the speaker to offer what we believe to be the best sound signature. I am not exactly well versed in the process nor do I have any real insight into what good frequency responses are for this type of IEMs, but for those of you who are in-the-know I am including a graph below which you are welcome to study. If you’re an audiophile, please share in the comments what this graph means to you.

PineBuds Pro frequency response curve

PineBuds Pro will be available later this month [edit confirmed date December 2nd] - likely the week following this blog post going live - and will cost $69. For the past 2 months the PineBuds Pro have been undergoing testing and were submitted for both FCC, CE, and CE RED evaluation and have now received the above-mentioned certificates (these certificates should also find their way up on the Wiki in the coming weeks). The default sound signature has been tuned for those users who are not interested in tinkering with their units or in custom firmware, and from what I hear their default sound signature is really pleasant - Marek got to experience the default tuning during Akademy last month and said he was pleased with how they turned out. I believe that the PineBuds Pro has a good chance of becoming a device similar to the Pinecil and PineTime in terms of their scope within the community - they will work well out of the box and offer an easily-accessible playground for those who wish to dig deeper.

Ox64

We were really pleased to see the positive reaction to last month’s announcement of the Ox64. Those of you who missed it, I suggest you read last month’s community update for details about the hardware. In a nutshell, the Ox64 is a tiny RISC-V single board computer with 64MB of RAM capable of running either Linux or RTOS - it can effectively be used as either a microcontroller or a tiny PC. At the core of the board you’ll find a BL808 SoC with 3 cores - a 64bit RISC-V core, a 32bit RISC-V core and a low power RISC-V core. It will be available in two hardware configurations, the first of which has 16Mb flash and no microSD socket and the latter 128Mb and takes microSD cards, which can be either used for storage or to boot a Linux OS.

On the heels of last month’s announcement I get to bring more good Ox64 news. I’m sure you’ll be thrilled to know the board should be available in the Pine Store in the near future - we currently expect the date to be November 25. The production is already underway and we ought to receive first units from the production-line any day now. That said, the current COVID19 situation in China makes it difficult to predict with certainty when delivery will take place - everything related to production and logistics is currently unpredictable. Please keep an eye on our social media and the chats for more information coming soon; an announcement concerning availability will be issued on Twitter, Mastodon and in the chats. On launch, two versions of the board will be available and will sell for $6 and $8. The first SKU is geared towards RTOS while the latter towards Linux development.

Linux on Ox64 - via Marek Kraus on Twitter

Speaking of Linux development, the second portion of the good news I have for you is that Linux on the Ox64 has already been successfully booted. Our very own Marek Kraus managed to get the board to boot a buildroot installation. The flashing process and connecting UART is currently a bit unintuitive, but this is also something that will be greatly improved in coming weeks. Marek has already made an open source flasher which will hopefully support the Ox64 soon, and this is bound to help the process of getting the board up-and-running as easily as we’re all accustomed to. Marek adds that following some additional work it should be possible to boot Linux from a microSD card, making the process even simpler than booting from Ox64’s internal storage. Obviously we expect to see much development on this platform as developers and early adopters get their hands on units later this month or in early December.

UART connected to Ox64 (a bit messy setup currently) - via Marek Kraus on Twitter

I should also note that there are 3 add-on boards in the works for the Ox64. The first will be a camera module using either USB UVP or MiPi CSI. This will be a great addition which may allow you to transform the Ox64 into a security or nanny cam - I’m sure you can think of other uses too. The second add-on board will allow you to connect an LCD panel with a touchscreen as well as an i2s audio DAC with headphone amp and a headphone jack. A tiny retro-handheld (surely it’ll emulate NES), a small DAP, a DIY alarm-clock? - I think there’s plenty of cool things that can be achieved with such an add-on board. The last add-on currently planned will break-out the Ox64’s Ethernet - which is something I imagine many who’ll want to hack on the thing will be excited for. Stay tuned for more Ox64 news in the coming months as the add-ons take shape.

Star64

We initially hoped to have Star64 available today but some last minute production issues have pushed the release date back to next month. While this is a bit of a disappointment - as it would make for an awesome surprise to have the hardware drop alongside the update - but it is ultimately good news that the issues were identified and addressed prior to any hardware shipping. We currently expect to have the Star64 available at some point in December, potentially prior to the December community update, but please note that this date may be pushed back further due to the COVID situation in China. As I’ve written in the previous section on the Ox64, things are a bit up in the air currently when it comes to hardware production and deliveries.

Just as a recap, the Star64 is a RISC-V single board computer StarFive JH7110 64bit RISC-V CPU sporting quad SiFive FU740 cores clocked at 1.5GHz. The SOC is equipped with BXE-4-32 from Imagination Technologies. The IO is similar to the Quartz64 and the board’s footprint follows our model-A form-factor, with some notable differences however: the Star64 is fitted with a USB 3.0, 2X USB 2.0 ports, a PCIe slot as well as two native Gigabit Ethernet NICs. If you are interested in learning the details of the hardware spec then I invite you to read the August update in which Star64 was announced. Even more information about the board can be found on the STAR64 documentation page, to which I strongly encourage you to contribute.

Front and back of the Star64 - note the double Ethernet ports next to the digital audio out

On launch, the Star64 will be available in two hardware configurations - with 4GB and 8GB of RAM for $69.95 and $89.95 respectively. There will be competent software on launch as a good starting-point for developers and early adopters. I wrote about how much progress has been achieved in September and October, with AOSC having been successfully booted on the board with all key features already working, and we’ve seen further developments on the software front since. I am not really in the position to make announcements for other projects but you can expect to hear declarations of software support for the Star64 coming soon. I am really excited to see Star64 launching soon and I am glad that it is highly anticipated by the community. I dare say, bar the Ox64, the Star64 is the board our base is most excited about since the launch of the RockPro64.

PineTime [by JF]

Last month, just a day following the October community update, InfiniTime 1.11 was released. In case you missed it, I wrote a dedicated blog post about this new version of the firmware. Feel free to have a read if you want to learn more about the new watch faces and functionalities featured in InfiniTime 1.11.

Two new InfiniTime watch faces

We received a lot of feedback since the release and been asked many questions, most of them about the new resource package. I would like to take this opportunity to answer some of them in this post.

As a reminder, the resource package containing data (fonts and pictures) is needed to enable the 2 new watch faces (Infineat and G7710) in InfiniTime. These watch faces make use of the external flash memory of the PineTime to store this data that would be too big for the main memory of the watch. As this data is not built into the firmware, it needs to be flashed into the watch separately. Flashing this package requires a companion app which supports this new feature. At this time, Amazfish and ITD already support this functionality, and other companion apps will hopefully follow soon. Let’s take the time to thank companion apps maintainers and contributors for their great job!

So, does it mean that you cannot upgrade to InfiniTime 1.11 if you don’t use the particular companion apps? Of course not! You can still use your PineTime running InfiniTime 1.11 with any other companion app. The only thing you won’t be able to do is to upload a new resource package and enable the new watch faces. You can always temporarily switch to Amazfish or ITD to upload the packages and then continue using your favorite companion app as per usual.

Many users also asked if the resource feature would allow them to install new applications in the PineTime without the need to flash a whole new firmware. Unfortunately, not (yet). Currently, the resource feature only supports “static assets” like fonts and pictures. Executing code coming from the resource package is obviously not impossible, but it’ll require you to take a few additional steps.

Since this new release went live I’ve already spotted at least two pull-requests that built something new on top of the resource feature: a new watch face - Horizon, and a new gallery application that displays pictures, QR codes and text files. I’m really happy to see contributors leveraging this new feature in their contributions!

New Horizon watch face pull request (left) and gallery application (right)

This month I would also like to highlight this tweet from @octoshrimpy, showcasing a re-design of the UI from InfiniTime based on the Catppuccin theme. And, to be honest, I think it looks very good!

Redesign of IntiniTime elements - via Octo Jones on Twitter

That’s all for this month, tune in December for more PINE64 news.

InfiniTime 1.11

Tue, 18 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We released InfiniTime 1.11 a few days ago. The timing of the release did not align with the monthly community update, so we decided to write a small blog post to highlight a few new features and provide new about the PineTime community!

InfiniTime 1.11 is the result of three and a half months of work from many contributors. 59 pull request have been merged with changes ranging from new watch faces to small bug fixes passing by improvements in multiples area of the project.

I’ll highlight a few of these new changes in this post, and feel free to read the whole release note for more information!

InfiniTime 1.11 brings 2 new watch faces!

External resources

As you may know, InfiniTime is currently quite constrained by the memory space available in the PineTime. Both RAM and flash memories are quite well packed, and we have to ensure that the changes we include in the project will actually fit in the remaining memory available.

But we are not doomed to save any byte in memory forever, and we have multiple options to give InfiniTime a bit of fresh air!

If you read the Pine64 monthly community updates, you may have noticed that I wrote about the usage of the external flash memory of the PineTime for some time now. Remember the blog post from December 2021 where I teased a few watch faces with custom backgrounds ? Nearly a year, that’s the time it took to put all things together to make this happen : InfiniTime can now use the external flash memory to store fonts and pictures and make them available to applications and watch faces!

Testing custom backgrounds back in December 2021

This feature will bring a lot of possibilities in the future : the external memory is a 4MB flash memory. It’s really huge compared the the 512KB available in the main memory of the PineTime. In the future, we’ll be able to move more and more data from the internal to the external memory, which will free very precious space to add more and more features to InfiniTime!

What did it take to build this feature? Things started with the integration of LittleFS, a file system designed for embedded systems, in InfiniTime 1.3.0. At first, this file system would only be used to store user settings and BLE bonding information, but we knew it would be the basis for other functionalities in the future.

Then, the BLE FS API was added in InfiniTime 1.8. It provided companion apps with an access to the internal file system of the PineTime. It was not that useful at that time, but once again, we knew we would need it in the future.

Now that we know how to store and access files from the external memory, we can focus on the next step : extending InfiniTime so that applications and watch faces can actually access to the images and fonts stored in the file system! This step took a lot of time with many trials and errors until we finally reached a point where we were satisfied by the performances of the system. Indeed, the external memory is far slower, and we wanted to provide the best user experience no matter what. Most of the work done in this step is documented in this page.

And we are not done yet : we need to provide the users with an easy way to install the resources. And for this, we need the support of companion apps. ITD and InfiniSim added support for the external resources very soon in the development process. I also implemented the upload procedure in Amazfish which allowed me to test that the procedure actually worked!

Now, everything is in place to release this new feature to the wild!

New watch faces

Contributors to the InfiniTime project work on many great features, apps and watch faces, and keeping up with this constant stream of pull-requests is probably the most difficult part of our job as project maintainers. I’ve been eyeing the watch faces Infineat and G7710 for quite some time now, but couldn’t merge them because of their memory usage.

It turns out they were great candidates to be the first watch faces to leverage the resources feature in InfiniTime!

Infineat is a very stylish, colorful and customizable watch face that displays the battery level using an animated Pine64 logo. The big font makes it very easy to read.

The Infineat watch face

The G7710 watch face is designed to mimic the interface of LCD watches. It displays the week number, day of the year, days until the end of the year, date, time, step count, battery level and heart rate.

The G7710 watch face

To enable those watch faces, you’ll need to install the resources package provided in the release note of InfiniTime 1.11. Please check the release note and the documentation for more information about this. Note that for now, only ITD and Amazfish support this feature, but I hope other companion app will integrate the upload procedure for external resource very soon!

Other additions and improvements

External resources and the new watch faces are obviously not the only changes we make to the project! On the UI side, we made many improvements in the UI to improve the consistency of the interface and make it more readable. We also created a new ‘counter’ widget to make settings like the date, time and alarm easier.

The new Counter widget in the time setting screen

A new Sleep mode is available via the Quick Settings menu. This mode disables notifications, chimes and all automatic wake up options (touch and motion) and will prevent the watch from waking itself (and the user) up during the night.

The new sleep mode in the quick settings menu

I would also like to mention that the Core Developers team worked on a new document that describe the vision of the project.

You’ll find the complete list of additions, improvements and bug fixes in the release note.

InfiniSim

InfiniSim, the InfiniTime simulator, evolves alongside InfiniTime. Its main developer NeroBurner takes a great care to make necessary changes in the simulator to adapt to changes in InfiniTime.

Infineat running in InfiniSim. Did you know that InfiniSim provides an easy way to take screen shots?

InfiniSim was also extended to support all the features related to the external SPI flash memory, the file system and the external resources. A new tool “littlefs-do” allows to easily manage the simulated SPI flash memory : list files, read and write files and even load the external resources package in a single command! Please check the documentation to see what littlefs-do is capable of!

Wrap up

That’s it! Enjoy InfiniTime 1.11 on your PineTime! Feel free to join us in the community chat rooms if you have questions, need help or just want to talk about your favorite smart watch ever!

October update: An Ox, no bull

Sat, 15 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I hope that the good news and all the announcements of this month will make up for the much delayed publication date - which is something I sincerely apologize for. This month we’re announcing the Ox64 - a sub $10 Linux capable single board computer, we are bringing you news that both the Star64 and QuartzPro64 now boot Linux (and run it well too already!) and share all the latest PinePhone Pro development.

Let’s get to it.

I’d like to thank Alex (clover), Gamiee, Danct12, mothenjoyer69 and PizzaLovingNerd for their contributions to this community update.

N.B. Comments on the blog post need to be in English and follow our Community Rules and Code of Conduct.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Community update video synopsis

TL;DR

Housekeeping
- Apologies for the delayed release of the update; moving forward we’re reverting to 15th of the month for updates
- PINE64 at KDE Akademy earlier this month - talks about Plasma Mobile and the PinePhone (Pro)
- We’ve applied for a stall at FOSDEM 2023; we hope to be accepted and to see you there in February 2023
- Community Q&A next month at 8PM UTC, November 25th
Star64
- Star64 now boots Linux thanks to work by Icenowy
- Most of Star64’s IO and core functionality already works including the GPU
- Things to be ironed out include USB 3.0 and onboard WiFi not working, and issues with Gigabit Ethernet dropping packages
- More developers getting their hands on with the Star64 now
- Expect to see wide OS support for Star64 once the Linux base is fledged out fully
- Star64 will be available in November
Ox64
- The Ox64 is a RISC-V Linux-capable SBC for $8
- Features BL808 from Bouffalo labs RISC-V SoC with 64MB RAM
- 3 cores: 64-bit RISC-V core, 32-bit RISC-V core and low power RISC-V core
- Two variants of Ox64 on day one: for RTOS and Linux development - $6 and $8 respectively
- Expected availability in November
PinePhone (Pro)
- Reduced order-to-shipping times for both the PinePhone and PinePhone Pro worldwide; weekly dispatch
- Starting with kernel 5.19 PinePhone Pro’s cameras will work with Megapixels
- Improvements to standby and suspend; bringing the PinePhone Pro closer to user-parity with original PinePhone
- Kernel 6.x brings number of improvements; if you’re using a distro on megi’s kernel an update is advisable
- PinePhone Pro keyboard driver finds its way into kernel 6.1
- Anbox support is getting dropped; it is suggested to migrate to Waydroid if you use Android application on the PinePhone (Pro)
QuartzPro64
- QuartzPro64 boots BSP Linux thanks to work by mothenjoyer69
- Much of the core functionality is already available and we’re told that the board runs Debian with accelerated GNOME well
- QuartzPro64 was able to set the (current) world record result for an RK3588 in Geekbench 5
- Outstanding issues to be ironed out include: SD card and PCIe functionality as well as WiFi, NPU, HDMI RX); getting SD booting working is priority
- Debian testing images will be available once SD booting works
- Mainline kernel boots; BSP and mainline development ongoing in parallel
- The board holds much potential also for prospectus future hardware

Housekeeping

Let me start by apologizing for missing the September update. This is, to my memory, the first time we’ve missed an update in the past 4 years. The fault is mine; life got in the way. I had a personal situation that I needed to attend to, and with Marek and TL away at KDE Akademy there wasn’t anyone to complete the writing in time. I then faced a backlog of work at the EU store, which effectively meant that we chose to skip writing the September update altogether. Again, I apologise for this situation. This also means that we’re reverting back to the 15th of the month for community updates. While publishing the community update at the end of the month is probably better for the community, the middle of the month works better for my schedule. Moving forward, please expect the updates to be shorter than in the past—unless more members of the community decide to contribute. I therefore urge you, more than ever before, to partake in writing the update. Anyone is welcome to contribute content, be it news concerning documentation, development, new findings, the community, or anything else related to PINE64. It doesn’t matter if you are a notable and long-time community member or a newcomer—we welcome contributions from anyone. All you need to do is ping a mod or admin in one of the chats to discuss your contribution.

Now let’s get into housekeeping; as I already mentioned, TL and Marek attended KDE Akademy earlier this month. This marks the 5th time that PINE64 co-sponsored the Akademy event and someone from our project attended the conference. I unfortunately didn’t get a chance to attend this year, but from what I hear the conference was a success. It was also an opportunity to meet friends, contributors and partners from various projects. I should also mention that there were multiple references and conversations related to PINE64 hardware, and the PinePhone (Pro) in more particular, including a talk by Devin Lin and Bhushan Shah on Plasma Mobile. Indeed, there were multiple talks which included the subject of Plasma Mobile, one of which you can watch here. Needless to say, we’re looking forward to attending Akademy next year.

PinePhone (Pro) at KDE Akedemy - picture via twitter

On the subject of conferences and meetups—we’ve applied for a stall at FOSDEM 2023, which will be the first in-person FOSDEM meetup since 2021. FOSDEM has historically been a very important event for us and one which we’ve attended since 2017. This is the event where the PinePhone and other hallmark PINE64 devices were dreamt up and eventually announced. Granted we will be offered a stall at FOSDEM 2023, we’ll make sure to bring all the newest and greatest PINE64 hardware for you to check out. We’ll also bring with us unannounced hardware prototypes and concept devices to check out and offer feedback on. Needless to say, you should also expect some exciting announcements from us during FOSDEM; we intend on keeping with the tradition of announcing hardware at the conference. FOSDEM is also an opportunity for us to meet with the community, so if you’re in Europe and can fly to Brussels to attend the conference on February 4 and 5th, then make sure to come by and say hi. On the off chance that we won’t get a stall, we’ll arrange to host our own meetup somewhere in Brussels during the conference—we’ll make sure to let you know closer to the date.

Do you recognize this prototype from FOSDEM 2018? ;)

Lastly, the final quarterly community Q&A of 2023 will be held on November 25th at 8:00PM UTC. In case you missed prior Q&A’s, this is an opportunity for you to ask Marek and I live questions. We sometimes also have community members and developers join in to answer particular questions. The questions are picked directly from the chat and we strive to answer all of them within the time-frame of one hour. You can ask us questions on IRC, Matrix, Telegram and Discord—a full list of Q&A channels can be found here. Just as last time, we’ll be streaming the Q&A session on Youtube, Peertube as well as on the Discord live stage. Following the Q&A we usually take an hour and hang out in the voice chat and continue answering questions and keep the discussion going. So make sure to mark this date in your diary and join us. In case you won’t be able to make it, the Q&A sessions are recorded and uploaded in an unedited state to YouTube, Odysee and PeerTube. Hope to see you all there.

Star64

In August I dedicated a significant portion of the update to the Star64—more specifically to the hardware configuration that will be entering production. Aside from the obvious reasons for describing the hardware and introducing it, the core reason for focusing solely on the hardware stemmed from the fact Linux did not run on it yet. At the time I wrote that ‘efforts to support the SoC in Linux have already begun’ and expressed hope to see the development progress quickly due to the high interest in the platform in general and the Star64 in particular. While my belief that we’d soon see support for the board was sincere, admittedly I didn’t expect this much progress to be achieved so quickly—in less than 30 days. Therefore, now I will focus on the board’s software support status. So, if you somehow missed last month’s update and want to learn about Star64’s hardware then I invite you to read the August update before reading this month’s section.

I should start by crediting Icenowy Zheng for getting Star64 up and running. Some of you will likely know Icenowy from her participation in the Sunxi Community and work on numerous single board computers. Notably she also worked on the original Pine A64 (+) and many of our A64 devices, such as the Pinebook and PinePhone. Earlier this month a photograph taken by Icenowy was sent to me showing the Star64 sporting a handful of peripherals running AOSC Linux. AOSC is a general-purpose Debian fork, which supports single board computers and embedded devices as well as the x86 platform. As you may have already guessed, Icenowy has been one of the developers behind AOSC. The photo shows a 4GB RAM Star64 board running a full XFCE desktop environment atop kernel 5.15. For those who are wondering, I have confirmed that the GPU works; the PowerVR GPU on this RISC-V SoC is fairly capable and I’m sure will do well accelerating desktops with compositors that can take advantage of OpenGL. Since someone will ask: I haven’t been able to confirm whether VPU works at this time, but the VPU blob should be a part of (and work with) the FOSS driver.

Linux now boots on the Star64

As far as the IO is concerned, it is my understanding that USB 2.0, PCIe, GPIO, SD card, eMMC and Gigabit Ethernet all already work. Things that do not work or work partly include: the USB 3.0 (development of which is being prioritized) which doesn’t work at all, the onboard WiFi, which appears to not work because of driver issues, and while the Gigabit Ethernet works it currently drops packages. I don’t know the status of MiPi and CSI ports – it may be the case that these simply haven’t been tested yet. I should also note that I am writing this section 10 days before the update goes live, so any or all of the points may have already changed. Ultimately, the goal of listing the board’s enabled functionality is privately to illustrate how much development was achieved in just a few short weeks, and only by one (very dedicated and skilled) developer. This Linux build is very important however, since it will be used to test Star64 prototypes, which will be shipped to developers shortly.

Star64 in action with various IO being used - picture by Icenowy

This is only the beginning. With a handful of key developers now receiving the Star64 boards we expect to see the outstanding functionality implemented and issues ironed out; once all functionality is enabled we’ll invite partner project developers and individual contributors to port their OSes to Star64. The idea is to have very good support for the platform upon launch and so that end-users have a choice of more server and desktop oriented OS options. With people such as Kamil Trzcinski (Ayufan) and Samuel Holland (smaeul) receiving hardware soon, I expect to see more exciting Star64 developments in the coming weeks, so stay tuned for more news. Finally, the Star64 will be available for purchase to anyone who wants a unit in November. Pricing is yet to be determined.

0x64

[edit] It looks like most of the information regarding the Ox64 has already found its way online. The good news is that the coverage has been very favorable. To this end, this announcement is therefore a confirmation of what has already been written and ‘leaked’ online, with some additional details including pricing and expected availability.

At the start of the year I hinted at a few things coming in 2022—one of which was that we’ll be taking a plunge into the RISC-V this year. The Star64, and any PINE64 devices that may be built upon the StarFive JH7110 SoC in the future, represent just one strand of our exploration of RISC-V architecture. For some time now, ever since the Pinecil first released, we felt that having an entry-level RISC-V single board computer, which would lower the entry-point to the architecture, would be beneficial to the community. To this end and with no further ado, say hello to Star64’s little brother (well, sort of—in architecture only), the Ox64.

The Ox64 is a small form-factor single board computer powered by the BL808 RISC-V SoC—a new chipset by Bouffalo Labs. Some of you already know of this vendor, since one of their microcontrollers is used in the Pinecil V2 and PineCone. Surely you also immediately noticed that the board is named Ox64 (side note: Ox … Bouffalo … you get it right?) as opposed to PineOx which is used in the PineCone and based on the older BL602 microcontroller. This is because BL808 is not a usual microcontroller. It features three cores - a high performance 64-bit RISC-V core, a high performance 32-bit RISC-V core and low power RISC-V core. These cores are paired with 64 MiB of PSRAM, a SD card interface and MMU (Memory Management Unit), and make the SoC capable of running Linux as well as bare-metal firmware. We hence treat Ox64 as a Single Board Computer rather than a microcontroller, despite that it can be used as either.

Here it is in all its tiny beauty

Here are some of Ox64’s key hardware details. The BL808 contains a wide variety of really neat onboard features, such as WiFi 4 and Bluetooth 5.0, Zigbee connectivity and MIPI-CSI/DSI interfaces. It also sports a H.264 encoder, MJPEG encoder, JPEG decoder, an audio subsystem, Ethernet, USB 2.0 OTG and Neural Network unit. The Ox64 PCB with two USB ports, at the far ends of the PCB. The USB-C port features OTG and MIPI CSI for the camera module as well as an audio out/in interface. The secondary USB port is for power only. The WiFi chip antenna is soldered onboard and features a u.FL connector. The castellated header pin holes break out GPIO, SPI, I2C, I2S and UART. In the future, we plan to have adapter boards for Ethernet (using GMII interface), audio (I2C interface) and a camera module (USB).

The first sample units for developers and QA

Before we wrap this announcement up with information about pricing and availability I want to briefly touch upon software, which is pertinent to the pricing structure of the two SKUs that will be on offer later this year. As things stand, we’re awaiting this RTOS SDK, which should be available sometime next week and will be uploaded to the Ox64’s docs (which should already be up by the time you’re reading it). Getting Linux to run on the Ox64 will be a community endeavour, but with good documentation and additional external resources we expect to see initial support for the board surface soon. I should also mention that development boards have already shipped to a select group of developers, some of whom are interested in Linux and others in RTOS. I’ll be bringing you news on the progress in the months to come.

Ox64 pin assignment

Finally, the Ox64 board will be available in two configurations, one with 16Mb flash and no microSD socket, and another variant with 128Mb flash and a microSD socket. The prior configuration that is geared towards RTOS development will sell at $6, while the latter is intended for Linux development and will be available for $8. Both configurations are expected to be available at some point next month. You can find more information on the docs. Lastly, I’d like to remind you that the Wiki is editable by community members and we always welcome contributions, thank you.

PinePhone (Pro)

Before I get into the phone-related news of the month, I just want to provide you with a short update regarding shipping and availability of the PinePhone and PinePhone Pro. As some of you may have already noticed, the Pine Store has begun shipping both phones on a weekly basis from Hong Kong. This means that the time it takes for your PinePhone (Pro) to arrive at your doorstep has now been drastically reduced. Both devices are in-stock and, with current production-runs being quite substantial, we expect stock to last for the foreseeable future. Since stock is located in Hong Kong, COVID-19 related restrictions in the region are also less likely to affect shipping. As for the availability of both devices in the EU store; the PinePhone remains in stock while more PinePhone Pros are expected to arrive any day now. Across the board we strive to improve the process of ordering and delivering hardware; the weekly world-wide dispatches are just one of the many steps we’re taking to increase logistics efficiency (some of you may remember that in the past you had to wait months to receive your PinePhone). I expect to have yet more logistics news for you the following month, now let’s move onto software news.

And for software news, I think this is something many of you have been waiting for: as things stand, two issues PinePhone Pro users face are battery drain in idle and a lack of camera support. There are obviously also other problems, the importance of which I do not diminish—for example voice call quality, which is something I addressed in the August update. However, the PinePhone Pro’s short battery life and a lack of photo-taking abilities are two of the things I see mentioned most frequently in online discussion on the device’s daily-drivability. While a long, or at least reasonably long, battery life is fundamentally crucial to a phone’s daily usage, the ability to take photos is merely a feature—but one which we’ve come to expect from modern mobile devices. Regardless, both issues impede a sense of the device’s software completeness, especially when compared against the original PinePhone. This, however, is about to change.

Initial PinePhone Pro camera support has now been added to multiple OSes - Picture via Manjaro

Starting with kernel 5.19 PinePhone Pro’s cameras will work with the Megapixels application, shipped with most available OSes. To be clear, I already reported on the PinePhone Pro taking photos and even streaming video a while back, but an implementation necessary to take pictures in Megapixels (or similar userland application) has only become available now. If you’re running Manjaro on your PinePhone Pro then you can already give this new functionality a spin by switching to the unstable software branch. This may be true for other OSes too but I haven’t had the time to check. In terms of the current functionality, the viewfinder works smoothly and switching between the front and back camera is seamless. However, the images that the cameras produce and viewfinder image still have a long way to go; there currently is no color correction nor any post-processing, causing the images to look muddy and green-tinted. As things stand, at the time of writing, the original PinePhone takes better photographs despite the much inferior sensors (a slight digression—it is crazy to think how much of the image quality depends on the software rather than hardware). But this is a first step in a much longer journey to flesh out this functionality.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Initial camera functionality showcased - video by Wolf Fur

The other big news concerns improvements to the PinePhone Pro’s battery life when it suspends. This, in and of its own, is obviously very important but it has also further going consequences. Recent patches to uboot based on 2022.10rc4 not only allow the PinePhone Pro to remain in suspend for a longer time but also a faster wake up time and reliable recovery on phone calls. In my (admittedly limited) testing the phone woke up reliably on incoming calls even after a prolonged suspend-time. Over a day of testing, I didn’t experience a single dropped call—even when I left the phone suspended overnight (approx. 10 hours). This is a huge development brought to us thanks to work by dsimic and megi as well as other contributors, and one which I hope will find its way into uboot used by most OSes as well as Tow-Boot. I should also mention that I experienced audio-related problems upon waking up—namely, while the phone rang reliably the phone-call audio was gone. At times, the system audio seems to temporarily also vanish. It is clear that more work will be needed to get these features ship-shape but the ongoing progress shows much promise.

I also want to make it clear that while these steps towards software parity with the original PinePhone are very important, they are just that – steps towards parity, not parity itself. There is still a journey ahead of us before the PinePhone Pro and PinePhone’s functionality is identical or near-identical. At this point I want to acknowledge and help all those who are making this happen—the developers working on u-boot patches, the kernel as well as userspace applications. I am glad to see their work gradually coming together to make the PinePhone Pro the best possible device to experience mobile Linux.

PinePhone Pro keyboard drivers are finding their way into kernel 6.1 Phoronix reports

Since I originally wrote the section in September, four more important PinePhone-related things have transpired, which were pointed out to me by Danct12. For starters, megi has updated his mainline-based kernel to 6.0. This is a major Linux release, which brings about a plethora of overall improvements and fixes, as well as additional functionality (more on this in a bit); so if your distro of choice uses megi’s kernel then I strongly suggest you run an update. It should be mentioned that among the many things that kernel 6.0 brings, the next release (kernel 6.1) will incorporate the PinePhone (Pro)’s keyboard driver - Michael Larabel from Phoronix writes: “Queued via the Linux kernel input subsystem’s “next” branch is this commit introducing the PinePhone keyboard driver. An associated commit also adds the PinePhone keyboard driver for the DeviceTree. This new driver is for supporting the matrix keypad and MCU of the Pine64’s PinePhone keyboard case (…)”. We’ve also seen the community built modem firmware receive a new release. This release brings an update to Yacto 4.0.4, support for GSM-7 / UCS-2 / 8-Bit data coding scheme identification in Cell Broadcast messages and raw relaying as a SMS to the host if the default coding scheme is not used, fixes a problem with emergency broadcast messages in non-latin characters (making it a very important release if you happen to live in countries that don’t use latin characters) and fixes HWIDs compatibility for PinePhone Pro (Tow-boot) and PinePhone (Tow-boot / u-boot).

Lastly, Danct12 told me that “If you’re still using Anbox on DanctNIX’s Arch Linux ARM fork, keep in mind that Anbox and the relevant packages will be removed at the beginning of 2023. It’s recommended to migrate to Waydroid ASAP.” This obviously also applies to all other distributions, most of which, to the best of my knowledge, now offer a simplified way of installing Waydroid in both Phosh and Plasma Mobile user environments.

QuartzPro64

The last piece of news I come bearing this month concerns software developments on the QuartzPro64. In case you don’t know, the QuartzPro64 is a development board powered by the powerful RK3588 SOC from Rockchip. We shipped a number of QuartzPro64 boards to developers earlier this year and we’re finally starting to see some really exciting software developments on the platform. Earlier this week I had a chat with mothenjoyer69, a developer who has been working on QuartzPro64. This section will effectively be an overview of what I’ve learned from our conversation and the details mothenjoyer69 provided me with. For starters, perhaps the most important news is that Debian stable now boots on the QuartzPro64 using the BSP kernel.

QuartzPro64 running Debian - picture via Mothenjoyer69

Not only does it boot however, a lot of the core board functionality works too. When asked about it, Mothenjoyer69 wrote “The QP64 was recently shown to boot a BSP kernel, with almost all critical hardware working without issue. GNOME 3.38 boots with full acceleration, and glmark2 ran to completion without issue, and YouTube playback functions fine. With CPU frequency scaling available, the QuartzPro64 was able to set the (current) world record result for an RK3588 in Geekbench 5.” It is notable that OpenGLES already works flawlessly, including in glmark2. While Vulkan support isn’t functional yet, you can already expect some really solid performance in 3D acceleration tests. Speaking of acceleration, I’m told that the GPU was able to match a dedicated Nvidia GT750m in glmark2. I’m not sure how well this will translate to real-world 3D performance, but I certainly hope to make the QuartzPro64 the brains of a dedicated retro-game emulation machine at some point in the future.

To be clear, there are still a handful of missing features and outstanding issues which need to be addressed. Mothenjoyer69 explains “SD card and PCIe are currently the primary issues, with SD card fixes being worked on. WiFi and a few other parts (the NPU, HDMI RX) are also currently non-functional. SATA functions [however]. Realistically the fixes don’t appear to be that massive so right now SD card is the primary focus.” Once booting from SD will be fixed OS images will be made available for testing purposes on github. The work done by mothenjoyer64 and other contributors will, in time, serve as a basis for distributions to build their OSes atop of. As always, I hope that the early progress made on the board is indicative of the community’s interest in this powerful SoC and that eventually it will find its way into consumer-focused SBCs and future devices.

Mainline Linux booted on the QuartzPro64 - via Furkan Kardame (Manjaro)

I would be remiss not to mention that mainlining efforts are made in parallel to the work on BSP. Indeed, as Mothenjoyer69 explains, “mainline development has been very active with some large steps being made already. With the efforts of the Pine community, and ARM SBC community at large, the QP64 can successfully boot a mainline kernel, albeit with limited hardware support. With the continuing efforts of the community, and with assistance from Collabora, this will only improve as we move into 2023 and beyond." While mainline Linux is, as it always is, an end goal in an ARM SoCs development cycle, I for one am very happy that BSP and mainline are being developed simultaneously. Good BSP support and multiple feature-rich BSP OS images will help the platform grow and make the RK3588 viable for more user-oriented devices.

I am currently awaiting mothenjoyer69’s test images to become available so I can give the board a spin, and I must admit that I am genuinely excited to see what the RK3588 chipset is capable of. In the future I can see the QuartzPro64 platform becoming the basis for an entire line of very cool, versatile and highly diverse devices. I think that the chipset has multiple and widely different applications, the range of which can equal or even surpass the A64 and RK3399. Of course, only time can tell how this chipset will pan out. Until then, I’ll make sure to keep you updated.

That’s all for this month!

August update: RISC and reward

Sun, 28 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This month we take a close look at the Star64, check out PineBuds (Pro) progress and discuss the Pinecil V2. I also come bearing good news concerning the PinePhone Pro, which has seen a small but significant hardware redesign and some important software updates.

Let’s get into it.

I’d like to thank Alex (clover), Gamiee, JF and PizzaLovingNerd for their contributions to this community update.

N.B. Comments on the blog post need to be in English and follow our Community Rules and Code of Conduct.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Video synopsis of the August community update

TL;DR

Housekeeping
- We’re sponsoring Akadamy; meet us there!
- Community Q&A was held August 13, you can now watch it on YouTube
- A call for sticker design - looking forward to seeing what you come up with
- Blade hostboard for the SOQuartz is now in the PineStore
- The PinePower in the Pine Store and EU store is grounded - cause for confusion outdated photographs
PinePhone (Pro)
- Spare parts for the PinePhone Pro are now in stock
- Small hardware redesign - the PinePhone Pro now takes nano SIM
- Megi’s patches bring improvements to sound on the PinePhone Pro
- New releases from postmarketOS, DanctNIX, OpenSUSE and Manjaro; OpenSUSE shows off Qi Wireless charging
- Work-around instructions for Mobian installer issues
Star64
- Pictures of the first Star64 prototype
- Overview of the final Star64 IO layout, components (WiFi 6 & BT 5.2among them) and features
- Debian and Fedora already being ported to the SoC; we trust many other OSes will follow
Pinecil
- First batch of Pinecil V2 sold out in record time; next batch in EU store early September and Pine Store mid-September
- Pinecil V1 vs V2 and tip comparison by end-user - very cool video
- Pinecil V2 online authenticator; a walk-through of how to check whether if your unit is legit
- Ships with newest IronOS firmware
PineTime
- Watchmate: new companion app for desktop and Linux phones
- Watchmate works with InfiniTime and incorporates key functionality
- InfiniLink iOS companion app transferred to PINE64 community

Housekeeping

We’re once again one of the sponsors of this year’s Akademy, which is taking place in Barcelona 1-7 October. For those of you who don’t know about Akademy - it is an annual non-commercial meetup organized by the KDE Community. From memory, this is the 5th time that we’re a part of and sponsoring the event. Since this year’s meetup is an in-person event we’ll be flying into Barcelona to attend. Keep an eye out for Marek, TL and myself during the weekend of 30 September and October 3rd. We’re taking this as an opportunity to meet and mingle with people, so it is unlikely that we’ll be holding any talks or the like.

If you live in Europe, are a fan of KDE and happen to like our products then drop-by Akademy in Barcelona this year

We held the quarterly Q&A on August 13. As usual, Marek and I answered questions from the chats and for the first time managed to answer nearly all the questions posed. This time around we also managed to stream the Q&A to both Youtube and Peertube, while simultaneously having people in the Discord stage. Kudos to Marek for getting it all working this time around. The recording of the full and uncut Q&A session is available on Youtube, and thanks to Pak0St there are chapters available so you can easily find the bits and pieces you’re particularly interested in. The next Q&A will be held sometime in November.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Live recording of the third community Q&A held on August 15, 2022

In other community news - we’ll be printing PINE64 stickers for upcoming community events (I am keeping my fingers crossed FOSDEM 2023 is an in-person event). While we’ll surely be printing some fairly generic PINE64 branded stickers, we also want to reach out to you for submissions. So if you’re artistic and would like to submit a PINE64-centered sticker design, then we’re more than happy to receive it. Make sure to have the sticker design include your name or handle. As for design requirements, it needs to be a grayscale and read well in a small size. If we receive multiple submissions, then we’ll run some sort of community poll and have you select the ones you feel represent the project best. Please post your submissions on the forum or, if you prefer, in the #offtopic community chat; make sure to ping the mods to make them aware of the submission.

The Blade hostboard for the SOQuartz is now available in the Pine Store. In case you missed it, I wrote about the Blade and other SOQuartz hostboards back in May. This hostboard has been designed for clustering and fits inside a standard 1U server rack. You can fit 12 or more Blade hostboards into a single rack. I had the opportunity to check out a Blade prototype in May and was really quite surprised by how slim it was and how much I/O was present in the tiny space that the PCB provides. If you’ve been interested in clusters and were waiting for a spiritual successor to the Clusterboard then here it is.

BLADE hostboard with 8GB SOQuartz installed

Lastly, I want to make it clear that the PinePower desktop currently sold in the Pine Store and EU store is grounded (and has 3 prong plug) as requested by the community. I wrote about this new hardware revision already in the April community update -I encourage you to read the blog entry in case you missed it. I am aware that the pictures in both stores were outdated for a couple of days when the new batch arrived, which led to some confusion as to whether the hardware is from the new revision. All PinePower desktop units currently on sale and produced in the future will be grounded. Apologies for the confusion caused by outdated pictures.

PinePhone (Pro)

Let’s start with some hardware news. Spare parts for the PinePhone and PinePhone Pro are now in stock. I know that many users with cracked screens or damaged back-cases have been waiting for these parts to return to the store. I am happy to let you know that spare PinePhone (Pro) keyboard PCBs are now also available for purchase. I am mentioning the availability of these parts explicitly at the start of this section because I’ve recently seen people question our commitment to creating repairable hardware. So, let me assure you that we’re as committed to making repairable hardware as we always have been. The reason why spare parts were out of stock for a period of time is simply due to them selling out from the last PinePhone (Pro) production batches - spare parts are usually only delivered with a new production run. The spare parts are basically unassembled PinePhone (Pro) units. Same goes for keyboards and other equipment. If there is a break in hardware deliveries then it is likely that spare parts will temporarily sell out too. However moving forward we’ll hold a larger stock of spare parts.

In other hardware news, the most recent production run of the PinePhone Pro has seen a small but important redesign, at least for newcomers. One of the most common failure points on the PinePhone and PinePhone pro is the SIM slot. Users were required to use an adapter for their nano SIMs to fit into the micro SIM slot - some would insert the adapter without a SIM, pull it out, and damage the pins in the process. Others would insert a micro SD card into the SIM slot thereby damaging it. For this reason, the new production run of the PinePhone Pro incorporates a nano SIM slot instead. The slot has a clever design which prevents new users from accidentally inserting a micro SD inside too; to insert the SIM card you need to pull out a little tray (which doesn’t come all the way out), into which the SIM is inserted. We hope that this small improvement will result in fewer broken SIM and SD slots moving forward.

Nano SIM slot on the PinePhone Pro

There are a few software news I’d also like to cover this month. The most notable of which, and one which will eventually surely find its way into all OSes, concerns sound on the PinePhone Pro. Megi has recently released a set of patches that address some of the issues people have been experiencing: sound codec not working after boot (prior to an app playing audio), changing controls while headphone or speaker output is active breaks audio, sound stutter when serial console is enabled in CLI, OUTMIX and RECMIX drivers not matching the schematic and microphone quality. I invite you to read and follow megi’s development (b)log to learn of the details but, in short, the patches ought to improve the sound situation on the PinePhone Pro. I hope to see them make their way into individual OSes soon.

As for the OSes, we’ve seen a few releases for the PinePhone and PinePhone Pro this past month. This includes (at least to my knowledge - there may be others) postmarketOS, Manjaro, OpenSUSE and DanctNIX (Arch). Most of the distributions shipping the Phosh mobile environment have now updated to the newest version which adds swiping motions; I haven’t had the opportunity to try the newest version of Phosh myself, but I hear very good things about it. I would also like to note that OpenSUSE shared an image of the PinePhone charging wirelessly using the Qi wireless charging case (currently out of stock), which is super cool to see. I am including a picture from the tweet below.

Wireless charging on the PinePhone running OpenSUSE - via Adrian Campos Garrido

There is one more thing I’d like to mention in this blog post that is distro-specific: I’ve seen reports that Mobian users have issues with the installer image. The problem it seems concerns the root partition not expanding properly during the installation process. I reached out to Mobian developers about a potential work-around and Undef was really helpful in emailing me comprehensive instructions. I should also note that Mobian’s dev team is aware of the problem and actively working to resolve it.

Here’s the work-around:

Resize the primary partition using parted.

$ sudo apt install parted

Make sure to select the right storage device (exchange for x below); 2 will usually be eMMC while 0 is likely to be SD.

$ sudo parted /dev/mmcblkX

Inside parted run print just to make sure you are using the proper

device. You should see two primary partitions:

(parted) print

Enlarge the 2nd to 100% capacity:

(parted) resizepart 2 100%

Print to see if the partition expanded correctly and then quit the program:

(parted) print
(parted) quit

If you’re using an encrypted device run the following command - you will be asked for your encryption password:

$ sudo cryptsetup resize calamares_crypt

Then proceed to resize the ext4 filesystem:

$ sudo resize2fs /dev/mapper/calamares_crypt

Finally resize the btrfs filesystem and check results:

$ sudo btrfs filesystem resize max /
$ df -h

Once again, many thanks to Undef for the detailed instructions.

Star64

This month I come bearing good news about the Star64 RISC-V single board computer. Just three months after the board’s initial announcement today I get the privilege of unveiling the prototype - and I hope you’ll admit that it looks mighty cool. Star64 is the first true RISC-V SBC from us (I mean, unless you really consider the Pinecil a SBC), but as I wrote last month it certainly isn’t the last RISC-V piece of hardware you’ll be seeing from us. Just as a short recap: Star64 comes with a StarFive JH7110 64bit CPU sporting quad SiFive FU740 cores clocked at 1.5GHz. The SOC is equipped with BXE-4-32 from Imagination Technologies, which is said to be a solid mid-range GPU. Star64 will be available in two configurations - with 4Gb and 8GB of RAM, similarly to the Quartz64. Both hardware versions include USB 3.0 and a PCIe slot as well as two native Gigabit Ethernet NICs.

Star64 IO – left: dual Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI & power-in // right: 3X USB 2.0 & USB 3.0

The IO arrangement is very similar to what you’ve come to expect from one of our model-A type boards. Along the long leading edges you’ll find PCIe on one end and GPIO on the other. At one end of the board you’ll find a digital video output, a double-stacked Gigabit Ethernet port and a 12V barrel plug for power. On the opposite side, you’ll find 3x USB 2.0, 1x USB 3.0, an audio jack as well as a power button. There are also two U.FL ports for antennas - one for bluetooth and the other for WiFi.

Star64 – left: top view // right: bottom view

The onboard WiFi/BT module is RTL8852BU MIMO WiFi 6 with BT 5.2; it may already be supported in mainline Linux. The Star64 also has an MiPi display output complete with a touch panel (TP) input, a 12V power port, a CSI camera port and an eMMC slot. A micro SD card slot can be found at the bottom of the PCB. Similarly to the RockPro64 and Quartz64, the 12V port on the Star64 can be used for powering other hardware directly from the board - a popular example is powering one or multiple SSDs connected to a PCIe SATA adapter. I’ll add that, at least in theory, the Star64 would make a great NAS because of its SoCs low thermals and idle power. I am looking forward to seeing NAS-focused Linux or BSD* OSes available for the board.

Speaking of software, efforts to support the SoC in Linux have already begun. I’ve been told that both Debian and Fedora are already being ported to the StarFive JH7110, which is great news. We are certain that many other OSes will follow swiftly - especially once we start delivering the Star64 to interested developers. On the subject of availability: the Star64 will be available in a few weeks time, and will initially be available to developers. Given the interest in the Star64’s and the SoC powering I hope to see functional distributions available for the board soon after launch. We will obviously be monitoring the Star64’s software progress in the months to come and keep you posted on how development proceeds.

PineBuds Pro

A quick foreword about PineBuds changing name to PineBuds Pro prior to release: the hardware stays the same, it’s just naming convention - or branding if you will - changes to include the ‘Pro’ suffix. We’re doing this to indicate the additional functionality that the earbuds are capable of - ANC in particular. That’s all.

I am glad to report that development of the PineBuds Pro is proceeding well. In fact, CE/FCC testing is scheduled to start early September, so a mid-Q4 release is highly likely. In July I shared pictures of the first moulded PineBuds carry case without the electronic guts - today I get to show pictures of the first moulded and working prototypes. This time around this includes the pods and the case, both of which arrived from the factory just the other day. As you can probably tell from the picture, the final mould of the carry case looks much more refined than the CNCd version shown in April. It is hard to make it out from the photos, but the case features a textured finish on the outside and a smooth finish on the inside. The buds themselves have a two-texture finish too, with the stems made out of shiny plastic and the body of the buds being matte. While none of the pictures below depict this, the case now also features a small row of LEDs on the front, used to indicate charging status and remaining battery. But let me stress this again - these are pictures of prototypes, and thus everything you see is subject to change.

PineBuds – left: buds in carry case // right: buds seen next to the casa

Since the last post discussing the PineBuds we received much feedback regarding our initial decision not to brand the buds. This is not the first time we receive feedback concerning branding from the community; as a rule of thumb, we usually try to keep branding to a minimum on our hardware. As was the case with the Pinebook Pro, PinePhone and PineTab - we always try to incorporate the PINE64 logo in some tasteful and non-intrusive way. But this is a bit hard to achieve on something as small as a pair of wireless earphones. However, it does seem people are keen on rocking buds with a PINE64 pine cone, so we’ll run some test prints in the next few weeks and see how they turn out. I am attaching some impressions for you to take a look at below.

Lastly, the Pine Store commissioned development of an alternative SDK and firmware for the PineBuds. The hope is that the new SDK will make development of community customised and user-tailored firmware easier to achieve. The custom firmware and SDK builds are about 2 weeks away I am told - once delivered we’ll have developers evaluate the efforts. If this is the first time you’re hearing about the PineBuds I invite you to read the April and May community updates in which the hardware was introduced and discussed at some length. I am sure I’ll have more information about the PineBuds to report next month, so stay tuned.

Proposed PineBuds branding - let us know what you think

Pinecil [by Gamiee]

The Pinecil V2 landed earlier this month and sold out almost instantly. The next production run of the ought to be available soon however - you can expect the next batch to land in PINE64 EU at the beginning of September and in the Pine Store a few weeks later. There will likely be a limit on how many units can be ordered by one person to make sure that everyone who wants one can get one (if they order within the first 72 hours or so). To be notified of availability, please follow PINE64 and PINE64 EU on Telegram, Mastodon and Twitter. We’ll make sure to give everyone a solid 24hrs heads-up before the next Pinecil batch becomes available again.

Earlier this month I came across a very interesting comparison between Pinecil V1 and V2, which also includes a performance overview of the new tips. Spoiler alert, the V2 performs better when supplied enough power, but the new tips heat up much faster on both the V1 and V2. When combined with the right power source and fitted with the short 6.2 ohm tip the V2 heats up to a temperature of 300*C in under 3 seconds. It is a really interesting video by one of our community members, and I advise anyone interested in the Pinecil V2 to watch it.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

A comparison between Pinecil V1 and V2 as well as the new 6.2ohm tips - by River B.

As we mentioned in the previous community update, we have implemented a few anti-counterfeit measures into Pinecil V2. One of them is the possibility to verify that your Pinecil V2 is original. And you can do this on our authenticity verification page, which you can find on https://pinecil.pine64.org/. The process is quite simple: on your Pinecil enter the debug menu by holding down the minus (-) button, scroll down to the ID tab using plus (+) and enter the serial number (first row) into the online authenticator. You’ll be immediately informed whether your V2 is an authentic PINE64 product or a knock-off.

Authenticity checked page

The Pinecil V2 is being shipped with IronOS v2.18, which is still up-to-date at the time of writing. There are no requirements to update the firmware, but if anyone wants to update their V2 then it is not currently possible. This is due to the new Bouffalo chip not using the DFU protocol for flashing and the flash tool, which supports the Bouffalo’s flashing protocol, is still a work in progress. It should, however, be available soon; stay tuned for more information in the coming weeks and months.

PineTime [by JF]

This month, we welcome a new companion app in the PineTime ecosystem: watchmate. The author announced it on Twitter and Mastodon a few days ago. Watchmate is a companion app which runs on desktop and mobile Linux and is compatible with PineTime running InfiniTime. Written in Rust and based on libadwaita and BlueR it already supports many features from InfiniTime, such as setting the time, reading battery level, recording the heart rate value, controlling media player and OTA firmware updates.

The UI is really nice and easy to use and a bit similar to Siglo: once connected, it displays various info, allows you to select the media player that will send info to the Music app and upgrade the firmware over the air (OTA). Watchmate will display a notification when it detects that a newer version of InfiniTime is available in the project’s repository, which is a very convenient feature!

Watchmate functionality

A few features like secure pairing and notifications are not implemented yet but they are already listed in the project roadmap. They waited to test watchmate and have enough time to maintain the project, and that they would transfer the project to anyone who would like to take over it. Since then the Github project has already been transferred to the InfiniTime organization and the application on the app store has been transferred to an account managed by Pine64 to ensure that it remains available on the Apple Store until it finds a new maintainer! Thanks again to xan-m for their work on InfiniLink!

Watchmate running on the PinePhone Pro and Pinebook Pro

Thats all for this month, I’ll catch you all in September.

A response to Martijn's blog

Thu, 18 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We rarely, if ever, make responses to blog posts or articles. In fact, there is only one instance that I can think of when we did so. So then, somewhat uncharacteristically, this is a response post to Martijn Braam’s blog in which he explains why he left the PINE64 community. Let’s get one thing out of the way first: Martijn has done a lot for mobile Linux and PINE64 - he is a valued contributor and a colleague with a good insight into how PINE64 and the Pine Store Ltd operate. I should add that his opinions are welcome just as they have always been. Finally, there is no denying that his leaving is a significant loss to the project and, on a private level, a sad state of affairs for us in the community. If it wasn’t clear, we really like Martijn. But this isn’t what this blog post is about. Instead, this is a response to the points and concerns Martijn raises.

A short summary first: Martijn’s blog entry alleges that following PinePhone community editions, and after settling on Manjaro with KDE’s plasma mobile as the default OS, PINE64 and the Pine Store Ltd have sidelined developers from other mobile Linux projects. The argument is made that this has hurt development. The example given in the blog post supposes that the community team and Pine Store employees were firmly intent on removing SPI on the PinePhone Pro and coerced not to ship Tow-Boot. He concludes by saying that we no longer listen to the development community.

But here is the thing, SPI has been included on the PinePhone Pro due to the input from developers and against our initial intent. The talks concerning SPI were tense, as Martijn mentions in the article, in part because we did approach them with a presumption that we’ll inform developers of our plan to drop SPI. I may add that the decision was made among ourselves, without the input of any third parties or partners. The reasoning behind not including SPI on the PCB wasn’t motivated by any single project or outside source - it was based on the fact that for years SPI was largely unused on PINE64 devices. In instances where it was used, it sometimes caused issues, which in turn led to a few support nightmares. I should also mention that SPI has skyrocketed in price at the time and became harder to source; all this, collectively, had us initially pretty firmly determined to drop SPI altogether. And yet, despite this, we agreed to include it on the PinePhone Pro because developers from multiple projects - postmarketOS being one of them - were adamant that it was an absolute necessity.

We were also convinced to flash the SPI with Tow-Boot on the most recent batch of PinePhone Pro, which was the preferred bootloader of the majority of members in the private discussion group. Moreover, I should add that SPI is present on the Pinebook Pro and there is no need to solder one on. Pinebook Pro’s SPI doesn’t come with a pre-loaded bootloader, but the option to flash it is there for anyone who wishes to do so. As for the reason why Pinebook Pro doesn’t ship with a bootloader on SPI - it isn’t caused by favoritism for a particular group of developers or disregard for good ideas, but rather something more trivial. Namerly, a functional Tow-Boot build for the Pinebook Pro wasn’t available at the time of manufacture and shipping.

We created a space for development talks to be held (as we always had), there was a lengthy exchange, there was a difference of opinion, we listened to all developers, and the outcome of the discussion changed our mind on the subject of SPI inclusion and Tow-Boot. And to be clear, we listened to different people. Differences of opinion and unwillingness to listen are two different things and cannot be equated.

All this shouldn’t exactly be a surprise to anyone who has ever interacted with us since, on a weekly basis, we talk to people affiliated with different projects (and to those not affiliated with any projects). Over the past month alone we talked with developers from a handful of major Linux projects regarding support for existing and future devices. We are also in constant contact with community contributors working on non-Linux devices - PineTime, PineBuds and the Pinecil V2 being examples of the latter. And, of course, we talk to our core partners too. This, however, has no impact on whether a good idea from a third party gets implemented or not. We always have been open to suggestions and we will keep on listening to input from the community.

Now, surely there is more that we could have done in the past in the way of supporting development, and undoubtedly there is more we should do in the future. We haven’t delivered on a variety of ideas concerning supporting our development community - the DevZone being a prime example of a crucial system that still needs to be fully implemented (and it will). The DevZone will, among others, be a place where bounties will be offered to all contributors regardless of affiliation. Mea culpa, an argument can be made that in this regard we haven’t done enough in the past year. At the same time, I believe that our track-record of working with the community is such that listing examples of successful ongoing cooperations and of continuous support is unnecessary.

To sum up this response post; Martijn has his reasons for leaving and we should all respect those. We are also thankful for all the work he, and the entire postmarketOS has, poured into the Linux smartphone space and the PinePhone in particular. That said, we don’t want to leave the claim that we do not listen to our development community unanswered - because it is unfair and demonstrably false. We are not mindless marionettes unable to make up our own minds about what course to pursue either. As a project, PINE64 is not afraid of taking responsibility or admitting to a fault, and surely there are many mistakes that the management of the project has made in the past, but blind favoritism or unwillingness to listen to our community are not on the list.

July Update: A Pinecil Evolved

Thu, 28 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to the July community update - I hope you’re staying cool in the heatwave. This month we’re introducing the Pinecil V2 - an evolution of the original Pinecil - and taking a closer look at the Star64 RISC-V SBC. We also discuss Quartz64’s development progress, the PineBuds and receive an update on PineTime and InfiniTime from JF.

Let’s get into it.

I’d like to thank Alex (clover) Ben Brown (Ralim), pillow, JF and PizzaLovingNerd for their contributions to this community update.

N.B. Comments on the blog post need to be in English and follow our Community Rules and Code of Conduct.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tn4S1mdt7QQ

July Update video synopsis

TL;DR

Housekeeping
- New PineTalk episode is out
- Quarterly Q&A on August 13, at 8:00PM CEST (UTC+2)
- Alternative payment methods available in Pine Store again
- The Pinebook Pro is available
- PINE64 EU has launched
Pinecil (V2)
- New RISC-V SoC
- Adds BLE - opening potential for OTA updates & remote telemetry
- Automatic detection of tip resistance
- Compatible with existing peripherals and accessories, including cases
- Range of new, shorter 6.2ohm tips for higher power level
- IronOS already ported
- Counterfeit protection; future option for users to verify if their Pinecil V2 is legit
- Available very soon
Star64
- Congratulations to Gav for being the first to solve the riddle!
- Star64 is in final layout stages and we want to bring it to the market soon
- Uses StarFive JH7110 64bit CPU paired with BXE-2-32 GPU
- Available in 4 and 8GB RAM configuration
- Equipped with 2x Gigabit Ethernet ports (a variant with 1x GbE will be available later on for $5 less), PCIe, USB 3.0 as well as 2x USB 2.0 and GPIO
- Follows Quartz64 model-A pricing and footprint
PineSound
- PineBuds plastic molding is now complete and first test molds underway
- Hoping to being PineBuds to the market as soon as possible - maybe in October
- Similarly to the Pinecil and PineTime, PineBuds have been built to deliver a great out-of-the-box experience for everyone, while also offering depth for tinkerers and those who wish to hack
QuartzPro64 & Quartz64
- QuartzPro64 dev units started shipping; we’re still accepting coupon requests from developers
- Quartz64 receives DietPi support; now supported by Armbian, Manjaro, DietPi as well as giving option to run Arch Linux and NetBSD
- Pillow submitted patches enabling PCIe and analog audio, a fix for fast SD cards has been accepted upstream, and patches enabling JPEG encoder have been merged
PineTime
- Infinitime 1.10 released with many changes & improvements under the hood
- It is now possible to dismiss notifications
- Tweaks to display, colour and gamma settings - making things look better
- InfiniSim new features include animations & allows screen capture in GIF format
- Ongoing work to improve memory situation by leveraging additional 4MB of internal flash
- InfiniTime has 584 forks

Housekeeping

Before we get to all the news of this month there are a few housekeeping items. In case you missed it, the most recent episode of the PineTalk was released earlier this month. In this month’s episode, Zed - the show’s editor - replaces Brian as co-host and joins Justin in discussing PINE64 news, gaming on Linux and gaming-related Linux hardware. The latest episode can be found on PineTalk’s page along with all previous episodes. If you haven’t done so already I suggest you subscribe to the podcast’s RSS feedor follow it on the streaming platform of your choice.

It is time for the quarterly Q&A. The Q&A is a community event which provides you with an opportunity to ask questions live in the chat and have us answer you live. In theory, we should hold the Q&A this month, but due to the holiday season - Marek is unavailable at the end of this month and I’m away at the beginning of the next - we’ve decided to schedule the Q&A for August 13th, 8:00 PM CEST (UTC+2). Just as last time, you will be able to pose questions on Discord, IRC, Telegram and Matrix and we will be live-streaming on Youtube. Many people asked us to simultaneously also live-stream the Q&A session to PeerTube - we will try to accommodate this request. A reminder about the Q&A will be released closer to the date via Telegram, Discord News channels and Social Media. Stay tuned!

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

The last community Q&A in case you missed it

In other news, it is once again possible to pay using alternative methods in the Pine Store via Stripe. For the past few months people only had the choice of PayPal at checkout, but now credit / debit card payments as well as payments via Apple and Google Pay have been reintroduced. We are well aware that people want multiple choices at check-out, and the Pine Store actively explores ways to provide an array of payment options.

Speaking of the Pine Store, in case some of you missed it the Pinebook Pro is once again available for purchase. I know that many of you have been waiting for the Pinebook Pro to make a return, so if you’ve been waiting to pick up a unit then now is your chance. Dsimic is working on a write-up about the PCB of this Pinebook Pro batch, so keep an eye out for his post on this topic in the coming weeks.

The ANSI variant is avaialble now. There is no schedule for the ISO variant.

Lastly, this month PINE64 EU finally launched following a delay due to various regulatory and technical hurdles. The store’s opening has been met with overwhelming positivity and I am humbled by the response. I am also thrilled to see the number of people who decided to check PINE64 EU’s website out and to pick up hardware - I never expected this much traffic. There is more stock on the way and as I stated in the past the selection of available gear will gradually grow. Early August will see the addition of the PinePower, USB-C cables and swag, as well as a restock of the PinePhone and the PineTime. I invite you to follow PINE64 EU’s Twitter, Mastodon and Telegram news channel to be notified when hardware gets restocked.

Pinecil (V2) [by Ben Brown]

Two years ago, the Pinecil V1 was announced, and since then has become PINE64’s most popular consumer hardware. Sadly, I’m far worse at Riddles than the great Lukasz, so to cut to the chase, today we are announcing the follow up version two, which is more of an evolution than a revolution. Featuring improved hardware and accessories it retains the same ergonomics and design as the original Pinecil, and it will work with any accessories you already have. It will obviously work with any external accessories, such as cables, but also with existing cases and tips.

There are more improvements than just the teal silicon grip ;)

On the subject of tips, as well as the new Pinecil, we are creating a new line of tips for both the Pinecil V1 and V2. These tips are optimised for a higher power level than the standard Pinecil tips. By reducing the tip resistance from 8 to 6.2 ohms, they allow 65W at 20V USB-PD standard input. These tips will ship with the Pinecil V2 by default, but if you already own an original Pinecil then you’ll be able to pick up the 6.2 ohms tips from the Pine Store and use them with your existing device.

All parts are directly interchangeable and replaceable with the V1

The Pinecil V2 is a natural follow on from the first version, still using a RISC-V processor, but adding noticeable upgrades to the hardware. Key changes from version one:

New Processor (BL706)
- Adds Bluetooth Low Energy
Higher maximum input voltage
Tentative support for USB-PD EPR (28V)
Support for measuring tip resistance
- Allows automatic detection of 6.2 vs 8 ohm tips

Things staying the same:

GPIO is broken out on USB-C for creating your own projects
- Same pinout as Pinecil V1
Same great feel, including the rubber grip
Works with all existing tips
Same DC input + USB-C input connections
Same case as V1 and compatibility with the red and transparent cases

A notable improvement is the new BL706 RISC-V processor from Bouffalo. It is similar to the BL602 in the Pinenut from the Nutcracker challenge. The BL706 features Bluetooth Low Energy; so future IronOS releases will work to enable exposing features over Bluetooth Low Energy. One obvious future feature making use of BLE would be OTA firmware updates. That said, while technically possible, implementing OTA updates will be a non-trivial amount of work. It is something I suspect someone will make at some point for the bl70x/bl60x chips however, and If someone makes it, I’d be happy to incorporate it into IronOS.

Pinecil V2 PCB top and PCB bottom

The other potential future feature that BLE offers is remote telemetry and control. I’m currently thinking about what the future use of it would be, and I am always open to community requests and suggestions. For like a year now there has been chatter in the Pinecil chat about hacking a bl60x into Pinecil V1 to add WiFi/BLE; main driver has been having a remote control screen and possibly integrating into other software to, for example, turn on the air vent automatically while soldering. I suppose one’s imagination and the sky’s the limit, but these two implementations would be legitimately useful additions rather than gimmicks. The inclusion of BLE is directly inspired by discussions that have been going on in the community chat for the Pinecil, and we are looking forward to seeing where the community takes the new feature set.

Additionally the hardware is designed for higher voltages to enable USB-PD EPR support (the higher voltage USB-PD standard is starting to become available). Using this new EPR standard, 28V PD chargers can be used with automatic negotiation.

Pinecil V2 comes in a simpler box, more in line with the aesthetics of other PINE64 hardware

[edit from Lukasz] The Pinecil V2 will be available shortly: it may, in fact, be already available in the Pine Store when you’re reading this. The original Pinecil is the most popular PINE64 device - not counting the industry-focused SOPine modules - and it is also the most counterfeited hardware in our lineup. The Pinecil V2 introduces some measures to combat counterfeiting, which I won’t be discussing as I’m sure you’ll understand, but Ben told me that eventually users will be able to verify the authenticity of the Pinecil V2 on their own. Countermeasures aside, you should be aware that there are no more genuine Pinecil V1 units available and there won’t be any moving forward. In other words, all Pinecils available for purchase now on popular large web-stores aren’t legitimate.

Lastly, many thanks to Ben for introducing us to the Pinecil V2 and for the amazing support from IronOS.

Star64

Last month I had the pleasure to announce the Star64, PINE64’s first RISC-V single board computer. If you missed it, the announcement took the form of a riddle, and I was thrilled to see so many people from the community participating and offering responses and guesses. I would also mention that I found some of the inaccurate guesses truly inspiring, and may draw on them for inspiration in the future when we’re working on new hardware. Congratulations to Gav who was the first to correctly decipher the riddle - someone will reach out to you for your shipping details closer to Star64’s release date. For those of you who are interested in the riddle, I’ll do a short run-down analysis at the end of this section.

I covered a lot of the core hardware specifications last month, but just as a recap the Star64 is a single board computer comparable to the Quartz64 model-A - the notable difference being the RISC-V SoC at the heart of the SBC. The StarFive JH7110 64bit CPU features quad SiFive FU740 1.5GHz cores and comes paired with BXE-2-32 GPU from Imagination Technologies. I’d like to note that this is a different SoC to the one introduced last year, not in the least because this one includes a GPU. The board will be available in two configurations, with 4 and 8GB of RAM and we aim to match the Quartz64’s price point of the respective hardware versions. Similarly to the Quartz64 model-A, the Star64 will feature an open-ended PCIe port, USB 3.0 and GPIO. One thing I hinted at last month was that the Star64 will have 2 native Gigabit Ethernet ports. A version with only one Ethernet port will also be available at a later date, and we expect it to cost $5 less.

A look at the final layout of the Star64

Much of the work on Star64 work has now finished and the board in its final layout stage. There is still some testing needed, which will help us characterize the single board computer’s qualities and performance. The initial review has yielded some very positive results, partly because the SoC runs cool without the need for passive or active heat dissipation, even under load. The SoC running cool without a heatsink is great news, as it opens the door for the platform to become a basis for future devices. In any case, the initial impressions are very good and we have high hopes for the Star64 becoming an opener for our RISC-V single board computer range. It will still take some time before Star64 finds its way into the Pine Store, but the engineers are working hard to make the launch happen sooner rather than later. I will keep you posted on Star64’s progress in the coming months.

Finally, for those of you who are interested, here is a short breakdown of the riddle. I titled the riddle Victoria Line Station, because a station on the Victoria line underground in London is called Seven Sisters, which is the common name for Pleiades star cluster. First stanza: people who sing, act and dance and are recognizable are usually referred to as ‘stars’. The final line of the first stanza is a reference to a falling star. Second stanza: aside from the sky, stars can also be found in the sea - sea stars. I also associate stars with magic depictions in kids books. The final line of the second stanza indicates that 64 should be added at the end of the root name. Final stanza: here it would appear that I’ve made a mistake - stars first turn to blue giants, then to red giants, and only then explode. I should have gone back and double-checked my highschool knowledge.

PineSound

It has been a little while since the last update on the PineSound project and the PineBuds in particular. The PineBuds were first introduced in April and we have since been working hard to accelerate the pre-manufacturing process to bring production units to the market as soon as possible. I now come bearing news that the PineBuds tooling is finished and plastic molding has started. Obviously the plastic chassis of the buds and their case are just one part of the manufacturing jigsaw puzzle, but it is also a very important one. Granted the plastics turn out well, and no major changes to the mold will be necessary, then the next step is to deal with the electronics.

A decision was made to go with no branding on the buds

It may seem a bit counter-intuitive but, in a sense, the electronics are easier to deal with than the plastic molding. The most challenging part in this day and age is perhaps selecting components that can be reliably sourced in the long term. At present, we expect the production of PineBuds’ electronic components to be fairly straightforward, especially given that the prototypes have been thoroughly tested and found to be very reliable over the course of the past 5 months.

First plastic mold of the PineBuds carry case

If everything pans out, we hope to be able to make PineBuds available for purchase in early October. I hope that the Pinebuds will turn out interesting to a wide demographic by offering solid core functionality to those who simply want good in-ear headphones, as well as a deep and easily accessible array of options for those who wish to tinker and hack. In this sense the PineBuds are a very similar product to the PineTime and the Pinecil. Needless to say, we hope that the PineBuds will see the same level of success as the PineTime and the Pinecil have enjoyed.

QuartzPro64 & Quartz64

Before I get into some of the Quartz64 news, I would just like to mention that the first batch of QuartzPro64 boards have gone out to developers. I was glad to learn that the first round of developers have already received their boards and began working on supporting the platform. This was the first dispatch of QuartzPro64 and many more are yet to come. We have received a good response from the development community and the boards sent out earlier this month have found their way into the hands of very skilled developers. We are, however, still actively seeking the best possible candidates for these early development boards, so if you are someone who could contribute to the bring-up process of the RK3588 then make sure to submit your application to purchase a dev unit at half the price.

Thankfully you have quite a few heatsink mounting options Sergio - got a RockPro64 or (very) old GPU heatsink laying around?

Now, let us discuss Quartz64 developments. Earlier this month DietPi added support for both Quartz64 and SOQuartz. The Quartz64 is now officially supported by DietPi, Armbian and Manjaro, but instructions for running Arch Linux and NetBSD have also been added to the Wiki in recent weeks. We also hope to get other OSes on board supporting Quartz64 in the coming weeks. As a side-note, if you are a maintainer of a distro that added support for the Quartz64 then please reach out to one of the mods and notify them so they can add relevant entries on the Wiki. The reason why we’re seeing an increase in the number of OSes supporting the platform is the pace at which the Quartz64 matures. As I showcased last month, the current development pace has helped push the PineNote closer to a more general early-adopter release. Obviously the benefits are mutual, and development on the PineNote has also helped the Quartz64.

DietPi announcing support for Quartz64 this month

I spoke to Pillow this past week to learn what advances have been made in the past month. I was told that they submitted patches enabling PCIe and analog audio output for the Quartz64 Model-B to mainline Linux. A fix for fast SD cards not working on the Quartz64 has also been submitted upstream and will hopefully find its way into previously mentioned OSes with the next Linux installment. Last but certainly not least Pillow patches enabling the JPEG encoder on the RK3566, which benefit not only the Quartz64 but also the SOQuartz and the PineNote, have now been merged. This is a tonne of fixes in a relatively short period of time, and these are fixes that benefit the entire RK3566-based ecosystem. I am thrilled to see the platform taking a hold in the community, maturing and gradually improving.

PineTime [by JF]

We released InfiniTime 1.10 “Yellow Mango” shortly after last month’s community update. This new release is the result of nearly 3 months of work by the community: 54 pull-requests were merged, totalling 139 commits and 242 files changes. Thanks to everyone who participated in this new version of InfiniTime! InfiniTime 1.10 contains a lot of changes under the hood: code cleaning and refinements, improvements to the build system (automatic font generation), update of the toolchain, and more. These changes are not visible to the end users but are very important for the maintenance of the project in the long term.

Of course, we have also added some features that will please our beloved users. A lot of them were asking for this for a long time for a possibility to dismiss notifications. This is now possible in InfiniTime - all you need to do is swipe on the notification from left to right to dismiss it.

Here’s a video I shot when testing this new feature on my devkit using the PinePhonePro:

See Work in progress: testing notification dismiss.

Testing notification dismiss from a PinePhone Pro with keyboard case

We’ve also tweaked the display settings and gamma to improve the color displayed by the LCD, improved the Timer app interface, and reduced the time needed for the watch to go to sleep. These are just some of the more noteworthy refinements, but this release has many other improvements and bug fixes.

InfiniSim, the InfiniTime simulator, has also received a couple of new features: it now supports InfiniTime animations (vertical and horizontal transitions) and allows recording screen capture in GIF format. This is a very useful feature that allows us to easily do demonstrations and share progress with other people. We’ll probably also use it extensively in our documentation in the near future.

Screen capture from InfiniSim showing animations and dismissing of notifications

Siglo also received a few updates and released version 0.9.9 at the beginning of this month. In contrast, InfiniLink, the iOS companion app for InfiniTime, is still looking for a maintainer. Xan-m, the original author, announced a while ago that they would not be able to maintain the project and that they would transfer the project to anyone interested to take over it. In the meantime, the Github project was transferred to the InfiniTime organization on Github. We also plan on transferring the app to an Apple developer account managed by Pine64 to ensure that the app will be available on the app store when Xan-m’s account expires.

InfiniTime is an open source project. It means that the code is publicly available and that anyone is free to do whatever they want with it as long as they comply with the license of the project (GPLv3). Therefore a lot of people contribute to the project by creating pull-requests and asking the core-developers to review and merge their contributions into the original project.

However, some changes cannot always be integrated in the project, and for various reasons: they do not fit with the project vision or priorities, developers do not have the time to review them or… the changes consume too much memory!

I’ve already mentioned this in the past: the PineTime is based on a tiny hardware that embeds a very limited amount of memory - 512KB of flash and 64KB of RAM. InfiniTime does not fully use the memory yet, but I take great care to avoid hitting the limit as that would make the maintenance of the project very difficult.

In such cases, some developers decide to maintain a fork of InfiniTime with their changes. A fork is basically a copy of the project that they maintain on their own. To this day, InfiniTime counts 584 forks! Among these forks, you’ll find Sec42’s fork that adds changes to make notifications easier to read by “old” eyes and Dmlls’s fork which adds the Infineat watchface and is very well maintained. These forks are a good thing as they allow developers to make their contributions available to the public even if they cannot be merged in InfiniTime right now, and they provide more choice to the users. Everyone wins!

Speaking of memory usage, I’m currently working on improving the situation by leveraging the additional 4MB of external flash memory available on the PineTime hardware. My work is still in the “proof of concept” state, but shows very good results. The goal here is to store data that needs a lot of space (mainly pictures and fonts) in this external memory to free some space in the internal memory. I’ve recently demonstrated a build with the G7710 and the Infineat watchfaces where pictures and fonts are stored in the external memory. There is a slight impact on the performances and display speed, but it opens the road to many new apps and watchfaces in the future!

See Work in progress: test background image and font loading from external flash memory.

Testing background image and font loading from external flash memory

As you can see, the community is still at work on anything related to PineTime! However, don’t worry if you notice a small drop in activity - we are just enjoying the summer and taking well-deserved holidays!

Finally, let me remind you that you can purchase the PineTime from the new PINE64 EU store that opened at the beginning of July!

June Update: Who likes RISC-V?

Tue, 28 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This month we reveal that we are working on a powerful and affordable RISC-V single board computer, discuss PineNote’s huge software improvements and provide updates on PinePhone, PinePhone Pro and Pinebook Pro’s availability. I am also taking the opportunity to let you know that, after 6 years of holding PINE64’s community manager post, I’ll be resigning from my position shortly, once PINE64 EU launches next week; Marek Kraus will gradually be taking over my responsibilities.

There is much to cover this month, so let’s get cracking.

I’d like to thank dsimic, Alex (clover) and PizzaLovingNerd for their contributions to this community update.

N.B. Comments on the blog post need to be in English and follow our Community Rules and Code of Conduct.

TL;DR

Housekeeping
- Read JF’s post about using the Quartz64 as a NAS
- QuartzPro64 developer coupons have started going out - devs, check your inbox
- New PineTalk is out
- Pinebook Pro available in July - a post on PCB revision coming soon
- PINE64 EU launching after (over) a month long delay
- Marek becomes community manager at PINE64
Who likes RISC-V?
- We’re making a powerful and affordable RISC-V model-A type SBC
- SBC in final layout phase
- Comparable specs and price point to Quartz64, but with RISC-V SoC
- Be the first to solve the riddle and receive our first RISC-V SBC
PinePhone (Pro)
- PinePhone and PinePhone Pro are back in stock - shipping mid July
- Installing community modem firmware is now easy
- You can play Doom on PinePhone (Pro)’s modem!
- Camera developments and major improvements to Megapixels postprocessing
PineNote
- Linux on the PineNote is now in good shape
- Major developments for the e-paper display - work by Smaeul on the driver detailed
- It is now possible to write using EMR pen on the PineNote running Linux in a standard Debian installation
- Showcase of smooth (quickly appearing) handwriting

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Video synopsis of the June Update

Housekeeping

Earlier this month JF wrote a guest post in which he showcased the Quartz64 model-A’s functionality as a NAS. The post details retrofitting a standard ATX computer case to fit a Quartz64 model-A and outfitting the setup with 6 SSDs. JF also provides general guidance to reproduce the setup and offers a handful of benchmarks of the NAS’ performance. While JF used Manjaro as the basis for his NAS, I feel this is a good time to let everyone know that Debian Armbian builds for the Quartz64 are now available for download. I know that many people are in favour of Debian’s stability when it comes to building something such as a NAS, and therefore I am thrilled to see that now it is available as an option on the Quartz64. I should also mention that I expect to see many more OS builds available for Quartz64 and SOQuartz shortly.

JF’s NAS - via guest blog post

Staying on the subject of single board computers, the QuartzPro64 developer edition coupons will start going out shortly. If you’ve signed up to purchase a unit, please keep an eye on your inbox. If you receive an email with a coupon code, you will have limited time to complete the purchase. The email will also include the link to the page where you can complete your QuartzPro64 purchase.

Last month I had the pleasure of bringing the much anticipated news that Pinebook Pro is re-entering production. This month I am glad to confirm that the Pinebook Pro is already in production, and we expect units to be delivered from the factory sometime in July. We will make sure to notify you once stock is available on social media and in the news channels. Dsimic will soon be publishing a guest post about PCB changes made to this production run, so keep an eye out for his impressions in the coming days.

A peek at the Pinebook Pro’s 2022 PCB - via dsimic

In case you missed it, a new PineTalk episode was released at the beginning of this month. In this month’s episode, Brian and Justin covered topics covered in the May community update and discussed their experience with open and security-focused Android ROMs. Justin also talks about an idea he pitched to me concerning a smart-speaker. The duo also promised to read and respond to the audience’s questions, so make sure to bombard them with emails, toots and tweets. I too think that the show deserves a higher degree of community engagement. If you haven’t yet added PineTalk to your RSS feed, then here is a handy link: RSS feed.

PINE64 EU is finally ready to open its doors for business. I don’t have a specified launch day yet, but it will be next week - it largely depends on how quickly I manage transport, unpack and inventory everything. I once again wish to apologise for the delay in the store’s opening - I ran into issues with EU regulation that needed to be addressed. Suffice to say, relevant institutions take their sweet time with every piece of submitted paperwork; in my case, it took some 4 weeks for a complete review. Anyways, here is what will be available for purchase on day one: PinePhone Pro, PinePhone, the Pinecil, PinePhone (Pro) keyboard case, protective cases for the phones as well as the PineTime. As I mentioned in the past, this is just the beginning, and the aim is to have the EU store grow its selection to include other hardware in the future. I should also mention that customers will be able to select from Mobian, Manjaro and postmarketOS to be installed on their PinePhone (Pro). I also have a small surprise which will be announced on the day of the store’s launch, so make sure to follow PINE64 EU on Twitter, Mastodon and Telegram (news channel, not a chat).

Lastly, at the beginning of next month, as the EU store’s launches, I will give up my position as community manager at PINE64. But fret not, I am leaving you in very capable hands - Marek Kraus will be taking on the role of steering the community in the future. Marek has been a part of the project for a long time and played a crucial role in PINE64’s success. He is highly personable, cool headed and, unlike me, also very technically skilled (including hardware and software). This means that not only is he able to communicate with contributors, engineers and partner project developers, but he is also able to speak their language. I am handing down this post to Marek with complete confidence and I know that he’ll do an incredible job. As for myself, while the PINE64 EU will be my core focus from now-on, I will remain a part of PINE64 and the community - I’m not going anywhere. I’ll also keep on writing the updates, hosting quarterly Q&As, engaging with the community, etc. The transition of responsibilities between Marek and I will be gradual and fluid; it will take time. Congrats Marek and take good care of my beloved project :)

Who likes RISC-V?

We have hinted at this for some time, and many of you knew it would become a reality eventually: we’re now in the final layout phase for a powerful, yet affordable, RISC-V single board computer. I need to be a bit cagey about what I write, partly because I want you to solve the riddle at the end of this section, and in part because not all information has been set in stone and disclosed publicly by the SoC vendor. Before I get into some of the details I’ve been allowed to disclose, here’s the spiel: the board will premiere in our signature model-A form factor, feature CPU performance which falls somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Quartz64, offer plenty of IO, and sport a price-tag similar to that of the Quartz64. In a nutshell, a Quartz64 model-A type board but with a RISC-V SoC. Sounds good? Then keep on reading.

PCIe is important to industry clients; ROCKPro64 in RoninDojo Tanto - via RoninDojo

The board will be available in two configurations, with 4GB and 8GB of RAM. Similarly to the Quartz64 model-A, the RISC-V board will feature both USB 3.0 and a PCIe slot. Having an open-ended PCIe slot on a board offers it a high degree of versatility, which we know is something that developers, end-users and industry clients want. The SoC features two native Gigabit Ethernet NICs, but I am not certain if there are plans to expose both of them on the PCB - this hasn’t been determined yet. Regardless, I figured it is worth mentioning it as an available option. The SoC has Imagination Technologies’ BXE-2-32 GPU for which the source code ought to be made available soon. Imagination Technologies have recently come through on their promise of open sourcing their other GPUs, so there is no reason to believe that it will be any different in the case of the BXE-2-32. Since the formal introduction of the board to the market is still a few months away, the code may very well be available on launch day.

The model-A SBC form factor should be familiar to everyone (pictured: Quartz64 model-A, PINE A64(+), ROCKPro64)

The last thing I want to communicate is that the RISC-V platform is something we wish to pursue in parallel to our well established ARM-based hardware. While we don’t have set-in-stone plans regarding the platform, be on the lookout for more RISC-V hardware offerings from now through 2023. We have some candidate devices for a RISC-V conversion and ideas for future iterations of hardware based on the architecture, which is something I believe many of you will find exciting. In short: we have made a decision to commit to the RISC-V platform.

I’ve decided to keep the name of the board out of this introductory post so that you can decipher the riddle below. As we’ve done in the past, the first person to correctly decipher the name of the board will receive the first unit that rolls off the factory floor. Your guess needs to be filed in the comments section; guesses posted elsewhere don’t count. Don’t worry if your guess doesn’t immediately show up in the comments - it needs to undergo moderation. All comments are time-stamped, so there is no chance of being leapfrogged by someone else submitting their guess after you. I’ll have more information about our RISC-V board for you next month.

Victoria Line Station

I sing, act and dance

celebrated by them all

I never climb my stage

but I sometimes fall

In the sea I dwell

and in every magic book

By heaven!

adding 64 is all it took

On my stage I shine

and when I feel truly blue

then there’s nothing

This is the final clue

PinePhone (Pro)

Let me open with a short update on Pinephone and PinePhone Pro’s availability; we currently expect to receive the next production-run in approximately mid July at which point shipping will commence. At the time of publishing this post, both PinePhone and PinePhone Pro should now be listed as being in-stock.

As most of you are aware, the PinePhone (Pro)’s Quectel EG25-G modem is effectively its own single-core Arm computer running a closed Linux-based firmware. Over the past 2 years the community put in an immense effort to improve and adapt the IoT modem’s firmware to better serve the PinePhone (Pro). Work by Biktor and Konrad, as well as that of other contributors, opened the modem up to tinkering and thereby also to alterations and improvements to its software. Before I write another word, I need to underline that it is PINE64’s and Pine Store’s position that the licensed proprietary firmware on the modem should not be tampered with, and it is my duty to notify you that altering the modem’s firmware may violate your local laws, which in turn can have very real consequences. Therefore, please consider the following to be a progress report and a showcase, which I find to be fitting well with the community spirit of this blog, but it is not an enticement to use alternative firmware on your PinePhone (Pro).

Until recently it was very difficult to switch from the closed Quectel firmware to the much more open firmware by Biktor. This community firmware contains no binary blobs in the userspace, and significantly reduces the modem’s power consumption and heat output by running the SoC at just 100Mhz instead of the default 400Mhz/ 800Mhz. Until recently, installation of the community firmware required you to have a firm understanding of the command line and ADB. Now, however, the process has been completely streamlined and achievable via fwupd, and from a GUI no less. I decided to try the process on my own hardware running DanctNIX Arch Linux. The process is as simple as opening up the GNOME software centre, searching for “Firmware” and downloading the GUI utility. Upon launching the Firmware utility the Quectel modem is automatically listed as eligible for firmware updates. Tapping the modem provides information about the current vendor firmware, vendor ID as well as many other information. Scrolling down reveals available releases from Biktor. The installation is as simple as tapping the chosen release, reading the precaution popup, and agreeing to proceed with the installation. The installation takes approximately 10 minutes, and at the end of which the phone needs to be rebooted.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Installing modem firmware using GUI - via Martijn Braam

I have now run Biktors firmware for a handful of days and I am very pleased with its performance. I can tell that the phone as a whole runs considerably cooler and the additional quirks it offers are fun to toy with. I also haven’t experienced any issues with LTE, GPS, making and receiving calls nor with sending or receiving SMS. If anything, on the default firmware I would sometimes experience issues with receiving calls (usually after a few days of the PinePhone running) but as of today, my PinePhone running the community modem firmware hasn’t dropped a single call - at least, not to my knowledge. But Biktor’s firmware has another tangible benefit over its closed-source counterpart: namely, it is more secure and not susceptible to the malware first distributed in December of last year. This is a major boon, especially to all those who are getting a PinePhone (Pro) strictly for privacy and security purposes.

But an open firmware opens an avenue for doing a wide variety of things, some of which are not necessarily related to telephony at all. Indeed, some applications may not even be useful, and only serve as an illustration of what can be achieved when running open source software. One such example is running Doom on the modem, because, ya’ know, everything needs to run Doom. Biktor put together a special (pre)release of the firmware which bundles X11, a VNC server and Chocolate Doom for those of you who wish to try this out. Below you’ll find a short video showing Doom running on the PinePhone’s modem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvLlP6BEPPk

Doom on PinePhone’s modem - original video via Biktor on Twitter

While I can neither recommend nor suggest flashing this community-built modem firmware, I privately think that it clearly serves a purpose and has an application if you reside in a region where unlicensed modem firmware is permissible. From what I can tell, the firmware offers many benefits to PinePhone (Pro) users and no obvious drawbacks. I should also mention that if you attempt flashing your PinePhone (Pro)’s modem firmware and something goes wrong, then neither we nor Biktor bear any responsibility for it. Lastly, I know that Biktor would appreciate help developing this firmware further, making it even more secure and its feature-set more robust, so if you are interested in this project then please consider donating via ko-fi or liberapay, or contribute code.

Lastly I’d also like to mention that the cameras on both the original and Pro versions of the PinePhone have received some major improvements. As I reported last month, thanks in large part to Megi’s efforts, the camera on the PinePhone Pro’s is now functional - although it will take time for it to be incorporated into an application like Megapixels. For the past month Megi has been working on a calibration application for PinePhone Pro’s cameras. In his recent blog post, Megi writes: “I started writing a GTK4 based app that connects to the Pinephone Pro over WiFi and allows to modify parameters inside the sensor and ISP, while monitoring the effects of various correction in real time, inspect histograms for various color components, and in general to experiment with the cameras and the ISP fairly painlessly. This should help with the calibration process as much as possible“. The application also allows live mjpeg streaming over HTTP to as a convenience feature. Megi also explains that he is putting a lot of time into the design of the UI controls and CPU optimisation, so that the application is both cognitively ergonomic and only utilizing a single core for a lag-free experience. Ultimately, the goal of his efforts are to make it easier for end-user applications, such as Megapixels, to properly calibrate and incorporate his code.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/H-S8F5zAUAY

Streaming video via the PinePhone Pro application app - via Megi’s blog

On the subject of Megapixels, Martijn Braam released a video showcasing new post-processing modes that will soon be included into Megapixels. Users will now be able to manually select from three different post-processing modes: the original mode (currently available), single and stacked. The new post-processing modes are not only much faster, but they also result in much nicer, richer and more natural photographs on the original PinePhone. Taking photographs is one of a smartphone’s core features, and the picture quality on the original PinePhone has just received a major ‘bump’. This is something all PinePhone users ought to be looking out for.

First image: old camera post processing / Second image: new camera post processing - via Martijn Braam on Twitter

PineNote

It has been some time since I wrote about the PineNote. This is partly because much of the work at this point centers around the e-paper display. But let me back up a little bit. The PineNote has benefited from all the progress made on the Quartz64 platform. In case you missed it, I described Quartz64 progress back in March and in last month’s update; much work has gone into making the RK3566 platform functional, and with patches being upstreamed a sizable portion of the core functionality is now available in mainline Linux. In other words, the basis upon which the PineNote is built is in good shape. However, the PineNote is not a single board computer and it also doesn’t rely on a traditional video output. The first breakthrough for the PineNote came in January of this year, when developers managed to initiate the e-paper display under non-BSP Linux. Since January much of the work concerning the PineNote centered around making the e-paper display more usable. Whilst the PineNote could display images for some time now, the refresh rate remained very low thereby limiting its scope of usability. The other issue with a very slow refresh rate is that it makes it impossible to write on the PineNote - negating one of the devices main features and selling points.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

DOOM on PineNote - via Danct12

But this is about to change. Recent breakthroughs by Smaeul and Maximilian, as well as other developers, bring us much closer to realising the dream of a fully open and well supported e-paper device. The PineNote can now use the A2 waveform which allows for fast transitions between black and white on e-paper; for those who like me are uneducated in this matter, you can think of it as a very fast local refresh rate, for instance just under the tip of the stylus. But that’s not all. Smaeul has also been working on a global refresh mode (entire panel, not local), which only refreshes ‘damaged’, or altered, sections rather than the entirety of the panel. As he explained, this leads to a dramatic reduction in memory bandwidth requirements. Referring to the video I am embedding below, Smaeul writes: “ Global refreshes with diff mode turned off for clarity (…) I’ve configured the window registers so only the damaged portion of the screen (the flashing part) gets read from DRAM. (…) We could add some heuristic to switch to a global refresh if a large enough portion of the screen is damaged. Since global refreshes only use 2 buffers instead of 3, this would minimize the peak memory bandwidth_”._

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Video showcasing the A2 waveform in Smaeul’s driver - video shared in chat

I also had an opportunity to talk to Maximilian, who showcased his build of Debian bookworm/sid with GNOME running under Wayland. This build runs a slightly modified version of Smaeul’s e-paper ebc driver with tweaks to the system configuration. Maximilian explained that his tweaks reduce artifacts and auto refresh, and force the driver to only output black and white pixels so that the A2 waveform can be used without dealing with colors and text rendering issues. The result? Smooth pen input and, from what I can tell, near flawless writing tested for example in a default and unchanged LibreOffice, which ships with Debian.

As you can see in the video from the user hrdl below, writing in a regular Linux on the PineNote (in Xournal++ with just two minor patches and configuration tweaks) does not only look viable but downright great. It is one thing to describe it and a different thing to see it, so below I am attaching the example video of handwriting using an EMR Pen in a pretty standard Linux installation on the PineNote.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

What the PineNote now needs is a default Linux distribution and user interface to ship. The OS doesn’t need to be polished, nor flawless, all it needs to be Linux with all the device’s core capabilities enabled. Marek and I will be talking to PineNote developers and partner projects in the coming weeks in a hope to work out an arrangement so that the PineNote can finally ship with Linux preinstalled. Here is the take-away from this section: we (and by ‘we’, I actually mean the devoted developers) are getting closer to realising the dream of an e-paper device running regular Linux, with a regular desktop, which allows you to do regular computational things on the device.

That is all for this month’s update, catch you all in July!

My DIY low-power 6 SSD NAS based on the Quartz64 ARM board

Fri, 03 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

ARM SBCs have been around for a few years now. They were made popular and accessible mostly by the RaspberryPi released in 2012.

I’ve been enjoying building countless projects around these boards : web servers, home-automation, camera recording, IM bots,…

A new trend has recently appeared in the SBC world : the PCIe slot! The RaspberryPi 4 Compute Module exposes it via the IO board, and the Pine64 RockPro64 is equipped with a PCIe 4x open-ended slot directly on the board.

I haven’t had the opportunity to get hold of one of these boards, but I’m lucky enough to have a Quartz64 model A on hands. The Quartz64 is based on the Rockchip RK3566 running @1.8Ghz. My board is equipped with 8GB of RAM. It also has Gigabit ethernet, 1 SATA connector, USB3, and of course, the PCIe port.

I experimented a bit with the PCIe interface by testing a couple of PCIe boards I had on hands at that time : the SATA controller board from Pine64 and an Intel 4x GBe board : they worked out of the box! Awesome, isn’t it?

4xGbe PCIe card installed on the Quartz64

2 SSDs connected to the Quartz64 via the SATA controller boad

I had an idea in the back of my mind : create a DIY low-power NAS based on a cheap SBC that can handle more than 2 drives (up to 6, preferably) without using USB. And it looks like this project is now completely possible! So… Let’s do it!

The prototype

The first prototype was very rough : everything was laying on my desk, with all the wires dangling around. It was a bit messy, but it allowed me to check that the drives were working correctly.

When I ensured that everything was working as expected, I bought a few more items : the SATA controller with 6 ports and an enclosure for 6 2.5" SATA drives.

How to properly power an SBC and 6 drives?

This question haunted me for some time.

For now, the SBC is powered by a 12V power brick via a barrel connector. And the disks are powered by the board using those specific power cables by Pine64. If I understand correctly, this cable is connected to the 12V power supply from the board and embeds voltage s to provide 12V and 5V/3.3V to the disks.

It works fine with 2 drives but… I want 6 of them! And I’m not sure those voltage regulators would support more than 2 drives.

I could probably find a PSU that outputs 12V, 5V and 3.3V, build the wires and adaptors by finding the correct connectors, etc. Buuut… That looked too difficult for me, and I doubt the result would have been elegant and safe.

The solution I implemented is the PicoPSU. It’s a very small yet powerful DC-DC converter that is designed to power embedded PCs. It comes in the forms of small PBC mounted on a standard ATX connector that fits directly in the ATX connector of any standard motherboard.

It looks good but the Quartz64 does not have that ATX power connector! Fortunately, I remember a blog post on CNX-Soft about an ATX breakout board. It has the ATX power connector on 1 side, a screw terminal for +12V, -12V, 5V and 3.3V on the other side, and a switch and a few fuses in between.

The following picture shows the PicoPSU on the top and the ATX breakout board in the middle. The PicoPSU receives 12V from the black and white connector on the left. The Quartz64 is powered by the red and white wires on the bottom, and the SSDs by the classic red/yellow/black wires on the right.

An SBC in an ATX case

This setup with 2 SSDs ran for a few months. But it’s still messy and fragile. I wanted to clean that up!

So I wanted to find a box to secure the whole build and hide all those wires… without breaking the bank!
The only compatible case I could find was the NAS enclosure from Pine64 but it supports only 2 drives.

I quickly figured I would need to tinker something based on a case that was not specifically designed to be compatible with the Quartz64! But hey! While I can do a lot of things with my 10 fingers on a keyboard, I’m not that good with my 2 hands and a screwdriver!
So I did not want to buy a shiny new case that I would certainly break while trying to drill a hole or something!

Luckily, I found an old (Pentium4-era) desktop computer that was going to be thrown to the landfill. I thought I could salvage the case and probably recycle the insides of that prehistoric computer!

So I emptied the case, cut the I/O shield with my Dremel and cut a thin aluminum plate so that it would fit in the case.

And I then drilled holes to fit the ATX breakout board, the PicoPSU and the Quartz64 with the SATA board.

While it’s not finished yet, I’m already pretty happy with the result so far! I’m planning on improving this build with an I/O shield for USB and Ethernet, connect the power button, the LEDs,… but that’s a project for another day!

The hardware

Here are more details about the hardware I used in this build:

The Quartz64 ARM SBC from Pine64 : the brain of the system
A 6x SATAIII controller board based on the ASM1166 chipset
A PicoPSU-150-XT DC-DC power supply. 150W is probably way too much, it has 2 SATA power connectors, so that will make my setup easier.
An Icy Dock ExpressCage MB326SP-B. This nice enclosure fits in a 5.25" bay and supports up to 6x 2.5" SATA drives.
6 SATA SSDs
An ATX break-out board, SATA cables, various connectors and wires I had on hands or bought for cheap on various web shops.

Linux distro

I installed the latest dev image from ManjaroARM on the eMMC flash module. Note that the support for the Quartz64 and the RK3566 is still in early development stage. So I expect a few issues and bugs, and I also expect for the support to improve very quickly in the next weeks and months!

As the PCIe controller is not supported yet in the default kernel (linux-rc, currently version 5.18-rc7), I switch to the kernel linux-quartz64 (version 5.17.0). Full support of PCIe should be added in kernel 5.19. Stay tuned :)

PCIe and DTS

The proof that the support for the board is still pretty new is that at first, the filesystem on the SSD would corrupt as soon as I copied big files (> 4GB) on the disk. This was apparently caused by an issue with the memory allocation for the SATA driver. With the help of the folks in the chat room dedicated to the Quartz64, we were able to patch the DTS/DTB files to work around this issue. Those patches are not applied yet in newer manjaro images so I’ll provide these patches here. Use them at your own risks, of course! Neither I or the original author of those patches will be responsible for any issue that could occur when using those files!

Linux 5.19 should bring support for the PCIe controller on the Quartz64 and applying those patches won’t be needed anymore!

Raid : ZFS?

ZFS is very trendy right now, and I wanted to do some experiments with this very popular filesystem. Unfortunately, ZFS is not included in the Linux kernel. So you have to build the kernel module manually. ArchLinux and Manjaro provide the package in the AUR so the installation was not that difficult.

It worked quite well until ManjaroARM updated the kernel to a newer version that is not yet supported by the ZFS driver. As I said earlier, the support for the Quartz64 is under heavy development, and Manjaro integrates bleeding edge versions of the kernel to provide the most up-to-date experience.

The Linux kernel is so bleeding edge that the ZFS module was not updated yet when I installed the new kernel on my setup, and it broke my shiny new ZFS filesystem.

I didn’t want my system to break randomly each time I ran pacman -Syu so… I decided ZFS was not the best fit for me right now.

BTRFS in mirror mode on 2 SSDs

At the beginning, I could find a good deal for only 2 SSDs. So after ZFS, I decided to test BTRFS. RAID 5 and 6 are not yet production-ready with BTRFS, but RAID 0 and 1 are completely supported. I’ve finally settled to format them in mirror mode (RAID 1).

This array will host the services I’ll run on this service : docker containers, my Matrix home-server and probably many others in the future!

mdraid RAID-5 for 4 SSDs

I finally found a good deal for the 4 remaining SSDs, and I decided to use mdraid RAID 5 for these 4 drives.

I’ll use this array as data storage.

What does it look like?

A screenshot is better than a thousand words!

Benchmarks

As soon as I showcased my project, a lot of people asked about the performances of this setup. So here are a few numbers!

You’ll quickly notice that those are not the performances you were hoping for. But in my opinion, knowing that everything worked nearly out of the box, those numbers are already quite great. And we’ll probably see those performances increase as the support for the board and the CPU improves in the near future!

Benchmarks with `dd`

Read directly from the block device:

# dd if=/dev/sdc of=/dev/null bs=4M status=progress iflag=direct
15497953280 bytes (15 GB, 14 GiB) copied, 44 s, 352 MB/s^C
3728+0 records in
3727+0 records out
15632171008 bytes (16 GB, 15 GiB) copied, 44.4116 s, 352 MB/s

Read from the BTRFS mirror array:

# dd if=bigfile.raw of=/dev/null bs=4M status=progress iflag=direct
31914983424 bytes (32 GB, 30 GiB) copied, 154 s, 207 MB/s
7609+1 records in
7609+1 records out
31914983424 bytes (32 GB, 30 GiB) copied, 154.001 s, 207 MB/s

Write to the BTRFS mirror array:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=./temp_zero bs=4M status=progress oflag=direct
6236930048 bytes (6.2 GB, 5.8 GiB) copied, 61 s, 102 MB/s^C
1497+0 records in
1497+0 records out
6278873088 bytes (6.3 GB, 5.8 GiB) copied, 61.5351 s, 102 MB/s

Read from the mdraid RAID 5 array:

# dd if=bigfile.raw of=/dev/null bs=4M status=progress iflag=direct
31822184448 bytes (32 GB, 30 GiB) copied, 85 s, 374 MB/s 
7609+1 records in
7609+1 records out
31914983424 bytes (32 GB, 30 GiB) copied, 85.2706 s, 374 MB/s

write to the mdraid RAID 5 array:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=./temp_zero bs=4M status=progress oflag=direct
4123000832 bytes (4.1 GB, 3.8 GiB) copied, 40 s, 103 MB/s^C
983+0 records in
983+0 records out
4123000832 bytes (4.1 GB, 3.8 GiB) copied, 40.0076 s, 103 MB/s

Samba benchmarks

Read from the BTRFS mirror array : 70Mio/s
Write to the BTRFS mirror array : 90Mio/s
Read from the mdraid RAID 5 array : 60Mio/s
Write to the mdraid RAID 5 array : 90Mio/s

Power Consumption

8W (idle) - 12W (load)

Next steps

On the hardware side, I would like to improve the wiring and cabling by adding an I/O shield for the ethernet and USB ports, add a power button, a reset button, a power led, and maybe paint the case to make it prettier.

I would also like to see how we could improve the performances of the system. There are probably configuration issues or bottlenecks that could be improved.

And finally, I would like to put this new server and NAS to good use! It’s already running my Matrix home-server. I would also like to store music and movies for my home theater and probably many other things in the future!

May Update: Worth The Wait

Tue, 31 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Hello everyone! This month we’re announcing production of the Pinebook Pro resuming and introduction of Quartz64 model-B. I had an opportunity to meet with TL earlier this month, and got some ear-on time with the Pinebuds, so I dedicated a section to my early impressions from the time spent with the prototype. This update also brings news of SOQuartz Blade hostboard production, camera enablement on the PinePhone Pro and a guest write-up by dsimic addressing issues some users have been experiencing with their PinePhone (Pro) keyboards. There is truly a lot to get to this month, so let’s get into it.

I’d like to thank JF, Dylan, dsimic, Alex (clover), Brian (33YN2), and PizzaLovingNerd for their contributions to this community update.

N.B. Comments on the blog post need to be in English and follow our Community Rules and Code of Conduct.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Video synopsis

TL;DR

Housekeeping
- Update moved to 28th of the month
- PINE64 in-person meeting
- Pinebook donation to school with kids in need of laptops
- We’re going though QuartzPro64 dev pre-orders
- PINE64 EU store; addressing delay
Quartz64 & SOQuartz
- Model-B released - available for $60
- SOQuartz Blade hostboard enters production
Pinebook Pro
- Pinebook Pro is making a return after months of absence
- Expected in Pine Store late June early July
- Price stays the same as do most specs
- Highlight of selected new released for the Pinebook Pro
PinePhone (Pro)
- PinePhone Pro restock expected late June early July
- PinePhone Pro camera enablement underway; look at first pictures
- Mobile Linux has gained support for Bluetooth HFP
- User-made script to easily install Waydroid
PinePhone (Pro) keyboard
- Dsimic writes at length about PP KB issues identified by community and developers
PineSound
- First PineSound dev boards allocated to devs
- PineBuds prototype early impressions
PineTime
- InfiniTime development progress
- New InfiniTime fork exposes high frequency accelerometer data; fork receives a dedicated companion app

Housekeeping

Let me start by addressing the delay in the publication of this month’s community update. I’ve been really busy with the EU store this past month (more on this later) and ill for the better part of last week, which left me with very little spare time to do the write-up. As a result, for the first time in years, this update is published at the end of the month rather than on the 15th. I have given some thought to the situation and arrived at the conclusion that we’ll make the 28th of the month the new update publication date. So be on the lookout for the next update on June 28th. Consider this publication tentative - in two-three months I will reevaluate if changing the publication date to the end of the month was a good decision.

Earlier this month we held our first in-person meeting since FOSDEM 2020. It was a small get-together, primarily aimed at discussing the PINE64 progress and PINE64 EU’s launch. It was a pleasure to see the people who make the cogs turn in person again. Thank you guys for paying me a visit!

From the left: Lukasz, Gamiee, Lynx, TL and Ayufan

As some of you may recall, last year we made a pledge to donate Pinebooks to a charitable cause. It may come as a surprise but, as it turns out, donating hardware is actually not simple. One would think that it is a case of establishing a suitable cause and shipping the hardware, but nothing could be further from the truth. I’ll spare you the detail of the hurdles we had to overcome, but suffice to say finding a suitable recipient of the Pinebooks proved difficult. It is therefore with great pleasure that I bring you news that the first batch of Pinebooks have found a new home at a school where kids were in need of a laptop. I would like to take this opportunity to sincerely thank One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) for helping us in finding the right recipients of the laptops. May the Pinebooks serve their new owners well.

We are looking forward to dispatching more Pinebooks to schools and charities this year

We have started going through developer pre-orders for the QuartzPro64. Allocation of the boards was initially delayed (in part due to my absence this past month), but with units now rolling off the factory floor we’ll move swiftly to issue first coupons. We have decided to send the boards out in smaller batches rather than all at one time - this will allow us to monitor progress and developer engagement. So if you filed an application to pick up a QuartzPro64 at a reduced developer price of $150, and won’t hear from us in the coming weeks then don’t worry, we’ll send out units for the months to come. At the same time, I’d like to remind you that the developer pre-orders are still open and that there is still time to file a coupon request. To learn more about QuartzPro64, I invite you to read the March community update where I detailed the board’s specs and explain our decision to subsidize the initial production run.

Final QuartzPro64 PCBA

Lastly, I wish to address the PINE64 EU store’s launch delay. For the past month I’ve been cutting through layers upon layers of red tape - as it turns out, it is one thing to ship to the EU and a whole different thing to have permanent representation here. Since the situation is ongoing I will refrain from discussing the specifics at this time - what I will say is that I have now gotten a lawyer to help the process along. I hope that all outstanding legal paperwork can be sorted out in the next 2-3 weeks. As always, I’ll keep you posted on the PINE64 EU’s Twitter and Mastodon.

Quartz64 & SOQuartz

Earlier this month we released the Quartz64 model-B that sports the same RK3566 SOC found on its larger sibling as well as the SOQuartz compute module. Model-B comes in a familiar form factor and is available in a 4GB LPDDR4 RAM configuration for $60. While the model-A is geared more towards the development community, the model-B is meant as an easy-to-integrate option for industry partners and regular end-users. It does offer fewer IO options than the model-A but still manages to deliver a solid connectivity selection including 2x USB, 1x USB 3.0, and Gigabit Ethernet with PoE. You also get AC WiFi, Bluetooth 5.0, MIPI CSI, and DSI as well as a mini PCIe slot.

Quartz64 model-B top and bottom

I had the opportunity to try out the new board earlier this month, and I was very happy with both how well it is supported and with how well it performs. I tried Manjaro with Plasma and, to my surprise, the board performed really well running at my monitor’s native 4K resolution. Running the desktop under Wayland I would describe the experience as perfectly smooth; it is clear that Plasma Desktop benefits from Panfrost (FOSS GPU driver) acceleration at 4K resolution. I will go as far as to say that the model-B would be a great candidate for a 4K kiosk running a dedicated application or a browser-based app. As someone who enjoys playing retro games, I also think it would make for a great small emulation box. I hope we’ll get a LAKKA image for it eventually.

I’ve spoken briefly with pgwipeout, one of the contributors who laid the software foundations for the Quartz64 device lineup, and asked about software progress. He told me that model-A and B, as well as the SOQuartz, have found their way into kernel 5.19. He added that the VOP2 driver was accepted into kernel 5.19 for HDMI output, but the DTS changes will first find their way into kernel 5.20. Now that we’ve got a solid software foundation in place, we need the board to offer a wide diversity of OS choices. Manjaro has done a great job, and their OS images are really well maintained, but I am well aware that many need a Debian-based or specialized (e.g. LAKKA) operating system to meet their requirements. So, If you are associated with a project who would like to support the Quartz64 devices, make sure to reach out to me or one of the admins.

SOQuartz and SSD in the Blade hostboard

The SOQuartz compute module, which is based on the same hardware configuration as the model-A and model-B, has already been released for some time, and the first pre-release OS images for the module are now available. With the software taking shape fast, the SOQuartz host boards have entered production and should be available in the Pine store soon. Aside from the model-A type host board - which is basically an IO breakout board - we will soon also be offering the Blade hostboard. The Blade has been designed for clustering, and fits inside a standard 1U server rack: 12 or more Blade hostboards can fit into a single rack. I wrote at length about the Blade in November last year, but here is a short recap of the IO the Blade exposes: Gigabit Ethernet, a micro SD card slot, 1x USB 2.0 header, digital video output, 40x GPIO header, UART output, power barrel jack port and an M.2 PCIe slot for storage. The Blade has been designed to have IO located at the short leading edges, allowing for easy access and cable management as well as tight stacking inside a server rack. More information about the Blade and SOQuartz model-A host board will be coming soon.

Pinebook Pro

It has been a year since we were able to ship the Pinebook Pro, and ever since the last batch sold out we have been continually asked to bring it back. Today I am pleased to let you know that the Pinebook Pro has now re-entered production and will be available for purchase at some point in late June or early July. You will surely also be happy to learn that we are re-introducing the laptop at an unchanged price of $219 - the price it sold at prior to all the disasters which at first made production difficult and eventually impossible. The hardware remains largely unchanged from the 2021 version of the laptop. This includes the PCBs, keyboards, metal and plastic parts, etc. For those who haven’t followed the Pinebook Pro production hurdles over the past months: the main reason for production stalling was our inability to acquire reasonably priced and vendor-insured high-grade IPS panels. We did, however, already have much of the remaining parts lined up and ready to go. The new panel ought to deliver identical performance to those used previously. The only other change concerns the battery - the new battery is marginally smaller at 9600mAh, which is 400mAh less than in previous iterations.

Kali Linux on Pinebook Pro - image via Kali Linux

I feel like it is a great time to pick up a Pinebook Pro - those of you looking to get a unit should know that the laptop is now a very mature platform, with many available OS options and a thriving community. It is also a platform that benefits from developments on the PinePhone Pro. I’ve seen an array of updates to Pinebook Pro OS images over the time that the laptop was unavailable - this includes the default Manjaro with Plasma desktop, which I’ve been using for the past 3 years on my laptop. The excellent postmarketOS with GNOME build has just received an update this past week; if you are partial to the GNOME desktop and enjoy Alpine Linux then you absolutely should give it a go. One other OS I’d like to mention is Kali Linux, since a popular application for the Pinebook Pro is using it as a dedicated pen-testing device. Kali Linux has recently made it possible to use the Kali kernel and u-boot instead of compiling your own, thereby greatly simplifying the installation process. Those of you seeking Debian and Fedora installations will be happy that these are also available. All OSes and documentation for the Pinebook Pro can be found on the Pinebook Pro documentation - information relevant to the new panel and battery will be uploaded to Pinebook Pro’s Wiki next month.

Keep a lookout for more information on the Pinebook Pro in the coming weeks.

PinePhone (Pro) [by Lukasz, Dylan and Brian]

Before we get into the software news, I want to quickly touch upon PinePhone Pro’s availability. The PinePhone Pro is currently out of stock, but it won’t be long before more units arrive. The next batch is expected to land in the Pine Store sometime in late June or early July and should last for months to come. I will notify the community as soon as more units become available, so keep an eye on our social media and news channels.

Let’s dive into software. Earlier this month a breakthrough was achieved in getting the cameras to work on the PinePhone Pro. Megi brought up support for the rear (main) camera, forward-ported the BSP driver for the front-facing selfie camera, and integrated it into the kernel tree along with device tree changes. For those of you interested in the details, details of the process can be found in his recent blog post which I obviously encourage you to read. As he writes, this is just the beginning of the journey, and developers will now need to integrate userspace support of the cameras in applications such as Megapixels. For the time being, to snap a photo you’ll need to open CLI and jump through numerous hoops. While it may take some time before capturing photos on the Pro will become convenient, the recent development brings us one step closer to reaching parity with the original PinePhone’s functionality. I can only hope that implementing Megi’s work into userspace applications will proceed at a good pace and won’t get bogged down with any major obstacles. I am including pictures from both the front and rear camera below; please note that both images are completely raw without any post-processing applied. I’m not an expert in mobile photography, but those pictures look pretty darn good to me.

Picture taken using PinePhone Pro’s selfie (front) camera - image from Megi

Picture taken using PinePhone Pro’s main (rear) camera - image from Megi

Dylan:

Mobile Linux has gained support for Bluetooth HFP (Hands-Free Profile) - a Bluetooth specification that allows you to make hands-free phone calls. This specification has already existed for a decade and is supported by all kinds of phones. I submitted a series of patches to PulseAudio to support Bluetooth HFP in ModemManager, which will allow you to manage calls through

Bluetooth HFP devices. This includes accepting, rejecting, hanging up calls. Some devices can also display the current network operator, service status, phone battery level, etc. This is also implemented by this patch series. postmarketOS users will soon benefit from my patches. A detailed explanation can be found on my blog.

See Enhanced Bluetooth HFP support in ModemManager & PulseAudio.

Bluetooth HFP demo - via Dylan

Brian:

Lastly, but certainly useful to many of you who may not know or have struggled to setup Waydroid, a community member - Cara (FOSSsingularity) - has recently created an easy to use script for configuring and managing Waydroid. This script includes the ability to set up a custom rom to run in the container, and the ability to enable or disable gapps support. In a similar vein, the same contributor has also created a Maui Shell installer script for Manjaro, for those of you who wish to test out the Alpha of the new shell without having to manually configure it to launch. Awesome stuff!

PinePhone (Pro) Keyboard [by dsimic]

[NB: _This is a community blog and we are always delighted to host content by members of the community, especially when said written material is submitted by noteworthy contributors. We never alter or edit written material submitted to us (unless necessary - e.g. for clarity, typos, composition, structure, etc). Please consider the following as an opinion piece, which does not necessarily reflect the position of the Pine Store Ltd. or PINE64 community’s management team.]
_

Let’s face it, there are a few well-known issues with the PinePhone (Pro) Keyboard Add-On (PPKB) that have been identified since its launch. Even more importantly, there have also been a few complaints about the lack of official transparency and openness regarding these issues, which this write-up will attempt to remedy by providing a long-overdue official summary of the issues. Perhaps this write-up will be a bit long and filled with more technical stuff than is usual in the community updates, but in this case, there is no point in oversimplifying things or in beating around the bush. If you do not have the time to read this section in its entirety, here is a TL;DR - when the PPKB is attached to a PinePhone (Pro), please treat the phone’s USB port as if it did not exist.

In this write-up I’ll refer to both the PinePhone and the PinePhone Pro collectively as ‘the phone’, where the same applies to both variants, for the sake of brevity. Using ‘PPKB’ as the abbreviation for ‘PinePhone (Pro) Keyboard Add-On’ has already been established. It is also good to point out that the PPKB is internally made of two independent parts, the charging part, and the keyboard part. As visible in the PPKB schematic, the former is based on the IP5209 which charges the PPKB battery and provides the 5V boost output to power the phone, and the latter is based on the EM85F684A, powered independently by the phone.

Alright, let’s get into more details. There are three primary issues with the charging part of the PPKB, which were both identified very early during the development of the PPKB, but the issues were partially dismissed because the limited testing that was possible during the development was unable to prove that the issues are real and capable of inflicting actual damage to the equipment. However, putting the PPKB into the hands of so many people effectively resulted in lots of testing, with wildly different environments, which unfortunately resulted in two issues surfacing as real issues and capable of damaging the equipment. An unfortunate side issue is that, for a yet unknown reason, no printed manuals were included in the retail cardboard boxes in the first PPKB batch, which caused unnecessary confusion among the owners.

The first issue with the charging part of the PPKB comes from the fact that the PPKB is connected to the phone in a way that makes it act as some kind of an invisible USB charger that is plugged into the phone’s USB port all the time when the PPKB is attached. Of course, it does not look like that from the outside, but that is the way one of the pogo pins found under the back cover of the phone is wired internally. That pogo pin is electrically the same as the 5 V pins found inside the phone’s USB Type-C port, to which an external USB charger connects to. Thus, connecting a USB charger to the phone’s USB port while the PPKB is attached is effectively the same as splicing two USB chargers together, which usually does not result in anything bad due to the construction of the chargers, but it also sometimes causes damage to the chargers (let’s remember once again that the PPKB is an invisible charger). Unfortunately, a few PPKB owners had to discover all that on their own, and we had a few PPKBs releasing the magic smoke.

To be fair, it is possible to turn the PPKB’s 5 V boost output off, both in software that talks to the battery charging IC inside the PPKB and by using the physical button on the PPKB itself, but it was concluded empirically that the inactive status of the charging part of the PPKB achieved that way simply cannot be trusted, because the charging part may become active again unexpectedly. Moreover, nothing gets electrically disconnected that way, which still ends up in a USB charger plugged into the phone’s USB port feeding power into the charging part of the PPKB, which in this case may be even worse for the health of the charging part, because there is now no power coming out of the PPKB to “fight against” the power coming in from the USB charger. Not good at all.

To sum it up so far, you must never use the phone’s USB port for charging when a PPKB is attached to it. As we know, the official PPKB manual already says that a USB charger must never be connected to the phone’s USB port when the PPKB is hanging off its back, so it has all been about old news so far, but with the additional, hopefully helpful, descriptions of how it all works together.

The second issue with the charging part of the PPKB comes from the fact that the phone, among other things, acts as a 5V source for the bus-powered USB devices connected to its USB port; in the USB Power Delivery (PD) lingo, the phone can act as a PD power source. The 5V boost regulator inside the phone, which provides that 5 V power source when needed, may also be seen as another invisible USB “charger” connected to the same point where the PPKB and the external USB charger are connected – the 5 V pins found inside the phone’s USB Type-C port. Of course, appropriate mechanisms exist to prevent the phone’s 5 V power source from becoming turned on while a USB charger or a self-powered USB device is plugged into the phone’s USB port, but those mechanisms are unfortunately not perfect, and the existence of the PPKB as another power source throws all that off.

In particular, the internal 5 V power source in the PinePhone is controlled at the hardware level by the closed-source firmware blob that runs inside the ANX7688, which handles some of the functions of the PinePhone’s USB Type-C port. As a result, relying on the ANX7688 firmware to keep the PinePhone’s internal 5 V power source turned off is simply impossible when a bus-powered USB device is plugged into the PinePhone’s USB port. Moreover, it’s possible for the battery voltage to become present as the power supply for bus-powered USB devices, instead of the boosted 5 V voltage, which may actually put the circuitry inside the PinePhone at even higher risk of damage. On the bright side, the internal 5 V power source is controlled entirely by software in the BraveHeart revision of the PinePhone, which puts BraveHeart owners in a much better position, but I’m not aware of the required software support actually being available. As the final result, we can effectively again have two ‘invisible USB chargers’ spliced together when a bus-powered USB device is plugged into the PinePhone’s USB port. Again, not good at all.

When it comes to the PinePhone Pro’s internal 5 V power source, things are luckily a bit better. The internal 5 V power source is controlled by the RK818 PMIC, which according to its datasheet should react properly whenever externally supplied 5 V is detected, turning the PinePhone Pro’s internal 5 V power source off. Though, some issues may still be present, such as not knowing for sure what happens when the PPKB’s boost output is turned off while a bus-powered USB device is plugged into the PinePhone Pro’s USB port, at which point the internal 5 V power source should become turned on automatically, possibly glitching the connected USB device and effectively starting to feed power into the PPKB, etc. In a few words, things can quickly become exactly the same as having two “invisible USB chargers” spliced together, as described above. None of this has been tested or confirmed yet, which means that the PinePhone Pro is getting the same treatment as the PinePhone in this regard, at least for now. Not good, once again.

The third issue with the charging part of the PPKB, which is completely independent of the first two issues, is that a bus-powered USB device plugged into the phone’s USB port can draw power directly from the PPKB’s 5V boost output, with no additional current limiting in place. As a result, a misbehaving USB device can end up drawing up to 2.4 A from the PPKB, through the phone’s USB port, regardless of the actual power negotiation that took place. In general, this should not cause any permanent damage to the phone or the PPKB, because they were both designed to handle such currents during regular charging. However, it may end up causing damage to a misbehaving bus-powered USB device, because it may not be designed to withstand up to 12 W going into it in case of some failure. To be fair, this scenario with a misbehaving USB device that draws a lot of power and burns itself down should be very rare, at least in theory. These are hopefully not the famous last words. :)

Finally, to sum it all up, it is not only that the phone’s USB port must not be used for charging, but it must also not be used to connect bus-powered USB devices. To put it differently, when a PPKB is attached to your phone, please treat the phone’s USB port as if it did not exist at all.

I will also create a couple of new pages in the PINE64 Wiki that will provide even more details about the PPKB issues, together with the relevant excerpts from the PinePhone and PinePhone Pro schematics, etc. Those Wiki pages will provide further explanations, so please feel free to check them out once they become available.

PineSound

The first PineSound development boards have already been allocated, and I got some hands-on time with both the board and PineBuds prototype earlier this month. There isn’t much I can say about the PineSound dev board that I haven’t already said in last month’s update, but I wanted to share my experience with the PineBuds. Consider this a first look. Before I get into it, I want to make it clear that it will take (yet undetermined) time before the buds become available, and much will change between now and then. I also won’t write about the feel of the plastic, since this prototype was CNCd (yeah, I didn’t know you can CNC plastic either), and in all likelihood, the final version will end up feeling nothing like this. The buds themselves are nice, really small, and light. They are not the smallest buds I’ve ever seen, but they are certainly among the smaller ones I’ve tried (and I’ve tried quite a few - I’m a bit of a connoisseur). The default tuning sounds good, offering a pleasant V-shaped curve. I wanted to underline this because the V sound signature isn’t something I particularly enjoy. Obviously, a major draw of the PineBuds is that you’ll be able to flash the internal EQ with any sound signature, and I’m certain someone will create a ‘flat’ sound signature for the Buds.

We’ve gone through a few iterations of renders, trying to figure out how we want the PineBuds to look. I am sharing some ideas below - there is no guarantee they will look like this, these are just some ideas.

PineBuds concept renders

The carrying case has some way to go before it reaches a production-ready status. The prototype case we’ve shown last month has no charging or battery LED status indicators, and it is something we’ll want to change. We’ve also decided on a sliding rather than a hinged mechanism for the lid. At present the mechanism leaves much to be desired. Obviously, it is still very early and this unit is just a proof of concept, but even at this stage, it’s clear that refining will be needed to deliver a good experience of opening and closing the case. We also haven’t zeroed in on a suitable battery to use inside the case - obviously, the bigger the battery we can squeeze in the better. As I mentioned, the current prototype was CNC milled, so I can’t speak to the feel of the shell, but the shape and size of the case are good if a little bit large. I think that the larger size of the case will be justified by the battery capacity. That’s all I have for the time being - as new prototypes are created I’ll make sure to update you on this project’s progress.

PineTime

The InfiniTime team is still working steadily on the project! A few improvements have already been merged since the last release. I won’t go into much detail as they are not released yet, but you can see the overview of what has already been done and what we are working on for the next version by going to the next milestone page.

Features and fixes already merged for the next release of InfiniTime

Among other things, we are actively working on leveraging the external flash memory of the watch to store pictures and fonts. This will allow us to free up quite a lot of space in the memory of the PineTime. I’ve recently done a few performance tests of various implementations. I took a lot of inspiration from PineTimeLite. In this fork of InfiniTime, Joaquim has already done a lot of experimentation with loading resources from this external memory, and I hope that we’ll be able to achieve similar results in InfiniTime soon!

ITD, the InfiniTime daemon and GUI application written in Go has recently released a new version 0.0.5. This new version adds a new whitelist feature that is very useful when you have multiple PineTimes laying on your desk. It also implements all new functionalities from InfiniTime like the filesystem and weather APIs. Even if those APIs are not usable by the end-users yet, their integrations in companion apps make the lives of the developers easier. For example, I use the filesystem functionality quite extensively right now to implement the resource loading from the external flash memory!

FS API integration in ITD

StarGate01, who has already contributed to InfiniTime, has created a new fork of InfiniTime specifically designed to expose high-frequency data from the accelerometer. They also built a companion app to display this data in real time. Those projects will certainly be useful to developers who want to develop advanced algorithms and signal processing based on the PineTime accelerometer!

High frequency data from PineTime’s accelerometer

That is all for this month. Remember, next community update is scheduled for June 28th. See you then!

April update: no more unicorns

Fri, 15 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This month’s update is packed to the brink with news: the product team is negotiating restarting Pinebook Pro production, QuartzPro64 will be heavily subsidized and developer sign-ups are now open, we’re introducing the PineSound project, and PinePower power supplies will be making a return to the Pine Store soon. I cannot recall the last time I had so many positive things to report on, so let’s get to it.

I’d like to thank JF, Peter (LinMob), Alex (clover), Brian (33YN2), and PizzaLovingNerd for their contributions to this community update.

N.B. Comments on the blog post need to be in English and follow our Community Rules and Code of Conduct.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Video synopsis of the April community update

TL;DR

Housekeeping
- Go back and read the April fool’s post prior to continuing with the update
- Quarterly community Q&A April 15th, join in and ask your question
- PINE64 EU launches on May 10th
- Product team negotiates resuming Pinebook Pro production
QuartzPro64
- QuartzPro64 is now in production
- Dev order system open for those who want to get their hands on the device early
- We subsidize the QuartzPro64 for devs - selling it for $150
- Dev boards do not have CE or FCC
PineSound
- Introducing the PineSound community driven project
- PineSound dev board soon to be allocated to devs; will be available broadly at a later point in time
- PineBuds are the first product based on the dev board; prototype exists and works
- PineBuds include many common high-end wireless earphone features and allow end-users to flash their own firmware easily
PinePhone (Pro)
- Next production run on the PinePhone (Pro) keyboard on the way
- Many improvements to keyboard driver, particularly with respect to charging
- postmarketOS and Mobian decide to use Tow-boot
- Elementary OS is considering porting to the PinePhone Pro (and Pinebook Pro?)
- PinePhone Pro Wiki documentation gets a major overhaul thanks to multiple contributors
- Linuxphoneapps.org quietly launched late March; works well when using Firefox on the PinePhone
- Many tweaks and improvements are landing PlasmaMobile in the coming weeks and moths
PineTime
- InfiniTime 1.9 launched with many improvements, fixes and a new watchface.
- InfiniSim, now a part of the project, and in sync with InfiniTime
- InfiniTime merge requests discussed
- InfiniLink for iOS is no longer maintained - someone willing to step up and maintain the project?
PineDio
- Improvements to the USB and PinePhone PineDio LoRa case drivers
- InfiniTime ported to PineDio STACK - a good starting point for further exploration
- Documentation underway
PinePower
- PinePower desktop and mobile will be making a return to the store shortly
- PinePower desktop improvement: USB grounding as requested by many Pinecil users
- Portable PinePower receives a substantial redesign meant to help with staying put in North American main socket

Housekeeping

In case you missed it, we ran a little April fool’s spoof at the beginning of the month. I must admit that I am not a fan of the April fool’s tradition and we, as a project, haven’t really dabbled in pranks before. So, then, why did we publish the post and why am I mentioning it now? - because, as with any good joke, the April fools post contained an element of truth to it. More on this later on the update, seriously.

It is time for the second community quarterly Q&A. If you’re reading this on the day of the community update’s publication, then make sure to stick around and join in later today/ tonight on Youtube, Discord or PeerTube. We’ll be going live at 19:00 GMT/ 12:00 PT. The point of the Q&A is for us to take questions live and answer them then and there. I’ll be taking questions live from the chats - you have a choice of Discord, IRC and Telegram. From previous experience I know that the chat will more than likely turn into a wall of text in a matter of minutes - I therefore ask that you ‘at’ me (@lukasz) before writing your question, otherwise I will more than likely miss it. I will likely bring in developers to answer questions too - make sure to ping people you direct questions to. Once the Q&A is over we’ll head over to one of the casual voice chats and hang out for the rest of the evening. I hope to see you there.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

In the event you missed it, we held the first quarterly Q&A we held in January

We have upgraded the main PINE64 and PinePhone Matrix channels. Both of them previously ran version 1 of the Matrix protocol and this caused us all sorts of headaches, including moderators randomly losing their powers and people who left being forced back into the home server. Needless to say, an upgrade had to happen sooner or later. The new rooms now run version 6 of the Matrix protocol which will alleviate all the aforementioned problems. An unfortunate side-effect of the upgrade is that everyone who was part of the original channels will need to manually rejoin. An invite link is present in the original groups.

As some of you noticed, there was no new PineTalk episode last month. Those involved in the production of the podcast were busy with real-life things and simply didn’t get the chance to record. I’ve spoken to Brian and Justin and they both confirmed that a new episode will be coming later this month. If you haven’t done so yet, make sure to subscribe to PineTalk’s RSS feed.

The product team is in advanced talks with a factory regarding resuming production of the Pinebook Pro. As I’ve promised countless times in the past, I’ll keep you updated on the progress regarding restarting the laptop’s production. I’m told the team is etching closer to strike a deal and that the production circumstances will require some alterations to parts of the hardware - keep an eye on our social media and news channels in the coming weeks.

Yes, there will be bundles

Lastly, I am thrilled to let you know that PINE64 EU will be going live on May 10, 2022. By the time you read this, the Polish state should already have listed PINE64 EU as a registered company and all required paperwork should be in place to start sales. The website and logistics are also all ready to go. However, I am still awaiting approval from the debit/credit card payment gate, which takes a long time. I am also waiting for the hardware itself. With less than a month to go, I’ll be posting frequent updates on the store’s Twitter and the newly set-up Telegram news channel. I don’t foresee any issues at this stage, but should any problems arise (I am thinking about customs in particular) I will make sure to communicate it publicly via social media. Telegram and Twitter is where you will find all future communication from PINE64 EU.

QuartzPro64

Last month we outlined our plans for the next generation of Pro-grade PINE64 hardware - the QuartzPro64. In case you missed the original announcement, the QuartzPro64 is a powerful development board featuring an 8 core SoC which comes paired with 16GB of RAM and 64GB of expandable eMMC flash storage as well as an impressive array of IO options. I’m not going to repeat the entire spec list below since it was covered in detail last month - if this is news to you, then I suggest you go back and read the March update and pick up reading this section after.

Unpopulated PCB of the QuartzPro64

Today I am happy to let you know that the QuartzPro64 will soon be available for order via our developer pre-order system. To get your hands on a unit you’ll need to fill in a short questionnaire, similar to the one PinePhone Pro developers submitted at the end of 2021. This will help us determine if you’re the right person to receive the hardware prior to software running on the new platform. Conversely, it will help keep these development boards out of the hands of end-users and application developers. More on this in a bit later. So, then, if you are a developer with an interest in the RK3588 platform, and wish to get an early start on a board that exposes nearly all of the SoC’s available IO, then please make sure to head over to the developer sign-up page to register your interest.

Now let me level with you - the BOM of the QuartzPro64 is north of $300. The price is dictated not only by the (rather pricey) SoC, RAM, and eMMC flash but also by the exhaustive list of the exposed IO. As I’ve explained in last month’s post, we didn’t want to compromise on the IO due to the assumed target audience; it is hard to debug and ultimately enable a feature if said feature isn’t physically present on the PCB. But at the same time, we do have a vested interest in a good uptake of the board among the development community. I’d go as far as to say that we hope for the QuartzPro64 to become the go-to board for RK3588 development. A decision has therefore been made to heavily subsidize QuartzPro64 so that the price of the board doesn’t prevent people who wish to be a part of the development process from getting one. After some deliberation, we decided to sell QuartzPro64 for $150 to developers who file an application. Needless to say, we hope to see many applications in the coming days.

RK3588 block diagram

Please note that it will take us time to review all applications and issue approvals. Once the first set of candidates has been determined we’ll then send out purchase coupons. Coupons are valid for a period of two days, then they expire. From previous experiences with the PinePhone Pro and the PineNote, I expect that we’ll send out 2-3 rounds of coupons - so if you do not receive one initially then don’t fret, there is a chance you’ll be included in the second or third round of coupon dispatches. Application rejections will be issued after all applications are reviewed and all QuartzPro64 boards have been allocated.

Before I wrap this section up, I’d like to make it clear that these boards will not be FCC or CE certified. While, technically speaking, single board computers aren’t required to have such certifications in most places, we always make sure to certify our boards when moving into production. However, QuartzPro64 boards aren’t currently produced in a quantity that would warrant us to start such a certification process. They are meant for the development community and should be viewed as prototype hardware. In some countries you need to register with your local authority to receive uncertified prototypes, elsewhere there is no such registration requirement, and yet in other countries you outright cannot receive uncertified electronics equipment; please make sure to check your local regulatory guidelines prior to submitting your application.

PineSound

At the end of last year, in the December community update, I teased the launch of (…) a cool small project into our lineup. Let me first clarify what ‘small’ means in this context: a small project is limited in scope and completely community-driven. Examples of such existing PINE64 projects include the Pinecil and PineTime“. As I’ve mentioned in the Housekeeping section, the April fool’s post from earlier this month did in fact include some real information. While we won’t be making plush unicorns with mics sticking out their heads anytime soon, we have been prototyping a set of end-user flashable wireless earbuds. But let me backup a bit. Today we’re introducing the PineSound board; a development platform for earbuds and a digital audio player, utilizing the Bestechnic BES2300 Bluetooth 5.0 audio chip. We will initially distribute the PineSound dev boards to developers whom we know are particularly interested in non-Linux projects such as this. In time, however, the PineSound dev board will be made available to anyone interested in developing on the platform or even using it in some DIY audio project. The board features 2x coaxial & optical input (left) and output (right), a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, 4.4mm and 2.5mm balanced jacks, an SMA connector, USB-C as well as touch and LCD ports.

The PineSound dev board (v1.0)

Before we get into the specifics of the PineSound project I want to explain its placement in our lineup, and talk a bit about the importance of the development community’s interest in the hardware. The approach we’ll be taking is, in a sense, very similar to how we handled the PineTime and the Pinecil. This means that the success will largely depend on whether a community grows around the platform. As we did with PineTime, we will allow the development community to help set the course of the PineSound project. All important decisions, such as moving from development to production, the production itself, opening sales, etc, will be coordinated and discussed with the community. We recognize that working closely with developers and the community is critical in projects such as this - while the PineTime and Pinecil are now hallmarks of PINE64, we need to acknowledge that the PineCube has been largely a failure. The general lack of interest in the PineCube can, at least in some part, be ascribed to a failure on our part to facilitate community building around the device. We’ve learned from this experience and have done everything on our end to assure that PineSound as a whole is a success from the get-go.

See, they’re real. Seriously.

The first device to be introduced based on the PineSound dev board will be the PineBuds wireless Bluetooth earbuds. What I wrote in the April fool’s post about the buds is accurate - they offer features found on high-end in-ear headphones, such as ambient and environment noise cancellation, and long battery life. They have 6 microphones total, 3 on each bud, as well as touch-based input situated on the external side of each bud. We designed the cradle which houses the earphones so that custom user-created firmware can be flashed. The cradle has built-in UART used for firmware flashing, which is automatically exposed when it is connected via USB to a computer. There will be a wide variety of things developers and (eventually) end-users will be able to do with the earbuds - flash custom sound signatures, determine touch controls, adjust resonance to fit the user’s ear canal resonance and even turn the PineBuds into hearing aids. The last application is particularly interesting - the BES2300 is one of just a handful of chips considered for use in ‘over the counter hearing aids’ by various regulatory bodies.

A peak inside - picture of an early engineering prototype

Ben (Ralim), probably best known as the creator of IronOS, has had his hands on the prototype for some time. Here is what he had to say when I spoke to him earlier this week:

“I think of the buds as (…) [a] good working device, that the community can hack on and tweak, [while of] the Dev board as the experimentation setup for exploring this chip and finding out just how powerful it is. [T]here are some binary blobs in the firmware around Bluetooth [and] some for voice assistants (but I don’t know if we would ship them). But it was in a compilable and runnable state with fairly complete hardware drivers. I see it a bit like the bl602, where we have a working SDK with some blobs, but the hardware is very good for hacking on. The main MCU so far is quite powerful and battery efficient. Flashing is easy over a UART serial port [too].”

It is clear that the hardware has a lot of potential from both developers’ and end-users ’ perspectives, and I hope that the project garners some interest from the community as a whole. More information about the PineSound will follow next month, so keep a lookout for news.

PinePhone (Pro) [by Lukasz, Peter & Brian]

A new production run of the PinePhone keyboard case is now underway and should be available soon. The keyboard case has proven to be a very popular accessory, and therefore the initial production run sold out quicker than other optional back cases currently offered for the PinePhone and the PinePhone Pro. We expect that the new batch will last us 2-3 months, so if you’ve been eagerly waiting to get your hands on a unit then there should be no problem in obtaining one. On the subject of the keyboard case, the IP5XXX_POWER (keyboard power) driver by the developer Samuel Holland has now been upstreamed. A handful of fixes are also coming (or have already arrived, depending on distribution) to improve battery operation and charging of the PinePhone (Pro) when paired with the keyboard case. When charging, the new algorithm will strive to charge the phone’s internal battery as fast as possible first, and only then start charging the keyboard case. During operation, the keyboard case will only start charging the phone’s internal battery when it is nearly depleted. It will try to maintain a 20% charge of the phone’s internal battery. The new driver will also provide a set of triggers to notify the user via the phone’s LEDs about the status of both batteries. I suggest you read the developer Megi’s blog post to learn all the details.

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Keyboard case production - a short video from the factory floor

PinePhone and PinePhone Pro with keyboard case charging - picture by Megi

In other news, postmarketOS and Mobian have made the decision to use Tow-boot as opposed to u-boot with their distributions. In the case of the PinePhone Pro, this means that end-users will be required to flash Tow-boot on their devices prior to using these OSes. I wrote at length about Tow-boot in last month’s update if you wish to learn more about it and its application on both the PinePhone and the PinePhone Pro. The Mobian team writes: “by letting users install the bootloader themselves, either on the SPI flash (…) or the eMMC’s boot partitions (…), we can stop embedding our own copy of the bootloader. (…) Both new and existing users should install Tow-Boot or a similar system to provide updates to their boot firmware. [Using Tow-boot] will be required on new installs using images generated after 2022-04-02.”

elementary OS on the PinePhone Pro? yes please!

On the subject of mobile Linux OSes, many of you will be happy to learn that elementaryOS are exploring the possibility of bringing their OS to the Arm platform and, in the future, also the small screen of Linux smartphones. The development is currently targeting the PinePhone Pro - a sample unit was delivered to Danielle from elementaryOS earlier this month. It is worth noting that the team already has some experience with the RK3399 SoC and our platform as they have - in the past - attempted to bring elementaryOS to the Pinebook Pro. As a side-note, elementaryOS on the Pinebook Pro is something I’d still very much like to see - fingers crossed. I spoke to Danielle this week and she had this to say: “Mobile Linux is coming and the time is now to be planning and developing. PinePhone Pro is a really compelling developer platform and I’m excited to start working with a whole new world of open source apps and operating system.” I wish Danielle and elementaryOS contributors the best of luck with this endeavor; we’ll be keeping our fingers crossed for yet another mobile Linux OS option to see the light of day.

In other news, the documentation of the PinePhone Pro on the PINE64 Wiki was growing steadily in the last couple of days thanks to the relentless work of multiple community members. In summary, the “State of the Software’’ section on top of the PinePhone Pro article now received a graphical overview table of the current software stability and functionality, which makes it easier for users to get an overview of the overall software state without having to collect the information from multiple locations such as bug trackers. The overview also contains notes regarding bugs or details, which might impact the functionality of a specific feature. Of course, this enumeration does not make a claim to be complete in any way but should ease the search for related information considerably. The table can be found under https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_Pro#State_of_the_software.

A functionality matrix has been added to the PinePhone Pro Wiki section

The software section of the PinePhone Pro article, which was extended gradually, was rewritten as well to bring a more coherent information section with all relevant information. The section should now be considerably easier to read, especially in the parts, which were causing confusion in the previous instructions. Aside from a large number of improvements, the section now also received a dedicated troubleshooting subsection and numerous new information. The section can be found under https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_Pro#Software. As it is often asked where bugs can be reported and how projects can be supported, new articles regarding where to report bugs and how to contribute to projects were started as well, which will be gradually improved and extended over time. In this context it can be noted that all community projects are happy about any form of contribution. Knowledge of coding is not required, instead there are various ways to contribute to projects, for example with designs, ideas, translations, documentation, through hardware or with creative work, or by simply being a positive member of the community. On this note, I want to thank everyone for their unremitting help. Without your contributions, the community would simply not be what it is today.

There is one more noteworthy piece of information concerning documentation of mobile Linux software: LinuxPhoneApps.org finally quietly launched at the end of March. It lists all the apps that were (and still are) listed on LINMOBapps. The list is presented in a way that is more friendly to PinePhone’s Firefox browser, preventing it from asking whether it should kill the script that slows things down. The list now has more apps, with more being added slowly but steadily. Note that not all apps are packaged for your distribution nor are they all to be considered feature-complete. If you want to follow, join or help out the further development of the site, check out the LinuxPhoneApps FAQ.

On a final note, Plasma Mobile will be seeing several bug fixes, lots of optimizations, and a few new features in the coming releases. The mobile data toggle has been fixed so that the setting is remembered across reboots, a virtual keyboard toggle has been added to the quicksettings panel, the ability to reorder the quicksettings menu has been added, there have been various animation fixes, shrink and grow animations have been added to the shell buttons and homescreen, work has been done to start implementation of custom homescreens (though this is not yet finished), the media widget in the quicksettings panel now supports multiple video/audio sources by swiping left or right, the lockscreen has received a new notification widget, the APN settings menu received several UI fixes, the panel’s opacity logic has been fixed, and spacebar has received several fixes to its UI alongside some bug fixes. Most notably work is planned for a lockscreen shell overlay that would handle incoming calls and alarms, and give users a nice fullscreen overlay to interact with, although this is still in the planning stages.

PineTime [by JF]

The InfiniTime team released a new version of the open-source firmware for the PineTime at the beginning of April. The first new feature you’ll notice in InfiniTime 1.9 “Limeberry” is the new Terminal watchface! This original watchface displays the date, time, battery level, steps, heart rate, and BLE status as if they were printed on a console terminal. It’ll more than likely please the geeks among us.

The new terminal watchface looks great

A new feature allowing to disable the BLE connectivity was also added. This feature was requested by many users as it saves a bit of battery and increases the privacy of the PineTime. When BLE is enabled, the watch continuously broadcasts “advertising” messages allowing devices to detect and connect to it. It also allows some kind of tracking; when BLE is disabled, those messages are not sent and the watch is then “invisible” to anyone trying to detect it.

Those of you who use the heart rate sensor will be happy to know that we improved the accuracy of measurements of the heart rate sensor. Thanks to the wasp-os team for their help with this! The heart rate monitor now displays more sensible and reliable values - it has been tested and approved by Nico!

The heart rate monitor is now much more accurate

InfiniSim, the InfiniTime simulator, is now also supported by the team and integrated into the CI. Each time a new PR is created and merged, the CI checks that the change builds in InfiniTime and also in the simulator. This will help maintain both projects in sync and ensure we don’t break anything when changing something in either InfiniTime or InfiniSim. The new InfiniTime release also brings many improvements to notifications (call notifications won’t vibrate forever when receiving a call) and to the Alarm app. The 12-hour time format is now better supported. You can read the whole release note and download the firmware on the project page.

InfiniTime receives a lot of contributions from many users and developers, and I’m really thankful for that! Unfortunately, for various reasons we cannot merge and integrate each and every one of these features as soon as they are published by their author. One of those reasons is memory usage. As you may know, the PineTime is based on a small-ish MCU with 64KB of RAM memory and 512KB of flash memory. From my experience, this is a very comfortable amount of memory when compared to many other microcontrollers. But still, we have to be very cautious to not hit the memory limit if we want to be able to add new features and improvements in the future. That said, here’s a highlight of some of those cool features I hope we’ll be able to merge at some point in time. A feature that is often requested is the support for other languages and alphabets. New languages require a lot of memory for storing new fonts, which we cannot afford right now. But InfiniTime is completely ready to handle these, and yehoshuapw proves it by maintaining a fork of InfiniTime that integrates Hebrew. A new version of this fork was released a very short time after the release of InfiniTime 1.9. Kudos to the maintainer!

Watchfaces also need quite a lot of memory. The Infineat watchface is one of them - it is a very neat and well-designed watchface that uses the Pine64 logo to display the battery level!

Infineat looks really neat!

I also like this QR Code application, which displays 4 QR codes specified by the user via a BLE API. Those QR codes can be links to web pages, online accounts, and even vaccination certificates for COVID-19! Very cool.

An example QR code displayed on the PineTime

Last piece of information for this month - I’ve learned that InfiniLink, the companion app for iOS is not maintained anymore. Here’s the message its author, xan-m, wrote in the last commit ‘Added localizations and goodbye message’:

“I’m sorry to say that this will be the last update to InfiniLink. I started a new job a couple of months ago and no longer have the spare time to continue development of this project. If anyone is interested in taking over, please let me know and I can transfer everything over. Thank you for all of your support and suggestions along the way!”

I would like to thank xan-m for their work on InfiniLink. Xan-m created the whole app from scratch and quickly proved that a companion app for iOS is definitely needed in the community and the PineTime ecosystem. Let’s wish xan-m good luck in their new job, and I hope we’ll meet again soon! So, who will take over the project to maintain the presence of our beloved open smart watch in the iOS world?

PineDio [by JF]

Lup and I are still actively working on the PineDio STACK with a double goal: check that the hardware is working as expected and to document our development environments. Lup is really good at documenting his experiments. He’s currently writing an extensive article about running the Apache NuttX RTOS on the PineDio STACK which I encourage you to read.

On my end, I’m working on porting InfiniTime to the STACK. This is quite easy as the display and touch panel are exactly the same as the one on the PineTime. I think InfiniTime will be a nice starting point to experiment with the STACK hardware: the RISC-V MCU (BL604), the LoRa radio, the GPS and secure module on the add-on board, etc. As you can see on the video below, the display driver is now functional and even works a bit faster than on the PineTime. It can go even faster when more memory is dedicated to the display driver.

See the video here.

InfiniTime now runs on the PineDio STACK - here’s a quick comparison to the PineTime

I’ve also upgraded my driver for the PineDio LoRa USB adapter and LoRa PinePhone back case. Some changes were needed to support kernels > 5.10. Note that the driver for the CH341 chip (USB to SPI converter) also needs an update to support kernel 5.16. I forked the driver to apply the changes until they eventually become approved in the upstream repo.

The PineDio USB dongle

PinePower

Both the desktop and portable PinePower PSUs will be making a return to the Pine Store next month. I am glad to report that since the original units were in stock some improvements have been made to both designs. The desktop unit, often ordered alongside the Pinecil, has now grounding on the USB ports. This is a feature that many users have asked for. Otherwise the desktop power supply looks and functions just as the original iteration. The portable 65W PinePower has seen a more substantial physical redesign - the PSU itself has been shrunk slightly, making it overall more compact, and the overall physical dimensions have been altered along with internal weight distribution. The new design solves a problem that people in the US, using those tiny rectangular prongs for the mains socket; the original portable PinePower would sometimes not stay in place due to its weight distribution when plugged into a wall socket, while the new design does. I’m sure that this is a welcome redesign.

The USB ports on the desktop PinePower are now grounded

That’s all for this month, I’ll catch you all in May.

Introducing the PineBuds and PinePod. Seriously.

Fri, 01 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

People are frequently asking us to create more mainstream devices such as an inkjet printer or a microwave, and for a good reason. Complex open devices such as the PinePhone are both exciting and fun, but they also aren’t for everyone. Or putting it inversely, they are for a very particular group of people. In contrast, simpler devices in our lineup such as the PineTime, PinePower, and Pinecil have all garnered a broader user base. Heck, I’d go as far as to say that the Pinecil is now a downright mainstream device with Amazon USA officially recommending it to those seeking a soldering iron. So then - we thought to ourselves - it’s time to go mainstream.

See? told you …

Seeking inspiration and scrolling through lists of popular home appliances, game consoles, battery-operated toys, etc, we frequently thought to ourselves: “we could probably do it equally well, if not better, and make it open”. We figured that since we’re already going after Apple with the PinePhone, we could also take a shot at the growing internet-enabled toy market. We therefore started development on a brand new lineup of unicorn toys with microphones, with the capacity to function as an always-online child-friendly voice assistant, and optional Home Assistant integration. With this new project already underway, two even more potentially lucrative market segments presented themselves: portable digital audio players and wireless earbuds.

So, with no further ado, let me introduce you to PineBuds and the PinePod. The buds offer features found on high-end in-ear headphones, such as ambient and environment noise cancellation (utilizing 3 microphones in each bud), touch-based input, and a long battery life. All in a small form factor too, of course. Unlike existing products, however, we’ve designed the PineBuds with development and open firmware in mind. You’ll be able to plug the buds cradle into your computer via USB and tailor the firmware to your own needs - changing the internal EQ settings and customizing the touch input being the obvious examples. The cradle has in-built UART, which is used for flashing firmware. I’m told that with the right tweaks, the PineBuds may actually work as over-the-counter hearing aids too. Seriously. The chipset inside the PineBuds is so versatile that it will also serve as the basis for the PinePod digital audio player. We haven’t yet gotten the design of the PinePod down, but I’ll browse Apple’s store for inspiration later today. Regardless, I just feel an open stand-alone music player belongs in 2022.

You’ll be pleased to know that the SDK has already been compiled and proven to work, and that a development board is incoming. Unfortunately, we had already started manufacturing the unicorn toys before deciding to switch focus. As a result, the first batch of the dev boards will arrive back from the factory next week following a slight delay, after intensive unicorn toy disassembly operations. More details about the PineBuds and the PinePod will be coming in this month’s update, and pre-orders for the development boards will be opening soon via our pre-order system. Seriously.

Oh, I almost forgot, those are the actual buds in the header picture at the top of the page, and they are already functional. The unicorn is real too.

Here’s the dev board - I’m serious

March Update: Introducing the QuartzPro64

Tue, 15 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

This month we’re announcing the QuartzPro64 - a new single-board computer based on Rockchip’s powerful RK3588 SoC. This is our first Pro-grade SBC since the introduction of the ROCKPRo64, and I believe it to be a worthy successor to the much revered Pro lineup. I am also happy to let you know that the Quartz64 model-B will be arriving at the Pine Store in the coming weeks, with all of its features supported in the most recent Manjaro OS image.

We’ve got much to discuss, let’s get into it.

You can watch the synopsis of this month’s community update on YouTube (embedded below) as well as on Odysee and PeerTube. To stay up-to-date with PINE64 news make sure to subscribe to this blog (subscription widget at the bottom of the webpage), follow PINE64 Telegram News channel, the announcements channel on Matrix, the announcements channel in Discord as well as our Twitter and Mastodon.

I’d like to thank JF, Alex (clover), Brian (33YN2), Danct12 and PizzaLovingNerd for their contributions to this community update.

N.B. Comments on the blog post need to be in English and follow our Community Rules and Code of Conduct.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Synopsis of this month’s update in video format

TL;DR

Housekeeping
- A new episode of PineTalk is out - listen to the hosts’ suggestions for future PINE64 devices
- Improvements to the chats have been made over the last few weeks which should significantly reduce spam
- PineTab and Pinebook Pro will sadly remain unavailable for a while longer
- PINE64 EU is on track for May 1st launch
QuartzPro64
- We’re introducing the QuartzPro64 based on RK3588 - available in the coming weeks to developers
- It will cost North of $300 and will initially only be available to developers via a coupon system
- With development in mind, the QuartzPro64 exposes as much I/O as possible
- Equipped with 16GB RAM and 64GB of expandable eMMC
- Will only be available publicly when BSP releases are in good shape
PinePhone (Pro)
- Shipment has resumed post-CNY and most if not all of the backlog has been cleared
- Suspend now works on the PinePhone Pro - u-boot fix applied by pgwipeout
- Keyboard case battery capacity reporting in UI is coming - already available in Manjaro’s OS images
- Tow-Boot 4th release adds official support for the PinePhone Pro adding mobile-specific elements
- SailfishOS and Nemo mobile get GPS support on the PinePhone and work began to start integrating the fingerprint reader back case
- The original PinePhone can be used to run LibreELEC - and it runs well including 1080p@60 video playback
Quartz64
- Quartz64 model-B is coming soon; 4GB version of the board is launching first
- Manjaro OS image for model-B if feature-complete, including full support for desktop and UI usage and all I/O present on the board
- More improvements for the RK3566 and thus also the Quartz64 and derivative devices is coming soon
PineTime
- Active development is ongoing with many merge requests awaiting
- InfiniSim is an InfiniTime desktop simulator, which can be run on a PinePhone (Pro) that allows for easy InfiniTime development and testing
- InfiniSim is now a part of InifiniTime organization on GitHub

Housekeeping

I’m starting with a last-minute edit to this month’s update; Shenzhen, the city where PINE64 electronics are manufactured, has just imposed a strict COVID19 testing procedure and issued a ‘stay at home’ order until March 20th. This is due to an increase in COVID19 cases in the region. It remains to be seen how, if at all, this situation will impact our production schedule. However, for the time being, the shipping staff have been sent home, which means that only Hong Kong-based shipments (PinePhone, PinePhone Pro, and PineNote) will be sent out this and the coming week. Once I have an update on the situation I’ll make sure to relay it to the community via social media, on the forum, and in the chats.

Left: original text in Chinese // Right: auto-translation into English (‘deep training’ to be read as ’thorough testing’)

A new episode of the PineTalk is out. In this most recent entry to our community podcast, Justin and Brian discuss current PinePhone and PinePhone Pro developments, including Tow-boot and improvements to Mexapixels post-processing, as well as their own open-hardware ideas. While I do not think we’ll embark on a journey to create an open Google Glass-type device, as suggested by Brian, an open speaker with a personal assistant is actually a compelling idea (and one we discussed internally all the way back in 2020). A solid idea Justin and one perhaps worth visiting. Have a listen and let us know what you think about the show-hosts ideas for future hardware. The most recent episode can be found on PineTalk’s page; I also encourage you to subscribe to the podcast’s RSS feed.

During my absence (more on this a bit later), Fire219 and Gamiee have done some solid improvements to our chat infrastructure. As I’ve reported late last year, and as many of you know from first-hand experience, spam in the chat has been an issue in recent months. A part of the problem is our cross-platform bridge: not all moderators have moderation privileges on all platforms, and those that do aren’t always there to react. Moreover, it is easier to get the moderators’ attention on some platforms than others. Earlier this year Fire219 and Gamiee laid the foundations for automatically removing spam and flagging potential malware. This reduced the number of incidents but hasn’t fully eliminated the issue. Now, however, we’ve got two new weapons at our disposal: cross-platform deletion and a sophisticated and trained AI bot with cross-platform deletion permissions. This means that even if the, rather sophisticated, bot fails to catch the spam any moderator can delete any spam message on any platform. Long story short, the spam problem should be less intrusive moving forward.

I also promised you an update regarding PineTab and Pinebook Pro’s availability; as may recall, the product team has been scavenging around for a vendor who’d be willing to sell us a batch of LCD panels that are reasonably priced and come with a warranty (so that if they are faulty, do not meet the grading or fail during usage we can RMA them at the source). Unfortunately, as of today, the team has not found a vendor who would be willing to sell such a batch of panels. We’re well aware that it has been a long wait and that many of you are eager to see the production of these devices resumed, but I’m afraid we’ll all have to wait a little longer for the next production run. I’ll make sure to keep you updated if anything changes.

PINE64 EU website is coming along

Lastly, I’ve been away these past few weeks laying the foundations for the PINE64 EU store. The last paperwork to get the EU store off the ground has now been filed, and I even have an office with (mostly) assembled IKEA office furniture. If all goes to plan, and the Polish state’s bureaucracy doesn’t take an eternity to process the application, then I hope to receive the first shipment of hardware sometime in late April. I don’t want to commit to a firm launch date at this stage, but I am currently aiming to have everything ready to go on May 1st. For those who want to learn more about the plans for the EU store, I invite you to read last month’s community update. I’ll be posting progress updates on PINE64 EU’s Twitter as we get closer to launch.

QuartzPro64

In January I outlined our plans for the Rockchip RK3588 platform - a powerful Arm SoC with an impressive array of I/O options. Today I am pleased to introduce the QuartzPro64, our single board computer based on the RK3588. Let’s start with a quick recap: the RK3588 is an 8-core SoC, featuring 4x A55 and 4x A76 cores clocked at 1.8GHz and 2.4GHz respectively. This new SoC features the recently introduced Mali G610MC4 GPU with 4 cores, based on the Valhalla architecture. The SoC is capable of driving an 8K display and multiple 4K displays (4 total), has a 6TOPS NPU, an 8K 10-bit decoder as well as an 8K encoder. In our single board computer lineup, the RK3588 SoC is the successor to the very successful RK3399 used in the ROCKPro64. However, while this SoC is the successor to the RK3399, I want to make it clear that it will not be replacing it anytime soon. Thus, the QuartzPro64 will also not be replacing the ROCKPro64 for a very long time either.

No picture due to the ‘stay at home’ order affecting the product team, so this will have to suffice for now

Before I get into discussing the details of the QuartzPro64 I feel that I first need to make two things clear. Firstly, to purchase the board you will need to be a developer - at least initially. We’ll use the same coupon system we used for the first production runs of the PineNote and the PinePhone Pro once these devices launch. The software for the QuartzPro64 is yet to be developed and to say that the device is ‘not end-user ready’ would be an understatement; we both hope and expect to see BSP-based support in the initial months, with mainlining efforts running in parallel to the BSP development. Secondly, this will not be an inexpensive single-board computer. While we haven’t settled on a price-point yet, we expect it to cost North of $300. It will be sold either at cost or we will subsidize it. I think that it is necessary for me to mention the above up-front to align everyone’s expectations and tamper with unnecessary hype. Here’s the take-away: this is an amazing platform, but it will take time for it to mature.

QuartzPro64 block diagram

Now, with that out of the way, the QuartzPro64 will ship with 16GB of LPDDR4X RAM and 64GB of eMMC storage, which ought to be plenty for development and future implementation. With development in mind, we chose to expose as much of the available I/O as possible.

Here’s the core I/O run-down:

USB-C (with video-alt mode)
USB0-C (with debug mode)
USB- 3.0
2x USB 2.0
HDMI in
2x HDMI out
PCIe 3.0
2 SATA ports
2x Gigabit ethernet
2x SMA Antenna
2x MIPI DPHY
2x MPI DPCHY
Fan header
RTC battery holder
An array of switches, including power on/off maskrom and system KEY
eMMC socket
SD card slot
Power in via DC 12V

The board is 180mm x 180mm in size, features heatsink mounting holes and system KEY buttons on the PCB. We hope this feature set will make QuartzPro64 interesting to its target audience - the development community. In anticipation of people asking about the general availability of the board; at present time it is unclear when the QuartzPro64 will be made available more broadly. This will depend on BSP and Mainline development. As most members of the community I too have high hopes for the QuartzPro64, and more broadly for the RK3588 platform, and I hope to see the SoC implemented in PINE64 devices in the far-off future. For the time being, we’ll be announcing QuartzPro64’s availability on our Telegram, Matrix and Discord announcement / news channels and on social media in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.

PinePhone (Pro)

Shipments of the PinePhone and PinePhone Pro have resumed following Chinese New Year’s end, with the first batches of both dispatched earlier this month. I haven’t followed the dispatch process in recent weeks, but I believe that much of the CNY backlog has now already been shipped (and in many cases delivered). On the subject of PinePhone and PinePhone Pro shipments - we’re working on improving the dispatch and delivery logistics. The end goal is to ship smaller batches but more frequently. For the majority of you, this means that your PinePhone and PinePhone Pro order will be delivered much quicker. We are currently trialing a service that would cut down the delivery time significantly - depending on how the trial period goes we may implement this shipping mode permanently, and even expand it to other devices. I’ll return to this topic once the trial period is over and a decision has been reached later in the year.

PinePhone and PinePhone Pro most recent dispatch (I am intrigued by the red broom, you too?)

On the subject of software, there is much progress to report. Perhaps most importantly of all, suspend now works properly on the PinePhone Pro using u-boot. This enablement, or “fix” to be more accurate, comes courtesy of pgwipeout, who found a solution to this problem. I asked pgwipeout what the solution was, here is his response: “DMA transfers to SRAM always fail, no matter the source. The original fix handled disabling DMA on the SDMMC controller in SPL, but the SDHCI (eMMC) controller still was attempting DMA. I simply created a toggle for DMA in SPL for the SDHCI controller. Thus U-Boot on the eMMC now can load the SRAM bits without corrupting the data in-flight”. This fix has now found its way into Manjaro’s most recent OS image, which means you’ll be able to suspend/resume from suspend on the PinePhone Pro just like on the original PinePhone. While similar functionality can be achieved via Tow-boot (33YN2 writes more about this further down in this section), for those of you who specifically wish to use u-boot on their device I am glad to let you know that it is now a viable option.

Battery capacity reporting for the keyboard case now works in the UI on the PinePhone and PinePhone Pro thanks to Megi. This means keyboard case battery levels can be read in Plasma Mobile, Phosh, and SXMO in the same way as the smartphone’s main battery. Prior to this, you needed to read the battery status from the command line, which obviously wasn’t the ideal way to keep track of battery usage. This enhancement has now made its way to Manjaro; if you’re on Arch then you can wait for kernel 5.17 or switch to linux-megi-rc package. I am confident that more distro will follow suit and implement this enablement in their OSes.

Keyboard case’s battery charge displayed in Phosh - picture by Martijn Braam

Tow-Boot, a user-friendly version of U-Boot, has seen a release for the PinePhone and PinePhone Pro. The project page states that Tow-Boot aims to make the process of booting your device “boringly” normal and simple. The goal is to have a standardized booting experience across a variety of Arm-based devices, with no need for board or OS-specific differences in the builds. The most recent version of Tow-Boot introduced a smartphone UI, supporting both touch-input and small screens. In line with the project’s mantra, the project explains on their GitHub that this build of Tow-Boot should “(…) enable users to live the dream of EBBR but on their phones.” Tow-boot also allows for a variety of additional functionality, similar to Jump Drive, exposing the smartphone’s internal eMMC memory in a way that it can be mounted and flashed from a PC. It also allows the user to select the bootable device (SD / eMMC) via a combination of button presses. To learn more, check out the project’s website.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Video showcasing Tow-Boot installation to PinePhone Pro’s SPI flash - via Martijn Braam

Megi has demoed LibreELEC running on the original PinePhone and outputting video to an external display (TV). The KODI UI is accelerated and runs smoothly as does the video playback, which appears to be rock solid. I’m told that 1080p video, including 50fps (and likely also 60fps), plays back really well on the original PinePhone running LibreELEC. There isn’t a dedicated PinePhone OS image but thankfully Megi has put together comprehensive instructions on how to make one yourself. He also included a guide detailing how to add a LibreELEC entry into his multi-OS p-boot image. I really enjoy the PinePhone being used in non-phone specific ways, and this is certainly a great showcase of the versatility that the device offers. Being a retro-gamer I already asked Megi for a guide on how to port LAKKA to the PinePhone.

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LibeELEC on the original PinePhone - original video by Megi

Lastly, an alternative X86/X86-64 emulator for ARM64 called Fex-EMU (Compared to Box86/64 it aims to be faster), has seen major improvements leading towards the goal of getting full Proton and Steam compatibility. It is great to see further work being done in this space. And although it’s being mentioned here, this obviously not only benefits the PinePhone, but any ARM64 device out there!

Quartz64

Given QuartzPro64 introduction this month, I would be remiss not to mention all the development that Quartz64 has seen in recent months. I am also happy to announce that the Quartz64 model-B has now entered production and should become available in April (or earlier). Just to recap, the Quartz64 model-B features the same RK3566 SoC that is found on the model-A and on the PineNote. The SoC features 4x A55 cores and the Mali G52-2EE GPU. The model-B will be available in 2 configurations - with 4GB LPDDR4 and 8GBLPDDR4 RAM for $59.99 and $79.99 respectively. Unlike the model-A, model-B follows in the ROCK64’s steps and offers a small footprint. The small footprint means that some of the model-A I/O has been removed, but it retains the USB 3.0 alongside 2x USB 2.0 ports as well as DSI, CSI and RTC. This I/O selection is coupled with a full 40 GPIO pin connector and onboard Bluetooth and WiFi module. You can also outfit it with an eMMC module or a NVMe SSD (via PCIe 1x) located on the bottom of the PCB. It is a versatile little board, geared more towards end-users and industry than the bigger model-A.

The form factor of the Quartz64 model-B is, in all likelihood, very familiar to most of you

The model-B arrives at a good time; the software for the platform has matured to a point that distros and projects can develop fully fledged, functional OS images for the Quartz64. As per usual, Manjaro is the first to deliver an OS image with all core functionality enabled. The OS is built upon mainline-based kernel (5.17) and comes in five variations: minimal, with XFCE desktop, Plasma Desktop, GNOME and MATE desktops as well as Sway. The desktops (which support acceleration) are fully accelerated via the open source Panfrost GPU driver and I can attest that the desktop experience on the Quartz64 is excellent as far as SBCs are concerned. Latest pre-release Manjaro OS builds for the Quartz64 can be downloaded from here.

Quartz64 model-A with 2x SATA SSDs attached and powered directly from the SBC - picture by JF via Twitter

But that’s not all. I’ve spoken to pgwipeout and he’s told me that many improvements to end-users’ experience are in the works. He also updated me on the mainlining status of the various components: “Dwc3 support is pretty much ready to land in mainline, with the combophy queued up for 5.18. That also means pcie and sata are coming soon too. I’ve gotten DSI to work partially with the vop2 driver, but it still needs more work”. Moreover, the SPI controller has been confirmed to work and that SPL handling of recovery is now supported in mainline u-boot. While some I/O found on the model-A, such as the DSI, still needs some work all I/O on the model-B is already fully functional - “If you are including anything about model b, it’s pretty much good to go out of the box” pgwipeout told me. I believe that the release of the model-B will lead to a much broader adoption of the RK3566 and, in turn, a much wider range of OS choice. Indeed, I know this to be true, since we’ve already shipped a handful of dev kits to projects interested in supporting the Quartz-line of devices.

PineTime [JF]

Since last month, the InfiniTime community kept working on the features I wrote about in last month’s update, and some of the features being work on have already been merged in the *develop* branch of the project. These new features will be available in the next release of InfiniTime. Just to recap, the new features will include, among others, an airplane mode, the terminal watchface and improvements to the heart rate sensor management.

The community is very active and is creating pull-requests faster than we can possibly review, test and merge them. This is also true for the feature requests - there are currently 91 pending features requests. I’m really grateful to be surrounded by such an enthusiastic and understanding community whose people understand that we are working on the project in our spare time, and that the features will be done when someone will find the time to work on it.

This month, I’m happy to announce that InfiniSim, the InfiniTime simulator, is now its own dedicated project. NeroBurner, the author of InfiniSim, joined the team to develop and maintain the project under the InfiniTime organization on GitHub. We worked together to create the project and to ensure that all the InfiniTime code modifications needed were applied to support the simulator. InfiniSim allows everyone and anyone to run the whole InfiniTime UI on their computer. It even runs on the PinePhone Pro!

See the video here.

InfiniSim running on the PinePhone Pro

You can use InfiniSim to easily design and debug new apps for InfiniTime from the confort of your powerful computer without even needing to flash it over (and over again) to the PineTime. I am also planning on using InfiniSim to take screenshots of the menus and apps of InfiniTime and add them to the project’s documentation. Take a look at this impressive mosaic!

If you are interested in using or contributing to InfiniSim, please check out the project page. It also provides useful information on how to build and run it.

That’s all for now, catch you next month!

February update: chat with the machine

Tue, 15 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

As the Chinese New Year comes to an end and people return to work, production and shipping return to normal. More units of the PinePhone Explorer Edition, the PinePhone (Pro) keyboard case, the PinePhone Beta Edition and all the other popular products will be dispatching in the coming days. In the meantime, we bring you exciting news concerning PineNote development progress, LVFS and fwupd for the PinePhone and PinePhone Pro’s and instructions on how you can modify your Pinecil to increase its performance further (at your own risk, of course).

Let’s get to it!

You can watch the synopsis of this month’s community update on YouTube (embedded below) as well as on Odysee and PeerTube. To stay up-to-date with PINE64 news make sure to subscribe to this blog (subscription widget at the bottom of the webpage), follow PINE64 Telegram News channel, the announcements channel in Discord as well as our Twitter and Mastodon.

I’d like to thank JF, Alex (clover), Brian (33YN2), PizzaLovingNerd, biktorgj, Dylan Van Assche, William Starkey (ThanosTheTankEngine), Caleb and Samuel Holland (smaeul) for their contributions to this community update.

N.B. Comments on the blog post need to be in English and follow our Community Rules and Code of Conduct.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Video synopsis of this month’s update

TL;DR

Housekeeping
- CNY comes to an end; give shipping and support a few days to get back to their routine
- First community Q&A was great fun; we’ll do better next time and include more chat protocols and potentially stream the event on multiple platforms
- Malware shared again - do not install software from unknown sources onto your device
- Beware of flood of counterfeit Pinecils
- PINE64 online store - PINE64 EU - opening in April/ May
PinePhone (Pro)
- Many orders of PinePhone Pro & keyboard case over CNY - shipping will resume shortly
- New keyboard case driver allows to check battery levels and set PinePhone charge rate (Wattage)
- Plasma Mobile 5.24 released with multiple bug fixes, improvements and a new window / task switcher
- Chat with the machine: newest community firmware by biktorgj for the modem brings ability to issue commands to the modem via SMS and phone calls
- The community modem firmware can be now flashed and upgraded via fwupd thanks to work by Dylan
PineNote
- Plasma Desktop now runs on the PineNote with a grayscale UI theme; porting of first applications has began – you are invited and encouraged to join and contribute to the effort
- postmarketOS has been ported to the PineNote; works well with a choice of Phosh or SXMO
- Although much work is yet needed, we’ve reached the point where all device hardware works (thanks to work by smaeul and pgwipeout); new driver exposes all e-paper modes and EMR pen pressure works in Linux
- Work yet needed to enable GPU acceleration on the e-paper display (works with other output modes)
Pinecil
- New IronOS makes improvements to temperature regulation, so the Pinecil heats up faster and holds the temperature more precisely
- A new MacOS and Window update utility for the Pinecil is now available - allows safe and easy flashing
- Pinecil VBUS mod allows the device to use 24V input safely
PineTime
- Work towards 1.9 release is ongoing; will include airplane mode, a new terminal-themed watchface and bug fixes
- Documentation is being reworked
- There is now a fully functional InfiniTime simulator that allows for easy experimentation and debugging on PC rather than hardware; JF is impressed by its capabilities
PineDio
- Issues with early PineDio STACK prototypes have been identified and ironed out thanks to work by JF and Lup
- A new stock firmware for the STACK has been created and sent off to the product team; will not only allow end users a software platform to get started with the STACK but also allow product team to carry Q&A testing

Housekeeping

I’d like to start with a quick reminder that the Pine Store is just coming back to life following Chinese New Year. I am writing this a week prior to the update going live, and I have no insight into the support system, but from prior years experience I can make an educated guess that support has a hefty backlog to get through. I keep on getting pinged by people asking why their support tickets haven’t been answered, which leads me to think there are quite a few cases awaiting answers. I am asking you for patience - it will take time for support to work though the tickets, but they’ll get to yours eventually. Thank you for understanding.

In case you missed it, we’ve held a live Q&A session on January 21. The session turned out to be a success with many people tuning in and asking questions. I was initially unsure how many people would be interested in participating, but it is clear to me now that there is a strong need for such a quarterly event in the community. I know that many questions remained unanswered and that more time for such as Q&A should be allocated next time. The next community Q&A is due in April, and we’ll make sure to do a better job planning the session out, making it more inclusive of other chat protocols and potentially also live-streaming it on multiple platforms. In short, we’ll make sure to be better prepared. You can watch the first community Q&A on Youtube, Peertube and Odysee.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

First quarterly community Q&A

Throughout January we ran a survey asking people about their PinePhone use - now the results are in and published for anyone to view and dissect. Although ‘only’ 3079 people took part in the survey, I think that the results offer a glimpse into the most active portion of our community and offer an understanding of some overarching trends. The things that surprised me the most based on the responses are how many people daily drive their PinePhone, how popular SXMO is, and the relative indifference of a fourth of respondents to UI choice. If you haven’t done so yet, I suggest you head over and read the full survey report.

More malware targeting the PinePhone (and other devices) was shared in our chat rooms as well as our partner project chats these past weeks. I will not dwell on this topic as an investigation is already ongoing - I would, however, like to remind everyone to never download any file or archive from unknown origins onto your device. I refer you back to the December community update for more details.

Another thing that transpired the past month is an avalanche of counterfeit Pinecil soldering irons on popular internet outlets and shopping sites. As with any device that receives a lot of traction, copycat products are bound to emerge eventually. This is particularly true for conceptually relatively simple devices, such as the Pinecil, which makes them easy to copy. What makes these fakes more than just copies of the original is that they bear our logo on the box and feature inscription identical to that on real Pinecils. This is obviously a trademark violation and an attempt at tricking customers. It is only recently that these counterfeit Pinecils have spread like wildfire across popular online shopping sites, and that’s why I’m addressing this issue publicly. There is a limit to how much I can say about this situation right now, but here’s a piece of important information - if you want to get an original Pinecil, make sure to look at the box (often present in online listings), since all Pinecils across all regions are sold in the same exact box as the one on the Pine Store. And no, we do not manufacture blue Pinecils.

It looks like a Pinecil, it quacks like a Pinecil but its not a Pinecil

Let us end this month’s housekeeping section on a positive note. As some of you have noticed, I’ve been around less these past two months. There are a few reasons for this, but the one of interest to you is that I am in the process of setting up an EU-based PINE64 store – called PINE64 EU. The store will offer EU-based support, mandatory compliance with EU warranty policies, repair services as well as various options, such as selection of pre-flashed OSes on the PinePhone and PinePhone Pro. This is something that has been in the pipeline for a long time but COVID and COVID-related restrictions, as well as a number of other unforeseen events, have forced me to shelve plans of opening a EU regional store until a more suitable time. That time has now come. To be clear, it will take some time for the store to become operational - I am currently planning on launching the business sometime in late April or in early May. I will, of course, let you know when the store launches. In the meantime, you can follow PINE64 EU’s progress reports on its Twitter account.

Do you like the PINE64 EU logo?

PinePhone (Pro)

The PinePhone Explorer Edition (EE) launch has probably been the smoothest device roll-out we’ve had in years. We announced the PinePhone Pro in October, laid the roadmap for delivering Explorer Edition by January 2022 and made good on the promises. All phones ordered prior to January 18th have been dispatched on time and most, if not all, are now in the hands of their rightful owners. The sales and logistics teams did a mammoth job to make this happen and I’d like to publicly thank them for pulling off this feat so close to the start of the Chinese New Year. Good job, you’ve made a lot of people happy.

PinePhone Pro picture from the production line - this is what you get in the box

We’ve also managed to get our initial shipment of the PinePhone (Pro) keyboard and add-on cases out the door just before the holidays. While the keyboard and add-on case’s development isn’t quite as much of a success story as that of the PinePhone Pro, I am still very happy to see the add-ons now in peoples hands. The keyboard has received further software improvements just recently and been merged into Megi’s kernel tree. The new driver, created by Samuel, makes it possible to check battery voltage that can be read from sysfs in the terminal. You can also set what Wattage your keyboard case delivers to the phone. This is particularly useful when pairing the keyboard with the PinePhone Pro, since the default charging Wattage value is too low to allow for sustained charging during use of the smartphone.

People are really treating the PinePhone / Pro with the keyboard as a tiny computer - picture via terminal_junkie on Twitter

Many PinePhone Pro, keyboard case as well as the other add-on orders have been placed over the Chinese New Year period. We’re aware many of you are eagerly anticipating your devices to ship, but please permit the product and shipping teams a few days to work through all the orders. As always you will be notified of your shipment via email. I also encourage you to check the shipping, stock and availability webpage once in a while.

Plasma Mobile [by 33YN2]

With the release of Plasma 5.24 comes a new plasma mobile package! There’s been dozens of bug fixes and tons of UI improvements in this release. Most notably, the task switcher and the quick settings panel have both been completely revamped. Not only do they look much nicer, but they also run a lot better - and this applies to both the PinePhone Pro and the original PinePhone.

The app drawer has also received improvements so that it runs better and so that apps can finally be removed from it. And the mobile power settings menu has finally received fixes that now allow the phone to properly be set to not go into suspend when set to “Never”. Aside from that, you can expect a litany of bug fixes and UI improvements in the Plasma Mobile applications themselves, including a new application navigation design by Devin Lin.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

New swipe-based application / active window switcher - via KDE Plasma Mobile

Currently in development is gesture based navigation support, and there are plans for redesigning the homescreen. Overall this new release is a major step forward in delivering a robust, bug-free and enjoyable UI experience. With how much things have shaped up in this release, it sure will be interesting to see what comes in the next one. Make sure to check out the Plasma Mobile Gear 22.02 release post to read the rest of the changes in store.

Chat with the machine! [by biktorgj]

[quick foreword by Lukasz] The work done by Biktor is incredible as is the effort by Dylan to package the firmware into fwupd (read next section). I think that it is clear at this point that, objectively, this is the definitive firmware for PinePhone / PinePhone Pro’s modem - not to mention that it is also the safest. For legal reasons I need to state the following: 1) we do not encourage users to modify their modem’s firmware nor do we encourage it and 2) altering the firmware on the modem does void device warranty. This is a community blog, and the views outlined below belong to community contributors and not the Pine Store.

It’s been a year and half since I started working on the custom firmware for the modem. Most of the time I’ve been just reimplementing things the stock firmware did, and trying to patch and fix the things that didn’t work so well.

The Pinephone and the Pinephone Pro are special devices that do not have the modem integrated in the SoC. This causes more difficulties in getting everything to work, but it also presents opportunities to make things no other phone can do. These last weeks I’ve been implementing messaging and voice calling functionality in the modem’s userspace; that is, being able to text the modem itself, calling it, or making it call you and reply to your messages.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

“Hello? Who’s this? oh, hi modem”

At this point it’s just a proof of concept. It only works correctly on ModemManager-based distros, and has a limited set of commands you can request via SMS (some as useless as getting a kernel log via SMS), and calls only play a sound file in a loop, but it opens up endless possibilities to develop additional functions ranging from knowing if something is using the GPS without you knowing, to having the modem call you at a predefined time so you can have an excuse to get out of a boring meeting. If you’re running the latest release, feel free to send ‘help’ to the modem at the non-existent number +01 555 01 99 999 and it’ll reply back with a list of the currently available functions.

The latest community-built firmware can be downloaded from Biktor’s GitHub

LVFS & fwupd for the modem [by Dylan Van Assche]

You’ve been able to install Biktorgj’s firmware on your PinePhone and PinePhone Pro modem for a long time. However, installing it required you to use the command line and you had to pay attention that the battery on your PinePhone had enough charge. postmarketOS wanted to make this flashing process more user friendly, secure and easier to upgrade, therefore I have been working with Biktorgj to bring firmware updates on your device through fwupd. Fwupd is the de facto standard on Linux to deliver hardware firmware updates through the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) used by Lenovo, DELL, and other hardware vendors.

It took a long time to debug the firmware update process of the modem, since it is not documented and contains various bugs. These were solved and integrated into the fwupd ModemManager and fastboot plugins. Various patches were submitted to fwupd, ModemManager, eg25-manager, etc. to make it all work. After some help from the LVFS and fwupd maintainers we now have the firmware updates available through LVFS which are signed and properly tested by me and Biktorgj. Moreover, you can now upgrade your firmware through GNOME Software, KDE Discover or the fwupd CLI after switching to the community firmware branch. Note that this branch is not supported by the original hardware vendor at all, but it provides stability improvements, enhancements, and protection against the root exploit which is being abused by malware to brick your PinePhone and PinePhone Pro modem.

I described the whole process on my blog and invite you to have a read.

See Updating Pine64 PinePhone modem firmware with fwupd.

Demo of the modem’s firmware being flashed

PineNote

The PineNote has seen a handful of important developments since last month. The initial successful e-paper enablement on mainline-based Linux, thanks to work by smaeul and pgwipeout, now allows partner project developers to start work on porting their OSes to the PineNote and adapting user interfaces for the grayscale display. Last month we got a handful of units into the hands of our friends at KDE and they’ve started work on adapting Plasma Mobile to work on the PineNote. I spoke to Aleix, KDE e.V. president, last week: he told me that aside from working on a proof of concept UI in grayscale, KDE has also started adding support for apps - “(…) work to support the first apps on the device has started. At this time developers are working on getting Pikasso, a simple drawing app, to properly support the integrated drawing tablet on the device”. Plasma desktop already runs on the PineNote and, when using a modified high-contrast theme, the full desktop environment seems surprisingly viable on e-paper. If you want to join the conversation, help and contribute to the development of Plasma on e-paper or have an application you’d like supported on e-paper then please join Plasma-Ink Matrix channel.

Plasma Desktop with grayscale theme on the PineNote - via KDE dev team

But Plasma isn’t the only UI that has graced PineNote’s display in the past month. The device now also boots postmarketOS with Phosh UI using the DRM driver display written by smaeul (with pgwipeout’s tweaks). The merge request for initial support has already been submitted so there is a good chance that we’ll see a PineNote OS image from the postmarketOS team at some point in the near future. I’ve briefly spoken to Caleb from postmarketOS and they told me that Phosh looks great in high-contrast mode. However, they also mentioned the default theme cannot be modified since various parts of the UI are hardcoded. Noteworthily, SXMO - a mobile UI that came to be on the PinePhone - has now also been ported to the PineNote; I am very much looking forward to seeing how this particular UI works in practice on the PineNote. Regardless, the more choices the better, and having a wide range of desktop and phone UIs available will help us determine the right trajectory forward for the PineNote.

postmarketOS on the PineNote - via Caleb

Not only have we seen much movement on the UI-side, but many low-level enablements have also been made in recent weeks. Indeed, the functionality of the PineNote is growing by the day and things are starting to look great. Aside from the e-paper display, Wacom and capacitive panels, we now have Bluetooth, WiFi, as well as sound output. Bluetooth was broken on the PineNote until recently but, as Samuel Holland explained to me, it was fixed by using a different firmware. He added that this effectively means all hardware components of the PineNote have now been tested and do work (to various degrees). Even EMR pen pressure sensitivity has now been enabled and works in Linux. Given how little time the PineNote has been in active development, seeing all these efforts slowly start coming together and forming a larger whole is very exciting.

EMR pen pressure working in Krita on the PineNote - via Samuel Holland

That said, there are a number of issues that remain to be resolved and make Linux more usable on the device. As pgwipeout explained to me, GPU acceleration doesn’t work when outputting to the E-Book Controller (EBC) - the display controller for the e-paper display. This means that the UI and all its elements are currently sluggish. But enabling the GPU over EBC is only a part of the issue. There is also a need to create a standard for exposing refresh modes to userspace (different refresh modes supported). Caleb says that creating a daemon will be needed to automatically switch modes depending on what the user is doing - e.g. switch to mode A2 when scrolling or drawing on the PineNote. At present time, the A2 mode doesn’t seem to work properly, so writing on the PineNote in Linux is not viable (the input appears with a delay). Eventually desktop environments such as Plasma Desktop and Phosh as well as individual applications should support the waveform switching feature, so that the display can adapt to the user’s activity.

The good news is that significant progress is being made on this front too. As Samuel Holland explained to me, the mainline-based display driver now supports all of the display controller’s modes. These modes determine the ability to independently update different parts of the screen at the cost of CPU and power usage. Samuel says that previously only the least sufficient software mode was available and that the now enabled “(…) hardware LUT mode allows us to run the panel at full speed. Since the waveforms are designed for a specific refresh rate (…), this means better image quality”.

Displaying an image isn’t everything however and there are multiple other issues that still need addressing. For instance, due to a bug, u-boot currently doesn’t detect the root filesystem automatically, and requires the user’s input over UART. Needless to say, this isn’t exactly a viable manner of booting the device into an OS, especially not for regular end-users (but surely it is also an annoying step even if you’re an enthusiast). So, while there is clearly a way to go before we can all enjoy reading and writing content on the PineNote running a traditional Linux desktop environment, let us appreciate how much progress has been made in just a few short months. With the amount of work being done on this particular device, and on the RK3566 platform in general, I am confident that early adopters will get a chance to get their hands on the PineNote late this year.

Pinecil [by William Starkey]

IronOS 2.17/2.16 changes: the two most recent IronOS updates, 2.16 and 2.17, bring some great new features to the Pinecil, as well as significantly improve some of the existing ones! The major improvements made in 2.16 are upgrades to the temperature regulation, so the Pinecil heats up faster and holds the temperature more precisely, and refactoring & bug-fixes of the USB Power Delivery (PD) stack that fix compatibility issues with some Type-C power supplies, and a myriad of other small quality-of-life improvements.

IronOS 2.17 brings some useful new features, including the ability to check if the iron has had the VBUS mod (explained below) performed correctly, and a new debug menu entry showing raw values from a Hall effect sensor if one was added to the board. It also brings some improvements to the Russian, French, and German translations. The logo conversion tool now outputs a .dfu file directly to make it easier to add a custom logo, and the build tools are all now compatible with Alpine Linux - so you can build and flash IronOS from a PinePhone or PinePhone Pro running PostmarketOS.

PINE64 Updater: a flashing utility designed to make the experience of updating the firmware on your PINE64 products easier is under development by Gamiee, one of the admins of the PINE64 community chat rooms. The software currently supports updating the firmware of your Pinecil and is available on MacOS and Windows. It’s planned to gain support for Linux and allow flashing more Pine64 products in the future. The PINE64 updater is currently available on github at https://github.com/pine64/pine64_updater if you want to contribute to the project or use it to flash your Pinecil more easily.

[edit from Lukasz] A quick foreword to the following section - we always allow and encourage users to experiment and mod their devices. But, please, bear in mind any modifications to Pinecil’s hardware does void the warranty.

Pinecil VBUS mod: early on in the Pinecil’s lifetime, shortly after it was announced, there was some controversy over the voltage rating of the Pinecil. It was rated for 24V, but the chip responsible for handling USB power delivery, FUSB302, was not rated for more than 21V. While the “Absolute Maximum” rating for the chip is 28V, it will still sometimes die when 24V is fed into it. The VBUS mod is a fairly easy permanent fix for this issue. As we found out, the pin on the FUSB302 that connects to the incoming power rail (VBUS) is not actually used by IronOS, and therefore doesn’t have to be connected. The mod is, thus, as simple as cutting the trace going to that pin.

The recommended technique is to use the corner of a razor blade and drag it across the trace highlighted on the picture - at the point between the two arrows. This position will change depending on the version of your Pinecil board, so, when you get the board out of your Pinecil (follow the disassembly instruction on the wiki at https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Pinecil#Disassembly_steps ), compare your board with the visual aids to find the location to cut, press the corner of a razor blade into the board slightly above the starting location, then carefully drag it through the trace, firmly applying pressure so that you cut through the copper. Make sure you do not cut any other traces!

Once the trace is cut, make sure it is no longer connected, using either a multimeter or IronOS’ new VBUS mod detection feature (available in IronOS 2.17). To use the IronOS mod detection feature, plug your Pinecil into any USB-PD-capable Type-C port using a C-C cable, then open the debug menu by holding down the “-” (minus) key after the screen turns on. Press the “+” key in the debug menu until you reach the section labeled “PWR”. It will say “PD No VBUS” after “PWR” if you have properly cut the trace.

When you have confirmed that the mod was successful, you will be able to use your Pinecil with a 24V power supply without any risk of causing damage to the iron!

Mod illustration before (left) and after (right)

PineTime [by JF]

InfiniTime 1.8 was released last month (see the January community update for more details). According to the feedback we received, BLE connectivity seems to work much better than before thanks to the addition of the secure pairing functionality. If you haven’t done so yet, I strongly recommend you update your PineTime to this latest version. The next release is not ready yet, but many contributors and developers are working to add new functionalities and fix bugs. Infinitime keeps getting valuable feedback, interesting feature requests and many many pull requests - thanks to everyone who is contributing to the project!

So what have we been working on? You can get a preview of the features we plan to add to the next release by checking out the 1.9 milestone. This list includes a new airplane mode feature (to disable the BLE radio when you don’t need it), a new “terminal” watch face and a complete rewrite of the documentation.

Terminal watchface - pictur by 13werwolf13 on Github

Another project I would like to highlight is the InfiniTime simulator by NeroBurner, which has been worked on for a few months now. This simulator runs the whole InfiniTime UI, allowing developers to easily design new applications and user experiences directly on their PC without needing to test and debug the changes on the actual PineTime. I recently had a look at this application and I have to say I’m genuinely impressed by the amount of work NeroBurner put in. It simulates the whole UI by reusing code from InfiniTime and it “stubs” (replaces) low level code that accesses the hardware so that it can run in a simple window on your desktop. The author opened a pull request on InfiniTime and I’m eager to review it and see how we will integrate it into the project.

GIF of InfiniTime simulator - by NeroBurner on Github

Upcoming weather forcast functionality in the simulator

As you can see in the following picture, the integration of weather information in the PineTimeStyle watchface is still ongoing thanks to the simulator!

Stay tuned for the next release and, until then, enjoy your PineTime.

PineDio [by JF]

Remember the PineDio STACK? This is a development kit based on the Bouffalo BL604 RISC-V MCU which embeds many devices like a LoRa radio, a motion sensor, a display and a touch panel. We have already talked about it in previous updates, and Lup has already written extensively about it LoRaWAN on the STACK, Rust on Apache NuttX BL602 EFlash Loader: Reverse Engineered with Ghidra and related topics.

Unfortunately this kit is not yet available in the Pine Store as we still had a few issues with our prototypes: we were unable to make the LCD work and we had a few issues with flashing one of the boards. Fortunately, we were able to fix those issues and now can move onto the next stages of development. I’m currently working on a demo / selftest firmware that implements basic drivers for all onboard devices (LoRa radio, sensors, display,…) to ensure that the firmware is able to communicate with those devices and that they are working properly. This firmware will not only allow future developers to check that their board is working correctly, but it’ll also make it possible for the PINE64 production team to test the boards at the factory before shipping starts!

I’ve just sent the first version of the firmware to the production team. Now, I’m waiting for feedback and I’ll eventually do some changes and improvements if needed.

Here’s a video showing that firmware in action: https://video.codingfield.com/videos/embed/ab40f429-18d0-4827-b2b3-123f74ab8d09

Once this firmware will be ready, PINE64 will be able to start the production of the PineDio STACK.

That is all for this month’s update, if you haven’t done so yet make sure to subscribe to this blog - the subscription widget is at the bottom of this page.

PinePhone community poll results

Mon, 31 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Throughout January we ran a poll asking people about how they use their PinePhones. Some poll results are quite predictable while others yielded unexpected results. Before we start, let me put on my academic hat for just one minute. This is a small, self-reported and not representative sample. A total of 3079 respondents took part in the poll - which amounts to less than 5% of all PinePhone owners. I’d therefore hesitate to extrapolate any of the results to the entire PinePhone community. I find it more likely that this sample reflects the most active community members and people following our project. It is also worth mentioning that some questions posed in the poll weren’t exactly well phrased, and that the poll itself did not follow any established conventions. But this was never meant to be a comprehensive study - it is instead, at best, a peak at the overarching trends of the most active portion of the community. To this end, when describing the results I’ll use descriptive generalizations, such as ‘more than half’ or ‘the majority’, rather than exact numbers or percentages I feel that this is more in line with the nature of the data and the general spirit of the poll. For what it’s worth, I’ll also share some of my thoughts and insights as we review the results. Exact numbers and percentages are, however, included in the graphs.

As always, I encourage you to share your thoughts about the results in the comments section.

Thank you to all those who took the time to fill in the questionnaire!

Geography

A third of all respondents are from the United States. In Europe, Germany, the United Kingdom (UK) and France have the highest respondent counts. The number is by far the greatest in Germany - more than twice that of the United Kingdom. In terms of per capita, it would appear that we also have a large active community in the Netherlands, Sweden, Austria and Czechia. Adjusted for population size, the response counts in these countries are actually on par or larger than in the UK or France. Outside of Europe and the US, Canada and Australia have the two largest PinePhone enthusiast communities. Similarly to smaller European countries, when adjusted for population size, the response counts in Canada and Australia surpasses larger European countries. Interestingly, there is a sizable number from Russia - a country where the PinePhone isn’t shipped to.

As expected, the number of respondents in Africa, South America, the Middle East, India and South Asia is low, with Japan being the sole exception. We are still experiencing issues shipping to India and some South American countries (Brazil in particular), which likely accounts for the low response numbers from these geographic regions.

The high number of respondents in Afghanistan is clearly an error. It would appear many users overlooked the first question and left Afghanistan - alphabetically the first option - as their answer in the drop-down menu querying geographic location.

Linux literacy

The vast majority of respondents report being highly Linux literate. A tenth of all respondents consider themselves true Linux wizards and nearly half identify as enthusiasts capable of writing (some) code. A sixth of all respondents reported being ‘tech-heads’ with a good understanding of Linux operating systems.

Non-Linux-savvy users, and people interested in smartphones but with a limited understanding of Linux, are but a small percentage of the sample.

While the PinePhone undoubtedly caters primarily to a Linux literate and technically savvy crowd, I do not believe this result to be representative of the entire community. I strongly suspect that community members with a lower Linux literacy are significantly underrepresented in this poll. Here is one plausible explanation: PinePhone owners with a lesser interest in Linux and FOSS in general do not follow our blog, forum, chats and social media, etc, and therefore haven’t had the opportunity to partake in the poll.

There is also something to be said about the subjective scale used to evaluate respondents’ Linux literacy - more specifically, I think it likely that a portion of the respondents may have overestimated their degree of Linux knowledge. To be clear, this isn’t a snarky jab at respondents, just a known psychological bias found in nearly all self-evaluation forms.

Experience with mobile Linux (capable) smartphones

Although the majority of users reported the PinePhone being their first Linux smartphone, I was surprised to learn that just under a fourth of all respondents have previous experience with mobile Linux. This value is much higher than I expected. I suspect that this result is not representative of the entire PinePhone community.

It would be interesting to learn whether the majority of people with previous mobile Linux experience belong(ed) to the Ubuntu Touch, SailfishOS, Nokia N900 communities, or whether their experience stems from elsewhere.

Poll results

PinePhone usage

I was excited to find that a fourth of all respondents daily drive their PinePhone. Over a quarter of all respondents also use their PinePhone as a secondary smartphone, while a third report using their PinePhone occasionally.

I am very pleased to learn that the majority of respondents use their PinePhone frequently or daily. That said, I suspect that the percentage of people daily driving their PinePhone is overrepresented as compared to the entirety of the PinePhone community. Regardless, I am looking forward to the first in-person FOSS conference to see people show up with their PinePhones in hand.

I am, however, most curious about the people who only use their PinePhones occasionally as they make up a third of the sample. Is there a particular scenario when they use the PinePhone? Do they follow development of one or more OS? Do they use it infrequently due to missing features? Are they considering daily driving it at some point? Would they consider using the PinePhone Pro or some other Linux smartphone more regularly? I’d like to know the answers to these questions - it would warrant a poll of its own.

OS and UI choices

Most respondents - just over a third - have Manjaro Linux installed on their PinePhone. Mobian and postmarketOS appear to be equally popular, with more than a fifth of installs each. DanctNIX (Arch) is in fourth place with approximately an eighth of all installations. Ubuntu Touch arrives in fifth place, accounting for less than a tenth of PinePhone OSes.

Most frequently tried operating systems are: Manjaro, Ubuntu Touch, postmarketOS and Mobian - respectively and in this order. In retrospect I feel that the question inquiring about which OSes tried out was not well phrased. Presumably most people get to experience Manjaro with Plasma Mobile as it ships with the PinePhone, and this cannot be equated with actively seeking out and installing other operating systems. I therefore find it hard to interpret Manjaro’s position at the forefront of this graph.

One interesting observation is that many people try out Ubuntu Touch but end up settling for a different OS. I am curious as to why: is it because Ubuntu Touch is not a traditional Linux distribution? Is it because the PinePhone build lacks some core functionality? Or is it simply the case that our core user base is after a different experience?

As for user interfaces: about a third of all respondents have a preference for Phosh and a fifth for Plasma Mobile. One in ten respondents reports liking Lomiri best. Somewhat surprisingly one in ten respondents has a preference for either SXMO or SWMO (approx 5% each) - this is more than I’d expect given the novelty and complexity of the UI(s). I suspect that the high number of respondents using SXMO and SWMO reflects on the high degree of Linux literacy in the survey sample.

What I find by far the most interesting, however, is the fact that nearly a quarter of all respondents do not have a strong UI preference (whatever works best). I admit that I expected people, many of whom identify themselves as enthusiasts, to have, how should I put it, preconceived UI preferences. Perhaps the Linux community isn’t as partisan when it comes to desktop environments as people say.

PinePhone Pro and add-ons

Over half of poll participants indicated that they will be purchasing a PinePhone Pro - a fifth stated they’ll be picking one up as soon as it becomes available (the survey launched prior to the PinePhone Pro becoming publicly available).

A third remain undecided whether they’ll pick up a PinePhone Pro but only less than a tenth do not intend on picking one up.

As for the optional PinePhone (Pro) add-on accessories - clearly the most desirable PinePhone add-on is the keyboard case, with nearly two thirds of all respondents planning on purchasing it.

A quarter of respondents plan on purchasing the keyboard add-on case in combination with one of the other add-ons. Aside from the keyboard, the most popular back cases for the PinePhone (Pro) are the fingerprint reader and Qi wireless charging add-ons.

A quarter of all respondents will not be buying any add-ons for their PinePhone.

Data compilations

Favorite OSes for daily driving

The majority of users who daily drive their PinePhone use either Mobian or Manjaro Linux - both of which account for just under a third of installs each. postmarketOS and DanctNIX (Arch) come in second and third place with a fifth and a seventh of all installations respectively.

While it is undeniably true that this poll sample is not representative of the entire PinePhone community, I do find it likely that these OSes are the four most popular on the PinePhone platform. Therefore it also makes sense that they are frequently chosen for the purpose of daily usage. Conversely, other OSes are much less popular among the core PinePhone base and therefore also less frequently chosen for the purpose of daily driving.

Favorite OSes among those who use their PinePhone as a backup/secondary smartphone

Among those who use their PinePhone as a backup or secondary smartphone, Manjaro Linux is the most popular OS with nearly a third of all installations. Mobian is the second most popular, with a quarter of all installations, followed by postmarketOS and DanctNIX (Arch) with approximately a fifth and a seventh of installations respectively.

I suspect that a sizable portion of people who use their PinePhone as a secondary smartphone keep the default OS image - Manjaro with Plasma Mobile - as their default installation. Data indicates that only half of people who use their PinePhone as a backup smartphone have tried out other OSes. This stands in contrast to the vast majority of people who tried out other OSes prior to settling on one to daily drive.

Favorite UI among people who drive their PinePhone daily

Phosh is by far the most popular UI among those who daily drive their PinePhones with a presence on nearly 40% of all installations. This is more than likely due to Mobian - which features Phosh by default - being a popular choice for daily driving.

Interestingly, SWMO and SXMO are collectively as popular among those who daily drive their PinePhone as Plasma Mobile, with approximately a seventh of all installations. I am surprised by how popular these UIs are among the PinePhone user base. As you’d expect those who daily drive OS installations with SWMO and SXMO identify themselves as highly Linux literate.

A fifth of respondents in this subsample do not have a UI preference.

Favorite UI among people who use their PinePhone as a backup/ secondary smartphone

Phosh is the most popular UI for people who use their PinePhone as a secondary smartphone with a third of all installations, while Plasma Mobile comes in second with a fifth of all installations.

A tenth of all respondents in this subsample chose Lomiri as their favorite UI. This is interesting, since this number is comparatively large when contrasted with Ubuntu Touch’s popularity on the PinePhone. I suspect that this indicates people like the Lomiri UI but find obstacles elsewhere in the Ubuntu Touch OS, leading them to switch to one of the four most popular OSes. In other words, they like the UI the best but don’t actually use the OS that offers it.

A fifth of all respondents in this subsample do not have a UI preference.

UIs on the four most popular OSes (Manjaro, Mobian, postmarketOS and DanctNIX)

Plasma Mobile is the most popular UI among Manjaro, accounting for a third of all installations. This is quite predictable given that the default OS image installation shipping on the PinePhone offers this exact OS-UI combination. That said, Phosh is nearly as popular with just under a third of all respondents selecting it as their favorite. A quarter of Manjaro users claim that they do not have a strong preference for any UIs, as long as the UI is efficient and bug-free.

Unsurprisingly Phosh is the UI of choice for Mobian users, half of which selected it as their preferred UI. Interestingly, a fourth reported not having a strong UI preference.

The most interesting results, at least in terms of UI, are to be found among respondents currently running DanctNIX (Arch) and postmarketOS. While both user bases report favoring Phosh, a significant number of users selected SXMO and SXMO as their preferred UI(s). On postmarketOS this number amounts for a whopping third of all respondents; on DanctNIX the number accounts for a seventh of respondents in this subsample. A tenth of DanctNIX users also selected Lomiri as their favorite UI, which is curious since it isn’t available on Arch. Plasma mobile has been chosen by a fifth and a tenth of postmarketOS and DanctNIX users respectively.

This means that SWMO and SXMO are collectively more popular among postmarketOS than Plasma Mobile and comparatively popular among DanctNIX users.

Closing thoughts

I am sure that some of you will be tempted to jump to conclusions having read the poll results and the compilation data, but I strongly recommend you refrain from doing so. I remind you that the sample consists of 3079 respondents, a number which cannot be viewed as representative of the entire PinePhone community. Moreover, due to the methodology, or rather lack thereof, it is impossible to extrapolate results from this data set in a way that would reliably reflect trends in the broader community.

So, then, what is the data good for? I believe that the poll paints a couple of interesting trends among the most active and engaged members of our project. For one, it shows us that this segment of the community views themselves as highly Linux literate - and this is likely accurate (to a degree). PinePhone owners who partook in the poll are also likely to daily drive their PinePhone or use it frequently as a secondary smartphone. It is clear that among this segment of the community four operating systems are most popular: Manjaro, Mobian, postmarketOS and DanctNIX (Arch). Manjaro and Mobian being clearly preferred for daily driving the PinePhone.

We also learned that users of the aforementioned OSes have different UI preferences. While Phosh is clearly the most popular UI across the board, it came as a genuine surprise to me how popular SXMO and SWMO are in general and on postmarketOS more specifically. I didn’t expect such a complex and unorthodox UI to gather such a following in a relatively short period of time. But to be clear, I think this is great. We also shouldn’t overlook that a sizable portion of respondents is indifferent to which UI they use as long as the experience is solid.

I feel we also learned that many respondents like the Lomiri UI and many of them try out Ubuntu Touch on their PinePhone but ultimately decide against using it. To me this is an important finding, with potentially very important implications. Exploring this further, however, falls outside the scope of these poll results (and would likely require a study of its own).

I was glad to see so many respondents planning on picking up a PinePhone(Pro) keyboard to augment their mobile Linux experience. I can tell you that, indeed, the keyboard add-on is very popular and currently one of the best selling items in the Pine Store.

Finally, I am glad to see so many respondents are planning on picking up a PinePhone Pro now or in the future. This is obviously good news for us, our community and the mobile Linux crowd in more general. In a year it may be worth running a similar poll inquiring about the PinePhone Pro to learn whether we met the expectations with our new device.

Once again, I’d like to thank everyone who took part in this poll, I really appreciate it.

_Found a mistake? Please let the mods know or leave a comment below
_

January Update: More News

Sat, 15 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to the first update of the year. The year just began but much has already happened. These past 2 weeks saw the release of the highly anticipated PinePhone keyboard case and the PinePhone Pro Explorer Edition. And there is more good news: the PineNote’s e-paper display now works, and is now available for purchase without the need for a coupon.

We have many things to cover, so let’s get to it.

You can watch the synopsis of this month’s community update on YouTube (embedded below) as well as on Odysee and PeerTube. To stay up-to-date with PINE64 news make sure to subscribe to this blog (subscription widget at the bottom of the webpage), follow PINE64 Telegram News channel, the announcements channel in Discord as well as our Twitter and Mastodon.

I’d like to thank JF, Alex (clover), Lukasz, PizzaLovingNerd, and Samuel (smaeul) for their contributions to this community update.

N.B. Comments on the blog post need to be in English and follow our Community Rules and Code of Conduct.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Video synopsis of this month’s update

TL;DR

Housekeeping
- We’re running a PinePhone community poll - it takes 2 min to answer, please fill it in
- We’ll be hosting quarterly Q&A sessions allowing you to ask any questions related to PINE64 - first Q&A on Friday, January 21 at 21:00 UTC
- Chinese New Year starts February 1st; production, shipping and support members are off on holidays until Late February
- Once Chinese New Year is over, we’ll investigate Pinebook Pro and PineTab production opportunities
PinePhone Pro
- PinePhone Pro Explorer Edition is available for pre-order for $399
- PinePhone Pro orders placed before January 18th ship late January; orders placed on and after January 18th ship in late February, after Chinese New Year
- A quick review of PinePhone Pro’s software state - a list of things that need to be enabled or fixed before the phone is daily-drivable
- New OSes to choose from: Gentroo, LuneOS were already ported, while openSUSE and Fedora ports are in the works
PinePhone
- OpenBSD now boots on the PinePhone; much work is needed to enable core functionality
- From Jolla’s community news blog we learn that the PinePhone port of SailfishOS accounts for more than 40% of all installs
- Pico 8 Raspberry Pi port works on the PinePhone - yes, it does run DOOM
RK3588
- Many of you have seen the announcement - the RK3588 will be made available to vendors (in bulk) later this year
- It is a very powerful and complex SoC - full Linux functionality will take time, likely a long time
PineNote
- If you are a developer or an enthusiast, you can now order the PineNote without a coupon
- Support for PineNote’s e-paper display has now been enabled in mainline-based Linux; we now have a functioning DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) driver for the device’s e-ink controller and panel
- Next release of the mainline-based kernel enabled USB OTG functionality; this will make development much easier moving forward
PineTime
- Infinitime 1.8.0 released with new features for end-users such as BLE secure pairing, and prep work for future features.
- New version of GadgetBridge adds step counter support
Pinedio
- LoRa USB adapter brings LoRa connectivity to any computer or SBC equipped with a USB port
- LoRa addon for the PinePhone has very rudimentary software support for now
- Lup Yuen Lee has been experimenting with Apache NuttX on the PineDio STACK

Housekeeping

Let’s start with a quick reminder that we’re running a poll to learn more about the PinePhone community. If you are a PinePhone user and haven’t filled in the questionnaire yet, then I kindly ask you to do so. The more people take part, the more complete the picture we have, and the better the poll results are. It is a short, 9-question survey and it takes no more than 2 minutes to fill it in. The poll will close at the end of the 24th of this month, at which point we’ll crunch the numbers and generate a report. I initially thought we could have a report included in the next community update, but now I’m thinking it may be a better idea to spend more time on the data and to write a more substantial stand-alone report. I haven’t made up my mind yet, I need to see the numbers first. I’ll keep you posted.

We’re going to be hosting quarterly Q&A sessions using the stage feature on our Discord server. This will give people a chance to ask questions about current and future projects, or anything else PINE64-related. I want these Q&A sessions to be casual, so rather than having questions submitted beforehand I’ll be picking queries from the chat and inviting people onto the stage for a talk. The first Q&A session will take place next Friday late evening (UTC), January 21st. As for why we’re using Discord, the answer is simply: it has the functionality we need and works flawlessly, and 2) there are now over 10,000 people on Discord, which is twice the number of the next biggest PINE64 chat protocol. The Q&A session will be recorded and uploaded to Youtube, Odyssey, and Peertube at a later date if you don’t make it or do not use Discord.

Chinese New Year (CNY) begins February 1st, at which point all production, shipping, and related activities will come to a halt. Pine Store sales, info, support, and product teams are off to spend time with their relatives and enjoy a well-deserved vacation. All factories will also stop production during this period. The Pine Store will keep taking orders over CNY, but shipping will first resume in the second half of February. Any queries submitted over this period will also be answered first after activity resumes in the latter part of the month. There will be a big build-up of emails and support tickets over this period, so it may take longer than usual to receive a response - thank you in advance for your patience. Do note that if you order hardware very late in January it is more than likely that it will ship in late February.

Lastly, once factories start up again, one of the first things on the product team’s agenda is exploring the viability of Pinebook Pro and PineTab production. We know that many of you are waiting to get your hands on a Pinebook Pro or a PineTab; granted that prices of LCDs reach a reasonable price point after CNY, we’ll be scheduling a production run for March. I’ll make sure to update you on production-related matters closer to the date.

Quarterly Q&A voice channel in the official PINE64 Discord

PinePhone Pro

Speaking of the PinePhone, there’s a lot to unwrap for this month. The PinePhone (Pro) keyboard case is now on sale, as many of you may have seen, and the PinePhone Pro Explorer Edition is now also available for pre-order. The first production-run of keyboard cases should have already shipped by the time this post is live, and shipping will continue right after the Chinese New Year. As for the PinePhone Pro, orders placed by January 18th will ship out this month, while orders placed after this date will be dispatched as soon as the team returns from their holidays. While the PinePhone Pro’s software is progressing extraordinarily fast, and we’re in a much better position than with the original PinePhone Braveheart and Community Editions, there is still much work needed to bring full functionality to the device, and this will take time. Please also note that while the keyboard addon will support the PinePhone Pro, it likely will not yet be functional by the time you receive your units, as software support is still being worked on.

PinePhone Pro pre-orders are now live

Reassuringly, however, the Mobian team is confident of the PinePhone Pro being daily drivable before 2022 ends in their recent PinePhone Pro status blog post. Other partner project developers share the sentiment; the phone performs very well in all mobile environments and no hardware design flaws have been uncovered in the development batch. As things stand today, there are four major software shortcomings that prevent the PinePhone Pro from being truly daily-drivable (by end-users already acquainted with Linux smartphones). I’ll list them in the order of significance: the PinePhone Pro doesn’t wake from suspension, battery level reporting is poor, cameras do not work and, lastly, audio call quality is poor. Out of the four, the first issue directly impacts PinePhone Pro’s daily drivability, since without functional suspension the phone is limited to a short run-time. However, once waking from suspend gets sorted, we estimate that the PinePhone Pro will be able to remain dormant, while receiving SMS/MMS and calls, for as long as the original PinePhone (18-24hrs). These issues will eventually be sorted, but they are something that early adopters picking up a phone today need to be aware of.

Finally, LuneOS and Gentoo have been ported to the PinePhone Pro, and ports of openSUSE and Fedora are already in the works. You can see all OSes currently available for the PinePhone Pro under the software releases section of the device documentation (although it appears the Gentoo port hasn’t been added yet - please see the original Tweet). Speaking of the Wiki, earlier this month the PinePhone Pro was granted FCC certification (which can be viewed online), which follows on the heels of the CE RED certification granted in November. Both certifications will be uploaded to the Wiki alongside production schematics and part datasheets this month. There is now also a dedicated Explorer Edition subsection on the Wiki, and it is currently void of content. Anyone is welcome to contribute to the page.

The Maui Project (part of the KDE ecosystem), recently announced that they are working on a simple and unobtrusive desktop environment intended to adapt to different form factors, including desktops, tablets, and phones. While in a very early testing release simply intended for feedback, it shows quite a lot of promise thanks to its many features and clean user interface. You can expect an Alpha release in March of this year according to their current roadmap shown at the bottom of the announcement post.

PinePhone

With regards to the base PinePhone, OpenBSD has been demonstrated to boot, although much work is needed to get it to a functional state. Among the issues encountered by Crystal in his mailing list; errors flood the console, the various sensors of the device are read incorrectly, powering off the device does not fully work, and the CPU is run at the wrong clockspeed. It is however extremely promising to see this kind of progress!

A recent Jolla community news post disclosed that the most popular SailfishOS port of the last year was for the PinePhone. This in and of itself may not be super surprising, but the fact that the PinePhone port accounts for nearly 40% of all installations and has “(…) over double the installs of the other devices in the top ten list combined” is noteworthy. It is always exciting to see how our hardware impacts other communities and I cannot but think that this is a prime example of the PinePhone shaping a different community. Perhaps with sufficient interest from Jolla’s community members and contributors, we’ll see a port for the PinePhone Pro too - time will tell.

Sailfish OS port statistics - picture via Jolla

Lastly, Danct12 has tested Pico 8 on the PinePhone (running DanctNIX Phosh) with the keyboard add-on. Although his pre-production keyboard has some stuck keys (production units will not have this issue), this video of him playing a Pico 8 port of doom on the keyboard is still very cool to see. I’ll leave you with his video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHIj3mCnQZ0

Pico 8 port of Doom running on the PinePhone with a Keyboard -

For those of you who wish to run an open-source alternative, he has also taken a photo demonstrating Tic-80 running on the PinePhone with the keyboard addon - via Danct12

RK3588

With the announcement of the RK3588 at the Rockchip Developer Conference of 2021, we are able to talk more freely about the RK3588 SoC. No doubt many of you have already read about this new chip, and know that it is far more potent than the current RK3399 we use in the Pinebook Pro, RockPro64, and PinePhone Pro, seeing as its GPU, in particular, is 10 times faster. With that said, we will have chips delivered to us in the second half of the year, and rest assured no one else will have them before us. It is unlikely that there will be complete mainline Linux support or working GPU drivers within at least a year from the time that the chips start being delivered. We do not have any plans currently to put these chips into our devices until after progress has been made by others in this space. Here is the takeaway: the RK3588 is a very powerful SoC, with heaps of potential, but it is also a highly complex chip. It is, therefore, more than likely that it will take a long time for all its core features to be brought up and properly supported under Linux. We’ll be watching the development of the RK3588 closely, and once all the core functionality is in place we’ll be bringing great hardware built upon the architecture.

RK3588 block diagram

PineNote

Due to the progress made on the Quartz64 and PineNote platforms in recent weeks (more on this later) the PineNote can now be purchased without the need for a coupon. That said, the PineNote is still to be considered a developer and enthusiast-only device at this point in time. There is no default operating system or user interface for the PineNote and it ships with only the bootloader installed. If you intend to purchase one, at present time you’ll have to install, and likely also build from scratch, your own Linux system to run on the device. If this doesn’t scare you off and sounds like a fun challenge, then please read the Pine Store’s PineNote product page description as well as Samuel’s report below prior to picking up a unit.

Much progress has been made over the past month toward getting Linux up and running on the PineNote. During December, most developers received their PineNote units, and began familiarizing themselves with the device, getting their favorite Linux distribution to run alongside the Android factory test image. Folks are running Alpine and Debian in various configurations, with a NixOS port in progress, and more distributions are on the way. Out of that effort came critical tool and documentation improvements, which helped to get later folks up to speed quite a bit faster. There were some great hardware projects as well, like irrenhaus’s sturdy 3D printed case for the PineNote’s UART Adapter:

PineNote UART Adapter - via irrenhaus on Discord

After the new year came some major kernel milestones. The largest one was the release of a functioning DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) driver for the device’s e-ink controller and panel.

PineNote Eink panel working - via Smaeul

This accomplishment is important for two reasons. First, it proves the viability of the product as a mainline-first Linux e-reader. Second, it allows developers to start testing and optimizing their graphical applications for e-paper displays. Similar to how Linux apps had to be modified (or new ones had to be written) to work well on a PinePhone-sized touchscreen, applications will also need changes to function smoothly on a slow-updating, grayscale e-paper display. For example, developers will need to remove animations, maximize contrast, and avoid conveying information through color. While making these updates is no small task, it is only a matter of time now that the process has already begun.

To be clear, the display driver is not yet complete. Currently, it only uses the basic grayscale waveform. More work will be needed to support the optimized anti-ghosting waveforms, the fast monochrome waveform used for low-latency pen input, and the dithering waveform necessary for watching videos. Still, it is exciting to see what people are already doing with the panel. Folks have been working on several desktop environments, including GNOME and XFCE:

XFCE on the PineNote with Arch Linux Arm - via Danct12

The next release of the mainline-based kernel enabled USB OTG functionality, which means development can now happen directly on the PineNote using a physical keyboard. Further updates brought support for the touch screen and audio playback. That leaves the microphone array and Bluetooth as the remaining unsupported hardware.

The PineNote shares most of its hardware with the Quartz64, so most of these changes benefit that board as well, just like the PineNote effort is built on top of earlier Quartz64 development [done by pgwipeout and others]. For example, the e-ink panel now works on the Quartz64 board, too:

So, now that developers have devices in hand, and the e-paper display and other hardware is up and running, the pace of activity should only accelerate over the next few months.

InfiniTime [by JF]

We released InfiniTime 1.8.0 a few days after New Year celebrations. This is an interesting release as it brings new features for the end-users and also prepares the ground for future functionalities.

InfiniTime “Fuzzy Kiwi” now supports the “secure pairing with a passkey” for BLE connection contributed by James. I talked about this feature in the last community update. When enabled by the companion app, the BLE connection is protected by a passkey: a PIN code is displayed on the PineTime and is requested by the companion app. This ensures that only your phone or computer can connect to your watch. It also encrypts the communication, so that no one will be able to intercept the notifications sent from the companion app to your watch, for example. And, last but not least, the secure pairing (bonding) allows the companion app to reconnect faster and more reliably to your watch!

This feature is optional for now, and we hope companion apps developers will enable this feature by default, so we can remove the unsecured connection mode in a future release.

InfiniTime 1.8.0 BLE secure pairing - via JF

This new release brings many other new features and improvements: Chimes by SteveAmor that notifies every hour or half-hour with a vibration, ShakeWake by Tim to wake your watch by shaking your wrist, a trip meter in the Step app by Stephanie, and more. Some features are more complex and need more time to implement than others. In that case, we often choose to split the feature into smaller steps that are more easily achievable in a reasonable timeframe. That’s what we did for the Weather service and the BLE file system API!

Ultimately, the weather service will allow InfiniTime to display weather data (temperatures, forecasts, etc) sent by the companion app. The first step to this goal was done by Avamander as the BLE API required is now implemented. We decided to merge this feature even if there’s no weather app available (yet) to give companions app developers the opportunity to integrate this API in their app while we are working on a nice weather app and/or the integration of the weather data in watchfaces. Work is already in progress as Adam has already integrated the weather service in Amazfish and Kieran is currently working on extending the PineTimeStyle watchface to display the weather data!

InfiniTime 1.8.0 with upcoming weather widget on PineTimeStyle watchface - via JF

As you already know, we are very constrained by the memory available in the PineTime: 64kB of RAM and 512kB of flash memory. The available memory fills quite quickly as we are adding new features so we must take great care when allocating memory to ensure we keep its usage under control. For example, I’ve recently analyzed the RAM memory usage and managed to free no less than 9kB (14%) of RAM.

The flash memory contains the code of InfiniTime and also all the static assets (pictures, fonts, etc). This data takes a lot of space, and the relatively small flash memory space prevents us from adding nicer pictures, new fonts, and additional languages. Fortunately, the PineTime is also equipped with an additional flash memory of 4MB! Our long-term goal consists in using this additional memory to store all our static assets and free some space in the main flash memory.

The first step was taken a few months ago when we implemented a file system in this additional memory. A new step was recently taken by Tim with the implementation of a BLE API that allows companion apps to read and write files from/to this storage! This will be the channel of choice companion apps will use to send and update those fonts and bitmaps! There is still quite a lot of work to do before users are able to send custom graphics to their watch, but we are making progress! Check the last community update to see an example of custom background in InfiniTime!

A new version of Gadgetbridge that integrates the step counter of InfiniTime was recently published. I think this is a nice addition to the companion app, that now displays the count of steps and also displays the historical data in graphs.

Screenshots of the new Gadgetbridge version - via JF

PineDio [by JF]

Great news for the LoRa community: Pine64 announced the availability of the PineDio Lora USB adapter and of the LoRa addon case for the PinePhone!

LoRa Add-on and Adapter found in the store

The LoRa USB adapter brings LoRa connectivity to any computer or SBC equipped with a USB port (a PinebookPro or a RockPro64, for example). The LoRa addon for the Pinephone is an addon case that embeds the LoRa radio and antenna, and connects to the Pinephone using the pogo pins on the back of the phone.

Software support is very rudimentary for now, but I’m happy to announce that I’ve recently published the source code of my driver for both devices. This driver is still very basic and allows to send and receive raw LoRa messages. The repository contains a chat demo application ”Communicator” that allows you to send and receive text messages over LoRa. In the following video, you’ll see a simple chat between my desktop computer, the Pinephone, and a Lopy board: video:

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

LoRa communication between desktop using USB adapter and PinePhone LoRa add-on - via JF

Lup Yuen Lee continues his experiments with Apache NuttX on the PineDio STACK and wrote a very comprehensive article on running LoRaWAN on NuttX. You’ll probably be interested in this article even if the PineDio STACK is not available yet, as it contains a lot of interesting information about embedded software, NuttX, and LoRaWAN.

That’s it for this month!

PinePhone Pro Explorer Edition pre-orders open January 11

Tue, 11 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

We initially hoped to open PinePhone Pro Explorer Edition pre-orders earlier this month, but the factory encountered minor problems which had to be resolved prior to production starting. Such hiccups are common and expected, and normally a ten-day delay isn’t a major problem. However, with the Chinese New Year starting on February 1st the January production and shipping windows have now shrunk to just a handful of days. We’ve therefore been impatiently awaiting the factory’s green light per our policy that “(…) we [only] take pre-orders for [devices] once production is securely underway”. Thankfully the ‘go-ahead’ signal arrived earlier today.

PinePhone Pro Explorer Edition pre-orders open today, January 11th (7:00PM UTC / 11AM PST) and there will be a 6 day order window for January/ early February deliveries. Pre-orders placed on or after January 18th will first ship out once the team returns from their holidays.

The Explorer Edition is a large production run and we don’t expect it to sell out quickly. This also means that if the Pine Store server becomes slow or unresponsive on January 11th then please don’t spam it with repeated F5 key presses - instead, come back the next day to place your order then. Your PinePhone Pro Explorer Edition will ship by the end of January as long as you place your order anytime in the January 11th - 17th window. Please note that we’re only selling 1 unit per person and that the PinePhone Pro needs to be checked-out separately to other store items.

Stay tuned for more PinePhone Pro news in this month’s Community Update.

Learn more:

order now

Happy New Year, the keyboard and cases are here!

Fri, 31 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The PinePhone & PinePhone Pro keyboard case and add-on cases are now available in the Pine Store!

Go to store

About the keyboard case

The keyboard case works with both the PinePhone and PinePhone Pro and features a clam-shell design. It uses pogo pins located on the phone’s midsection and attaches by replacing the default back cover. When folded, the phone’s screen and the keyboard rest securely against each other. The hinge features a 180° design, which not only allows for two-hand typing on a surface but also for comfortable thumb-typing when fully extended. The etched keycaps can be easily relocated for alternate layouts such as AZERTY or QWERTZ. The keyboard case runs an open firmware, which means that anyone with the know-how can alter existing functions or add new ones. The bottom (keyboard) and top (phone) sections of the assembly are well-balanced thanks to the large, 6000mAh, internal battery capable of charging the PinePhone (Pro) during operation. The internal battery effectively triples the phone’s battery life. The internal keyboard battery can be manually toggled on/off and the keyboard’s battery charge level can be read in the supported OSes; the keyboard remains functional with the battery fully depleted.

You do not lose access to the PinePhone (Pro)’s USB-C port, speaker, microphone, or any external features, such as volume and lock buttons, with the keyboard attached. There is also a cut-out for the camera, torch, and headphone jack. The USB-C port on the keyboard is capable of powering both the keyboard and PinePhone (Pro) simultaneously. This means that you can plug in a USB mouse, a USB-C dongle, or some other peripheral while the phone and keyboard’s internal battery charge. Please keep in mind that the keyboard case transforms the PinePhone (Pro) into a PDA, which means that taking calls will likely prove awkward without a wired or wireless headset connected.

More information

To learn more about the keyboard and its journey please read:

Keyboard case core features

Well balanced clamshell construction
Unbranded and understated design; black shell with dark gray/ matte black keycaps
Pogo pin-compatible with PinePhone and PinePhone Pro
180° hinge for two-hand typing on surface or thumb-typing when held
Rearrangeable etched keycaps with deep travel
Programmable open source firmware by Megi
Accessible phone’s headphone jack, USB-C port, volume keys, and microphone
6000mAh internal battery capable of charging the PinePhone (Pro); charge levels reported in OSes that support this feature
USB-C charging; capable of charging keyboard case and PinePhone (Pro) simultaneously

About the add-on back cases

We are simultaneously releasing the much anticipated add-on back cases for the PinePhone and PinePhone Pro. These three cases offer: PineDio (LoRa), Qi Wireless charging and fingerprint reader functionality. Similarly to the keyboard case, these add-on cases make use of the pogo pin interface found on the PinePhone and PinePhone Pro’s midsection. All three cases are made of very sturdy polished black plastic and feature a modular construction. Simple disassembly of the electronic components opens up a gateway for hacking in additional functionality, at least for those of you who are up to the challenge. It also means that the cases are just as repairable as the PinePhone itself.

More information

To learn more about the add-on back cases and their journey please read:

Fingerprint reader case core features

Unbranded and understated design
Sturdy ribbed construction
High quality and fast sensor
Sensor capable of accepting swipes up/down & left/right
Uses open firmware for i2c bridge by Zachary Schroeder
Modular, easy to disassemble
Hackable design

Wireless charging case core features

Unbranded and understated design
Sturdy ribbed construction
Qi Wireless and Wireless Power Consortium protocols supported
Works out of the box with the PinePhone or PinePhone Pro, no software needed
Modular, easy to disassemble
Hackable design

PineDio LoRa case core features

Unbranded and understated design
Sturdy ribbed construction
Uses Semtech SX1262 power efficient LoRa module
Software enablement for the PinePhone by JF
Modular, easy to disassemble
Hackable design

Phoptographs by Martijn Braam

PinePhone community poll

Wed, 29 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

People pick up a PinePhone for the freedom to choose an operating system, to enjoy privacy by default, and to truly own the device they purchase. From the moment a PinePhone departs from our warehouse we no longer have any insight into what happens to it. I frequently get asked questions about PinePhone’s user base, the percentage of people daily-driving it, and the most popular operating systems on our platform. I have no real answers to offer to these questions. Today I am turning to you for help to paint a picture of the PinePhone community by volunteering answers.

We’ll let the survey stay up for about a month to get the largest possible sample. Once the survey gets taken down, we’ll crunch the numbers and share them with you in the February community update.

Before I let you get to it, PinePhone and PinePhone Pro related news will be dropping very soon, so I encourage you to subscribe to this blog - the subscription widget can be found at the bottom of the page.

The poll is now closed.

Thank you to everyone who participated!

Poll results available here

December update: a year in review

Wed, 15 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Seasonal greetings from the PINE64 community team! In the last community update of 2021 we’ll take a look at progress made this year and discuss potential avenues to explore in 2022.

As far as news is concerned, we are happy to let you know that the PinePhone Pro Explorer Edition and PinePhone Pro keyboard production is steaming ahead with units available soon.

Let’s get into it.

You can watch the synopsis of this month’s community update on YouTube (embedded below) as well as on Odysee and PeerTube. To stay up-to-date with PINE64 news make sure to subscribe to this blog (subscription widget at the bottom of the webpage), follow PINE64 Telegram News channel, the announcements channel in Discord as well as our Twitter and Mastodon.

I’d like to thank JF, Alex (clover), Brian (33YN2), PizzaLovingNerd, CounterPillow and Marek (Gamiee) for their contributions to this community update.

N.B. Comments on the blog post need to be in English and follow our Community Rules and Code of Conduct.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Video synopsis of this month’s update

TL;DR

Housekeeping
- Merry Christmas everyone!
- PineTalk recorder live on December 15 - listen and join us after the show
- Serious incident with malware made for the PinePhone; a run-down of what happened and steps taken
A look back at 2021
- Component shortages, logistics hurdles and brown-outs; a difficult year to manufacture and introduce new hardware to the market
- Introduction of Quartz64-line of devices, including the PineNote
- Crucial year for laying foundations for PineDio LoRa devices and peripherals
- The introduction of the PinePhone Pro
- High LCD prices stalled Pinebook Pro and PineTab production for much of the year
A sneak peak at 2022
- The RK3588 will be announced at Rockchip’s event tomorrow and it’s looking great
- We’re pushing to bring PineDio to the Market ASAP; this is our main goal for early 2022
- A small, but super cool, mystery project will be announced in Q1
- We are interesting in exploring RISC-V architecture; something we may tackle in 2022, if production / component availability permits
PinePhone Pro
- Developers have been getting their PinePhone Pro (PPP) over the past 2 weeks; positive response and good software progress means we’re proceeding With PPP Explorer Edition
- Explorer Edition edition available soon for $399
- Great software progress: modem, voice calls, LTE data, audio output, torch and LED all work now
- OS images available include: postmarketOS, Manjaro, DanctNIX (Arch), Mobian and NixOS
- Small spec-bump since announcement - production PPPs have a higher resolution 8MP front-facing camera
PinePhone (Pro) hardware
- Keyboard is in production and should be available in a few weeks, likely in early January
- PineDio LoRa back case will be in Pine Store soon; thanks to efforts from devs it now works
- Fingerprint back case progress made and QA OS image for factory delivered; likely release in Q1 2022
PinePhone (Pro) software
- KDE Plasma Mobile 21.12 release brings a change from Ofono to ModemManager
- Plasma Mobile’s new release includes many new UI improvements and resolves some pesky bugs
Quartz64
- Linux 5.15 brings Quartz64 device tree
- Quartz64 now outputs video via HDMI at 1080p 60hz for now; audio out via SPDIF also works out of the box
- GPU works using the Panforst open driver
- Tianocore EDK II implemented and allows for full UEFI
PineTime
- Car game utilizes PineTime accelerometer for steering; awesome demo of the device’s hackability
- Many features coming to InfiniTime: BLE bonding with a PIN code to establish encrypted secure communication with the smartphone (or computer)
- BLE filesystem API allows access to the PineTime’s internal filesystem via BLE
PineDio
- PinePhone PineDio LoRa back case works and can receive messages from other devices
- PineDio PinePhone back case is coming to the Pine Store soon
- Work carried out on new PineDio STACK prototypes
PineCube
- Work on reverse engineering the H.264 encoder driver for the PineCube SoC underway
- A new closed-source H.264 driver works with the mainline kernel; can be used in the meantime

Housekeeping

Thank you to everyone who contributed to the projects in 2021. I particularly want to thank our admins, Matthew (Fire219) and Marek (Gamiee), for their work. For those who don’t know, they are the people who put out the occasional fires and make sure that the cogs of the project keep turning. And a big shout-out to the moderators, who are doing a great job keeping our communication protocols clutter-free and safe. I also want to thank all of our partner projects - Manjaro and KDE in particular - for their work on our devices and their commitment to our shared community. I cannot forget about all the contributors, whom there are too many to mention individually, that make projects such as the PinePhone (Pro), the PineTime, and PineDio possible. Lastly, I want to thank all of you in the community for actively supporting us - I hope we did right by you yet another year. My best wishes to everyone - have a great holiday season.

This month’s PineTalk will be recorded live on December 15th. Brian (33YN2) and Justin (Porky) will be using the ‘stage’ feature on Discord, found at the bottom of the server’s channel list. I encourage you all to join in, ask questions and stick around afterwards for a chat with the hosts and other community members. In case you miss it, the episode will be available in an edited format a few days later on the podcast streaming platform of your choice, as per usual.

Notification about the malware was issued in the News channels and in the chat platform - top: Telegram // bottom: Discord

Lastly, I want to address a serious issue that transpired last week. A malware was shared in the chats, with the perpetrator claiming that it is a snake-type game and asking people for feedback. The malware has been made specifically for the PinePhone, wiping the phone’s file system and targeting a known vulnerability of the vendor’s modem firmware. It is important for me to note that the malware requires you to manually download and install it using root privileges (sudo). Here is a short run-down of what we did to mitigate and investigate this situation:

Removed malware from chat and banned offending account(s) on more than one occasion
Carried out an internal investigation of the incident
Consulted Hacker Fantastic from Hacker House and received further assistance as well as a suggested course of action
Secured website(s), the forum and Wiki; this includes more stringent rules for file uploads and additional screening of packages
Deployed mitigating countermeasures to the chats and other communication protocols
Notified our user base
Having gathered the necessary information, authorities were informed of the incident - a formal investigation is underway and involves two law enforcement agencies

I am not going to go into more detail at this time, but I will keep you informed once the case reaches an end. What I will say is that we have good reasons to believe we can bring this to a satisfying conclusion. Before I head onto the next section, let me state the obvious: be cautious when installing software from unknown repositories onto your device.

A look back at 2021

This was a gratifying but difficult year. At the beginning of the year, we initially believed that the worst was already behind us. As it turned out, however, 2021 proved to be even more challenging than last year. Component shortages, price-hikes of electronic parts, shipping hurdles caused by ongoing pandemic mitigation strategies, and production difficulties caused by state-imposed power consumption limits; are just some of the things we had to tackle this year. The circumstances forced us to prioritize and focus on the things that we could actually deliver. Although this may seem like a straightforward strategy to adopt, in reality it wasn’t. Figuring out what will be available, how much it will cost, and where it can be manufactured, was a complex jigsaw to solve. Regardless of the circumstances, there was a sense that we need to press on rather than wait until things take a turn for the better. With the year 2022 looking only marginally better than 2021, I think this was a painful but good strategy, as waiting it out is clearly not an option.

As if component shortages and pandemic mitigation measures weren’t enough to cripple production …

Three decisions were made early on in the year: to introduce single board computers and devices based on the RK3566, to start working on our own LoRa-based communication platform, and to bring a higher-end PinePhone to the market. The Quartz64 model-A was unveiled in February and was made available two months later. In June we introduced the SOQuartz compute module, which started shipping to developers and early adopters just recently. Both devices were met with much interest (I’d go as far as to say that the SOQuartz is very popular) and software enablement for the platform is proceeding quickly. The promising pace of software development also convinced us that now is the right time to introduce the PineNote - an e-ink device based on the Quartz64-line of single-board computers. PineNote’s announcement is something many in our community have waited years for and, with the RK3566 SoC being a perfect fit for the job, we launched production.

An adapter for the MNT Reform laptop with SOQuartz installed (our best wishes to Lukas and the team) - picture via MNT Reform Twitter

This year we also announced our plan for a LoRa-based communication platform called PineDio, which will allow all of our devices to communicate over vast distances without the need for a GSM/CDMA modem. We have a long-term commitment to the PineDio ecosystem, and I’ll talk more about it in the following section, but suffice to say I am very impressed by the progress made this year; I am looking forward to seeing PineDio deployed across the globe.

Lup Yuen Lee documents in detail PineDio development on his blog - picture via Lup’s Twitter

Last, but certainly not least, we announced the PinePhone Pro in October this year. This is certainly one of the most anticipated devices we’ve created. We worked on the PinePhone Pro for over a year prior to making the announcement, and the process of bringing it to the market was no simple feat. We tried at least three different hardware configurations before settling on the final device design. Hardware development proved particularly difficult due to various components drifting in-and-out of availability - making it hard to determine production viability in 9 month’s time. Uncertainty was high throughout the process and the decision to proceed with production was made just a month prior to the announcement. Only once all components and factory floor-time were secured did we feel like it was safe to launch the PinePhone Pro. One benefit of these circumstances is that it has only been 2 months since the announcement, and we have already shipped units to developers, and will be shipping the Explorer Edition in just a few short weeks.

One out of many PinePhone Pros in the wild - source on Twitter

Concluding this section, and for the sake of diligence and fairness, it is also important to note that we didn’t manage to produce more than a single production run of the Pinebook Pro this year. The reason for the prolonged halt in Pinebook Pro and PineTab production is related to the elevated price-point of LCD panels. Even with the current price increase of the laptop, we could not cover the production and assembly costs with a good quality LCD (something that the Pinebook Pro is known for). The price of LCD panels has remained high throughout the year but recently we saw some indications that prices may gradually start coming down; this makes us cautiously hopeful that production can resume soon after the Chinese New Year. To this end I want to make it clear to everyone - the Pinebook Pro, in its current configuration, will keep on being produced, and production will start as soon as we can source panels at a reasonable price. I’ll write more about this in the next section.

A sneak peek at 2022

The year 2022 will be, by and large, all about the PinePhone Pro and the Quartz-line of devices. By this time next year - granted no disaster strikes - there ought to be (tens of) thousands of active PinePhone Pro users worldwide as well as a significant number of PineNote testers and developers. We also hope to bring back the Pinebook Pro and PineTab after the Chinese New Year that is celebrated at the start of February 2022. LCD prices have been coming down in price steadily these past months and we expect to see broader availability of affordable panels soon. We are looking forward to having the Pinebook Pro and the PineTab in stock just as much as you do. Lastly, Rockchip will finally be introducing the RK3588 on December 16th (which means I can’t write about it on the day the update goes live - sorry), which will most certainly be of interest to us. What I will say is that it will bring entry-level desktop-class Arm CPU performance and plenty of IO options; keep a lookout for press coverage of Rockchip’s event.

keep an eye on Rockchip’s press release website

While the prospect of a high-end computational device is certainly exciting, it also isn’t at the top of our to-do list. Something that is on our agenda however, is launching our LoRa range of PineDio devices. JF and Lup, as well as a handful of other developers, have been working on the PineDio gateway and device nodes for much of this year. Thanks to their efforts (most of which have been well documented in the community updates) the PineDio platform has now reached a significant degree of maturity. RTP has recently contributed a dedicated Armbian-based build for the PineDio gateway, which makes the initial setup and operation simple. I don’t currently have any firm dates for the roll-out, but we should have a preliminary timeline established by the end of next month.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bustSeT2QEg

A look at the PineDio gateway OS image - via RTP Privacy Tech Tips on Youtube

At the start of 2022, we will also be introducing a cool small project into our lineup. Let me first clarify what ‘small’ means in this context: a small project is limited in scope and completely community-driven. Examples of such existing PINE64 projects include the Pinecil and PineTime. Small projects benefit from two things: 1) software for them can be completed to a high degree of satisfaction in a short(er) period of time; 2) and we can do them better than big brands for less. The Pinecil, in particular, has shown that we can upset a stagnant market by introducing a better and open device for half the price of existing options. This time, however, we’re hoping to bring something that can be enjoyed by enthusiasts and mainstream customers alike. It will be the first open device of its kind (to my knowledge) and we’re making it from the ground up with the help of experts. There will also be a dev board for it, which will likely be released at the same time as the device itself. This is all I can say right now, but an announcement should follow in Q1 2022.

Another area we wish to explore next year is RISC-V. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that RISC-V SoCs are of interest to us, as we have already spoken about plans for an entry-level RISC-V SBC in the past. While our plans to use Allwinner’s RISC-V SoC stalled, our curiosity in the platform has not waned. We’re interested in both microcontrollers as well as much more powerful Linux-capable SoCs, and we are already drawing up plans on how each type can be used in novel and innovative ways. As is usually the case, the journey will likely begin with a development platform and eventually make its way into enthusiast-grade devices. These devices will likely not appear anytime soon, however, so don’t hold your breath. In any case, if the supply line and component shortages subside, we’ll surely be taking a close look at what RISC-V can offer the PINE64 community.

Lastly, we will be working towards improving the global shipping times of the most popular devices. I don’t want to make any promises at this point - I just wanted to let you know that we’re exploring an option that would potentially allow us to ship globally regularly. We’ll start slowly, probably with the PineNote, due to the relatively lower volume of sales compared to our smartphones and laptops. If the dispatch option turns out to work well, then we may start using it for other devices. We’ll also await your feedback. I’ll make sure to keep you posted.

PinePhone Pro

By the time this update goes live, you will likely have already seen countless developers posting photographs and videos of their PinePhone Pro units. The task of sorting, issuing and shipping developer’s orders was carried out within the time frame we initially aimed for. I am happy to report that much of the early feedback has been very positive: developers find the unit fast, easy to work with, and well-executed. It also appears there are no major flaws in the design. We are, therefore (still) aiming to open PinePhone Pro sales late this month or early the next. The price of the Explorer Edition remains unchanged - $399. The exact availability date will depend on how quickly we can establish a viable QA testing methodology at the factory; QA testing hurdles make for a boring story so I’m not going to describe the ordeal, but if you want to learn more then leave a comment below and I’ll respond with the details. The take-away is that it shouldn’t be long now. I will publish a blog post when the PinePhone Pro becomes available for purchase. The Explorer Edition launch blog entry will include detailed information about the device and software maturity so that everyone ordering a unit will know exactly what they’re getting (into). I don’t want people expecting full functionality picking up a PinePhone Pro at this time, instead, I‘d like to see well-informed early adopters who are willing to engage with the community and contribute to the development process.

Porting of OSes has started - screenshot of Software Releases section on Wiki

If you fall into the category of a competent early adopter, then I am glad to say you’re in for a treat. Last month I listed 5 things needed to reach software parity with the original PinePhone - today we can already cross 3 of these off the list. The following are now functional: 1) USB for data and video, 2) sound output and, 3) modem including voice calls. Credit for these enablements go to A-Wai from Mobian and Megi; obviously, neither of them develops in a vacuum, and input from other developers contributed to these features now being functional. Even little things, such as the torch or notification LED now work. Mind you, these implementations are in a preliminary enablement stage, and regressions are to be expected at this development stage. More importantly, however, this means that the main outstanding missing core features are the cameras and power management improvements. The latter also includes finding a solution for the smartphone’s failure to wake from suspend. There are other, smaller, issues that need to be addressed, but from an end-user perspective, these are the major two.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Audio now works on the PinePhone Pro - via Manjaro dev team

There are now postmarketOS, Mobian, Manjaro, DanctNIX (Arch) as well as NixOS OS images for the PinePhone Pro. Some of these can be found on the PinePhone Pro docs, whilst others - like Mobian - are yet to be added to the list (but can already be found on the project’s repositories). I am sure that more OSes will follow shortly - indeed, some may already be available by the time you’re reading this. As was, as still is to some degree, the case with the original PinePhone, there will initially be discrepancies between functionality across distributions. Things that work on one OS will not work on another and vice versa. These differences will eventually fade and a similar experience will be available across the board. But this will take time. I have been using my PinePhone Pro daily for over a month now, mostly running Manjaro with KDE Plasma Mobile, and I can see myself dumping my Android in the future (once resuming from suspend works). Needless to say, I am very pleased with the software progress and the hardware itself. My assessment is obviously biased, but thankfully there are already plenty of hands-on accounts available for you to make your own mind up whether this is your future daily driver or not. Some devs already do really fun things with the device to showcase its raw power, as illustrated by the emulation of GameCube. Honestly, this exceeded my expectations.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

GameCube (Dolphin) emulation on the PinePhone Pro is pretty crazy - via FOSSingularity on Twitter

There is one more thing I’d like to touch upon - the final design of the PinePhone will feature a higher-end (8MP) front-facing camera than originally (5MP) planned. The rest of the specs remain the same, just as they were initially announced. This is a small and likely relatively insignificant spec bump, but it is also something I have to make you aware of. Information on the device page and Wiki should now also be updated to reflect the upgraded hardware. For those of you who want the specifics: the camera is an ov8858 8MP 1/4-inch sensor, known to produce good quality pictures. Anticipating the question: yes, the current dev units already have this camera module installed. I am told that it is a significant step-up from the sensor (OG PinePhone’s main camera) in every sense of the word - consider it a small bonus.

Lastly, I have put in some initial work to draft a Wiki layout for the PinePhone Pro (which I closely modeled after the original PinePhone’s Wiki), and I am happy to see people already contributing content. I would like to encourage all of you who have already received their PinePhone Pro and those who will soon be receiving one soon to fill in as many outstanding information knowledge blind spots as possible. Anyone can create a Wiki account and contribute content to any section, and if you are registered on the forum your existing credentials should work. The more of the basics we can collectively cover at this early stage, the better the experience Explorer Edition users will have with their devices. Thank you!

PinePhone (Pro) hardware

The PinePhone keyboard and LoRa PineDio back case will be available in the Pine Store shortly - likely at the very beginning of January. I already described the reasons why the keyboard was delayed at the last moment in the November update; long story short, both the developers and production team weren’t completely satisfied with the keyboard’s membrane. Consequently, the vendor was asked to improve the responsiveness and consistency of the key presses. Given how the keyboard has now already been in prototyping and testing for over 6 months, another few weeks to get it just right is a small price to pay to deliver a better piece of hardware. And we really want to get it right from the get-go rather than having to revisit design choices in the future. That said, I do apologize for the delay, and I am very aware that many of you are growing impatient. The good news is that we’re having many keyboard units manufactured, so the chance of us selling out in a very short amount of time is slim to none. In other words, everyone who wants one will be able to pick one up. DanctNIX (Arch), postmarketOS, Manjaro, and Megi’s multiboot OS images have all been updated to support the keyboard at this time - there may be others that I’m not aware of, please check with your OS maintainer.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

p-boot now has portrait mode - via Megi

The PineDio back case is now functional thanks to work done by JF and Lup. It will be available in the Pine Store soon, as early as next week. I won’t be writing more about the PineDio back case in this section, since I am sure JF will cover the key developments further down in this community update (you may also want to read last month’s update for more PineDio news). I am super thrilled that the back case will be available by the time the PineDio gateway hits the store. Since we’re on the topic of back cases, then I am also happy to report we’ve also made progress on the fingerprint back case. Zachary, the community developer behind the first fingerprint reader prototype, delivered a custom QA fingerprint sensor testing OS image to be used at the factory floor; if the factory finds this build sufficient for testing purposes then we may finally see the fingerprint reader back case launch in Q1, 2022.

PinePhone (Pro) Software [by 33YN2]

Plasma Mobile has seen some major changes that have now been released in the Plasma Mobile Gear 21.12 release. The biggest is that it now has fully switched over to using ModemManager for telephony functionality. It also now has support for MMS messages in its SMS app, and additionally the SMS application now automatically detects links and 2FA codes and gives a copy shortcut to quickly copy them to your clipboard. Aside from the telephony changes, the shell itself has seen lots of work. Not only will the buttons now move to the right-hand side of the display when the device is rotated into landscape mode, but it also now has the new list view app drawer layout. The task switcher has also seen a major redesign, with a more efficient card style similar to that which is used by Lomiri. This is far from the end, however, there are more improvements and fixes coming for the new task switcher, and more to be done to the shell too. Make sure to check out the Plasma Mobile Gear 21.12 blog post for a more detailed look!

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Showcasing performance of an early build of Manjaro with Plasma Mobile on PinePhone Pro

Quartz64 [by CounterPillow****]

A lot has happened this past month in terms of Quartz64 software. Linux 5.16 finally has the Quartz64 Model A device tree, which describes the Quartz64 Model A’s hardware and allows the mainline kernel to actually boot on the board completely out of the box, without patching needed. But the biggest news is probably the VOP2 patch set, enabling video output on the RK356x family of SoCs, of which the Quartz64 uses the RK3566. It’s in a very rough state; its internal state tracking logic is broken, the frame presentation is buggy, and it only supports 1080p monitors at 60 Hz at the moment, but it’s great to finally see movement on this front.

HDMI output on Quartz64 model-A

The patch set comes courtesy of Sascha Hauer, whose work is based on the downstream Rockchip BSP kernel’s driver. A small follow-up patch by Michael Riesch to enable it on the Quartz64 Model A has also been contributed. Both Manjaro and pgwipeout’s CI Debian installer already have the patch set applied, which allows people who are interested in the board to have a go at it without having to patch their own kernel. We still recommend you have a UART adapter such as PINE’s Woodpecker to troubleshoot any issues. It’s only $1.99. Don’t have regrets.

In terms of booting, Jared McNeill ported Tianocore EDK II to the Quartz64 Model A, which means that there is now full UEFI available. The port is still in an early stage, but it’s an exciting move towards getting the board ARM SystemReady certified. The port still requires Rockchip’s firmware blobs, however, as Rockchip has yet to release the ARM Trusted Firmware sources for the RK3566 and RK3568. At the same time, pgwipeout has begun tinkering with mainline u-boot. Albeit there is some manual hackery and binary blobs involved, he managed to get mainline u-boot running. This is another promising route towards a better booting experience on the board. He also experimentally ported the mkimage utility changes over to the mainline version.

VM on the Quartz64 - via Jared McNeill on Twitter

As for the Linux kernel, I have been doing a bunch of small work here and there. SPDIF audio works in kernel 5.16 right out of the box on the Quartz64, if you’re into that. Analog audio works as well, thanks to the i2s-tdm audio controller driver I’ve ported. As soon as the VOP2 patch set dropped, I also got to work on HDMI audio, which works, but isn’t merged yet because the VOP2 patches aren’t merged either. We depend on the HDMI output and a video clock to get HDMI audio, so there’s a dependency on that patch set. Additionally, I submitted the SPI nodes to the RK356x device tree, which means that starting with kernel 5.17, people will be able to simply enable the SPI node in the Quartz64 device tree and add their SPI device definitions to it.

Rockchip’s engineers have been very busy with unspecified other projects, but they have submitted some patches to the Linux kernel as well. The naneng combo PHY, which handles the physical interface for SATA, USB 3, and PCIe, has been submitted for review by Yifeng Zhao and is currently in its third iteration. pgwipeout’s Quartz64 CI kernel has this patch set applied too. Sugar Zhang of Rockchip has also contributed some SPDIF driver updates to make it work with the newer Rockchip SoCs.

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Slightly patched kmscube showing a shadertoy shader

Oh, did I mention yet that the GPU works? Yes, the GPU works. Alex Bee took over Ezequiel Garcia’s GPU enabling patch set, and with a recent enough version of Mesa, you’ll have working 3D acceleration. It can even thermally throttle now, in theory, but in practice, the GPU doesn’t really get hot enough. In my stress tests with a medium heatsink on the device, the GPU never got hotter than 45°C (around 25°C over ambient.) Thanks to the VOP2 patch set, a couple of bugs have been found in other drivers. Alex Bee discovered a bug in the IOMMU driver that made video output fail on 8GB boards. This was fixed during the Linux 5.16 bug fixing cycle, so now the video output will work on all Quartz64 boards, no matter the amount of RAM.

I’ve also discovered a bug while working on the VOP2-prompted HDMI audio patch set, namely that my i2s-tdm audio controller driver wasn’t happy being loaded multiple times. Oops. I’ve fixed this in Linux 5.16. Many of these improvements will of course affect the PineNote, as it uses the same SoC: if somebody adds something to the RK356x device tree, it’ll also be available to the PineNote device tree that smaeul wrote.

As always, you can track our continued progress on the Quartz64 Development Wiki page which I try to keep as accurate and up to date as possible.

PineTime [by JF]

Remember when last month I mentioned this nice demo from Petterhs, showing him controlling a 3D object using the motion sensor of the PineTime? Peter has now extended this demo which now allows him to control a car in a car racing game. I really enjoy such demos, since they showcase how hackable PineTime is and how endless the possibilities are!

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

PineTime as a game controller

InfiniTime developers and contributors are working on a few great features for the project. I won’t go into the details right now since we are still working on them, but here is an overview of what you can expect in future releases of InfiniTime.

First, the secure BLE bond. This feature, contributed by evergreen-22, enables BLE bonding with a PIN code that establishes a secured (encrypted) communication. I did check that the communication was actually encrypted using my sniffer setup. The screenshot below on the left shows a “sniffing” session from a PineTime running InfiniTime 1.7.1. As you can see, everything is visible in plain text: BLE commands, characteristic handles and notification content (“Hello world”). The screenshot to the right shows the same scenario but running on a build which includes this new feature. Now we no longer can make out of the content of the BLE messages:

Left: unencrypted connection // Right: encrypted connection

The next massive feature is the **BLE filesystem API**. Geekbozu implemented this API which allows companion apps to access the internal filesystem of InfiniTime. For now, this filesystem is only used to store user settings, but the end goal is to also store pictures, logos, fonts, translations, and much more in the memory. This feature is a major step toward reaching this goal. As a demo, I sent multiple random pictures to my developer PineTime and used them in a custom build of InfiniTime as the background of my clock:

Background pictures set via BLE filesystem API

Note that those features are not stable yet, and therefore we have not released them in a public version of InfiniTime. They are however available in the develop branch of the project and everyone is free (and welcome) to test them and provide feedback!

That’s it for this month! I wish everyone a Merry Christmas, a happy new year, and happy unboxing for those of you who’ll receive a PineTime as a Christmas gift!

PineDio [by JF]

As you probably know, the PineDio range of devices aims to deploy LoRa (Long Range low-power wireless communication) everywhere and across all PINE64 hardware . We have already talked about the LoRa PineDio gateway, the USB adapter, and the PineDio STACK (development kit based on the BL604 microcontroller) in previous updates.

Did you know that Pine64 is also working on a LoRa backplate for the Pinephone? This backplate will allow the Pinephone to send and receive LoRa messages thanks to the integrated LoRa module and antenna.

PinePhone (Pro) PineDio back case disassembled - a close took at the LoRa antenna

These last few weeks I worked on bringing this backplate up and running, and succeeded in receiving LoRa messages from other LoRa devices. This is still mostly a work in progress, but it clearly shows that the integration of LoRa in a mobile phone running Linux is possible and, indeed, already functional! For those interested in the technical details, I documented everything in this series of 3 articles: First look at the LoRa backplate, Flashing the LoRa backplate and A driver for the LoRa backplate.

See the video here

Receiving LoRa messages on the PinePhone with PineDio back case

Note that the LoRa backplate is not available yet in the store, but Pine64 is actively working on it and even requested software to test the board in production, so they will probably be available in the near future! [edit from Lukasz] Indeed, with the software now in a functional state, we will be starting to sell the PineDio back case for the PinePhone and PinePhone Pro in the next few weeks.

On a similar topic, Lup Yuen Lee is currently working on bringing NuttX to the PineDio STACK. He also documented the testing of the new prototype version of the STACK we received last month. This new prototype comes in an enclosure and is equipped with GPS and a motion sensor in addition to a display and a LoRa module.

PineCube [by Gamiee]

As we have seen in previous community updates, the PineCube is already very usable with software MJPEG encoding. But it’s still not perfect, since software MJPEG encoding uses a lot of CPU power and, but to the PineCube’s single ARM Cortex-A7 core, not much power is left to other things. Because of this, PineCube’s SoC has a hardware H.264 encoder core, which can encode video with minimal impact on the CPU. But for this core to be functional we need a driver. The current driver is closed sourced and doesn’t work with the mainline Linux kernel; it only works with ancient Linux 3.10 kernel. So I started to reverse-engineer this driver, and I’m creating an open-source implementation of it; you can track the progress of this project and learn more about it here.

While I was working on this project I learned a lot about how the whole driver and encoding core works. But I also found newer drivers, which can work on the mainline kernel with some modifications. So I modified and built the latest Linux 5.15 kernel, prepared the Debian root filesystem, and tried to see if the drivers would work. And it did!

PineCube running mainline Linux kernel

So in the meantime, while I work on an open-source re-implementation of the driver, the PineCube can have hardware accelerated H.264 encoder using a modified closed source driver. Since I didn’t have enough time to test it fully it remains uncertain if popular libraries like FFmpeg or GStreamer will be capable of using this driver, but it should work and I will let you know in the next community update about the progress made.

That’s it for this month, Happy Holidays everyone!

November update: first impressions

Mon, 15 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Is it truly November already? Is it just me, or is this year flying by at warp speed? This month’s update focuses on initial impressions of the PinePhone Pro and production keyboard. We’re also going to take a look at the SOQuartz Blade hostboard and discuss InfiniTime 1.7 release.

But before we get into it; next month I plan on doing a recap of the year 2021, similar to the one from last year, so make sure to stay tuned for that.

You can watch the synopsis of this month’s community update on YouTube (embedded below) as well as on Odysee and PeerTube. To stay up-to-date with PINE64 news make sure to subscribe to this blog (subscription widget at the bottom of the webpage), follow PINE64 Telegram News channel, the announcements channel in Discord as well as our Twitter and Mastodon.

I’d like to thank JF, Alex (clover), Brian (33YN2) and PizzaLovingNerd for their contributions to this community update.

N.B. Comments on the blog post need to be in English and follow our Community Rules and Code of Conduct.

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Community update video synopsis

TL:DR

Housekeeping
- We’ve made efforts to curb spam in the chats, you should be seeing less of it from now on
- We’re considering making an in-person PINE64 community meetup mid-2022, would you attend?
PinePhone Pro
- Dedicated this month’s section to first impressions of the PinePhone Pro
- A look at small previously undiscussed design changes from OG PinePhone
- SoC does run warmer than OG PinePhone’s, but heat doesn’t transfer to person using the phone
- Its fast, very fast
- Packaging from recycled cardboard and plastic
PinePhone (Pro) keyboard
- Available next month for $49.85
- We’re fixing membranes (again) following feedback from early production units
- Initial impressions of hardware - quite a few things changed since prototypes
- Open firmware works out-of-the-box on OSes that support it
SOQuartz
- In case you missed it, the SOQuartz launched last month
- Introducing the third SOQuartz hostboard - the Blade
- Blade hostboard to be used in 1U server racks; can be stacked for clustering
PineTime
- Release of InfiniTime 1.7
- New motion sensing allows for faster wake-on-lift
- New motion sensing can be used as a motion controller; someone interested in making a game?
- Step data now being tracked in Amazefish and other apps; and many other optimizations
- New members joins the team
PineDio
- Ongoing development report - a dev update
- New OS image with Chirpstack LoRaWAN stack and TTN support available
- New PineDio STACK prototypes on the way

Housekeeping

Not unlike most other online communities, we’ve been waging war with spammers for some time. Spam is, and likely will always be, a part of chats and forums, and while it is always annoying (and sometimes offensive), until recently it was merely a nuisance rather than a plague. These past 8 weeks, however, the volume of spam across different chats significantly intensified, which resulted in Matthew (fire219) spending much time on dealing with the situation. We now have a fairly robust multi-faceted system on each of the platforms, which insofar seems to be doing a good job at keeping automated spam and unwanted accounts out of our community. While no system is 100% foolproof, you will see much fewer spam in the chats from now on.

As most of you know, we usually make FOSDEM our yearly PINE64 community get-together. This year FOSDEM has once again made the decision to make the event virtual, which has prompted us to consider scheduling a dedicated PINE64 meetup in 2022. We’re thinking about the May-July timeframe, somewhere in the heart of Germany. How many of you would / could attend this event? Please let me know by answering this forum poll. If enough of you declare interest, then by next month I’ll try to schedule something together with TL Lim. Before anyone asks - the meetup will surely also have a virtual component for our community members in Asia, North/ South America and Oceania; I know that pancontinental travel is still difficult or outright impossible for some.

Lastly, I’m aware most of you read the October update introducing the PinePhone Pro, but some of you have likely missed the follow-up I wrote late last month. I suggest you go back and read it as it contains some information that will contextualize a few of the things I write in this community update. The follow-up also included news about the PineDio, the PineNote and an announcement that the SOQuartz compute module is now available for sale - give it a read.

PinePhone Pro

First, a quick note for developers. We closed the PinePhone Pro pre-orders two weeks ago since the number of applications far exceeded available dev units. We’re hoping to start issuing coupons this week. The reason for the delay in issuing coupons was a mainboard layout issue with the pogo pins, which was identified during QA. A fix for this was quickly found, but all PCBs had to be returned to the factory - hand soldering on all units would be too time consuming. This should not affect our December shipping time-frame, nor the Explorer Edition. This does, however, limit your pre-order coupon validity window - from the moment you receive the coupon you’ll have 3 days to finalize your purchase. I’ll notify everyone when coupons start going out, so you know to check your email inbox regularly. Keep an eye on the Telegram/ Discord news channels and our Twitter/Mastodon accounts.

This month, I have dedicated this section to my first impressions of the PinePhone Pro. At the time of writing I’ve only had the device for two days, the first of which I spent debugging an issue with the touch controller. Megi was able to patch the issue quickly however, and I haven’t been able to put the device down since. Obviously everything I am about to write is fundamentally biased, but I will stand by every word I write - no PR-speak, I promise. The device is fast, very fast when compared to the original PinePhone and other similar devices. I haven’t tried Linux on a recent mid-to-high end Android smartphone, and I am curious how the experience stacks up against something like the One Plus 6 in the UI. Judging Caleb’s videos of the OnePlus 6T, the UI’s responsiveness is indistinguishable from the PinePhone Pro. I’m sure they’ll confirm or rectify my observation once dev units ship.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

A quick look at PinePhone Pro’s performance

UI animations are perfectly smooth, applications open nearly instantly (Firefox opens in under 4 seconds on an OS running from SD card), scrolling in the web browser or interacting with elements of an application results in an immediate input reaction. For a lack of a better word, everything feels instant on the PinePhone Pro. Something as trivial and mundane as interacting with the interface suddenly becomes fun. Since there is always someone asking about this - playing 720p Youtube videos works flawlessly and the videos load instantly (1080p will also work fine at 30FPS on an external display). Speaking of videos, there are now a handful of recordings showcasing PinePhone Pro’s performance if you want to verify what I say with your own eyes. Obviously we’re just the very beginning of development, so you can expect the experience to further improve in months to come as software matures and becomes more refined.

I am also happy to report that my device doesn’t run hot. Warm, circumstantially yes (mostly in the top quarter of the LCD display), but at no point did I feel it reached uncomfortable temperatures. Indeed, it is my impression that the PinePhone Pro runs cooler than the original PinePhone. I verified this with Justine and Phillip (from Manjaro) who also received their PinePhone Pros in recent days. Justine told me that “(..) [it] does run cooler than my previous [PinePhone] even when compiling packages on it”. I also checked the internal temperature of the device after running an artificial load on all cores for 10 minutes - the SoC reached the temperature of, and remained at, approx. 68*C. The temperature dropped to 58*C after a minute of cool-down time. It then hovered at 47*C after 10 additional minutes of inactivity with just the web browser open and the screen on. It appears that ~55*C is the SoC’s average operating temperature when browsing the web, installing packages, etc. and the temperature is dissipated well by the chassis without one spot becoming exceedingly hot. So, in conclusion, the SoC does get hotter than on the A64 on PinePhone, but it doesn’t feel like it to the person using the device.

From left to right: Temps under load, after one minute and after ten minutes of cool-down

I am not going to write about battery life just yet, since the battery and charging kernel driver as well as various settings still need tweaking. Megi told me that the current software will “happily charge out of spec”, which also means that charging to (what the kernel thinks is…) full battery capacity isn’t a great idea. Besides, any numbers I’d provide at this point would be meaningless in 3 months time. Since I already started listing things that need work, here’s the rest of things that currently do not work fully or partially: 1) sound (which also means no…) 2) phone voice calls, 3) cameras, 4) USB for data, video or OTG 5) torch / camera flash. Some of these are already worked on and will be resolved quickly, while others may take longer. While we need to acknowledge that there is a lot of work ahead of developers, we simultaneously have to appreciate how far development on the original PinePhone has gotten us.

PinePhone Pro with back case and battery removed

Returning to the subject of the hardware, I have a few observations that pictures or renders cannot convey. The panel is really bright and the colours are rich; the vibration motor is much more powerful than on the original PinePhone; 5Ghz WiFi connectivity has been exceptionally good even when compared with my 2 year old flagship Android phone; and the phone has some heft to it, which is a good thing. There are also a handful of other external changes from the original PinePhone’s design. I’ll omit the big and obvious things that you can read about on the PinePhone Pro’s main page, and instead focus on some tiny details I previously omitted to mention. The thermal pad on the back case is much larger and appears to distribute the heat well. The battery is different and is labeled with the new phone model. The sim card and SD slot are slightly different as are the buttons at the leading edge of the phone (they have a more distinct actuation point). Lastly, the WiFi / BT antenna layout on the midframe has been altered for 5GHz connectivity.

Before moving onto the next topic, the packaging is made out of recycled material, including all of the cardboard and most of the plastics. I know that it matters to many of you in the community, so I felt it is worth a mention.

Lastly, as always, I suggest you follow Megi’s blog for software-related and other PinePhone Pro news.

PinePhone Keyboard

The keyboard has now been scheduled for release next month, in December. The delay is caused by a fix that will need to be applied to the keyboard’s membrane following feedback from developers who received production samples earlier this month. I know that many of you have been waiting for the keyboard for a long time, and I understand that the wait is annoying, but we want to make sure to both account for developers’ feedback and to deliver the best possible PinePhone (Pro) keyboard that is possible. Notification about the keyboard going on sale will be made on Telegram/Discord news channels, the official forums news section, on our official subreddit as well as Twitter and Mastodon. The keyboard will be priced at $49.95.

PinePhone (Pro) production keyboard fully extended laying flat

I’ve now had a couple of days of hands-on time with the production version and figured I’ll share my experience with it. Despite having already written about the keyboard in the past, covering the production model in depth is warranted since surprisingly many changes have been made since the final pre-production model. This applies to both surface-level and electronic changes. The keyboard received a final layer of polish and it shows - there are no more sharp edges and I no longer can make out mold lines no matter how close I look. The production case finish is best described as semi-soft and very smooth, making it a joy to hold. On the downside, as compared to the pre-production units that featured a matte finish, it has a tendency to attract more oily fingerprints. If you wipe it down after use, however, it will look as good as new.

Once opened, the most obvious difference from the prototypes are the keys. The font is now thick and very legible - the key caps pop even in low light. The keys themselves have a matte black finish. The combination of the glossy case and matte keys is very nice, it really does look great. The rubber domes for the keyboards are black as opposed to white on the final prototypes, making the gaps between keys less apparent. The travel and wobbliness of the enter key has also been significantly improved. But this isn’t all, additional structural changes to the top portion of the keyboard where the PinePhone (Pro) is inserted have also been made. The pogo pin connectors have been slightly raised, assuring that connection is maintained between the keyboard and phone even as the top of the chassis flexes when opening or closing. Speaking of flexing, the top section is now firmer and, in conjunction with the well tuned hinges (they are truly great), the whole contraption feels just right.

Can you spot the difference? Left: production keyboard / right: prototype

As for electrical under-the-hood changes, a concern raised by developers following Megi frying his prototype a couple of weeks ago, resulted in a fix preventing overcharging of the battery. The chip that blew on the prototype was analysed closely and it was established that electrical over stress was to blame. As a result a low dropout regulator, acting as a current limiter, was added to the circuitry. If you didn’t understand any of the above then here is what it boils down to: there is now a counter measure in place so your keyboard or phone do not get electrically damaged. A number of other improvements suggested by the devs have also been implemented - I wrote about this at length in the September community update, so I suggest you (re)read it for more details.

Finally, the keyboard’s open firmware worked out of the box on my Manjaro Plasma Mobile and Arch Phosh installations, and I found no firmware-related issues. I haven’t tried the keyboard with postmarketOS, but that should work too out-of-the-box. The keys on the keyboard needed a few minutes of break-in time. Initially some keys would require more pressure to actuate than others; it took a couple of firm presses on all keys to have the membrane settle in for a lack of a better word. Having done the above I experienced no further issues. Following this feedback, and similar experiences reported by developers, we chose to push back the release of the keyboard to improve the membrane so that end-users do not experience such issues when they receive their units. I cannot wait until you receive your PinePhone (Pro) keyboard and share your experience with it.

SOQuartz

I already spent much time on the SOQuartz and two of its hostboards in last month’s follow-up post, so in this section I’ll be focusing on a new hostboard for the module - the Blade. If you missed the announcement of SOQuartz’s launch, please read the previous blog entry. The Blade hostboard is designed to fit into a 1U server rack and, in a sense, brings the legacy of the SOPine and SOEdge Clusterboard to the next generation of PINE64 modules. More than a dozen Blade hostboards can be housed in a standard server rack, making any cluster compute project highly scalable depending on set requirements. Using the hostboard, new modules can also be easily added ad-hoc to the cluster setup.

SOQuartz Blade hostboard (2x) prototypes (Gigabit Ethernet unpopulated in this photograph)

The Blade features a Gigabit Ethernet connection, a micro SD card slot, a USB 2.0 header, digital video output, 40x GPIO header, UART output, power barrel jack port and a M.2 PCIe slot for storage. All IO is located at the short leading edges of the blade, allowing for tight stacking inside the rack. Blade’s layout makes for an IO feature rich setup in a very compact form factor. We believe that the Blade, along with the model-A and small form-factor hostboards introduced last month, will offer sufficient versatility to early early adopters for their desired use case. The blade is, however, not the last Quartz board we’re working on - stay tuned.

PineTime and InfiniTime (by JF)

The InfiniTime team released version 1.7.0 “Jackfruit” a few days ago. This new version brings a feature many of you were asking for: the possibility to manually set the date and time without the need of a companion application. It is now possible! InfiniTime 1.7 also adds a new “motion and step” BLE service. This service allows a companion app to fetch the number of steps counted by the watch. To my knowledge, this feature has already been integrated by itd, InfiniLink (previously Infini-iOS) and Amazfish.

Step-count synced from PineTime to Amazefish on Linux PC

This brand new motion service also exposes raw X/Y/Z values from the accelerometer. When I implemented this feature, I wasn’t sure how useful it would prove but Petterhs proved the potential of the feature showcasing a 3D cube moving based on PineTime’s position. Who knows, maybe someone will come up with a game that would use the PineTime as a controller?Of course, this isn’t everything that InfiniTime 1.7 has to offer, there are many other features and improvements, make sure to read the release notes for more details.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Controlling a 3D object using the PineTime

I’m also happy to welcome Riku aka Riksu9000 to the team! Riku has already made contributions to many features in InfiniTime and I’m really happy he accepted the invitation to join us. Finally, I would like to highlight Nico’s blog; Nico writes a lot about SailfishOS as well as PineTime and InfiniTime. On his blog, you’ll find many articles about the different releases of InfiniTime, including 1.7 “Jackfruit”, as well as a nice recap of all of the project’s release history.

PineDio by JF

We are still working hard on enabling software support for the PineDio (LoRa based) devices. Lup Yuen is writing a thorough article about the PineDio Gateway. This article introduces the gateway, explains how we tested it, the setup and how to connect to TheThingsNetwork (TTN) LoRaWAN public network.

In the meantime, RTP provided us with a new image for the PineDio gateway. This new image comes preinstalled with Chirpstack LoRaWAN stack, supports TTN and automatically resizes the filesystem according to the SD card’s capacity. Finally, I’ve been told that new prototypes for the PineDio STACK development board were ready and will be sent to me very soon. Stay tuned!

Sneak peak at PineDio STACK cassing fitted with a PineTime display

That is all for this month, thank you for your attention!

October Update Follow-up

Fri, 29 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Happy Halloween! As promised earlier this month, here is the follow-up to the October community update. Some of the topics I’ll touch upon will be covered in more detail in November. I’ll keep this one brief.

Housekeeping

PineTalk discussed the PinePhone Pro in last week’s episode. At the time of writing, it is the most listened-to episode of our community-run podcast, and there is a reason for it - it is a very good episode. I encourage you to have a listen.

Earlier this week we had a guest post about the creation of the Meet the PinePhone Pro announcement trailer. If you’re interested in learning how the trailer was made, and which software was used during its production, then I invite you to have a read.

Logistics issues in China and the USA have caused a significant increase in parcel delivery times. The USA is particularly affected by the situation. There is nothing we can do about it, but the reason I am bringing it up is due to the increase in support tickets requesting help in tracking down packages (and sporadic claims of packages being lost). All I can do is ask you for patience - it may take a long time, but in 99.9% of cases the parcel will eventually arrive at your doorstep.

Lastly, our Discord is about to reach (or already reached) 9000 members, making it the biggest chat platform out of all protocols used by our community. I think this is quite the milestone and I am very happy to see many new faces actively engaging in discussions. I know Discord is frowned upon by some in the FOSS community, so before anyone complains - there are corresponding and bridged channels in Telegram, IRC, and Matrix available for those who wish to use a different platform. Full chat list here.

SOQuartz

The SOquartz module will be available for purchase in the Pine Store next week. I already covered the SOQuartz in-depth in the June update, so I encourage you to read that blog entry for more information. For those who do not know, the SOQuartz is a module that is pin-compatible with the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 (CM4). It will work with existing CM4 baseboards but we’re also creating some of our own.

We have a model-A type hostboard - primarily for the purpose of development, with all available IO exposed, but it can obviously also be deployed in different scenarios. There is also a small footprint hostboard with dual cameras, 2x USB 2.0, HDMI and GbE for embedded projects. These are just some of the hostboards we have planned for the SOQuartz, and belive me I’ve kept the best ones for future updates. We’ve got some really cool stuff coming that I think many of you will be thrilled to learn about. I’ll return to the subject of SOQuartz hostboards in November.

small form-factor hostboard

Model-A hostboard

The module will be available in three configurations: 2GB, 4GB, and 8GB of RAM for $35, $50, and $75 respectively. These prices are for SOQuartz with onboard WiFi/BT (there will be a version without), without soldered-on eMMC (you can install one of our standard eMMC modules). We expect that the introduction of SOQuartz will be well met by our industry partners, but we also have plans to make it an interesting platform for community projects. The hostboards are only a part of the strategy to get the community interested in the SOQuartz - something to look forward to in 2022.

PinePhone Pro

We have now closed the PinePhone Pro dev unit applications and will start going through purchase coupon applications next week. We have 4 times more applications than available dev units, so those of you who will not receive a coupon at this time will have to wait until the Explorer Edition becomes available later this year.

As a side note, I got hands-on time with the PinePhone Pro last week. This is the first time I had an opportunity to see the PPP running Linux - Manjaro with Plasma Mobile in this particular case. As far as impressions over a pint in a pub are concerned, I can say this with confidence: it’s very fast. Despite it being an early engineering unit, I didn’t encounter any apparent heat or excessive battery drain issues, so things are already looking good. Megi and other developers have been putting in a lot of work into the PinePhone Pro these past two weeks - you can follow Megi’s work here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBgNAbb0rFs

I recorded a video at the pub with Kamil, but you’re probably better off watching a more coherent video by Martijn Braam

Three more things. First, a quick correction regarding what I wrote in the October update and elsewhere: the regular PinePhone protective cases will fit the PinePhone Pro. I tried the hard case - it is a tight fit but a fit nonetheless. Secondly, I ran an AMA on /r/Linux earlier this month, you may wish to check out some of the questions I answered. Lastly, the PinePhone Pro is now undergoing CE/ FCC certification.

PinePhone / PinePhone Pro Keyboard

The PinePhone / PinePhone Pro keyboard has entered production. I know that there has been a lot of back-and-forth on this topic these past months - as it turns out, creating a keyboard is much harder than one would think. In fact, it is almost as hard as making a stand-alone device. I wrote extensively about some of the problems we encountered in the September community update if you’re keen to learn more.

I’ve used mine to take notes on the go recently, and it’s been a great experience - especially when thumb-typing

Since September there have been two additional internal revisions of the keyboard. During this time the vendor addressed mechanical and electrical concerns which were raised by the design team and developers. With the fixes in place, the final design was submitted for production. We’re confident all kinks have now been ironed out.

The currently produced batch is a pilot run of sorts and should be available in the Pine Store in November. Minutes before posting this follow-up, I was told that the first units have been delivered. The price of the keyboard will be $49.95.

PineNote

Unlike the PinePhone Pro dev units, PineNote dev unit pre-orders will remain open for quite some time. Frankly speaking, PineNotes will likely remain behind a developer pre-order ‘wall’ until the e-paper display becomes enabled in Linux. I have written about the development progress, also in relation to enabling the PineNote’s e-paper display, in both this and the previous month’s community update.

We will start going through the dev pre-order coupon requests starting next week and keep actively reviewing incoming applications on a weekly basis for the foreseeable future. We haven’t yet made the decision if units for ‘early adopters’ will also be available only via the pre-order system, but I suspect that they will.

Software progress on the RK3566 platform is proceeding well, and I intend to discuss it at length in November. For those of you who are interested in following software progress, I suggest taking a look at the current mainline Linux support ‘status’ matrix and e-paper display reverse engineering effort status.

Pinecil

The Pinecil remains one of the best-selling devices we have in the store. Recently, a big Youtuber made a video about the Pinecil praising it. We still have a lot of stock, but if the current sales volume continues for the next 2 days then we’re at risk of running out. I’m not sure if more Pinecil production was scheduled for this year - consider this a heads up if you want to get one.

PineDio [by JF]

The PineDio range of products is composed of multiple devices and is all about LoRa: a LoRa gateway, a USB LoRa adapter, a RISC-V development kit with an embedded LoRa module, and a LoRa adapter for the PinePhone (Pro). These past few weeks, Lup and I worked on writing software and firmware for these devices - all of which are based on the Semtech SX1262 LoRa module. Lup has already managed to connect the STACK to a LoRaWAN gateway running ChirpStack, and even to The Things Network (TTN is a public LoRaWAN network).

Raw LoRa data received/ sent using PineDio USB dongle (on Pinebook Pro!)

LoRa SX1262 Linux driver for the USB PineDio adapter - via Lup

Meanwhile, I spent time trying to understand the low-level layer of the LoRa protocol by implementing “raw” LoRa communication between multiple devices (the USB adapter, the STACK, and other LoRa modules). I ran into some issues, but finally, thanks to Lup, communication between the devices was successfully established. I can’t wait to continue these experiments with the platform, and eventually build actual applications based on LoRa and the PineDio devices!

How "Meet the PinePhone Pro" was made

Wed, 27 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

As PINE64‘s flagship mainline GNU/Linux smartphone, the PinePhone Pro, was about to be announced, a trailer and some nice renderings showcasing the phone and its features had to be produced.

The groundwork for the trailer was started in February 2021 and took all the way up to a few days before the trailer was released at October 15th 2021. The work for the trailer included making the material and models, creating the scene and the surroundings, animating the scenes, establishing a story in the video, finding fitting music, cutting it and adding sound details, writing and recording the text and cutting the video, which took many hours of work until the following trailer was released:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wP2-6Z74W44

The trailer is almost entirely made with free and open source software – modelling, the scenes, animations and final cut including the music is all done in Blender, vector graphics and some smaller graphical edits for the screen contents are done in Inkscape and Gimp. The trailer is made by volunteers from the community.

The visuals

The general idea of the trailer was to tell a story: visually we wanted to lead the viewer from the history of the PinePhone, to the introduction of the PinePhone Pro including its features, to the actual usage. Not only did we want to tell the story of PINE64 making shipping such a device real but also point the viewer to what was achieved so far and what the user can achieve using the phone. We selected a darker setting for the intro part of the video and we tried to go for brighter settings mixed with realistic settings for the PinePhone Pro introduction part of the video.

For product renderings typically Blender Cycles is used, which has the downside that the raytracing can take a very long time to achieve a fine rendering quality, unlike Blender’s Eevee architecture using rasterization instead of raytracing (especially used effects such as depth of field and other makes raytracing a must here). That means even short scenes with a duration of 3 seconds (that is 60 frames per second, making such a short scene 180 individual renderings with for example 1:30 minutes rendering time per frame) took until late at night (or overnight) to finish rendering, even with the usage of CUDA and Cycles X in the Blender alpha.

Most scenes in the trailer went through multiple different versions, some of the scenes were numbered up to version 7 or 8 until we were happy with the storytelling and the visuals. Being able to build upon previously created scenes, ideas, model, textures and settings however helped with creating the finally used scenes considerably, so even after ideas were discarded the time used to create them was well-invested.

For scenes such as the privacy switches scene new techniques had to be learned to achieve visuals like floating text on top of a scene using depth of field using compositing to combine multiple scenes. All scenes also use three-point lighting. The small details make up the nice appeal of the overall trailer.

During the creative process quite a lot of scenes which were not used in the final trailer were created and some of these unused scenes were reused to create nice visuals for press images at the time of the release (see PinePhone Pro Press for some examples) or interactive 360 degree views of the phone.

The voice

The wonderful voice in the trailer is Bryan J. Olson, who absolutely love Linux! Pay him a visit under https://bryanjolson.com/

The face behind the voice: Bryan J. Olson

The long search for the music

Finding the best music for the trailer turned out to be difficult. We looked into various free licenses and decided that we want to prefer using CC0-licensed material if possible. At the same time we tried producing our own music inspired by some heavy piano pieces based on various examples we listened into. In the whole process we sighted material in the low three figures, including various styles such as jazz, classical music, synthwave, lo-fi and generic ambient music. As best fit turned out the song „Motions“ by Rafael Krux, licensed under CC0, after overcoming our own concerns that the music might be too cinematic.

The music had to be cut in multiple places to make it fit the story: strokes of the piano were synced with the phone or with logos and texts appearing, to seemingly integrate it into the trailer. Some subliminal sound effects were also added (such as swoosh sounds), to give movements of the phone a greater force. Cutting the music and fading parts in and out could be easily done in Blender’s video cutting interface.

We hope you enjoyed the trailer and the community work, as well as this write-up how everything was made!

October Update: Introducing the PinePhone Pro

Fri, 15 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to what will likely be remembered as the most important community update of 2021. Today we’re introducing the PinePhone Pro and announcing that both PinePhone Pro and PineNote pre-orders are now open to developers. I am well aware that this announcement will overshadow everything else that I may wish to report on, so I intentionally chose not to include other exciting news in this post. I will write a follow-up piece covering other topics later this month - stay tuned.

But that’s not all. All PineTime owners ought to read this month’s update concerning InfiniTime. The firmware recently received updates which significantly improve the user experience and BLE connection stability. JF also writes about the project’s growth and ongoing project management restructuring.

You can watch the synopsis of this month’s community update on YouTube (embedded below) as well as on Odysee and PeerTube. To stay up-to-date with PINE64 news make sure to subscribe to this blog (subscription widget at the bottom of the webpage), follow PINE64 Telegram News channel, the announcements channel in Discord as well as our Twitter and Mastodon.

I’d like to thank JF, Alex (clover), Brian (33YN2) and PizzaLovingNerd for their contributions to this community update.

N.B. Comments on the blog post need to be in English and follow our Community Rules and Code of Conduct.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Community Update video synopsis

TL;DR

Housekeeping
- Wiki getting started and orphaned Wiki pages help needed
- KDE turns 25! Happy birthday!
- Good job on the PinePhone Pro launch team!
PinePhone Pro
- PinePhone Pro announced - start by reading the PinePhone Pro website
- Features RK3399S SoC made by Rockchip for to the PinePhone Pro
- Ships with 4GB LPDDR4, 128GB eMMC, Gorilla Glass 4™ IPS panel, 13MP main camera, USB 3.0 via USB-C, native video out via USB-C + countless improvements
- Pogo pins & privacy switches are present: the PinePhone Pro is compatible with the keyboard and back cases
- Developer pre-orders and Explorer Edition coming later this year for $399
- Developer units are in production due to be delivered soon
- The blog post focuses on the decision-making process and explaining why now is the right time to introduce the PinePhone Pro
- The PinePhone / PinePhone Pro keyboard enters production; keep an eye out for a follow-up post late this month
PineNote
- PineNote developer pre-orders are now open
- Dev units ship with EMR pen, magnetic cover and a UART USB-C breakout board for debugging
- CE /FCC certification is now complete
- Production is underway and units are being delivered from factory now
- Biggest software problem relates to initialising the panel under Linux; developers have ideas how to accomplish this, but it remains untested
- Availability of early adopter units depending on software progress - likely later this year
PineTime [by JF]
- InfiniTime 1.5 brings a highly requested feature - alarm clock!
- InfiniTime 1.6 releases just 2 days after 1.5 with a single line commit, which makes all the difference - InfiniTime has now stable BLE connection!
- Restructuring of the InfiniTime project, creating a Github organization and taking on contributors to help with issue triage, PR reviews and merging
- A word on donations to the InfiniTime project (and to other PineTime efforts)

Housekeeping

Before we get into the exciting news there are a few housekeeping items on our itinerary. The first of which concerns Wiki contributions. Let me start by thanking everyone who has contributed to our Wiki - I’ve seen quite a few Wikis and I think that ours is among the best out there. That said, there are a few sections that are either incomplete, neglected or simply haven’t received an update in a long time. There is a list of orphaned pages that need to be integrated into main articles, reworked or completely removed. More importantly, however, the getting started section - meant as a technical tutorial for complete novices - has not been maintained in over a year. While each device page usually offers a segment explaining how to get up and running, the global getting started section remains relevant because it contains information for less technically capable users. If someone is willing to volunteer their time to restructure this section, update it with information and give it an overhaul, then please reach out to me or one of the mods in our chats.

Yesterday our friends at KDE celebrated their 25th birthday. As many of you surely know we’re very closely partnered with KDE and have recently been made patrons by KDE e.V. KDE’s help and support over the years has been very important to us: most of our devices, including the Pinebook Pro, the PinePhone, and now also the PinePhone Pro, all ship with Plasma installed by default. I told this story publicly once already, but it’s worth repeating - the PinePhone owes its existence to the promise that Plasma Mobile held at the time of the project’s inception. Suffice to say we’re very fond of KDE and their team members, many of which we have the pleasure to call our friends. So, then, I want to say a deep-hearted happy birthday to KDE developers and their community. Please head over to their forums, social media, chat or elsewhere and make sure they know their work is important to our community and the open-source ecosystem as a whole.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

KDE’s 25 anniversary video

Finally, I want to say thank you to our team for doing a great job on the PinePhone Pro launch. And I don’t mean the people who made the hardware possible, although they deserve a special round of applause for pulling it off under current manufacturing circumstances. To those who put together the trailer and the renders, created the website, put together and tested the pre-order system, and to all those who helped ensure we’re on track to have everything ready on October 15th - I am very grateful for your effort and help. Well done.

PinePhone Pro

This month I have the pleasure to introduce the newest member of the PINE64 family - the PinePhone Pro. It is a fast smartphone with premium features, built from the ground up to run mainline Linux operating systems. In anticipation of great interest in the nitty-gritty hardware details, we published a dedicated webpage complete with specifications, availability information, device renders and an extensive FAQ. I strongly suggest you go and read that prior to continuing with this section. Seriously, go read it first.

PinePhone Pro webpage: https://pine64.org/pinephonepro

Instead of reiterating the information on PinePhone Pro’s website, I’ll use this section of the community update to explain why we decided to introduce a more powerful smartphone and discuss some of the key design choices.

Let me start by setting the stage. At the time of the original PinePhone’s introduction to the market there were only a handful of mobile Linux operating systems available, none or few of which ran regular Linux with open drivers. The goal of the project was to provide developers with an open, readily available, and inexpensive platform to drive Linux on mobile forward. The PinePhone ended up giving rise to new OSes, such as Mobian or DanctNIX (Arch), and helping existing projects such as Plasma Mobile reach new heights. The PinePhone’s introduction also attracted interest from desktop Linux OSes such as Manjaro and incentivized established mobile projects, such as UBports, to support mainline Linux.

Original PinePhone developer pre-order announcement - a blast from the past :)

Fast forward to today, many of the 20+ operating systems have reached a mature-Beta status. All core functionality has been enabled and we’re seeing more complex features being added. Mobile Linux may not yet satisfy the needs of mainstream consumers, but we’re now at a point where open-source enthusiasts are willing to give a Linux smartphone a go. MMS messages, Android app support via Anbox or Waydroid, 24hrs of standby time with reliable calls and SMS, accelerated camera viewfinder, and photo post-processing are just some of the features that led people to start daily driving their PinePhones. Now that software has reached a higher degree of maturity, introducing a fast smartphone with premium features makes sense.

Here it is - beautiful, isn’t it?

The announcement of the PinePhone Pro is therefore an acknowledgment that our journey with mobile Linux is entering the next stage. You could say that it denotes a shift from being ‘primarily development-focused’ to ‘technically-inclined end-users centered’. This isn’t the most elegant way of phrasing it, but you get the gist. With the PinePhone Pro we deliver hardware that will run current operating systems effortlessly and with some room to spare. But raw performance isn’t everything - attention has also been paid to the things that matter the most in a phone used daily: the screen, the camera, storage and RAM capacity, and the overall fit and finish were all central during the design phase. A lot of consideration went into each component choice, and many decisions were discussed with developers over the course of the past year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCxDcMdr_fo

Martijn Braam, a postmarketOS developer and our friend, takes a look at the PinePhone Pro

Before moving on to discussing design decisions, let me clear up a few things: the PinePhone Pro is not a second-generation PinePhone, but rather a higher-end PinePhone. The original PinePhone isn’t going away anytime soon either - in fact, we have thousands of units in the pipeline. The PinePhone Pro is pogo-pin compatible with the original PinePhone, which means that peripherals, such as the keyboard and add-on back cases, will work with both devices. So if you are getting one of the add-ons for your PinePhone then don’t worry, they’ll work with the Pro if you decide to get one in the future.

Finally, let me address some of the key design choices. We chose the RK3399 as our internal development basis for two reasons: we are well acquainted with the platform and it is nearly fully mainlined (the ROCKPro64, our RK3399 development board, recently received Arm’s SystemReady IR Certification). But we aren’t using a regular RK3399 chip in the PinePhone Pro. We worked closely with Rockchip’s engineers to tweak the original SoC to fit our use case - the result of the cooperation is the RK3399S, made specifically for the PinePhone Pro. RK3399S chips are binned and voltage-locked so that they conform to a smartphone chassis thermal and power consumption envelopes. Aside from great performance, the SoC also features a stellar feature set, including native video output via USB-C, support for high-resolution cameras and USB 3.0 data transfer speeds, just to name a notable few. But choosing such a well-supported platform also means that porting existing OSes to the PinePhone Pro will be fairly trivial. While it may take some time to achieve complete feature parity with the original PinePhone, the road to full system functionality will be relatively short.

A look at what’s inside the PinePhone Pro (mandatory disclaimer: images of a prototype and may not reflect end product)

As I previously mentioned, we consulted component choices with the developers. This informed many of our decisions, such as using the main camera sensor on the original PinePhone for the PinePhone Pro’s front-facing shooter. Similarly, together with the developers we settled on the main 13MP Sony sensor which has good mainline Linux support, produces nice photographs, and has the right physical dimensions to fit the chassis. Early in the process we decided to go ‘all-out’ and outfitted the PinePhone Pro with 128GB of flash storage and 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM. Needless to say, we kept all the things our community loves about the PinePhone, such as the removable back, privacy switches and a removable battery (N.B. the battery on the PinePhone Pro has also received an upgrade).

PinePhone Pro (left) next to a PinePhone (right), can you spot the subtle differences?

Lastly, let’s discuss decisions that determined the look and feel of the PinePhone Pro. Keeping backward compatibility with the original PinePhone was our priority, so from the get-go, we knew that whatever choices we made they couldn’t deviate too much from the original design. The face of the PinePhone Pro features a Corning Gorilla Glass ™ covered in-cell IPS display that produces a nice and vibrant image. It has good viewing angles and gets really bright. The decision to maintain the original PinePhone’s screen resolution of 1440x720 was made early on; higher resolution panels consume more power and increase SoC’s load, resulting in shorter battery life and higher average thermals. A few extra pixels aren’t worth it. As for the back case, it features our trademark understated matte finish. The development unit I had the pleasure to use was considerably more resilient to oily fingerprints than the original PinePhone. It is difficult to describe a tactile experience so I’ll leave it at that - I hope that photos do it justice. Finally, the entire device is slightly thicker than the original PinePhone - by 2mm to be precise. The change in thickness was made to accommodate thermal dissipation and the new display.

PinePhone Pro (left) and PinePhone (right) thickness comparison - it’s barely noticable

That’s it, I think I’ve covered everything. If you have any further questions, make sure to leave them in the comments section. We currently have a small production run of the PinePhone Pro rolling off the factory floor - these units are aimed strictly at developers. The idea is to give devs time to get acquainted with the hardware so that they can start porting their operating systems to the new platform. If you are a developer and want to get your hands on the PinePhone Pro early, then I suggest you promptly place a pre-order as the number of units is very limited. Early adopters will have to wait a little longer to get their hands on the PinePhone Pro Explorer Edition. That said, it won’t be an extensive wait - we aim to start shipping the Explorer Edition late this year or very early the next (shipping will depend on production scheduling and the CE/FCC certification process).

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

I spoke to Destination Linux about the PinePhone Pro, go have a listen

Before I jump into the PineNote section - I know many of you are waiting for news about the PinePhone/PinePhone Pro keyboard and add-on cases. Due to the PinePhone Pro’s launch, and all the preparations which lead up to today, I’ve had very little time to keep track of hardware and software developments. All I know is that the keyboard has finally entered production. I’ll take the next week or so to catch up on everything and write a concise follow-up blog post that will hopefully answer all your questions. I’ll also make sure to query developers about any major developments that have taken place in the past month. Keep an eye out for the post around October 30th.

PineNote

It has been three months since we announced the PineNote - an open e-paper device, based on our range of Quartz64 single board computers. It features a fast quad-core SoC (RK3566), 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM, 128GB of eMMC flash storage and comes equipped with an EMR pen-capable fast refresh e-paper panel. In case you missed it, I suggest you read the August community update which I dedicated to introducing the new hardware. In time, the PineNote will run Linux (and who knows, maybe even *BSD) with an open software stack, allowing you to do a range of things that are impossible on traditional e-paper tablets. Sky’s the limit. But the path to achieving such functionality is a long one, and it will require skilled developers to get PineNote’s core functionality off the ground. Existing desktop and mobile environments, such as KDE Plasma, will also need to be altered to make a viable user experience on the unorthodox grayscale display. The bring-up process has already started and a select number of developers have received pre-production PineNotes in the past weeks - but many more contributors are needed to accelerate the development process.

Last month I reported on PineNote’s current software status in detail, but I haven’t had much of a chance to catch up on it since. It is my understanding that the biggest hurdle to overcome remains e-paper functionality - more precisely, getting the display to initialize under Linux. Just prior to writing up this section I scrolled through the PineNote dev chat backlog, and the good news is that developers are actively working towards making this a reality. Aside from the display, development on the RK3566 is going really well and it appears that we’ll have a very well-supported SoC on our hands in a matter of months. This process will surely be propelled further by more people from the development community getting their hands on the hardware.

A keyboard with the PineNote? sure why not - via Danct12

Speaking of the hardware - I am happy to let you know that the initial PineNote production run has successfully rolled off the factory floor and the device has received its CE/FCC certification earlier this month. This means that we’re now ready to start taking pre-orders from developers and contributors who are keen to help us realise the vision behind the PineNote. These units will ship without an operating system installed, with the device in a flashable mode by default. Devices aimed at developers will also ship with the EMR pen, a magnetic cover and a USB-C UART break-out board to aid with debugging. We will start shipping later this year, possibly as early as late November; keep an eye out for updates on our social media and news feeds as well as the shipping, stock and availability page.

PineNote production line

As for early adopter units, their availability will largely depend on software development progress. Ultimately, the schedule will be dictated by when the e-paper panel gets enabled on Linux. As I already mentioned, developers have some ideas on how this can be achieved (click here to see what Caleb had to say about it), so it may be a matter of a few weeks before we reach this milestone. However, admittedly it is also perfectly conceivable that enabling the e-paper panel will prove more of a challenge, and consequently take a longer time. In a sense, the ball is now in the developers’ court and the rest of us (including the production team) have to wait for a green light to proceed. As always, I’ll keep you updated on how things are progressing in future blog posts and updates.

PineTime (and InfiniTime) [by JF]

In last month’s update, we announced the release of InfiniTime 1.4, which greatly improved the reliability and responsiveness of the touch panel and added a nice color picker for the PineTimeStyle watch face. Less than a month later, we published not one but two releases of InfiniTime! These 2 releases have allowed the project to reach a new milestone in terms of *daily driver readiness*. Let’s take a closer look at what these releases bring to the table.

InfiniTime 1.5 Huckleberry

If I had to guess the feature InfiniTime users missed the most, I would say it’s the alarm app. Users would often ask if an alarm app is available in the chat rooms, in response to the toots and tweets I write to announce new releases. My answer was always the same: that we’ll have an alarm app when someone will work on it. It’s as simple as that. InfiniTime is an open-source project and all contributors are volunteers working on it in their free time. There’s no priority, no roadmap and no set date for the next release. There are only people working on whatever they want whenever they want. Finally this pull-request was submitted.

The alarm clock app pull request

So, why did it take so long for this PR to be submitted? I can only offer my point of view. In my opinion, the alarm app presents 2 challenges. The first one relates to implementing the alarm in a way that it will wake the watch up and notify the user at a specified time. The other challenge is the design of the user interface. The UI needs to allow the users to specify an alarm time and the days the alarm should be triggered. Some developers are comfortable with lower-level development but are really bad at UI (I fit in this category), while others can do wonders on the UI side but struggle with low-level layers. Perhaps it is a bit of an exaggeration but it isn’t far off the truth either.

I therefore really like how mruss77 approached implementing this new functionality - he created the first version with basic features (only 1 alarm, with very few options and customizations) which are already functional and left room for improvements in further releases. So, now we have our first alarm app! It allows you to specify time and days (once, every day, or weekdays), to enable/disable the alarm and to check when the next one will be triggered. And, obviously, the app will notify you when the alarm is triggered with a small vibration.

A look at the alarm clock app - picture via Nico Cartron

Another important addition to this release is the rework of the BLE advertising strategy. In Bluetooth low-energy (BLE), advertising allows a device to broadcast *advertising* messages to announce itself to the other devices. These devices can then detect advertising messages when they are in scanning mode. James worked on refactoring the advertising logic in InfiniTime so that it now follows state-of-the-art recommendations, which should (and do) improve the interoperability with more BLE-capable devices as well as connectivity with the companion apps.

Last but not least, Tim ensured that the date and time are persistent across reboots. It means that InfiniTime is now able to recover the date and time when the watch is reset (either manually or due to a bug). I think this is a nice quality of life improvement as users have (had, to be precise) to regularly reboot their watch to recover the BLE connectivity (more about this later).This was a bit tricky as the NRF52832 (the CPU that’s running the PineTime) does not provide any register or memory areas guaranteed to keep content when the CPU resets. We also cannot afford to store the time in either the internal or external flash memory, as it would wear them far too fast. Fortunately, Tim found a way to store the date and time in RAM and to ensure this location will not be erased when the watch reboots!

InfiniTime 1.6 Ice Apple (we have a BLE fix!!!)

Only 2 days after the release of 1.5 I decided to publish InfiniTime 1.6. This release is really small in terms of the number of commits (only 1 commit to be precise) and changes (a single line of code was modified), but it is **huge** in terms of its impact for end-users: BLE connectivity now works a lot better than before!

Let’s go back in time to April this year. At the time Lukasz and I felt that InfiniTime reached many milestones (with the integration of the step counter and heart-rate sensor) and deserved an official 1.0 release. The only reason why I hesitated was BLE connectivity, which was not as stable as I wanted. BLE would work for a time and then simply stop. I couldn’t figure out why that was happening, and I didn’t know if other users were experiencing this issue too. As you know, we finally decided to announce InfiniTime 1.0 knowing that we could fix the issue in future releases. This proved to be the right move. InfiniTime and the whole PineTime project gained a lot of momentum and InfiniTime 1.0 release allowed PINE64 to ship the PineTime as an ‘end-user’ product rather than a ‘developer kit’. Most importantly, the majority of users were happy with this firmware release.

Buuuut I still noticed the BLE issue, and it was increasingly more obvious I wasn’t alone. Many users were reporting BLE connectivity issues, saying they had to reset their watch to be able to reconnect to the companion app. I’ve been chasing this issue ever since and I spent countless hours trying to understand why the BLE radio would stop emitting data after a few hours. Other developers quickly joined me on Github and in the chat rooms. They also spent a lot of time testing and debugging. In the end, we managed to prove that most of the BLE-related code is rock solid, but we still couldn’t understand why it was failing after roughly one day of usage.

So, why was this issue so hard to debug and fix? Debugging wireless communications can be very tricky since you cannot connect an oscilloscope or a digital analyzer using wires to figure out what is happening or what went wrong. I tried to set up a BLE debugging environment hoping to learn more about the issue… with no luck. Also, the BLE stack (NimBLE) is a very complex piece of code that works very closely with the hardware. Without going into too much detail, the BLE stack needs *real-time performance* to ensure that timing constraints from BLE are met and it relies on hardware *timers*, *RTC*, and *interrupts* to control the BLE radio. This strong coupling between the hardware and software, along with strong timing constraints, makes debugging a lot harder than usual.

Debugging - wires, wires and more wires

In the end, the analysis and the fix to the issue was provided by Daniel Jackson. Daniel found that a bug in the BLE stack would cause an overflow in the advertising logic which would stop advertisement messages from being sent. This fix is small and easy, but finding that specific issue in the whole code was like finding a needle in a haystack. I can’t help but be amazed by this mind-blowing collaboration between multiple developers from the open-source community. This was long-term work, it was tiring and frustrating, but we never gave up and finally understood what was going on and found a fix. Thanks to everyone who worked on this issue, and to all of you who supported us and tried to provide help and feedback - you’re awesome!

Project organization

Since I am the person who started InfiniTime (the project was initially just called my project and later PineTime-JF) I am the only one in charge. I have all the powers, I take all the decisions and I do whatever I want with the project. I do, of course, encourage users to provide feedback and other developers to submit pull requests, but in the end I’m the one who manages all feedback and decides which modifications make it into the codebase of InfiniTime.But with great power comes great responsibility as they say… As the project gained popularity and momentum, I couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed by the quantity of feedback, issues and pull requests. Responding to questions and issues reported by the users, reviewing and merging the nice pull requests, all take a lot of time and energy, and there isn’t enough time in a day (after work and family) to manage the project in an efficient way.

Without knowing it, I became a benevolent dictator and, at the same time, the project’s bottleneck. Many issues were left unanswered and it often took me several weeks to look at new pull requests. And that’s fine, that’s how open source development works! But that’s not the most comfortable position for me to be in. I cannot afford to spend so much time working on InfiniTime. More importantly, I also don’t want users and contributors to become frustrated by the relative slowness of the project.

I’ve been thinking about this situation for some time and recently decided to create a Github organization. Organizations on Github allow inviting other contributors to the project and giving them specific access and permissions. The goal is to onboard a few contributors to the new core team so that I’m not the only one allowed to triage and manage issues as well as review and merge pull requests.

InfiniTime Github Organization

This is a major change in the project organization. We’ll have to learn to work together in this new way, but I’m confident that together we’ll manage to do great things. As of today I invited 2 contributors who I know from the project on Github and the chatrooms. I have known Avamander since the beginning of the PineTime project, and he has always given me a lot of useful advice on how to manage and organize InfiniTime. He also contributed nice features like the Music control app. Tim aka geekbozu aka Geekboy1011 is very active on the chat rooms and worked a lot on the BLE issue we fixed in 1.6, and made many contributions to features like the persistent clock. Thanks to both of them for accepting the challenge and joining me in the new project structure. They are the first members of the new InfiniTime organization, but we’ll probably end up inviting more members later on to help with issue triage and PR reviews.

The new InfiniTime project URL is now https://github.com/InfiniTimeOrg/InfiniTime. Github should take care of redirecting the old URLs to the new ones, but I recommend you update your bookmarks and git remotes to ensure you’ll always point to the right URL

A word about donations

I’m always shy away from talking about money and donations in the context of working on open source projects. Open-source development, in my view, is all about collaboration, contribution, sharing and most importantly of all - fun. Money should not be an important part of it. However, at the beginning of this year many people started asking me how they could donate to thank me for my work on InfiniTime. At first I was a bit reluctant but finally created an account on Liberapay. I did so promising nothing in return (except that I’ll probably invite my wife to the restaurant to make up for the time I spend working on the project) and yet, some people chose to anonymously donate money!

I received far more donations than I anticipated and I continue to receive very generous sums. I have to admit this is a nice additional source of motivation and I thank everyone who has donated so far. But this is not a one-man show project - InfiniTime and PineTime are successful thanks to the work of many people. This includes developers working on the firmware (InfiniTime and WaspOS, for example), companion apps (Amazfish, Gadgetbridge, Siglo,etc.), users and testers who provide feedback, as well as bloggers and content creators who write and talk about the project online. If you want to donate money to the PineTime project, feel free to have a look at profiles of these people and thank them for their amazing work!

Keep in mind that money is not the only way to motivate and encourage developers and contributors - provide feedback, share your experience and enthusiasm and thank them for their work. These little things will make any developer happy!

That’s if for this the community update this month. Keep an eye out for the follow-up news blog post at the end of this month.

September update: Hurdles and Successes

Wed, 15 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In this community update we’ll discuss PinePhone keyboard progress (and hurdles), add-on back cases awaiting developers approval, initial PineNote impressions and early development progress, as well as news of InfiniTime 1.4 release and a guest post about PineCubes as a part of a security system. We also have an announcement for our community developers: we will be introducing bounties to the DevZone.

We’ve got some exciting things in the works that I am aching to share with you, so if you haven’t done so yet, now is the time to subscribe to this blog.

You can watch the synopsis of this month’s community update on YouTube (embedded below) as well as on Odysee and PeerTube. To stay up-to-date with PINE64 news make sure to subscribe to this blog (subscription widget at the bottom of the webpage), follow PINE64 Telegram News channel, the announcements channel in Discord as well as our Twitter and Mastodon.

I’d like to thank JF, Alex (clover), Caleb, Martijn, Danct12, Chris (newton688), Brian (33YN2) and PizzaLovingNerd for their contributions to this community update.

N.B. Comments on the blog post need to be in English and follow our Community Rules and Code of Conduct.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Video synopsis of the community update

TL;DR

Housekeeping
- DevZone internal testing concluded and roll-out already started
- DevZone to introduce bounties in near future
- Hosting cluster maintenance is underway; Gamiee is writing a public log about the process
- PineTalk podcast is coming back this month!
- Permissible usage of the PINE64 logo and brand name; PINE64 merch in the works (by third party)
PinePhone
- Two years since PinePhone dev units went on sale
- Keyboard production hurdles - a detailed account of why we don’t have an availability date yet
- Summary of the keyboard’s production firmware features and capabilities
- Back cases awaiting developers to green-light
- Waydroid is shaping up nicely [by Danct12]
- Megapixels 1.3 released - the PinePhone now takes much nicer-looking photos [by Martijn Braam]
PineNote
- Detailed first impressions of the PineNote; very impressive hardware, not much to complain about, perhaps apart from the cover (which will be improved in the future)
- Early development status report (thanks to Caleb); once Linux boots on the PineNote, there is a good chance for much of core functionality to work
- PineNote production is on-track, and dev/ early adopter ought to be available late October
PineCube
- A guest post by Chris (newton688) about using two PineCubes as a part of a security system; detailed information about the setup and functionality
PineTime
- Release of InfiniTime 1.4 marks the 1000th project GitHub commit
- Huge number of infiniTime improvements and bug fixes; end-users can now also customise the look and feel of default watchface
- WaspOS supports new accelerometer and brings a number of improvements
- iOS and Ubuntu Touch companion apps compatible with InfiniTime now available; Infini-iOS app now installable via Apple’s Testflight
PineDio
- Development progress report and debugging of PineDio Stack by FJ and Lup
- JF managed to get InfiniTime running on the BL604 SoC as well as used an e-paper display with the Stack; Lup successfully connected to a LoRa gateway
- Debugging revealed some hardware issues; a revised mainboard in the works

Housekeeping

Late last month we announced that the DevZone was being made ready for internal testing - over the past four weeks we’ve gathered a lot of feedback from developers and improved DevZone’s core systems. The platform has now reached a point where we feel happy to accept more participants aboard: the review process of the applications has already begun, and some developers may already have received invitations to set up their accounts by the time this post goes live. The opening up of the DevZone will be gradual, so if you don’t receive an invitation to set up an account at this time then do not worry. For those of you who don’t know of the DevZone development system platform, and wish to learn about it or are considering signing up, I invite you to read the July update’s housekeeping section for more details.

But this isn’t the end of DevZone news. Once the system is populated with developer accounts, we will be introducing bounties to the platform. Only developers on the DevZone will be eligible to accept a bounty once it gets posted. There will be both global (open to all developers) and group-specific bounties. Since the vast majority of people reading the community updates aren’t developers, let me provide a two-line explanation of what bounties are: bounties are a way to incentivise development and expedite problem-solving by providing a financial incentive. Such bounties usually apply to things that are difficult to solve, hard to implement or otherwise pose a significant challenge. In short, developers receive a one-time payment for solving a problem or implementing a missing functionality. The Pine Store has committed to putting up a substantial sum of money for the bounties and we hope this will help the DevZone thrive. More information about the bounty system will follow on DevZone’s global forum.

DevZone sign-ups will remain open indefinitely

In other news, PineTalk podcast is coming back after a two-month hiatus! The community-ran show that focuses on PINE64 news and related topics will resume shortly with new hosts and a reworked schedule. As it has been explained to me, the plan is to have an episode dedicated to discussion of news and the following one to community and partner-project topics. PineTalk is available on most popular streaming platforms such as Spotify as well as on our YouTube and Odysee channels. A dedicated post announcing the return of the PineTalk and introducing the new hosts will go live shortly - stay tuned to learn more. If you haven’t done so yet, make sure to subscribe to the show’s RSS MP3 feed.

New PineTalk logo by Julius Guthunz

Earlier this month Gamiee posted the first entry in a series about the maintenance of our hosting cluster. For those of you who don’t know, we self-host all our community infrastructure and services, including this website, on our own hardware - you can learn more about it from the original post about the move to the cluster. Gamiee’s first post explains the reasons for the maintenance, discusses the planned upgrades and showcases the temporary setup currently in use. It is a series I know many in the community have been waiting well over a year for, so I strongly suggest you check back regularly to follow the hosting cluster’s journey from the workbench back to its rightful place in BBXNET’s server room.

Lastly, I want to touch upon a topic that I get asked about on a regular basis - namely, the use of the PINE64 logo and brand name in both community and commercial projects. We have detailed guidelines for the use of the PINE64 name and logo on the main Wiki page (which also includes a media kit with assets in .svg format; this too is something I’ve been asked about recently). As a side-note on this topic - we’ve been contacted by community members interested in creating PINE64 ‘swag’ and have agreed to grant them the opportunity to create and sell unique designs. Needless to say, neither PINE64 nor the Pine Store will be profiting in any way from this. I hope you’re as excited as we are to see the ‘swag’ - personally, I am looking forward to starting my day with a cup of coffee in a PINE64 mug.

PinePhone

It has now been two years since the very first PinePhones entered production. Shortly thereafter, in November of that year, we shipped PinePhone developer units fitted with the first PCB revision and began preparing for production of Braveheart units. The PinePhone has gotten us - the mobile Linux community as a whole - far in a short amount of time, and made the dream of a mobile Linux possible for tens of thousands of people. I felt this was worth a quick mention on the PinePhone’s second anniversary. If you feel as nostalgic as I do, or simply want to see a very cool transparent PinePhone prototype, then I invite you to read the September update blog entry of 2019.

PinePhone Hardware

These past couple of weeks were effectively a race to deliver a finalized revision of the keyboard firmware and have it successfully flashed on the factory floor. The details aren’t important, but suffice to say that getting the firmware shipshape and flashed using a factory programmer proved to be a time consuming undertaking for both Megi and the product team. What is important, however, is that it all turned out well in the end, and on September 6th version 1.1 of the keyboard’s firmware was successfully installed using factory tools. When I initially started writing this text, some week ago, I expected to provide you with a timeline for production and the eventual availability date for the keyboard. However, this monday the vendor reported that the keyboard factory test image doesn’t recognize the production keyboard. As it turns out, due to last minute changes made to the firmware, the factory test software (a custom build of postmarketOS by Martijn Braam) no longer works. This temporarily stalled the production process. At the time of writing, Martijn and Megi are still trying to figure out a software work-around so that production can get back on-track. When manufacture (re)starts later this month I’ll make sure to provide you all with an update, which will hopefully include an availability date.

Did you know that the keyboard can be fully extended for thumb-typing? - picture by Martijn Braam

As for the final version of the firmware that ships on PinePhone’s keyboard, I am happy to say that it is more than we could have hoped for. It allows users to customise their keys, including the modifiers, in nearly unlimited ways via supporting utilities. This effectively means that users will be able to set their prefered layouts and alter key behaviour without needing to flash a custom version of the firmware to the keyboard’s controller - how cool is that? You can also physically relocate all keys, bar return and space, to correspond to your chosen software layout. The reason I advise you to leave the return and space in their respective places is because the tiny hooks that hold onto the metal stabilizers can be finicky and easily broken if not handled properly. Besides, it’s not like you can place these keys elsewhere on the board. Lastly, the firmware is now able to report charge status of the internal battery to the PinePhone’s operating system - a critically important feature following the (correct, in my opinion) decision to remove charging status LEDs.

Before moving onto discussing other topics, I’d like to thank community members who helped translate the keyboard quick start manual into German, French and Spanish. You guys rock.

From the left: stock PinePhone; PinePhone with fingerprint reader; PinePhone with wireless charging; PinePhone with keyboard attached

The PinePhone back cases with wireless charging and the fingerprint reader are now ready and awaiting developers approval. As soon as the cases get green-lit you’ll see them appear in the Pine Store. I finally had the opportunity for some hands-on time with both of the cases and I must say I really like how they turned out. For one, they match the PinePhone’s overall aesthetic perfectly: when mounted, they look like a natural part of the assembly. Admittedly, they do add a bit of bulk to the back of the PinePhone (but not the sides) - approximately as much as the hard protective case - but at no point during my few-day-long usage of the PinePhone with the wireless charging case fitted did I feel it was unnatural or too hefty. Something that pictures cannot convey is that the finish on these cases is really nice. They share a similar coating to that used on the PinePhone’s keyboard. What this means in practice is that not only do they feel very sturdy, perhaps due to the internal reinforcement grid, but are also significantly less likely to attract fingerprints than the default back case. The wireless charging case works fine with the desktop PinePower - I’ll likely end-up using it with my phone that isn’t fitted with the keyboard. If you’re interested in picking up a back case as soon as possible, please keep a close eye on our social accounts and news channels.

PinePhone Software

Waydroid by Danct12

In the past weeks, I’ve been working on packaging Waydroid to Arch Linux and I have released one of the test packages to the community (which also ended up in the Manjaro repository). That test package required some fiddling around with boot arguments and, even when you get it to work, it has all kinds of issues such as inverted colors and app stability. Since then the Waydroid team made a lot of progress, making app crashes to be less frequent and color formatting displaying correctly on the PinePhone. The performance is now quite comparable to Anbox - in fact, I find that Waydroid works better than Anbox! Regardless, the project is still relatively new and there is a lot of room for future improvements. Hopefully you’ll see Waydroid in our PINE64-Arch repository very soon. I leave you with a short video of the PinePhone running Subway Surfers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bG0uAQqeqW4

Android game running under Waydroid on the PinePhone

Megapixels 1.3.0 by Martijn Braam

Megapixels had a new release and is now at version 1.3.0 - the major change in this release is more contrast in the post-processing script, which results in pictures with more vivid colors and being more ‘contrasty’. Work is being done to make the amount of this processing being applied configurable through the Megapixels settings.

Picture taken on PinePhone with Megapixels 1.3 - image via postmarketOS

PineNote

In case you live under a rock and missed last month’s announcement of the PineNote, then I invite you to read it before continuing on with this section. PineNote production is on-track, and we expect to have development and early adopter units in the Pine Store next month. I’ve now had the PineNote development unit for a little over two weeks, so I thought I’ll start this section by sharing my initial impressions of the hardware. Obviously, I am hardly impartial in my assessment, but I believe my opinions closely echo those of devs who received their units. Also, in full disclosure, I am using a factory test build on my device for testing purposes. The device itself is what most people will probably find ‘just the right size’ - at 10.3” it is plenty large for reading and writing while also being comfortable to lug around in a backpack. It is relatively light and feels natural to hold, and at no point did I feel that it is bulky or unwieldy. The construction is really sturdy and the plastic bevel and back have a good feel to them. One gripe that I have about the plastic back is that it is a fingerprint magnet, which likely won’t matter too much since you’ll likely want to use a cover. The minimalist and industrial look of the entire device makes it look more like a work tool than a gadget, which is a good thing in my book.

See the faint circle, right of the PINE64 logo? - placing the EMR pen (or a magnet) down there enables recovery and debugging

The display is downright great. The contrast is excellent, even when compared against some e-paper industry giants’ offerings. Mind you, such a crisp image is achieved despite the e-paper display being housed under two layers of digitizers (Wacom, for the EMR pen, and a regular capacitive panel for finger input). The white and amber front light is really good; it lights the entire panel evenly and is extremely bright, even to the point of being visible in broad daylight, but it can also be turned down very low for reading in dim or dark spaces. Under the factory build of Android, which I’ve been testing the device with, the EMR pen’s responsiveness is very good - I’d say close to instant. I truly hope that a similar level of pen input responsiveness can be achieved under Linux in the future. Speaking of writing, I like the default stylus - it is really well built, well balanced, has a solid heft and provides a good writing sensation.

Left - PineNote inside without frontlight / right - PineNote amber frontlight in direct daylight

While I am very pleased with the device, it would be unfair of me not to mention things that I am not thrilled about (thankfully there are only two things to mention). I am not a fan of the cover - it is mechanically perfectly capable, it is light, thin and does the job, but despite looking nice it doesn’t feel good in the hand. It is now too late in the manufacturing process to change the design, but in the future we’ll surely redesign the cover or at least improve the feel of the material it is built from. Secondly, if you aren’t using the cover, which has an embedded magnet corresponding to the one in the EMR pen, the pen doesn’t have a way to attach to the PineNote. Again this isn’t exactly a massive issue, because I suspect most people will always want to house their device in a cover, but I felt that it was worth mentioning regardless.

I also have an update regarding the current status of Linux development for the PineNote. I’ve spoken to Caleb to get a sense of how things are going, and here is a summary of what they had to say. Work is simultaneously done on the u-boot, the e-paper panel and the Linux kernel. All the above are obviously directly interconnected, but it appears to me that there is an informal division of labour among the devs. Caleb has been looking into u-boot and the e-paper panel (more specifically, how to initiate it on Linux) because they believe that u-boot is responsible for loading the waveform data that enables panels functionality, quote “I’m currently working on porting over the parts of the e-ink drivers which are open source to mainline, then I’ll try to fill in the blanks using u-boot as a guide with the end goal of being able to get basic framebuffer support. I think the downstream u-boot is responsible for loading the waveform data and passing it to the kernel, given CounterPIllow and I have the exact same waveform data, if we can verify that other people do as well (…) then we can instead put the data in /lib/firmware and have the kernel load it like it would any other firmware”.

However, to test whether this will actually work, developers will first need to get Linux booting on the PineNote. As Caleb explained to me, pgwipeout’s Quartz64 kernel does work, and even boots, but gets stuck being unable to detect eMMC flash. This is likely a trivial oversight, and I am sure that it will be sorted out swiftly. If Caleb is right in their assumptions about how to initialize the e-paper panel, then there is real hope that we can get an image output soon after the device boots Linux for the first time. This, in combination with Wacom and the capacitive digitizers being already mainlined, means that there is a real chance for a lot of basic functionality being available to developers soon. The road ahead is obviously still very long, but the first steps are highly encouraging and I cannot wait to see how far the project progresses this year. I’ll make sure to bring you a steady stream of PineNote development updates on a monthly basis as I’ve done in the past for our previous devices.

PineCube by Chris (newton688)

For the last several weeks we’ve been busy with the latest PineCube project, which is to set up two and eventually three PineCubes as security cameras both inside and outside the house. As a starting point the first cube was imaged with the pre-built Armbian from the wiki: Linux Kernel 5.11, Motion and GStreamer capabilities. This cube connects automatically to the local WiFi and is powered using a micro USB cable and an off the shelf power supply. Anyone in the trusted local network can see the camera from a web browser through the motion tool at pinecube1:8080. Also, we can put it wherever it is needed, including monitoring the solar panel charge controller status from time to time.

Solar monitor feed

Motion can be configured to record short MPEG-4 video clips when it detects motion and to save a recording to a file internally. We expanded on this by posting the recordings to a private Matrix channel on a private server so that access can be controlled and notifications can go out to different people on different devices. This setup also serves as an off-site backup. This has turned out to be a versatile indoor unit that serves a variety of purposes. Attention has turned to how to support outdoor units.

Mounting the PineCube outdoors has some unique challenges. How do you get power to the unit? The WiFi may not be as reliable outdoors depending on weather conditions. Also, the weather, such as rain and moisture can affect the electronic components. Using PoE helps to solve the first two problems. Our existing networking equipment has active PoE so we went with that system, but it required an extra PoE splitter dongle to separate USB power from ethernet since the PineCube currently supports only passive PoE. To protect the device from water and humidity the unit needs to be sealed with something transparent that doesn’t distort the image. We found an acrylic dome of a large enough size to hold both the PineCube and the PoE splitter and used painted plywood as backing and shelving material. The unit will be sealed completely using a caulking compound that has yet to be sourced, likely a silicon compound. We will be testing the electronics beyond its specified limits in the next six months as the winter could bring temperatures below -30C. Fingers are crossed.

Left - A look at the internals // right - outside mount on wall

This second PineCube is accessible from the internal network in the same way as the first using Motion’s web interface. The resolution was increased to 1280x720 to provide better detail, but this increased the processing power required to capture videos making them very laggy. The tradeoff was acceptable in our case and so we disabled motion capture on this device. Also, with this device we decided to learn more about Armbian and so this one was installed directly from the official Armbian community supported image and installer, which required access to the console over UART, which can be done with the PinePhone/PineBook Pro USB headphone jack UART devices or other means described on the wiki. The kernel version is 5.10 and the version of Motion is older, but still usable until the next version of Debian brings in the newer software.

Image from the PineCube

There are a number of image controls that can be adjusted using the v4l2-ctl command-line tool, such as horizontal flip, colour balance, saturation and hue. There are also some test patterns built into the sensor that may be helpful in calibrating these.

Image adjustments examples using v4l2-ctl

There’s also an infrared filter for the sensor and the PineCube’s front board has a deck of four IR LED’s. They can work indoors and at close range to pick up objects, but our outdoor unit will require some adjustments before this could be effective at night. The sensor is currently set back from the acrylic dome too far and there is some glare from the LED’s. Also, the Green power LED is causing some glare too and that needs to be resolved, perhaps with removal of that one LED. Details of how to enable/disable the IR cut filter and the LED’s can be found in the Wiki.

PineCube image with infrared

As we add more cameras to our network, monitoring and managing them will be more time consuming. This is why we installed Prometheus extractors on them so that we can collect all sorts of data and monitor them using Grafana dashboards along with the other machines that we have on our network. Monitoring pending upgrades to Debian will require some more work since the CPU power required to check for packages to upgrade can sometimes interfere with the video capture operation. This might be resolved with a short scheduled daily outage. Meanwhile, this is done manually from time to time.

PineTime (by JF)

The momentum around the PineTime project does not slow down, quite to the contrary, Wasp-os and InfiniTime keep on receiving much feedback from users alongside contributions from developers. Moreover, the ecosystem of companion apps is constantly growing, and now encompasses most computer and mobile operating systems. It is amazing to see so much activity around this project we started almost 2 years ago.

Let’s start with InfiniTime 1.4, which was released a few days ago. This version is highly symbolic, as the very last commit of the release was exactly the 1000th commit to the project!

1000(!) InfiniTime commit

The release comes with a reworked touch driver, which improves the reliability and responsiveness of the touch panel. I’m really impressed by this contribution by Riku Isokoski, which helped reduce the latency of the touch interface to nearly zero, really improved the user experience in many apps: the setting of the timer is now as fast as it should be, the Paddle and Twos games are a lot more pleasant to play, and the whole UI feels snappier and faster than before. Another nice feature of InfiniTime 1.4 Pink Grapefruit which users will surely appreciate is the color picker feature for the PineTimeStyle watchface. You can now unleash your creativity and customize your favorite Pebble-inspired watchface!

Left - Quick Settings menu // Right - customization options of the default InfiniTime watchface - images via Nico’s blog

As always this new version brings many other improvements, such as better phone call notifications and better battery level monitoring, as well as bug fixes (we’ve hopefully fixed the bootloop issue). Nico provides a nice overview of this release in his article if you’re interested for an in-depth look.

WaspOS has also seen a few major changes since last month. Support was added for the new BMA425 accelerometer that is found in newer PineTimes, the weather app has had a fix for crashes and a bug that caused it to show incorrect values, a workaround has been made to prevent gcc-11 from building bricked WaspOS bootloaders, there is a bugfix for the wasptool OTA command, and the values for the heart rate sensor have been adjusted for more accurate readings of the heart rate.

Last month, I announced that 2 iOS companion apps were in the works. This month, I’m happy to announce that Infini-iOS released 2 beta versions 0.8.0 and 0.8.5, which are now available for testing on iOS. This application is very new but already provides many functionalities like time synchronization, displaying the heart rate value, battery level monitoring, OTA updates and more. This version is available for installation via Apple’s Testflight - feel free to try it out and provide feedback to the author if you own an Apple device.

Go developers will be happy to learn that a Go library and a daemon to interact with the PineTime are now available. The “itd” daemon comes with a command line interface (itctl) and a GUI frontend (itgui) which allow users to sync the time, receive notifications, control music playback, get info from the watch and many other functionalities.

Last but not least, I came across a new PineTime companion app for Ubuntu Touch. Many UBports community members were requesting such an app, and I’m happy that jiho started working on uwatch - a smartwatch sync app for Ubuntu Touch that supports the PineTime running InfiniTime. It will work on the PinePhone as well as any other device running Ubuntu Touch.

PineDio (by JF)

In July I introduced you to the PineDio Stack, a development kit built around the Bouffalo BL604 RISC-V MCU, which provides many onboard features such as the SX1262 LoRa module, an SPI flash memory, a LCD and touch panel, as well as a motion and heart rate sensor. In my opinion, the Stack is a really nice board that could serve as the basis of many future projects at PINE64!

JF’s PineDio Stack setup looks awesome! - via Twitter

Since last month, Lup Yuen Lee and myself have done many tests on the first prototypes we received a few weeks ago with the goal to provide as much feedback as possible to the PINE64 team so they can design the best hardware for the Stack. And we have some great news to share: I was able to run an e-ink demo as well as a stripped down version of InfiniTime on that board. Lup, on the other hand, managed to connect to a LoRa gateway using the onboard Sx1262 LoRa module.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

InfiniTime running on the PineDio Stack

As usual in the engineering world, not everything works the first time, and we’ve noticed some issues with the JTAG debugging port and the LCD controller. If you are interested in the debugging process of this board, I encourage you to read this article by Lup Yuen Lee detailing the entire process. Lup provides many details about the techniques and tools we put in place to debug the LCD controller. As a result of this exploration the product team is now preparing a new version of the board, and I hope we’ll be able to provide more good news very soon!

That is all for this month!

Cluster build log: Moving to temporary cluster

Wed, 01 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

As promised in the last month’s community update Housekeeping section, this is the first part of the cluster’s build log! This mini-series in which I will cover everything about upcoming changes our hosting cluster, and it begins with building a temporary cluster.

Why build a temporary cluster?

One of the latest photo of cluster

Let’s start from beginning. When we built the current hosting cluster a year ago, it was made in quite a hurry (some of the services needed to be migrated to the cluster on a moment’s notice). Also, it was the first time I (gamiee) and Matthew (fire219) were tasked with building a cluster. Because of this, some of the cluster’s features are missing and various things don’t work quite as well as we have hoped. For example, the cluster has power management boards (PCB on right side of every row), which are used primary for power distribution to the SBCs, but also it also has a I2C GPIO Expander for rebooting and turning off the SBCs. The I2C Expansion isn’t in use yet, because the primary node wasn’t able to detect it, so this is something that needs to be checked out when the cluster is turned off. And this is exactly the main reason why we are building a temporary cluster. We need to do some changes which require us to have the whole cluster turned off and on a workbench (not in housing room where isn’t much space), and this means that it will be inaccessible for several days. Obviously a long downtime wouldn’t be good when 100% of PINE64 community services are running on it. So we are going to build a temporary small cluster, which will have the minimal number of required nodes to have all services running, so we can make all upgrades with precision and at our own pace.

What do we need to make a custom cluster?

There are two things each node needs: a power supply and access to the network. Access to the network can be solved by using a classic Ethernet switch, but powering multiple RockPros, which are actually pretty power hungry, is a bit problematic if we don’t want to have multiple power adapters. One of the solutions is to design a very simple power distribution board.

When designing a power distribution board, we first need to calculate how much power the the whole cluster will require. According PINE64 Wiki - RockPro64 Page - Part Board Information, Schematics and Certifications, one node will need +12V and 3 - 5 Amps, supplied from 5.5mm/2.1 Barrel jack, or via JST XH connector, which is primary used for powering an external hard drive. I chose to use barrel jacks; 3 - 5 Amps is quite a lot, and that’s because it contains the current required for external PCIe device such as 3.5" HDD. Various benchmarks show that the typical power consumption of each board is around 7 Watts. Our temporary cluster will have 7 nodes, so we need a power supply that can supply 12V and approx. 5 Amps. Power supplies which can fulfill these requirements include those used for laptops, classical PC power supplies (ATX) and enclosed power supplies.

I chose to use a classic ATX power supply since they are cheap and really easy to source. When sourcing a PC power supplies one needs to be certain that it can actually supply the required current. Some power supplies have two +12V rails, 12V2 which powers the CPU and 12V1 which powers everything else. Since we will use the main ATX power connector, this one uses 12V1 rail, so we need to determine if this rail can supply the voltage we need (most of those vendors don’t specify the currents for both rails, it mostly show sum of both rails for 12V). But if we will use a power supply that has a single 12V rail for everything (like I do), then finding the current for 12V is easy. Having sorted out the power supply, we can start designing the board.

As I mentioned before, we are going to use main ATX Power connector, which is a 20-pin or 24-pin Molex. We will use 24-pin one, since it contains additional +12 V pin. We can find this connector as Molex 39-28-1243. The pinout is here:

(Source: Wikipedia)

From this connector we will just need +12V, Ground and Power On pin. The Power On pin needs to be connected to ground by the “motherboard” to turn on the power supply. I added a 2-pin jumper header for this, so I can turn it on / off using the jumper. The last thing we need is power output for the nodes. There are several ways of doing this: we can use USB female connectors (with USB to Barrel Jack cable), barrel jack female connector (with barrel jack-to-barrel jack cable) and screw-on terminals or just holes, where you can screw / solder the wires going out from barrel jack cable. I chosen to use just the holes. Doing so I had to be careful about the size and distance between them. Since I picked a very accurate size and distance, it proved a bit problematic to solder cables into it (I will use screw terminals next time). Basically, that’s all! It’s nothing fancy, but it will do the job for the time being while the hosting cluster is in maintenance.

You can find the schematics and board on OSHWLab

Layout of temporary cluster

I was thinking about various layouts that can be used for this temporary cluster. I can place every node on the side, but that will be kind of big. I can also place the nodes vertically, but that would be harder to mount, or I could just stack the boards and use distance field, as Electr0Lyte did with his cluster:

(Source: Electr0Lyte’s Twitter)

This inspired me and I decided to use the classic layout, which most of those small clusters use. I designed the power board so that it will be mounted vertically together with a switch. I 3D printed the holders for the switch and power board, mounted it into the plexiglass and here we go we made our own temporary cluster!

Testing temporary cluster with 6 nodes

This temporary cluster will be launched on September 2, 2021 from 8:00 AM to 11:00 AM UTC, If everything goes well. After the launch, the large hosting cluster will be moved to my place so I can do all the upgrades - something that couldn’t be made on-site.

This is all for this first update log, please let me know if you liked the extensive description of the process, or if it should be shorter. Also I want to say thanks to Lukasz, Matthew, PizzaMartijn, Maya.b and Electr0Lyte for all their help. See you in next update log!

DevZone rollout

Mon, 23 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

First announced in the July community update, the DevZone is a project management system for PINE64 devices. It will allow us to have a better overview of ongoing software development, streamline the product prototyping processes and keep track of suggested hardware changes. It is also a way for us to get an up-to-date survey of our developer-pool, including each developer’s core competences and availability. We believe that the introduction of this system will facilitate cooperation and accelerate the process of bringing new devices to the market.

Earlier this month we launched DevZone for testing in a very limited capacity. We made the decision that the best way to put the system through its paces is to actually use it in one of our ongoing projects: the pilot project chosen for this purpose is the recently introduced PineNote. But this is just the beginning. In the coming weeks and months we will be gradually opening up the DevZone to a wider number of community contributors and partner project developers. We have an extensive backlog of applications and we keep on receiving new ones, so it will take time before successful applicants get assigned to ongoing projects.

We believe that the DevZone will grow to be more than just a useful tool - as we see it, the DevZone will become a staple of our development community. If you’re interested in participating in the DevZone then we urge you to read the July community update’s housekeeping section for more details and submit your application. If you are granted a recognized developer status, a password (re)set link will be emailed to you, at which point you will be able to access the system. After filling in your profile details, an admin will assign you to one or more projects.

I am looking forward to seeing many of our active contributors on the DevZone.

The DevZone can be accessed from the widget at the bottom of this page

Introducing the PineNote

Sun, 15 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This month brings news that many of you have been waiting years for - we’re introducing the PineNote, a high-end e-ink device based on the powerful Quartz64 single board computer. But the good news doesn’t end here, the PinePhone keyboard has entered production, developers have begun work on PinePhone’s back cases, PineDio development is moving forward and we’ve seen a new firmware release for Pinebook Pro’s touchpad. There’s a lot of ground to cover this month, so let’s get to it.

You can watch the synopsis of this month’s community update on YouTube (embedded below) as well as on Odysee and PeerTube. To stay up-to-date with PINE64 news make sure to subscribe to this blog (subscription widget at the bottom of the webpage), follow PINE64 Telegram News channel, the announcements channel in Discord as well as our Twitter and Mastodon.

I’d like to thank JF, Alex (clover), Dylan (from postmarketOS), Peter (LinMob), Alfred (from UBports), Chris (kop316), Brian (33YN2), gamiee and PizzaLovingNerd for their contributions to this community update.

N.B. Comments on the blog post need to be in English and follow our Community Rules and Code of Conduct.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Community update video summary by PizzaLovingNerd

TL;DR

Housekeeping: DHL sent all PinePhones to NZ, so we had to reship all orders (sorry for the delay)
Housekeeping: Building a temporary cluster to complete and maintain hosting cluster; build log and updates incoming
PineNote: Announcing the PineNote, one of the most powerful devices of its kind on the market
PineNote: Quartz64 based; specs include - fast refresh e-ink panel with multiple frontlight settings, RK3566, 4GB LPDDR4 RAM and 128GB eMMC flash storage
PineNote: Wacom panel compatible with many EMR pens: we will offer our own
PineNote: Available this year for $399; early adopters batch includes EMR pen + magnetic cover (later sold separately)
PinePhone Hardware: PinePhone keyboard feels great and enters production this month
PinePhone Hardware: PinePhone keyboard available in September or early October
PinePhone Hardware: good news re: back cases - fingerprint reader and wireless charging add-ons sorted out, and should be entering production shortly
PinePhone Software: Ubuntu Touch mirclient support and trust prompts on the PinePhone; 20.04 upgrade Ubuntu Touch coming to the PinePhone
PinePhone: handsfree and car kit for the PinePhone allowing to answer calls without interaction with phone; will also allow synchronising contacts
PinePhone Software: LinMobApps features 300+ applications for Linux smartphones
PinePhone Software: Work on MMS progressing well and work on Visual Voicemail is underway
Pinebook Pro: New firmware solves many outstanding touchpad issues; majority of people now find the touchpad’s performance nearly perfect
Pinebook Pro: we’ll see Vulkan support for the RK3399 in Mesa 21.2; it also includes OpenGL 3.1
Pinebook Pro: 64bit Box86 AMD64 architecture emulator now available, runs on Arm64 natively
Pinebook Pro: Availability late this year looks more likely with decreasing LCD prices; good chance a large batch will be produced at end of the year
PineTime: InfiniTime 1.3 release brings new watch face and LittleFS integration, paving way to accessing internal 4MB storage for additional apps & functionality.
PineTime: WaspOS gets new alarm application and frees up 10% of memory; updated micropython
PineTime: Two iOS companion apps in development for all you iPhone users
PineDio: JF and Lup received PineDio Stack and PinePhone LoRa back cases; a closer look at the devices and discussion development challenges

Housekeeping

I know most of you want to get straight into reading about the PineNote but there are two housekeeping items that we need to address first. Gamiee and I will keep it short, we promise. Late last month DHL accidentally shipped all PinePhone orders (bar those dispatching from the EU warehouse) to New Zealand instead of their intended destinations. We initially hoped to quickly retrieve the shipping pallet and have it returned to Hong Kong, but DHL informed us that this will only be possible when an appropriate flight (allowed to carry battery-operated equipment) becomes available. Given these circumstances we made the decision to reship all orders from our Hong Kong warehouse, so you don’t have to wait until the misplaced pallet is returned to us. Those of you waiting for your PinePhones should have received tracking numbers by the time this post goes live, or shortly thereafter. We’re obviously very sorry for the situation, please accept our apologies. As always, you can follow shipping updates here.

Gamiee: It is now more than a year since we moved all our services such as the official forum, Wiki and this webpage to a hosting cluster made out of 24 RockPro64s. During this time the cluster faced various challenges, such as for instance nodes freezing up - an issue which was solved by using iSCSI instead of NFS for root filesystem sharing. But except for such relatively minor issues, the cluster has now been running nonstop for 354 days! After we got the cluster up and running, we promised to write an article about it. This never happened however, as the write-up was kept being postponed until we felt the cluster was completed (in its final form). This still holds true: the cluster is still missing some things we’d like to add to it, like power cables for remote reset of the nodes, as well as other things that are hard to implement without shutting down our entire infrastructure. For this reason, we decided to build a small temporary cluster, which will house nodes with the most important services, so that we can finish our hosting cluster without a major disruption to our community services. In the coming weeks I (gamiee) will publish a community post about building this temporary cluster, and I will keep providing updates about the deployment as well as the next steps for the hosting cluster in weeks to come. More information will follow shortly, stay tuned.

A screenshot of system uptime on one of the nodes

PineNote

You’ve been asking us to create an e-ink device for years, and indeed we actually looked to make one as early as 2017. I even remember publicly ping-ponging ideas with the community members at the time and researching which SoC would be the best fit for such a device. At the time we were looking to create an alternative to the entry-level Kindle and other such big-brand e-readers. We quickly learned, however, that big brands heavily subsidize their e-readers via book sales and even if we sold an open e-reader at cost (or a loss), we still couldn’t possibly match popular devices’ price tag. Thankfully, the technology landscape and what is achievable using e-ink has significantly changed since 2017. Since the announcement of Rockchip’s RK3566 we knew our opportunity to create an open e-ink device had arrived. Early this year we made the decision to create the PineNote.

The PineNote in the flesh (prototype)

The PineNote is one of, if not the, most powerful e-ink device available on the market. It shares in much of the Quartz64’s pedigree, sporting the same RK3566 quad-core A55 SoC paired with 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM and 128GB eMMC flash storage. The PineNote is also fitted with two microphones and two speakers, a USB-C port for fast charging and data, as well as 5Ghz AC WiFi. Suffice to say, there is more than enough power in the device to serve its intended purpose (more on that later). The inner frame - the midsection - of the PineNote is made out of a magnesium alloy (similar to the Pinebook Pros outer chassis), making for a sturdy construction, while the back features a pleasantly ‘grippy’ plastic back cover with speaker cut-outs. The e-ink panel is covered by scratch resistant and glare reducing hardened glass. The entire assembly comes in at just over 7mm thick, which is approx. 1mm thinner than the Kindle Oasis 3, if you ever held one of those.

A closer look at the PCB (left) and internal layout (right) (images of engineering prototype)

With the base-specs out of the way, let’s talk about the e-ink panel, which is indisputably the most important part of the device. The 10.3 inch, 3:4 panel has a resolution of 1404x1872 (227 DPI), can display 16 levels of grayscale. It features a frontlight with cool (white) to warm (amber) light adjustment. What this means in practice is that you can illuminate the panel in dim or dark spaces to your liking. For those of you who don’t know, warm light is usually preferable in very dim spaces since it may significantly reduce eye-strain. I am also sure we’ll eventually see an automatic frontlight implementation, similar to KDE’s ‘Night Color’ or GNOME’s ‘Night Light’, which allow the OS to reduce the monitor’s (in this case the e-ink panels frontlight) blue light based on time of the day. Atop the e-ink panel sit a capacitive glass layer - for finger touch-based input - and a Wacom electromagnetic resonance layer (EMR) for EMR pen input. We will be selling a EMR pen for the PineNote, but in the event you don’t like it or already have a pen you’re accustomed to, then you can use it with the PineNote (granted it is compatible with the Wacom EMR standard).

Edit August 16 00:09 UTC: A previous version of this post listed the e-ink panel’s refresh rate at 60Hz. This number requires much more context. It takes multiple frames to display most images on an e-ink panel. The visual performance of the panel also depends on the method of converting the screen image to data the panel understands. We will be unable to make estimates of the panel’s true performance in frames per second without much more testing and development. So we’ve removed the 60Hz figure for now. We apologize for any misunderstanding.

Wrapping up the hardware description section, the EMR pen (recommended by the vendor we’re working with) features a faint LED power on/off indicator, a previous/ next page button as well as an eraser button. I cannot say much more about the chosen pen at this time since I haven’t held it myself yet, but once I get some hands-on time with it I’ll be sure to share my initial impression. And while we can’t guarantee compatibility with any other pens on the market, we’re sure that people will test out their EMR pens and report back on the wiki so everyone can have a buyer’s guide.

We will be making the PineNote available for early adopters later this year for $399. The early adopter’s PineNote batch will ship with a magnetic cover (working with an on-board hall sensor, putting the device to sleep) as well as the EMR pen. Following the early adopter’s batch, both the cover and the pen will be sold separately.

PineNote in the magnetic cover and the EMR pen attached

As far as software is concerned, much of the work to run a mainline Linux installation on the PineNote has already been completed thanks to development done on Quartz64. However, the e-ink panel driver will most likely not be functional at the time of the device’s release in mainline Linux. So initial batches will probably ship with Manjaro built atop of BSP kernel 4.19, unless devs can get the driver to work with 5.XX kernel in the next few months. Time will tell. As for the actual user interface, we’re currently talking to the good folks at KDE and trying to figure out whether Plasma Mobile or regular Plasma (with panel-specific tweaks of course) will be the best fit for this particular device. As you can probably tell, this is an uncharted territory for all parties involved, but we’ll figure it out. Needless to say, the software isn’t finished - indeed, we don’t really even know yet what will work well with this technology and what won’t. It is just the beginning of our journey with e-ink technology, and it will take a long time and much effort to make the PineNote end-user worthy. This is very much an active-development development device at this time, and you should expect it to retain this status for quite some time.

Edit for clarity, August 15 19:38 UTC: We’re seeing a lot of excitement and “shut up and take my money, I’ll throw out my other e-ink devices tomorrow!” responses to this post, but remember that we are a community of developers first and foremost. If you’re looking to buy a PineNote in the first batch, you must expect to write software for it, not to write notes on it. The software shipping from the factory for the first batch will not be suitable for taking notes, reading e-books, or writing your dissertation. It may not even boot to a graphical environment. However, we are excited for what you’ll create with this device and we’re ready to take the journey with you. We’ll be posting more updates on software progress on this blog as they come in.

Its alive! Pretty impressive, given that Peter (pgwipeout) has only had it for 48hrs - picture by pgwipeout

As I see it, the PineNote will eventually not only make for a great device to read books, comic books, sketching, taking notes and productivity in LibreOffice (as someone who does a lot of typing, I am looking forward to connecting a keyboard up to it and not having my eyes burn at the end of the night), but also for browsing the web or listening to internet radio or podcasts. I’m sure some of you lunatics will also use it for terminal work and other such applications - godspeed and have fun with it, you’ve got our blessing. But jokes aside, an open e-ink device such as this really holds a lot of potential and opens multiple avenues to explore. Don’t think of it as an e-ink notepad or an e-reader, it is much more than that. I am looking forward to seeing what people will use it for outside of its core intended purpose. Schematics and other details will be up on PINE64 Wiki sometime between now and launch.

[edit 2:50 UTC, October 16] A preliminary PineNote Wiki site is now up with early schematics (v.1.0) and component list - click here.

What sort of peripherals would you like to see for the PineNote? As I already mentioned, I’d personally like us to explore creating a dedicated keyboard for it, converting the PineNote into a quasi-laptop device. What else do you think would be an interesting peripheral, expansion or add-on? Please feed us some good ideas, we’ll surely consider them.

You can chat about the PineNote on our forum and:

Discord

Matrix

Telegram

IRC

I talked to the good folks over at Destination Linux about the PineNote and our vision for this new hardware. During our chat we also talked about other PINE64 gear, including the PinePhone keyboard and much more. If you haven’t done so yet, follow this link to listen to the episode.

Before I wrap this section up let me clear one more thing up: I know that the introduction of the PineNote will lead people to think that other RK3566-based devices will follow shortly, but this isn’t the case. This isn’t the best time to introduce new devices in general, and certainly not ones based on a brand new SoC that is just undergoing a mainlining process. Just putting it out there to kill any unnecessary rumours.

PinePhone: hardware

This month’s good hardware news doesn’t end with the announcement of the PineNote. The PinePhone keyboard has entered production and we expect to have it available in the Pine Store in late September. I’ve now had extensive hands-on time with the latest keyboard prototype and I am thrilled to let you know that it feels amazing. You know that I am always cautious and try to avoid ‘hyping’ our devices - but my choice of words here is quite deliberate, the keyboard feels amazing. The keys are sturdy, easy to plunge and have a satisfying amount of key travel. The pressure needed to plunge the keys is also equal across the entire keyboard. The product team and vendor really deserve a pat on the back, they’ve done a great job. I have a few small form-factor devices with keyboards, and I can say with confidence that this is the best I’ve felt; thumb typing on it is pure heaven.

I’ve been using the keyboard with Plasma Mobile for a couple of days and it has been a great experience so far

The keyboard has also received a lot of overall polish - the hinges have great resistance without feeling overly stiff (as was the case with previous prototypes), molding quirks have been worked out and the fit and finish is now great. The keyboard now also has a really nice matte black (and slightly textured) finish that doesn’t attract fingerprints. One notable difference from previous prototypes is the removal of LEDs in the upper right corner of the chassis. Personally I welcome this development, the LEDs were bright and given the small size of the keyboard they were quite prominent for a lack of better word. But I understand that some may feel otherwise about their removal. Under the hood the PCB has been significantly reworked: we tried to implement all the feedback we received from developers, last of which have been received hours before final PCB layout submission. I’d like to thank Megi, Martijn, smaeul, dsimic as well as others who spent time reviewing the hardware and suggesting improvements. Thanks guys!

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

A video showing the keyboard prototype in action - video by Martijn Braam

We have now also sent out back case samples to developers, settled on a wireless charging solution and managed to figure out a reliable way to flash the fingerprint-reader firmware at the factory. In result you can expect an introduction of the fingerprint reader and wireless charging back case in a matter of a few weeks, probably sometime in early October. The wireless charging chip is compatible with both Air Fuel and Qi Wireless charging solutions, and follows the Wireless Charging Consortium standard. This means that not only will the PinePhone charge (as you’d expect), but the chip will also allow us to have a charging rate read-out and control over the charging process itself via i2c. As for the fingerprint reader, the firmware and open software have now been sorted out, and it ought to be rather trivial to implement this functionality in existing PinePhone Linux distributions. As I mentioned in last month’s update, the LoRa back case add-on will need to wait a little bit, because we need software to work via i2c. But the good news is that both JF and Lup have received sample units to take a look at.

Near final version of the wireless charging module (left) installed in the add-on back case (right)

Before I wrap this section up I wanted to ask: what other back cases would you like to see for the PinePhone? Any suggestions (barring NFC which we discarded for the time being) are welcome. We have some ideas of our own about what to explore once the current back case add-ons are released, but before I share with you what we’re considering I would appreciate hearing your ideas first - leave them in the comment section below.

PinePhone: Software

This section of the update was written by partner project developers and community contributors:_ Alfred (UBports), Dylan (postmarketOS), Peter (aka LinMob, the former PineTalk host and LINMOBapps maintainer), Chris (aka. kop316, working on MMS and Visual Voicemail functionality) and Brian (aka. 33YN2, PINE64 moderator and community contributor).

Images and videos by authors / projects.

Alfred: Let me start with Mirclient support. Ubuntu Touch on the PinePhone has always used Wayland for displaying app contents.This was quick to do for an initial bringup and the right step for future developments, but meant that certain functionality needed deep thought and reimplementation to allow the same experience across all supported types of devices and GPU driver stacks.

Due to the fact that we wanted to bring the same experience to PinePhone users as quickly as possible, we decided to bring Mirclient support to the PinePhone as an addition to Wayland. This practically means that Ubuntu Touch based on Ubuntu 20.04 will feature support for both apps that integrate well into the overall system as well as allowing Wayland-only apps to continue functioning properly. Wayland support will not go away and going full-on Wayland will be tackled after the Ubuntu 20.04 transition. This is a short-term solution to bridge the gap between the past and the future for both users and developers.

The next subject I want to tackle are trust prompts. The addition of Mirclient support in Ubuntu Touch 20.04 allowed us to bring one crucial feature to PinePhone users: Trust prompts. Trust prompts are a mechanism on Ubuntu Touch to securely ask a user for permissions to certain functionality, on behalf of the application. They slide up, stick above the application and wait for user interaction. If a user doesn’t want to allow an app recording audio then they are able to decide and change it later on. Integration into certain subsystems was necessary, from adapting almost-there Mir code to applying integration patches onto PulseAudio.This means that users can have a bit more trust in the platform as well as having their applications work properly.

Example of a trust prompt on Ubuntu Touch (left) and PinePhone running Ubuntu Touch 20.04 in convergence mode (right)

Ubuntu Touch 20.04 images should be available for the PinePhone soon and users will be able to switch to it either via the command line without losing their data or by reflashing their device.

Dylan: Almost every phone over the last two decades can be used in a car’s handsfree kit to make calls. Some of these handsfree kits also allow you to synchronize your contacts to the handsfree kit. This way, you can call your contacts through the handsfree kit without even touching your phone. However, that’s not the case with the PinePhone as it doesn’t support the required Bluetooth profile Phone Book Access Profile PBAP to achieve this. Fortunately, Bluetooth PBAP is supported by the BlueZ bluetooth stack using the OBEX daemon, but the PBAP code hasn’t been touched in almost 10 years!

I revived the BlueZ backend in the OBEX daemon to access the Evolution Data Server phonebook of the PinePhone (Phosh UI only) and submitted some patches upstream which will be available in the next BlueZ release. After applying these patches, your PinePhone can synchronize your contacts with any Bluetooth handsfree kit which can be found in cars!

See Address book synchronization over Bluetooth on the Pine64 PinePhone running Phosh.

Car handsfree working with the PinePhone, how cool is that?

Chris: While I have been steadily working to help finalize MMS support in Phosh, I am excited to show off another phone feature I have been working on: Visual Voicemail (VVM). For those not familiar with Visual Voicemail, it is a way to download and “view” voicemails instead ofdialing a number to listen to them.

I added support with two applications: Visual Voicemail Daemon (VVMd) and Visual Voicemail Player (VVM Player). VVMd is a user daemon that retrieves/stores Visual Voicemails from your carrier. VVMd is desktop environment neutral, so it should work with the desktop environment of your choice! While VVMd only has a plugin that works with the ModemManager telephony stack, I am happy to work with someone to add a plugin to support other telephony stacks, such as oFono. VVM Player is the GTK3 front end to VVMd. You can see screenshots here and here. You can also see a video of it in action below.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

A demo of Visual Voicemail on the PinePhone

Right now, Visual Voicemail on the Pinephone is confirmed to work on T-Mobile USA, T-Mobile USA MVNOs (Mobile Virtual Network Operator), and AT&T USA. If you want to keep up with the development (or help out), feel free to join the Matrix Room (#opensourcemms:matrix.org) or the IRC channel (#opensourcemms on OFTC), which is bridged to Matrix.

Peter: LINMOBapps now lists more than 300 apps for Linux smartphones now. Note that not all apps are packaged for your distribution, nor are they all what you would consider feature-complete. Also, the current technical implementation of the app list does not perform particularly well on the PinePhone (the performance is actually getting worse with every additional app), which is why I am looking to replace it with another solution. You can follow, join and help out the development on GitHub or wait for an early alpha version of the new implementation, which should be out later this month on alpha.linux phone apps.org.

Maybe its falls a bit short of the PlayStore selection, but boy is it an impressive and well documented list of Mobile Linux compatible apps

Brian: For those of you missing a way to share recordings of your PinePhone’s interface, or a way to share a recording from your camera, user u/UJC_theguy on the official PINE64 subreddit has shared his discovered method of recording video on the Pinephone at 1280x720 resolution and 30 fps. While it’s definitely not perfect, this is an excellent step towards video-recording on the PinePhone. Click here to learn more.

Pinebook Pro

Pinebook Pro owners have a reason to rejoice: a new and much improved firmware for the trackpad has been released. The Pinebook Pro’s trackpad is, or rather was, the main complaint people always voiced about the laptop. It lacked precision, there was delay between the input and the cursor movement, and at times it would act up completely - causing the cursor to skip from one part of the screen to another. All these issues are now gone, and you don’t have to take my word for it - 77% of people who performed the update on their Pinebook Pro and filled in dsimic’s questionnaire rated the firmware as “feels nearly perfect”.

The new touchpad firmware is a major improvement, and don’t take our word for it

The update process can be performed on any OS distribution and instructions for flashing are available for both Manjaro and Debian (and derivatives). I’d like to thank dsimic for his hard work on getting the new firmware bundled with the existing tools and writing up flashing instructions. He is currently also working on making the entire process more streamlined for end-users by making an attempt to package the firmware for fwupd. This will, hopefully, make the process trivial in the future. However, the current flashing process can be performed by just about anyone who is capable of following written instructions. So if you have a Pinebook Pro, I strongly advise you to carefully read dsimics firmware flashing thread on the forum and have a go at it.

In other Pinebook Pro related news, graphics on the RK3399 might be seeing some major improvements in the next few months. Merged back in June and now released in Mesa 21.2 is a new Vulkan driver for Arm Bifrost and Midgard graphics called PanVK, and the new Mesa release now also includes OpenGL ES 3.1 support for Panfrost. It should be noted that PanVK is not yet conformant, and that the work on it is still in its early stages, but it is nevertheless very promising and with it being included in Mesa it should see more contributions.

Back in July Box64 was released as the new x86_64 emulator for ARM64. While the Pinebook Pro community did previously have Box86 for running x86 software on ARM, it only supported ARM32, meaning you had to run it within a container or on a multilib system. With Box64 however, it is now possible to run software compiled for desktops on ARM devices such as the Pinebook Pro without having to use containers or other trickery. Of course, this technology is not magic, and there is a loss of performance through such a layer, even with the technology that Microsoft (WoW64) or Apple (Rosetta 2) use in their operating systems.

Lastly, I want to give a quick update regarding Pinebook Pro availability (we know that many of you are waiting to get one): IPS panel prices have finally started to come down, but their price-point hasn’t yet reached a level where we could manufacture a new production run. That said, we’re hoping to see prices decrease further in the coming weeks, at which point we’ll start exploring the potential for producing another batch. In other words, there is a good possibility that we’ll see another large batch of Pinebook Pros produced before the end of this year. Keep your fingers crossed.

Box64 opens up many opportunities on the Pinebook Pro, such as playing X86 games - picture via Kirfkin on Twitter

PineTime [By JF]

The activity around the PineTime project is still going strong: InfiniTime released version 1.3 (and many new features are awaiting review), WaspOS features a new advanced alarm application, Siglo is available on Flathub, FitoTrack supports the PineTime out of the box and we have two iOS companion apps in the work.

Let’s start with InfiniTime. As announced in the last community update, the release of version 1.3 came with a new watch face named PineTimeStyle. It’s a nice and stylish watch face, which is directly inspired by a popular watch face from the Pebble smartwatches. Another new interesting feature from this version is the battery level notification - the watch periodically sends the battery level to the companion app. Gadgetbridge uses this feature to draw a nice graph representing the history of battery usage. Another great feature of this release is the integration of LittleFS. While not apparent to the end user, this small file system in the *huge* (4MB) external memory is the first step to new features requiring persistent storage: fitness data, more graphical content, more fonts, more languages, etc.

New watchface (which some of you may recognize from the Pebble) and improvements to existing applications in InfiniTime 1.3

While development has been slower these past few months, WaspOS has again still seen a few big improvements. Most notably Micropython was updated to 1.16, and the merging of the previously mentioned Advanced Alarm application has finally happened. The new alarm application will allow you to set multiple alarms on specific days of the week, and it also adds a snooze option. There was also a major memory improvement that frees up 10% more RAM in applications.

There is also good news concerning different companion apps for PineTime. First, Siglo, the GTK app allowing InfiniTime to sync the watch with mobile or desktop Linux, is now available on Flathub. This means it’ll install and run easily on any Linux distro that supports Flatpack, such as Fedora.

FitoTrack is a privacy oriented fitness tracker for Android in which you can log and view your workouts. It records GPS positions, speed, distance, kcal and displays nice stats and graphs about your workouts. It can also connect to BLE heart rate monitors to record your heart rate while you’re doing sports. The good news is that it implements the Heart Rate Profile standardized by the Bluetooth SIG, the very same protocol InfiniTime implements to expose heart rate data to the companion app. This allows FitoTrack and Infinitime to work together out of the box without needing any further work on either project. If you were looking for some motivation to exercise this is probably welcome news.

FitoTrack app for Android now works with InfiniTime on the PineTime

A couple weeks ago I posted a call for Apple/iOS developers. PineTime and InfiniTime have a growing user base, and some users would like to sync the watch with an iOS device. It seems that my call has been heard as I’ve recently learned that there are not one but two iOS applications in the works: Comosus Time by Jim and Infini-iOS by xan-m. These apps are still in early development stages but they already have features like time synchronization, battery level and heart rate monitoring and firmware update (OTA). Let’s us wish Jim and xan-m best of luck with their projects!

iOS companion apps for the PineTime are in the works - Comosus Time (left) and Xan-m (right)

Finally, I would like to share this demo from TT-392 showing Bad Apple playing on the PineTime! I was blown away when I saw this 3 minutes and 40 seconds video playing on the limited hardware of the watch. It reminds us how limitless a hackable device can truly be.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqL8V3xWmxg

PineDio PineTime [By JF]

Last month we announced the PineDio Stack, an all-in-one development platform based on the BL604 RISCV MCU and the SX1272 Lora module, along with a LoRa back case for the PinePhone and many other LoRa devices.

A couple of days ago I received a nice parcel from Pine64 containing prototypes of these new LoRa devices: the PineDio Stack with a display, another PineDio Stack in a solar enclosure with a bigger battery, a LoRa USB adapter and a LoRa back case for the PinePhone. I’m sure you’re as excited as I am about these new devices, so let’s have a closer look at them!

The PineDio Stack is a development kit built around the Bouffalo BL604 MCU. This RISC-V processor is really similar to the BL602, except it has more I/O pins available. It runs at 192Mhz, has 2MB or flash memory, 278KB or RAM memory and supports Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) 5.0. The PineDio Stack also provides LoRa connectivity via a SX1262 LoRa module. Finally, the stack is equipped with a display, a heart rate sensor, a motion sensor, a USB to Serial adapter, a USB-C port, a GPIO port, a JTAG port and a battery charging chip - basically all you need for your embedded and IoT project in 3.5cm2. I haven’t been able to check this board yet, but I plan on porting InfiniTime, the FOSS firmware for the PineTime on this board Soon®.

PineDio Stack front (left) and back (right) with JTAG, a battery and a PineTime display attached

The next item I want to show you is the solar enclosure for the PineDio Stack. It consists of a big solar panel, a large battery and the PineDio Stack with its LoRa module. With this device, in example. you will be able to build an autonomous LoRa base station

PineDio Stack solar panel case outside (left) and the internal component arrangement (right) (images of a prototype unit)

Last month, we also mentioned that the LoRa back case for the PinePhone was taking shape (but we still need an I2C driver to be able to use it from the Pinephone). Here’s a closer look at the back case and the LoRa adapter itself:

PinePhone add-on back case disassembled (left) and the PineDio LoRa add-on module (right)

From what I can tell, it’s based on the SX1262 LoRa module and an ATtiny64, acting as a bridge between the I2C bus of the Pinephone and the SPI bus for the LoRa module.

Finally, let me show you the Pine64 LoRa USB adapter. It’s also based on the SX1262 LoRa module and relies on a CH341 USB to Serial adapter to connect to a computer

USB PineDio LoRa adapter

In the next couple of weeks I’ll experiment, develop projects and provide feedback to PINE64 and to the community about these really exciting new devices.

That is all for this month. We’ll catch you all in September with more news, updates and announcements.

July update: community developers portal

Thu, 15 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This month’s big news isn’t a piece of hardware or software but rather an upcoming platform aimed at community developers called the PINE64 DevZone. But fret not, I also have a number of hardware news to report - including a new LoRa device called PineDio Stack - as well as an overview of the software progress on our flagship devices.

Let’s get to it.

You can watch the synopsis of this month’s community update on YouTube (embedded below) as well as on Odysee and PeerTube. To stay up-to-date with PINE64 news make sure to subscribe to this blog (subscription widget at the bottom of the webpage), follow PINE64 Telegram News channel, the announcements channel in Discord as well as our Twitter and Mastodon.

I’d like to thank JF, Alex (clover), Danct12, Peter (pgwipeout), Martijn Braam, Brian (33YN2) and PizzaLovingNerd for their contributions to this community update.

N.B. Comments on the blog post need to be in English and follow our Community Rules and Code of Conduct.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Community update video summary by PizzaLovingNerd

TL;DR

Housekeeping: we’re creating a community developers portal called the PINE64 DevZone; sign-ups are open
PineTime: sealed PineTime units with InfiniTime 1.2 & newest bootloader are now available in the PineStore for $26.99
PineTime: InfniTime 1.2 brings new apps, improvements to RAM and ROM memory and various bug fixes; upcoming release will feature a new watchface
PineTime: WaspOS gets a sports app, a watch face chooser and a visual overhaul
PineTime: New firmware announced - Malila is based on RIOT and in early stages of development
PinePhone Hardware: final keyboard pre-production units now being made, production to start immediately after final review if no issues are found
PinePhone Hardware: wireless charging and fingerprint reader back cases being tested and reviewed in coming days; LoRa back case awaiting I2C driver
PinePhone Software: PinePhone now playing back accelerated video; app called Clapper made available
PinePhone Software: Arch Linux with Plasma Mobile now available to download; a SXMO build coming later this month
PinePhone Software: postmarketOS gets an update with quick suspend/resume support and number of other improvements in both stable and edge
Quartz64: software progressing at a very rapid pace and upstreaming of patches is underway
Quartz64: big missing functionality features include display output (worked on), audio out (worked on) and e-ink; latter will likely prove a challenge
Quartz64: we now have buildroot, Debian and a plug-and-play Manjaro OS images available for the model-A
PineDio Stack: a LoRa and BL602/604 development platform; allows you to plug in peripherals, has a small LCD screen and can be powered from batteries
PineDio Stack: can be used with solar power and fitted with batteries for a variety of implementations; we will likely offer voltaic panels for to fit the Stack PCB into

Housekeeping: PINE64 development portal

This month’s housekeeping focuses on one sole topic - the PINE64 developers portal called PINE64 DevZone. In recent months the community of active developers has grown significantly; I suspect that the number of active community developers has more than quadrupled since 2019, which is obviously great. This growth has, however, resulted in a side-effect of sorts - we (I in particular) have lost track of who is working on what. Moreover, with development taking place across various communication protocols and platforms, newcomers to the community willing to contribute code are forced to spend a long time looking through chat logs, finding relevant repositories, gathering resources and figuring out who-is-who in the community. We wish to help streamline this process, improve cooperation and build a system to disseminate development resources in an efficient way.

Registration for the DevZone is now open and anyone with an interest and experience in software development is welcome to apply. The portal is primarily aimed at developers unassociated with our partner projects (partner project developers will be granted a developer’s status automatically) and industry partners who want to contribute code or share their insights, but we’ll happily review any submitted applications.

DevZone sign-ups are now live

Let’s talk specifics. So then, what do we get out of it? We get an overview of active and prospectus community developers, their interests, experience and contribution history (to both PINE64 and other projects). This will help us better understand our community development pool and the available talent. We frequently find ourselves with a handful of early prototype devices and spend countless hours figuring out who would be the right fit for them. Development units sometimes end up in the hands of people who do not have the right skillset, are already working on a different device or are otherwise occupied. At the same time we overlook developers who would be an ideal fit. We have a backlog of ideas stalled due to the component shortages, and would like to get the show back on the road as soon as the world reverts to normal. We believe the DevZone will be principal in getting the wheels spinning once production of new devices is viable once again.

And what do you get out of it? If you’re granted developer’s status you’ll receive access to a knowledge and information sharing platform with early prototype data, pre-release schematics, development resources and an overview of ongoing development. Information disseminated on the platform will include things we don’t usually share publicly (not because they are secret per se, but rather because prototype details can create disinformation or give false impressions of the end-product). The system will give an overview of who’s working on what, provide a direct line to other developers and a guarantee that we see your feedback. You may also be invited to work closer with us on upcoming devices by reviewing prototypes; we’ll be choosing from this pool only. Lastly, we’ll label you as a developer on our platforms (where applicable), thereby making it easy for end-users and other developers to identify you. In time the DevZone will grow to encompass additional functionality, be it additional cooperation tools, an internal chat or something completely different. We’ll settle on what further features are needed together.

As I already mentioned, the portal is currently under construction and we presently don’t have a timeframe for launch. But if you are interested in participating in development on PINE64 hardware then I encourage you to register today - we’ll get back to you once the system is live.

PineTime [by JF & 33Y2N]

Let me start with really good news for those of you waiting (im)patiently to get their hands on a PineTime: I’ve just learned that the production of the new batch of PineTime is going well and, if everything goes according to plan, then single sealed PineTime units should be available when this post goes live! These PineTimes are flashed with the latest versions of the bootloader of and InfiniTime, so that you’ll be able to get the most out of your watch the moment you receive it.

As we announced last month, the factory was waiting for this release to start the production of the new batch of PineTimes. As a reminder: the ongoing component shortage forced PINE64 to use a slightly different accelerometer for this new batch, since the original one was not available anymore, and InfiniTime needed to add support for this new chip to ensure features like step counting and wake on wrist rotation would work as expected.

The 1.2.0 version of the firmware includes a new metronome application, improves the stopwatch app and brings about many improvements and bug fixes. We’ve also worked on memory optimizations which freed up quite a lot of space in both RAM and ROM memories. This will allow us to ensure that we’ll be able to add more features to the firmware in the future. As always, InfiniTime developers didn’t stop at this, and we are already working on the next release that will bring, among other things, a new stylish watchface!

Left: metronome // Right: stopwatch

In other PineTime news, WaspOS has seen a few improvements merged recently in the form of an early sports app which currently lacks polish cosmetically, a watch face chooser which shows a full screen preview of various watch faces to let the user decide which one to use, new icons, and bug fixes. Further, of note recently a pull request has been created that aims to add an advanced alarm application (much more featureful than the existing alarm app).

This month, I’m really happy to highlight a newcomer to the world of PineTime firmwares: Malila by Maarten de Jong (Arteeh). Maarten have previously been working on UI designs, a flasher app and a GTK companion app for WaspOS. His latest project, Malila, is no less than a fully-featured firmware for the PineTime based on RIOT OS. Here’s the announcement he made earlier in the chat rooms:

Hi community, I wanted to share something I’m working on: https://github.com/arteeh/malila

It’s a simple firmware for the Pinetime, based on RIOT. It doesn’t have any functionality, and it doesn’t support the bootloader yet, so as an end user don’t expect anything from it just yet :)

I started working on this to experiment with ways to fight the 8hz refresh rate bottleneck on the display. What I have right now is the following: A grayscale (2 bits per pixel) graphics system with two buffers, which we can use to only send a color over SPI when the pixel we’re writing to isn’t already that color.

It’s grayscale because a full 16 bit (65536 colors) buffer would be 115kb of RAM, which won’t fit. 8 bit (256 colors) using 57kb might theoretically fit, but would not leave room for any other software.

Anyway, I just started doing some initial work on getting a font converter (.ttf file to c array) working, and next up I want to write the code that writes letters to the buffer.

Long shot, but eventually I would like my project to have the following features:

- A nice looking Gnome-style (Cantarell font, Gnome icons and symbols) UI

- Micropython support

- Support for all the hardware (touch, hearbeat, etc.) and a way for Python programs to interact with it

- 6LoWPAN networking over BLE (RIOT seems to support this, and Linux has a kernel module for it)

Check out the repo if you want :-)

The project is still in its early stages, but it looks really ambitious and promising. For now, Maarten is focusing on the display driver and font rendering. Ultimately, Malila should look like the designs Maarten is working on in his PinetimeOS project:

Render of Malila PineTime firmware

Let’s wish Maarten best of luck!

PinePhone: Hardware

The first topic of the month’s agenda is the PinePhone keyboard, which I know many of you are eagerly awaiting. Those of you who read previous community update blog entries will already know that we created two prototype iterations and have been ironing out existing issues these past 3 months. We’re now at a stage where we incorporated most, if not all, developer feedback concerning the keyboard’s electronics, chassis (including fit and finish refinements) and fine-tuned the membrane responsible for the feel of keystrokes. There is now also a fully open firmware for the keyboard thanks to Megi, which I am happy to report will ship with the keyboard by default. As you can probably tell from the above, we’re very close to being production-ready. However, since we recognize the importance of this peripheral, we therefore also want to get it right from the get-go, and have decided to create a final set of pre-production review units (they ought to ship out in less than 2 weeks time).This will allow for any last-minute tweaks ot the end product if need be. Granted everything goes according to plan and no issues are found with these final pre-production units, we will start production immediately after receiving a green light from developers.

https://youtu.be/Gnb8K80h9aU

Left: final (hopefully) revision of the keyboard membrane // Right: keyboard testing at factory

In other hardware news, final pre-production back cases for the PinePhone have just arrived from the factory. The fingerprint reader and wireless charging modules will be fitted into the cases and undergo functionality and physical endurance testing in the next few days. If it turns out that the cases fit well, function as expected and we can source the necessary components to produce them in scale, then you can expect production to commence shortly. The LoRa back case will have to wait a little longer as we still need a developer to bring up the LoRa chip’s functionality over the I2C protocol. If you’re someone who’s keen on having a go at it then make sure to reach out to us in the comments section. Given current progress, we may see the back cases introduced at the same time as the PinePhone keyboard. I’ll write a dedicated post about the back cases once production starts - stay tuned.

https://youtu.be/qEXv_SrD0TA

Left: LoRa back case electronics // Right: PinePhone unlocked using fingerprint reader

PinePhone: Software [by 33Y2N, Danct12 & Martijn Braam]

The big software news of this month is that the PinePhone is now capable of accelerated video playback. The device has, at least technically, long had the possibility of doing hardware accelerated video playback using the mainline Cedrus media driver (demonstrated last year by Megi) which renders video using the Allwinner A64’s onboard Video Processing Unit (not to be confused with the GPU). Shown once again this year by Brian Daniels, not only is it possible to get smooth hardware accelerated video playback using gstreamer in the command line, but it is also possible to write applications that can utilize gstreamer and it’s hardware decoding, such as the case with the new Clapper video player. The PinePhone can output 1080p at 30fps with ease using acceleration, exceeding the native resolution; this is, however, something that may prove useful for those seeking to dock their PinePhone for convergence. In order to get video decoding working, at least for now, you must build GStreamer manually; however once this work comes to stable releases of GStreamer you can expect distributions to start utilizing hardware video decoding out of the box.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvmRV6IIGGo

Hardware accelerated video in Clapper - by Brian Daniels

In other news, there is now an Arch Linux ARM OS image featuring Plasma Mobile; this is something that many users have been interested in seeing for quite some time. The image features the newest Plasma Mobile UI (5.22) and joins the existing selection of Phosh and barebones installations - it can be downloaded from here!

The update schedule for the Plasma Mobile image is based on Plasma 5’s update schedule set out by the KDE team, which means that aside from bug fixes, there won’t be any new features added until the next major release is out. Aside from the addition of Plasma Mobile to the Arch roster, dni has made a pull request to the repository which adds SXMO as a UI option. We hope to see SXMO up and running soon, and a new OS image featuring this UI will be released by the end of July. Lastly, the community build of Arch Linux Arm has fixed a high priority security vulnerability last month - so make sure to update your installation if you have not done so recently.

Arch Linux with Plasma Mobile - by Danct12

Lastly, the postmarketOS build for the PinePhone has seen a number of improvements. The biggest one being the recent v21.06 stable release, which brought updated software for users on the stable branches of postmarketOS with Phosh 0.11 (and Phosh 0.12 in edge). The postmarketOS build also received quick suspend/resume support for the modem for those running the edge branch; this should increase the reliability of calls and mobile data on the phone. If you wish to give postmarketOS a go, the newest OS images can be downloaded from their website; you get a choice of three UI options: Phosh, Plasma Mobile and SXMO.

Quartz64

With Quartz64 now available in the Pine Store and shipping to early adopters, I will focus on the software progress this month. Those of you who wish to learn more about the hardware, please read last month’s community update, in which I outlined, in considerable detail, the current and future Quartz-line offerings. Earlier this week I spoke with pgwipeout who laid the foundations for mainline Linux on the RK3566 SoC used in Quartz64, and he briefed me on the progress made. The official device tree has now landed in mainline Linux alongside a number of nodes. Presently a method for handling the RK3566 and RK3568 split is being devised - once a solution is found, developers will be submitting a number of RK3566-specific patches upstream. Among them will be the basic device tree for the Quartz64 model-A as well as the supported, but missing in mainline, nodes enabling various additional functionality. One key bit presently missing, but in development, is the VOP-V2 display driver that will eventually allow for display output.

One of the first Quartz64 model-A boards in the wild - also, we will hold you to your word Chris ;)

Other key missing components are: the audio driver, e-ink and battery charging support. The audio and battery charging functionality will take time but are likely to be incorporated into the Linux kernel in a timely fashion. E-ink display functionality, on the other hand, is likely to prove a major challenge. From an end-user’s perspective, the display and audio drivers are obviously the most important in terms of basic usability, and there is a good indication that both will be the first missing pieces to be added. Rockchip is also actively working on preparing u-boot support for the RK3566 and has pushed downstream patches to RAM init as well as added RK3566 support in mkimage program. A complete overview of the development status can be found on Quartz64 Wiki page. Given how young the SoC is, and the short amount of time the Quartz64 model-A has been available, I think it is fair to say that development is progressing at a blistering speed.

Manjaro running on the Quartz64 model-A - by Spikerguy

For those of you who wish to contribute to development at this early stage, there are now multiple operating systems to toy around with. Pgwipeout made a buildroot recovery image and a Debian installer, both of which pack all currently available functionality and the newest commits. Since earlier this month the Quartz64 is also able to boot Manjaro Linux, which features the same kernel and patches as buildroot and Debian, and therefore also all currently available functionality. The Manjaro Linux OS image is plug-and-play, which means that you flash it to a SD card (or eMMC) and it’ll boot up just as you’d expect. Given current software maturity of the Quartz64, I suspect it may take a little longer to see other partner projects port their operating systems to the platform, but once baseline functionality is fleshed out I am sure we’ll see wide-range support for the platform.

PineDio

We are happy to announce that another device will be joining the PineDio family on launch day: the PineDio Stack. The Stack is effectively an all-in-one development platform, featuring the Buffalo BL604 RISC-V SoC (which is effectively identical to the BL602 that is currently undergoing open-sourcing as part of the nutcracker challenge, but with more available GPIO) and a SX1262 LoRa module by our friends at RAKWireless. The Stack will allow you to connect peripherals via exposed GPIO, will connect to a small LCD panel, and the entire PCB can be housed inside a small sleek plastic case. It will also be possible to operate the PineDio Stack solely from battery - it shares the PineTime’s battery charging circuit.

PineDio Stack assembled PCBs

While we envisioned the PineDio Stack as a development platform for the BL602/4 and SX1262, it can also be used for a variety of other purposes. It will obviously be up to developers’ and end-users’ imagination what the device is best suited for, but we have already started experimenting with a number of different applications that use the Stack as a LoRa end-node and use of voltaic solar panels in conjunction with batteries. We know that wireless solar-powered operation for LoRa end-nodes is a highly desirable feature and therefore also exploring an in-house solution for such a setup. I am including some of our tests below - please consider them very early tests; we will likely have a default voltaic solar panel available in the Pine Store for you to pick up once the Stack enters production. Developer units will be available late this month.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Left: Stack powered by solar energy // Right: Stack inside voltaic panel case fitted with a 18650 battery

In other LoRa news: the PineDio gateway is still awaiting certification as we’re missing a part, which we’re told will be delivered in 5 weeks time. As soon as the part (a crypto chip) is delivered we’ll move to certify the gateway and proceed with its production. As for the PinePhone LoRa back case - the electronics and the back case itself are completed and, at least in theory, ready to go. That said, we’re missing the I2C driver that would make the LoRa back case work with the PinePhone. We are currently talking to a handful of prospectus developers who could be up to the challenge to bring up the required driver - if you’re someone interested in this, make sure to let us know in the comments section below.

That is it for this month. I hope you’re somewhere nice and warm and enjoying the weather!

June update: new hardware and more on the way

Tue, 15 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’d like to start by giving you all a quick heads-up: next month I am away on vacation (first one since early 2020), which means that next month’s update will either be very short or split into multiple posts. If I write up a longer post then I may not publish it on the 15th but at some other point in time. I haven’t yet made up my mind how I’ll do this, so just keep an eye out.

With that out of the way let us get into this month’s news - the biggest one of which is that Quartz64 model-A is now available for purchase!

You can watch the synopsis of this month’s community update on YouTube (embedded below) as well as on Odysee and Peertube. Stay up-to-date with PINE64 news and make sure to subscribe to this blog (subscription widget at the bottom of the webpage), follow PINE64 Telegram News channel, the announcements channel in Discord as well as our Twitter and Mastodon.

I’d like to thank JF, Alex (clover), Ondrej (Megi), Chris (kop316), Brian (33YN2) and PizzaLovingNerd for their contributions to this community update.

N.B. Comments on the blog post need to be in English and follow our Community Rules and Code of Conduct.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

June community update video summary by PizzaLovingNerd

TL;DR for this month’s communty update:

Housekeeping: improvements to product pages and getting started. A new shipping, stock and availability tracker added to website
Housekeeping: a quick notice regarding code of conduct, moderation and just being a decent person to others
Quartz64: the model-A is now available in the Pine Store! (4GB model - $59.99 // 8GB model - $79.99)
Quartz64: development is proceeding quickly, but for now this is a board for developers and enthusiasts capable of contributing
Quartz64: model-B, with smaller footprint, available at a later date
Quartz64: introducing the SOQuartz compute module, featuring industry-standard 100 pin connectors
PinePhone Hardware: keyboard coming along well, two iterations of prototypes built in past 30 days
PinePhone Hardware: the keyboard now runs open firmware thanks to Megi; keyboard battery levels now reported in Linux; review of second iteration reveals some minor remaining problems need to be worked out
PinePhone Hardware: delay on Wireless charging back case because TI chip not available (silicon shortages)
PinePhone Software: Plasma Mobile 5.22 released; many improvements and new apps
PinePhone Software: even more improvements coming in Plasma Mobile 5.23
PinePhone Software: MMS (mmsd-tng) functionality coming along; kop316 working towards a v1.0 release, already in Mobian and postmarketOS
PineTime: availability of single sealed PineTime delayed due to component shortages: replacement part sourced, but needs to be verified, tested and potentially enabled in firmware
PineTime: a lot of development taking place, including optimizations for RAM and flash storage; many new apps being developed, inc. weather forecast, likely to be included in InfiniTime 1.2
PineDio: It will take us a little longer to deliver PineDio gateways - component shortages, affecting Realtek PHY, forced us to create a V2 revision of PINE A64-LTS - used as based for PineDio gateways
PineDio: Board bring-up takes time, but we’re committed to bringing the PineDio LoRa-range of devices to the market ASAP
PineDio: work on outdoor gateway ongoing; antenna routing being done currently; outdoor gateway includes 3x18650 battery holder and PoE adapter
Pinecil: The Hammerhead kit is now available in the PineStore for $24.99!
Pinecil: Hammerhead kit features 2x heads, 1x custom threaded shaft/tip and a 500*C resistant mat

Housekeeping

A lot of work has gone into improving the Community website this past month. Product pages have been reworked to be more informative and to include additional resources. If you have any suggestions for further improvements to the product pages, make sure to leave them in the comments section. We also added a shipment, stock and availability tracker on the website, allowing users to check current stock levels, estimated availability dates for popular devices and shipping status information. The system will be further refined in the coming weeks, but I feel that this is a good starting point. If you’d like to see other devices on the webpage, leave your suggestion in the comments section.

We also reworked the [getting started](https://www.pine64.org/documentation/Introduction/Getting_started/ page on the website. The new page is a significant improvement in every respect. It offers a quick overview of individual devices’ software maturity, recommended operating systems, and links to further resources. We also included all the necessary links to join the community. Once again, if you have suggestions for further improvements, leave them in the comments section. I am really keen to hear your feedback.

You now can check stock levels, estimated availability and shipping on this site

The getting started page is now much better at actually getting you started

Next, let me touch upon chat etiquette and moderation briefly. As you know, a part of what makes PINE64 special is the direct involvement of developers from partner projects (as well as community contributors) on our chats and forums. Having developers from the different projects participate, work together and communicate with users is a major boon for us all. It is therefore alarming that in recent months we’ve seen an increase in non-constructive dissent. I don’t wish to dwell on this - but long story short, it is one thing to voice an opinion and offer feedback, and another to ridicule or be hostile towards partner project developers. Just because you don’t like a particular OS or UI doesn’t make it hate-worthy. After all, it is people’s hard work, and it is open software, so I’m sure there are other objects more deserving of contempt. Developers are people too and they have their individual sensitivities - how you communicate matters, please keep that in mind.

To finish this section off on an uplifting note: I encourage everyone to listen to the latest PineTalk episode, in which Ezra and Peter interview Martijn Braam from postmarketOS and talk about how he got started with smartphone development and much more. The episode is worth listening to for the intro alone.

Lastly, a quick reminder that KDE Akademy is taking place June 18-25. This is also the fourth year in a row that PINE64 is a sponsor of the event.

Quartz64

After months of work, the Quartz64 is now available in the Pine Store. Let me begin with a short recap: the Quartz64-line is a series of computers featuring the Rockchip RK3566 SoC. This SoC combines a quad-core, ARM Cortex-A55 CPU with a Mali-G52 2EE GPU. It is capable of driving a single 4K display at 60fps and the GPU uses the open source Panfrost driver. It also has the benefit of running very cool, even without a heatsink and under a sustained load. The Quartz64 is a powerful and versatile platform that will serve us for years to come, also as a basis for future non-Pro PINE64 devices.

Quartz64 model-A viewed from top

Quartz64 model-A front IO

Right now, Quartz64 is only suitable for developers and advanced Linux users wishing to contribute to early software development. Both mainline and Rockchip’s BSP fork of Linux have already been booted on the platform, and development is proceeding very quickly, but it will be months before end-users and industry partners can reliably deploy it. If you need a single board computer for a private or industrial application today, we encourage you to choose a different board from our existing lineup or wait a few months until Quartz64 software reaches a sufficient degree of maturity. A matrix-style visual representation of the software development status is available on our Wiki. It will be updated as new milestones are reached. You can also follow, and contribute to, the ongoing development on GitLab. You can learn more about the Quartz64 model-A from my previous community updates written in February, March and May.

The model-A footprint matches our ROCKPro64 and PINE A64-LTS boards. It can be used as a stand-alone computer as well as a development platform for future PINE64 devices.

The board features an extensive I/O configuration, including:

Gigabit Ethernet
Digital video and audio out
Three USB 2.0 ports
One USB 3.0 port
One SATA 3.0 (6Gbps) port
One eMMC slot
One microSD slot
Embedded DisplayPort (eDP)
E-ink display connector
MiPi DSI 4 lanes
MiPi CSI 4 lanes
Touch Panel port
Lithium-Ion Polymer battery charger and power supply
2x10 GPIO header pins
PCIe ×1 open-ended slot

We are also providing an optional WiFi 802.11 AC +Bluetooth 5.0 module which interfaces with the board via SDIO 3.0. An alternate module featuring the Bouffalo 602 RISC-V 802.11n + BLE 5.0 module, currently undergoing open-sourcing, will also be available for the board in the future.

The Quartz64 model-A is available in two RAM configurations at launch:

4GB LPDDR4 RAM - $59.99
8GB LPDDR4 RAM - $79.99

As always, you’ll find complete specifications of the Quartz64 model-A, alongside relevant schematics and documentation on the Quartz64 sub-section of the PINE64 Wiki.

In the coming months you will also see us introduce the Quartz64 model-B, a physically smaller board, sharing the same footprint of our ROCK64 computer. The smaller size means this device is great for education, tinkering, personal projects, and similar applications. However, the smaller form factor limits the available IO. For this reason, the Quartz64 model-B will not be used as a development platform for our future devices in consumer form factors. WiFi and Bluetooth are integrated on the Quartz64 model-B. Users will be given a choice of either the BL-602 RISC-V 802.11n and BLE 5.0 module, currently undergoing open-sourcing, or an AP6256 802.11ac WiFi + Bluetooth 5.0 module. I wrote about the model-B at some length in the April community update, if you want to learn more.

Quartz64 model-B top / bottom (prototype)

Lastly, I am happy to introduce you to the newest member of the Quartz-line of products: the SOQuartz. The SOQuartz is a compute module that is software compatible and built on the same architecture as the Quartz64 single board computers. The module will share the Quartz64 RAM configuration and host onboard eMMC flash storage. Flash storage can be added via the eMMC socket (it accepts standard PINE64 eMMC modules) or by having it soldered on the back-side of the PCB. The option for a soldered-on eMMC adds a degree of flexibility for industry partners who may wish to standardise a hardware rollout.

The SOQuartz comes equipped with an Azurewave AW-CM256SM WiFi 802.11ac Bluetooth and WiFi module with an U.FL antenna connector. On the bottom of the PCB you will find the now industry-standard 100-pin high density connectors. This means that it will be possible to use the SOQuartz as a drop-in replacement for the most popular solution on the market.

SOQuartz top (prototype)

SOQuartz bottom (prototype)

I’d like to end by thanking everyone who has helped us create the Quartz64, in particular community developers who have been working on it for the past 3 months. Their feedback and insights made the Quartz64 model-A a much better device. We’re interested, what would you use Quartz64 to create? Are you getting in early to learn about the RK3566 and build the open-source drivers that will make it great? Or will it be exactly what you need to build the project you’ve always dreamed of, after some more hardware enablement? Let us know in the comments.

PinePhone

Hardware

Since last month’s update we’ve sent out two iterations of PinePhone keyboard prototypes to developers for the purpose of internal testing and review. I’ve received the first iteration myself and offered extensive feedback to the product team. As you’d expect from a prototype device, there were some issues. Aside from some relatively minor fit and finish problems, and a few oversights (e.g. the wrong number of holes for LED lights), the biggest problem I encountered was the keyboard’s stiffness. Our first pass at the keyboard membrane resulted in very stiff domes, which made it difficult to plunge the keys. There were also a handful of issues with the electronics, which is something Megi writes about in a post on his blog. I highly encourage you to read his blog posts.

Front view of PinePhone with keyboard next to a 3DS for scale

Side view of PinePhone with keyboard next to a 3DS for scale

Based on feedback from the first prototypes, the second iteration included fixes to all listed issues and improved on the feature-set. New membranes were created and installed, the chassis was improved, and the electronics circuitry significantly reworked. We now also have the source code from the keyboard vendor and will be working with Megi, Samuel and others to make it flashable. Granted no further issues are found with the electronics in testing, we may be moving to production soon - stay tuned.

Last minute edit and a follow-up to the above: Megi received his keyboard just the other day, and has already managed to get open firmware running on it. I spoke to him briefly in the chat yesterday, July 13th, about his initial impressions of the keyboard; he confirmed for me that the enter and space keys are now well stabilised (an issue on the first prototype) and that keys can be plunged with ease. Moreover, the keyboard’s internal battery can now be detected by Linux, and even display battery levels separately to the PinePhones battery. That said, some issues related to electronics still remain - a short somewhere in the electronics causes dual inputs and ghost inputs. There is also some work yet to be done on the feel of the keys, as there is a degree of inconsistency between rows. Megi is currently exploring the root cause of these problems - ghost-inputs in particular.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

PinePhone keyboard running open firmware - by Megi

One last thing I want to mention with respect to this topic: early feedback from the community indicated that many people would be interested in incorporating additional functionality into the keyboard. As a result of this, there is now a breakout header on the keyboard’s PCB, which will allow you to add LoRa and Qi wireless charging, and potentially also other peripherals in the future. However, due to the limited internal space inside the chassis, this will require soldering and as such is more of a nod towards hardware hackers rather than an end-user feature. In other words, we’re making it easy to add the functionality for those who are up-to-the-task.

Speaking of additional functionality, the PinePhone back-cases are coming along but it may take a bit longer than we initially anticipated. We’ve run into some issues, related to current component shortages - the TI wireless charging chip we settled on for the charging back case is currently very difficult to source, and we’re not happy with the performance of alternative options. I know that they’ve been pushed back already a few times, but we really want for the back cases to turn out great. I am leaving you with a handful of pictures of the current progress.

New prototype of back case for LoRa, fingerprint scanner and Wireless charging - electronics missing in picture

Before we move onto the software section, I need to shoehorn a short hardware-related notice into this part of the post. A new and improved quick start guide that will ship with future BE PinePhones is now available and has been uploaded online. Credit for the new guide’s layout and illustrations goes to Chris (Funeral). I actually do not know with certainty if PinePhones shipping this month will include this or the older quick start guide version, so if you’re waiting for your PinePhone then please read the one linked above; it is significantly better.

Software

New release of Plasma Mobile 5.22 [by Brian (33YN2)]

Plasma Mobile has seen tremendous progress for the current 5.22 release, and there is a lot still yet to come in Plasma 5.23. As outlined by the Plasma Mobile June blog post, a new audio overlay that allows fined tuned control of per-application audio (including the microphone input volume) has landed for next update in October, and there have also been lots of new homescreen improvements such as multiple home screen pages and the groundwork for customizable home screen support. Lots of bug fixes have also landed, with lots more to come in 5.23.

There has also been a lot of work that has gone into the growing list of applications for Plasma Mobile. Two new plasma mobile applications have arrived such as the Mastodon client app called Tokodon, and the new podcast app called Kasts. Also notable is that back in march a YouTube music app called AudioTube, and a YouTube app called Plasmatube were also created. Work is also being done on a Plasma Mobile email client, though that is still very early in development.

Volume & output control on newest Plasma Mobile is amazing - screenshot via KDE

MMS (mmsd-tng) functionality and development [By Chris (kop316)]

I want to update you all on the state of Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) on the Pinephone. If you are in a few countries where MMS is frequently used, a lack of this functionality can be a major show stopper for using the Pinephone as a daily driver. I am the author of mmsd-tng; mmsd-tng is a backend daemon to support MMS in Linux. In its current state, it completely supports MMS and is currently found in Mobian (Unstable), PostmarketOS, and Fedora repositories! Since it is a backend, any chat application can work with it, or it can run in a stand alone mode, though it isn’t terribly useful in this mode. The mmsd-tng front ends I am aware of are:

As for future work, I have been working towards integrating MMS support into Chatty, to complete MMS support for the Phosh stack. Once MMS support in Chatty is integrated, I will release a 1.0~release of mmsd-tng. Modem Manager’s new release (1.18) should also allow mmsd-tng to completely support MMS on carriers that split their MMS and data APN. If you want to keep up with development (or help out), feel free to join the Matrix Room (#opensourcemms:matrix.org) or the IRC channel (#opensourcemms on OFTC), which is bridged to Matrix.

If you have been thinking of contributing to open source development, I highly encourage you to do it! This is my first open source contribution and my previous experience with C is minimal. I can personally attest to the inclusiveness, patience, and professionalism of the Mobian, PostmarketOS, and Purism development teams. At no point was my lack of experience/newness to open source a barrier to my contributions, as all of those development teams are fantastic mentors who want to see me succeed as an open source developer. If you want to contribute, you will find the same welcoming experience as I have.

PineTime [by JF]

Last month, we announced the availability of a new batch of PineTimes in the Store in June, but… that component shortage struck again! The production is currently stopped due to the vendor being unable to provide a part needed for the PineTime - more specifically, the acceleration sensor. This sensor enables features like step counting and wake on wrist rotation, for example. The factory couldn’t find another source for this component and provided us with an alternative option - replace the BMA421 with the BMA425! Although the new component is very similar to the old one, we now need to ensure that InfiniTime is working properly with the replacement, and provide an update to support it if needed. This will unfortunately take a bit of time, but 2 units equipped with this new component have already been shipped to me and should have arrived by the time you read these lines.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Ezra (Elatronion) took a close look at the PineTime earlier this month, check out his video.

On the development side, a lot of work is happening behind the scenes, with many refactorings, bug fixes and optimizations, mainly related to RAM and flash memory usage. We are also working towards leveraging the external flash memory, which, with its huge size of 4MB, will allow us to store many more pictures, fonts and icons while leaving enough room to add a lot more features to the firmware down the line!

As the project grows, many new contributors have also joined the party - to this date, 58 contributors are working on the project. And, while I was busy debugging a nasty stack corruption issue, these contributors continued their work and created pull-requests with many interesting features: a new watchface, a metronome app, a weather app, UI improvements, and many bug fixes. InfiniTime v1.2, which we plan to release Soon(TM), is looking really good! Keep an eye out for when it drops.

PineDio

We are striving to bring our indoor and outdoor PineDio LoRa gateways, as well as the various end-nodes, to the Pine Store as soon as possible. I’ve devoted a lengthy section to all the PineDio gear in the works in last month’s update, so make sure to read that first in case you missed it. We initially hoped to make the hardware available this month, however it may take a little longer for us to bring the devices to the market. Let me give you a complete run-down of why it will take us a bit longer (if you’re not interested in the details, skip to the third paragraph).

Just as we were preparing to submit the gateway for certification we learnt that the Realtek Gigabit PHY used on the PINE A64-LTS - that is the brains of the PineDio gateway - can no longer be sourced (if you’re unaware of ongoing global component shortages, please read the February and March updates housekeeping sections). As a result of this, we had to introduce a new revision of the PINE A64-LTS (v2.0) with the same PHY used on Quartz64 model-A. This was not the only problem we found; the gateway also uses the BL602 WiFi/BLE chipset, for which we still need a working driver in Linux.

Because of these issues we were unable to submit the gateway for certification, but we hope to do so in the coming weeks. Meanwhile we’ve been working on our outdoor gateway. Given how the outdoor gateway chassis are made of aluminium, all the antenna signals - not only for LoRa but also WiFi and BLE - need to be routed to the outside. While it may seem a trivial task, it is not; antenna placement, I’m told, is crucial on these kinds of devices. We are working closely with an antenna vendor to offer an optimal layout within the constraints of the chassis, and I am looking forward to showing it off soon in its final configuration.

A peak inside the PineDio gateway chassis - color wires attached to 3x18650 battery holder

3x 18650 pack (under green bracket) and PoE location (black rectangular box) on the underside

Lastly, a decision was made to include a 3X 18650 battery holder, placed on the underside of the mainboard, and separated by a metal plate (part of the chassis construction) from the PINE A64-LTS and the LoRa RAK module. Three 18650 batteries will allow the gateway to operate for hours if direct supply of electricity is cut off from the unit. Speaking of power delivery, on the underside you will also find a power over ethernet (PoE) adapter, which I am sure many people will appreciate given the convenience of only running one cable outdoors. The outdoor gateway is shaping up to be a very robust and feature-rich unit.

I will have more news and announcements concerning PineDio in the coming month, so stay tuned and make sure to subscribe to this blog.

Pinecil

It has been a couple of months since we had a section dedicated to the Pinecil in the community update. I now finally have great news to share, which warrants allocating some real estate to the Pinecil. Hackers and tinkerers rejoice - the Pinecil hammerhead set is now available for purchase in the Pine Store. For those who do not know, the hammerhead accessory provides a large surface area for desoldering surface mounted components. The set contains a special threaded tip allowing for securely mounting either a large (20mm x 15mm x 20mm) or small (15mm x 15mm x 15mm) hammerhead. The hammerheads are made out of chromium coater pure blocks of copper, and have excellent thermal conductivity.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Hammerhead in action resting on thermal mat included in the kit

The purpose of the hammerhead is to provide a sizable area for easily removing surface mounted components - it is effectively a heating surface that may be used in conjunction with or instead of a hot air gun. The set also includes a thermally resistant mat rated at 500*C, which the hammerheads can be safely placed upon. I honestly feel like this is a great set for anyone who occasionally needs to remove more than a single component from a PCB and doesn’t have a hot air gun on hand. The set is available for $24.99 and if you’re interested I suggest you pick one straight away - most Pinecil accessories tend to sell out quickly. I am leaving you with two videos of the Pinecil equipped with the hammerhead tip in action above.

Contents of the Hammerhead kit

That is all for this month’s update, go forth and comment!

We are KDE patrons

Wed, 02 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

KDE is a project near and dear to our hearts. The original Pinebook, which forged the path for our current hardware lineup, was the first PINE64 device to ship with KDE Plasma Desktop. This was in early 2017. Fast forward to today, both the PinePhone and Pinebook Pro - our current flagship devices - ship with their respective Plasma user interfaces atop of the Manjaro operating system. As many of you surely also remember, earlier this year a dedicated KDE community edition of the PinePhone was sold with the intention to boost development of the Plasma Mobile user interface on the PinePhone.

Suffice it to say, we have a long-standing and close relationship with KDE. Therefore it gives me great pleasure to announce that PINE64 has been made a patron by KDE e.V.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank KDE e.V. and all the developers I’ve had the pleasure to work with over the years as well as KDE community members, who have been very supportive of what we do. This most recent development in our mutual journey will surely result in closer cooperation and a tighter integration of KDE’s technology on our hardware platforms. Many good things will come from this - stay tuned.

Read the full announcement on KDE’s website.

FemtoStar: taking aim for the stars

Wed, 19 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Networking and communication is something that has been on our minds as of late. As many of you are surely aware, we have started developing our own solution to private and secure peer-to-peer and group text messaging based on the PineDio gateway system, available next month. While we have high hopes for this system, we are also aware of its limitations. Voice communication and higher-than LoRa® data speeds is something we all rely on in our daily lives, and nothing will change this. If there was only a way to network via a secure and open source friendly manner - enter FemtoStar.

FemtoStar is a mobile satellite service working towards creating a satellite constellation for open and private communications around the globe. Their satellites as well as ground infrastructure run open source software atop of open hardware. The system can be accessed without needing to go through an official gateway, and anyone is welcome to review the source files as well as the code. FemtoStar’s vision is one of a privacy-respecting and net-neutral mobile satellite service that can be accessed by anyone, anywhere and at any time. Moreover, users’ hardware can be used to access the satellite network without prior consent from FemtoStar. All hardware can be used both to connect directly to satellites and to operate on-the-ground services. As for payments: ‘credit processing takes place on-satellite, and works even when no official ground station is available’.

We have now been talking to the people behind the FemtoStar project for some time, and we’ve been both impressed and captivated by their vision. Their idea of a low-cost and decentralized network allowing anonymous, geolocation-resistant communications is something we believe that our community can get behind. To anyone reading this, it is probably clear that we and FemtoStar have many convergent goals. A PineDio gateway can service the neighbourhood with text messaging, while a FemtoStar gateway can service an entire continent with data speeds fast enough to make phone calls or browse the web. In the weeks and months to come we will share more information concerning our mutual engagement, but in the meantime make sure to join their Matrix channel and give their FAQ a thorough read for more insights.

“The FemtoStar Project is excited to see PINE64 join our efforts to develop the world’s first private, truly open-infrastructure, 100-percent-free-and-open-source wide-area communications network. We expect PINE64’s experience with manufacturing and distribution of affordable, mass-market hardware to play a key role in making FemtoStar usable to the largest number of people possible, and look forward to integrating PINE64’s terrestrial LoRa network with FemtoStar’s satellite constellation.”

~ The FemtoStar Project

May Update: Connection Established

Sat, 15 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Let me start by welcoming the newcomers! If you are a new Pinebook Pro or PinePhone BE owner, make sure to pop by the chat or the forum and say hello to the community.

A quick note before we get into it: we have narrowed the width of the blogpost pages, thereby hopefully making entries easier to read. This caused some issues on mobile Firefox and Opera browsers. We believe the issue is now fixed, but if you run into any problems or oddities please make sure to let us know in the comments section. Thanks.

I’d like to thank JF, Alex (clover), Peter (pgwipeout), Biktor, Martijn and PizzaLovingNerd for their contributions to this community update.

N.B. Comments on the blog post need to be in English and follow our Community Rules and Code of Conduct.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

TL;DR

Housekeeping: shipping ongoing + ideas for shipping updates on the website
Housekeeping: SOEdge AI module available in the Pine Store & Pinecil hammerhead tip coming soon
Housekeeping: cluster hosting our services will be moved to a permanent server rack in near future; will affect chats in and forums.
Housekeeping: people behind FOSS2go are building PineGuild
PineTime: big interest in PineTime following 1.0 launch blog post; thrilled about the reception inside and outside community
PineTime: more PineTimes available in June, will feature InfiniTime 1.0
PineTime: many pull requests waiting to be merged; new version of Siglo and improvements to Pinetime support in Gadgetbridge
PinePhone: rolling production started - you can order the PinePhone any day or any month this year.
PinePhone: a close look at PinePhone keyboard internal review units; minor tweaks needed but it will be available this summer
PinePhone: wireless charging and LoRa back cases available in June
PinePhone: Megapixels 1.0 released with many improvements, including accelerated viewfinder and horizontal mode
PinePhone: ongoing work on modem update and work on VoLTE progress and findings
PineDio: PineDio official name of our LoRa project; expected to launch PineDio next month inc. getaways and end-nodes
PineDio: working in partnership with RAKwireless on the project, and the novel text messaging peer-to-peer & group application
PineDio: report from RTP and JF on gateway status - fully functional
Quartz64: new hardware revisions with developers; unless something unforeseen happens, available to developers in Pine Store in June
Quartz64: much software progress!
Pinebook Pro: many new faces in the community - welcome!
Pinebook Pro: Fedora 34 and Manjaro with GNOME available for the PBP
Pinebook Pro: production placed on halt due to component shortages; will keep you updated. If you want a Pinebook Pro, now is the time to pick one up.

Housekeeping

Shipping of Pinebook Pros and PinePhones has gone pretty smoothly and without any major hiccups. That said, PinePhone shipments destined for EU countries have seen a minor delay due to a DHL paperwork mishap, and I know that some of you are still waiting for your devices as a result of this. Everything has now been sorted out, so if you’re in the EU, and you ordered prior to April 15th, then you should be getting your PinePhone BE shortly. As always, I encourage you to follow the shipping update thread on the forum for the latest information about PinePhone BE and Pinebook Pro shipping status. Speaking of shipping updates: I am considering setting up a dedicated shipping update section on this website. For all intents and purposes it would function the same way as the forum shipping thread. I think it would look neater and the information would be more transparent to end-users, given that there is only so much one can do to edit a forum post nicely. What do you think - am I overthinking it or is this a good idea? Let me know in the comments section.

The second thing I wanted to touch on is the ongoing global component shortage situation. As you might already know, manufacturing devices has been very difficult in recent months due to a lack of readily available silicon, long lead times and massive price-hikes. We will continue with the strategy I outlined in March, and only sell inventory either already delivered from the factory or guaranteed to be manufactured. In short, you’ll see SBCs and devices drift in and out of stock on a fairly regular basis. As always, I’ll do my best to keep you up-to-date on device availability on social media and in the news channels.

In other news, the SOEdge is finally available for purchase! The SOEdge is our AI module based on the RK1808: it features a 3.0TOPS NPU, 4GB DDR4 RAM and two cortex-A35 cores. The pin-out is compatible with the SOPine, so you can also use the SOEdge with the clusterboard. Seeing as I currently do not have any news concerning software development, nor any additional hardware information to share, I am including the launch notification in this housekeeping section. To learn more about the SOEdge and its current software status (which is pretty solid thanks to gamiee’s work) please check out the March community update. For more information and other resources on the AI module, please make sure to check out the SOEdge documentation pages.

SOEdge and baseboard in the Pine Store

On a similar note, the hammerhead tip for the Pinecil has now been delivered from the factory, and will be seeing a release on the Pine Store in the coming weeks. Keep an eye out for an announcement when it becomes available. You can learn more about the hammerhead tip reading the last month’s update.

Hammerheads delivered from factory

I also have a notice to share regarding the PINE64 cluster hosting all our services. After nearly a year in temporary storage at BBXNET, the cluster is finally being moved to a permanent server rack where it will live out the rest of its days. This means that we will have to take it offline for a short amount of time. A temporary server, consisting of a small cluster of ROCKPro64 boards, will be used for the duration of the move. While static services such as this website or the Wiki are unlikely to be affected, I suspect that the move will cause a disturbance in the chats (the bridge will go down - and we likely won’t fix it until the move is completed), and we may also resort to temporarily locking the forum to prevent data loss. There currently is no set date for the move, but it could be as early as next month. A heads-up notification will be issued beforehand on Twitter, Mastodon, the Website, etc. I know people like this sort of stuff, so I’ll ask BBXNET folks to take some pictures for us.

Lastly, I want to give a shoutout to a new website dedicated to PINE64 devices and our community - pineguild.com. The website is brought to you by the people behind FOSS2go with the intention to serve as a news and resource outlet for our community. I know that they are also actively seeking contributors, so if you’re eager to do some writing about your PINE64 device then now you’ve got yet another outlet. I like and appreciate initiatives like this, and I really hope to see this portal take off. Go subscribe to their newsletter to show them it is worth their effort.

PineTime [by JF]

At the end of April, we announced the release of InfiniTime 1.0 together with the disponibility of PineTime smartwatches as “enthusiast grade end user product” on the Pine64 Store. This is great news for the developers of the projects, who can be proud of the accomplished work, but also for the users who will soon be able to buy a PineTime ready to use (single sealed unit). Advanced users and developers can also buy a pack of a sealed device and a development kit!

I cannot express how happy I am regarding the success of this announcement, which exceeded all my expectations. The article was shared, linked, tweeted and tooted all over the internet, and many popular sites covered the announcement. As a result, a lot of people joined the community chat rooms to ask questions, gave feedback and thanked us for the good work.

To give you an idea of the success of this announcement, here are some stats about it:

More than 38000 people read the article on the blog. This is the 2nd most popular article on the site. The influx of visitors put a strain on the cluster, but it handled it like a charm!
More than 300 new users joined our Discord server the day of the announcement.
The traffic on the Github repo of InfiniTime also quadrupled following the announcement.
Thousands of units were sold in the next few hours following the publication of the article, and the PineTime sold-out in the next few days!

These numbers show how much people were waiting for this release and how popular this project has become since late 2019. Thanks again to everyone who contributed to this success.

Oh and I have good news to share with everyone: a new batch of PineTime will be produced later this month, and I’ve provided the production team with new binaries so that those new units will be directly flashed with up-to-date bootloader and InifiTime versions.

Finally, if you want to have an overview of what’s available in InifiniTime 1.0, I recommend you have a look at this video review by PizzaLovingNerd.

This new release didn’t stop the developers from working on the PineTime, in fact quite the opposite. There are already a lot of pending pull-requests that are awaiting review before they are merged into the next releases. These include new and improved features, such as a new step application, new watchfaces, new wakeup features and much more. We are also working on improving the memory usage to make it easier to add new applications and watchfaces in the future.

Developers are also enjoying designing new watchfaces like this Casio inspired watchface and this 100% customized watchface by @SravanSenthiln1 (do you recognize the avatar of @PizzaLovingNerd, who produces the video versions of Pine64 community updates ?).

Casio inspired watchface by @SravanSenthiln1

On the companion app side, Gadgetbridge released version 0.56.2, with many improvements regarding the support of PineTime. This version improves the notifications by sending a title (name of the application that sends the notification, name of the sender of an email,etc.) along with the message, which makes the notifications much more readable on the PineTime. The functionality “find my device” was also added, which is useful if you cannot find your PineTime while it’s in range of your phone. Finally, this upgrade displays the battery level in the UI and in the notification area of your smartphone.

Gadgetbridge now shows PineTime’s battery and includes new features

Alex also released Siglo version 0.7, the GTK companion app running on the PinePhone and other Linux devices. This new version can now run in the background and send SMS notifications to the PineTime. It also brings many other bug fixes and improvements.

We talked a lot about software, but not much about hardware. This month, I would like to highlight a hardware hack by @alvarolsamudio, who managed to add wireless charging functionality to the PineTime - pretty cool!

PineTime wireless charginig hack by Alvaro Samudio

PinePhone: Hardware

I have some good news to share. For starters, the Pine Store worked really hard to secure PinePhone production this year. All crucial components that make up the smartphone have been sourced, and a portfolio of discrete replacement parts has been built up and secured in the event of an emergency. This will not only get us through this difficult year but also permit a continued rolling production of the smartphone. What this means in practice is that you will be able to pre-order a PinePhone any day of any month in 2021.

The PinePhone will, however, keep on shipping in batches due to the continued closure of the Hong Kong border with mainland China. I also presently don’t know if the time between shipments will be reduced by the rolling production or not. At any rate, the production of the next batch has already been scheduled and will likely start sometime early-next month. That said, it is obviously possible for unforeseen obstacles to cause manufacturing difficulties down the line (nothing would surprise me given current circumstances) in which case, you can count on me to let you know.

In other good news, the PinePhone keyboard internal review units have been assembled and shipped out to a select lucky few, including myself. Late last month I shared a handful of pictures alongside a video of an engineering prototype, which lacked some of the polish seen on the review units. As you can see from the pictures below, the keyboard has now taken on its final form. The laser etched keycaps look great in my opinion and I’m told that the texture of the chassis has been matched to the PinePhone’s back case. As you can probably tell from the pictures, the fit and finish of the keyboard has really been tightened up and is looking great.

Internal review unit PinePhone keyboard

However, it isn’t quite perfect just yet. The production team informed me that the keyboard’s membrane will have to be redone, although they didn’t specify why. I suppose I’ll find out soon enough (at the time of writing I haven’t received my unit yet). Regarding availability - at this point it largely depends on three factors: 1) how quickly can the i2c HID driver be made to work on the PinePhone; 2) how fast will new good membranes be created, and; 3) how soon can the mandatory torture testing be completed. Rest assured, we want the keyboard available in the Pine Store as much as you do. In the meantime, keep a lookout for updates - more info will be coming soon, once review units land.

Left: redesigned wireless charging PCB + coil // Right: LoRa PCB

Lastly I have - and you guessed it - more good news. We are planning to start selling the wireless charging and LoRa back cases for the PinePhone next month. The fingerprint reader case will arrive somewhat later, since we’re still working out sensor firmware quirks with the vendor. The wireless charging PCB has been redesigned since you’ve seen it last and the LoRa PCBA has now been delivered. I am attaching pictures of both PCBAs for you to check out. While the wireless charging case will ‘just work’ with any PinePhone right out of the box, since it is a ‘dumb’ periperial, the LoRa case will be marketed strictly at developers. We will make it clear on the Pine Store that the LoRa implementation will require extensive input from developers. Hopefully we’ll get it functional in record time.

PinePhone: Software [Martijn & Biktor]

Megapixels 1.0 [Martijn]

Megapixels 1.0 has been released. This version of Megapixels switches from GTK3 to GTK4, this is not for the sake of adding newer dependencies, but because this allows having working GPU acceleration in the camera preview. With the toolkit change also comes some UI changes that are now possible because we can now draw GTK widgets over the preview.

This means the custom rendered shutter/exposure settings are now replaced by dropdowns and the preview image now extends below the bottom row containing the camera controls. The blue tint bug has also been located and a workaround has been implemented making the camera usable without switching between the front and rear camera first.

The image post-processing pipeline itself hasn’t been changed in this release, but due to a smoother preview it’s now a lot easier to take sharp pictures with the PinePhone.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Video showcasing the accelerated viewfinder in Megapixels 1.0

VoLTE support [Biktor]

Last month I started testing VoLTE HD support in the modem. Both the Pinephone and the modem support HD audio over VoLTE, and the modem can be run at 8KHz or 16KHz sampling rates for better quality audio. There’s two slight problems though, which are:

Whatever sampling rate you use on the modem must be matched in the Pinephone’s audio subsystem, so if you set at 8K and you’re in a call, any other audio stream will have to match that sample rate, reducing sound quality.
The modem doesn’t support changing the sample rate at runtime, so it is not possible to dynamically set it.

Turns out 2 is a lie, the modem can actually change its settings at runtime, even during a call, the problem is stock firmware wasn’t really designed with that in mind and requires a reboot to use the new settings. Even more, the modem is capable of going up to 48K sampling rate, it’s only limited by the closed source binaries and the stock kernel. Right now, with the custom modem firmware, you can select your desired sampling rate to 8/16/48K, by issuing a simple AT command, and it’s applied at runtime.

That was the easy part. Now I’m looking for the best possible approach to get the Pinephone side of thing to be able to work in 8K for everyone using the stock firmware, but be able to switch it to 48K if supported by the modem firmware to get better audio quality.

PineDio

I cannot recall who suggested PineDio (get it, Pine + radio?) to us as a name for our LoRa project, but I’d like to thank whomever it was for the suggestion as it ended up being what we settled on. The PineDio is now officially the name we gave the entire PINE64 LoRA ecosystem of gateways and end-nodes. Today I am happy to announce that we’ll be fast forwarding the project with an estimated release date of late June. We will simultaneously release the PineDio indoor and outdoor gateways alongside a USB and SPI end-node, as well as the PinePhone LoRa back case. Once we have all devices built and delivered from the factory I’ll write-up an announcement post that will include pricing. If you’re interested in this project, then I strongly encourage you to sign up to our blog, follow updates on the relevant news channels as well as on our social media accounts.

PineDio outdoor gateway inside

Earlier this month we announced that we will be cooperating with RAKwireless on the PineDio. RAKwireless is an industry leading IoT solutions provider, producing high-end LoRa® gateways, sensors, kits and modules. Both our indoor and outdoor gateways, which are at the very heart of the system, will be using RAKwireless technology. We’re thrilled that we’re going to have an opportunity to work with RAKwireless and their community on this project. In both the cooperation announcement and in last month’s community update I’ve already outlined at length the goals which we will strive to achieve with the PineDio ecosystem. In summary, we are interested in traditional IoT applications as well as a novel implementation of LoRa for peer-to-peer and group text messaging. We have high hopes for bringing an alternative messaging system to all our devices.

Sending and receiving messages from PineDio gateway - by JF

Developers who have been working on gateway prototypes have already gotten quite far with their endeavours. JF informed me that, indeed, the gateway is already fully operational and both the RAKwireless LoRa module and GPS are already working well after some modifications to RAKwireless software. Both JF and RTP have managed to connect their gateways to The Things Network and Chirpstack, running locally on the gateways. JF also informed that he has already been able to receive messages from a LoRaWAN device on the PineDio. I also spoke to RTP about his work on the gateway. He informed me that sending beacons from the PineDio gateway works well, that the concentrator starts without any errors, and that GPS works accurately for him.

As such, it would appear that the gateway code is good to go, and most of the work required at this point will concentrate around the end-nodes. We expect that the USB end-node will be made to work swiftly, in part since we’ll have a third party help out with the process. The SPI end-node and the PinePhone back case (using i2c) will, however, require input from the development community. Once all end-nodes work with PINE64 SBCs and devices we’ll start exploring LoRa’s potential for peer-to-peer and group messaging. But one thing at a time.

Quartz64: Hardware

Earlier this month we shipped V2 of the Quartz64 model A and B to developers. The new board revisions feature a number of minor hardware fixes as well as a new Gigabit Ethernet PHY; the Realtek PHY chips we use on all PINE64 Single Board Computers (SBCs) is presently nowhere to be found. I wrote about this at length in last month’s community update if you’re interested in learning more about the situation. As things stand, we are currently awaiting feedback from developers regarding the new board revision - granted no issues are found in the next 2 weeks then the production will finally commence. As you probably can tell by the fast pace of the hardware’s development, we’re very determined to bring the Quartz64 to the market as soon as possible and usher in a new SoC-era for PINE64 gear.

Left: Quartz64 v2.0 board // Right: Quartz64 prototype

We are currently planning on making Quartz64 available next month. However, given the unpredictability of the manufacturing situation, please consider this a tentative time-frame. Once the production is underway, I’ll publish a dedicated post with additional information and an exact availability date.

Quartz64 v2.0 model B and A

Although the hardware will soon see the light of day, the software is still not ready for primetime. Indeed, despite a truly monumental effort from various parties and lightning fast development progress, Quartz64 is still in early stages of development. This is understandable given how young the SoC is and how few Quartz64 (and other RK3566 boards) are currently available to developers. We will therefore target this initial production-run at developers and technically inclined enthusiasts able to help in the bring-up process. The soon-to-be scheduled batch will be large enough to cover all developers interested in picking up a unit (and then some), but end-users will specifically be asked to wait a little longer. After all, it is in everyone’s best interest that these early boards end up in the right hands at this early stage of development.

Quartz64: Software [By Peter]

A significant amount of patches needed for the rk3568/rk3566 have been submitted to mainline, and a few have already been accepted. As things stand, the GPIO, pinctrl, iommu-v2, thermal, rk817-codec, gmac, PCIe, and power-domain patches have been submitted to mainline for the rk3568 chip series. There is also a basic rk3568 device tree in review.

The pace and activity levels are really high

We now have the V2 board in hand and have begun validating it. We have the new gmac PHY used on the v2 enabled on the new Quartz64 boards. Another piece of good news is that the SATA controller has been validated and works extremely well. The PCIe controller is in good shape, every card we have tested (except GPUs) works out of the box. We have started trying to spin up the Mali GPU using Panfrost open source driver, but the new VOP-v2 driver needs porting over. The new I2S driver will need to be ported as well to enable sound output. We are still waiting on ATF sources and the official errata for the GICv3. Work has started on mainline u-boot but depends on the ATF sources to work properly.

Pinebook Pro

Many Pinebook Pro units have reached their rightful owners in the past 30 days. Just as with past production-runs, the Pinebook Pro was once again met with a lot of positivity and praise, which was great to witness. I am also happy to see so many new faces in the Pinebook Pro sub-segment of our community - welcome! At the same time, I’d like to thank the veterans among you who have been actively helping out, offering suggestions and pointing new users to resources. Great job.

This is a really good time for Pinebook Pro owners. The past two months have seen a lot of development and new additions to the platform’s software portfolio. I wish to highlight two new arrivals in the Pinebook Pro’s software lineup: Fedora 34 and Manjaro GNOME. Peter Robinson, the Principal Architect for Red Hat, wrote up a complete and comprehensive guide for getting Fedora 34 workstation up and running on the laptop. Following the instructions will land you a mainline Fedora build featuring accelerated graphics on the GNOME desktop. Peter also links to an interim WiFi/BT driver in his notes, as Pinebook Pro’s WiFi/BT module hasn’t been upstreamed yet. I know many of you have waited for a simple way to run the newest Fedora on your Pinebook Pro, so make sure to let Peter know you appreciate his work on this.

Fedora 34 on the Pinebook Pro via Peter Robinson’s Twitter

Those of you who prefer GNOME over KDE can rejoice as now you have both an Armbian Focal and a Manjaro 21.04 ready-to-go OS image featuring your favorite desktop environment (I wrote about Armbian with GNOME last month, if you want to check it out). Manjaro 21.04 with the GNOME desktop features full functionality, including working GPU acceleration in the desktop, and a custom U-boot allowing other OSes to boot from SD when Manjaro is installed to internal eMMC flash. I gave the latest release a spin just the other day, and I must say that I am very impressed by the performance - it is really snappy.

Now I have some bad news. Pinebook Pro production will be placed temporarily on halt. The current component shortages make it very difficult to source the necessary parts to continue with the manufacture. The production team has done a lot of research in an effort to pump out another batch in late Q2 or early Q3, but ultimately chose against proceeding. In short, even if we resorted to work-arounds and use alternative parts and electronics, the end-result would be one of many compromises, which simply wouldn’t be fair to our community. On top of this we would have to significantly increase the asking price for the Pinebook Pro. I know that this is disappointing news but ultimately it is also the right call.

If you are on a fence whether you want to pick up a Pinebook Pro, then I strongly suggest you make a decision fast: the Pinebook Pro stock will last no longer than a few days. At present time I cannot say with confidence how long the Pinebook Pros hiatus will be, but I suspect it will be no less than 3 months before we can even start considering spinning up production again. Mind you, this statement is based on the current market situation. The component availability situation is presently very volatile and highly dynamic. The outlook may change at any time, quite literally. Rest assured that as soon as production becomes viable again, I’ll make sure to let everyone know.

That is it for this month! See you in the chats and on the forum to discuss this month’s update.

Let's make MiRAKles happen

Thu, 06 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Many of you are already aware that we are very interested in LoRa®. We hope to use the technology for both traditional IoT applications as well as in less orthodox ways, such as peer-to-peer text communication and even group text-messaging. This novel application potential is of particular interest to us, and in the coming months we will encourage developers to explore LoRa’s® viability as a text communication alternative to GSM/CDMA and LTE. We’re doubling down on LoRa® even at this early stage, so you can expect to see end-nodes for our SBCs, the Pinebook Pro, PineTab and PinePhone available in the Pine Store shortly. Indeed, we hope for LoRa® to become a staple of PINE64.

Group messaging over LoRa® is only conceptually plausible at the moment, but thankfully we’re not walking into this blindly or alone. We’ve been talking to the good folks over at RAKwireless about our ideas, and they’ve been both interested in what we had to say and very helpful in getting us started. For those of you who do not know, RAKwireless is an industry leading IoT solutions provider, producing high-end LoRa® gateways, sensors, kits and, of course, also gateway modules. Both our indoor and outdoor gateways, which are at the very heart of the system, will be using RAKwireless technology. We’re thrilled that we’re going to have an opportunity to work with RAKwireless and their community on this project.

“We are driven by innovation, open hardware, and community work, and that’s exactly what PINE64 brings to our company. Most members of the RAKStars community recognize LoRa as part of the development of IoT devices, however, PINE64 sees LoRa differently. With the power coming from both companies, we will enable people from all over the world to use LoRa technology in innovative ways, and most importantly, to deliver secure text communication.”

- Maria Hernandez

Thanks to the work of RTP from Privacy & Tech Tips, our gateways are already fully functional, and the setup process is as simple as flashing Armbian to a SD card or eMMC module and running the script. Voila! that’s it, you’re done.

Lastly, our friends at RAKwireless do not only have a highly qualified engineering team but also a large, friendly and active community consisting of staff, contributors and end users. María Hernández from RAKwireless, whom I’d like to thank for getting me up-to-speed on everything related to LoRa®, has been both very welcoming and exceedingly helpful in getting me acquainted with their company and community. She’s awesome.

If you’re interested in RAKwireless, and in applications of their technology, then I highly encourage you to pop by their Discord server (aptly named RAKStars) and say hello to their community. I’ve been in their chat for a while now, and I can say with confidence that it is a great place to get help with everything LoRa®. We too have a dedicated chat for our LoRa® project, which you can access on Discord, IRC, Matrix and Telegram.

More information about our plans for using LoRa®, our cooperation with RAKwireless, and news regarding hardware peripherals will follow in the weeks and months to come. As always, to stay up to date on progress please make sure to follow PINE64 Telegram News channel, the announcements channel in Discord as well as our Twitter and Mastodon. Give RAKwireless Twitter a follow too while you’re at it.

Gateway prototype front

Gateway prototype back

It's Time: InfiniTime 1.0

Thu, 22 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

When we announced the PineTime in late 2019 we couldn’t have imagined how popular of a project it would end up becoming. From the very start, it was evident that this will be a project like no other in our lineup. Following 18 months of intense development, the InfiniTime has now reached a release version, and the development community has made a decision; the Pinetime will be introduced to the Pine Store as an enthusiast-grade end-user product. Future production-runs (succeeding the one currently available) will ship with InfiniTime 1.0 and will be considered ready for daily use. This is a monumental achievement not only for PINE64 and the PineTime development community, but also for the open source at large. I’d like to thank all of you who made this a reality, my mind is blown.

~Lukasz Erecinski

Today I’m thrilled to announce the release of InfiniTime 1.0!

Before we go into more details about this release, let me introduce you to the PineTime project and its history.

A brief history of the PineTime project

The PineTime was first introduced in October 2019 as a completely community driven side-project, and positioned as a complementary device to the PinePhone. PINE64 decided on a simple hardware platform - a square body and a FOSS-friendly SoC, to make the developers life a bit easier.

At the time, PINE64 was just tossing a bottle into the sea and waiting to see what will happen. Will the community like the idea? Will developers be interested in working on such a project?

Well, we now know how the story unfolded; prospective users and developers turned out to be very interested in the idea of a FOSS smartwatch. I too was really excited about this project the moment I read about it in an article, and I was really happy to be one of the first developers to receive a PineTime development kit.

It wasn’t long before a significant community of users and developers gathered in the community chat rooms. People from all around the world joined the chat to discuss the PineTime, their projects, their experiments, their progress and their ideas.

The project reached its first milestone in September 2020, when PINE64 chose InfiniTime as the default firmware for sealed and development kits PineTimes. And today, 7 months later, we reached a new important milestone: InfiniTime’s first release.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Video version of this post by PizzaLovingNerd

InfiniTime origins

I started InfiniTime as a personal project. I wanted to experiment with the hardware and the embedded software with the vague idea of integrating it in my home automation. However, a lot of work was needed before I could even imagine using it for switching on the lights in my house: writing low-level drivers, working on the user interface, integrating the Bluetooth Low-Energy (BLE), working on Over-The-Air updates (OTA), just to name a few things that needed to be resolved and implemented.

Initially I called the firmware “My project”, and then “Pinetime-JF”, which quickly became popular in the PineTime community. It wasn’t long before people, users and developers alike, joined in and contributed new firmware features and bugfixes. They helped testing new releases and built the project from the ground together with me! Seeing all these people contributing, I decided I wanted my firmware to be a community project and therefore renamed it to InfiniTime.

Soon thereafter we were joined by other projects like Gadgetbridge and Amazfish, as well as more recently Siglo. These projects deliver companion apps which run on Android and Linux smartphones respectively. They added support for the PineTime very early on, and we are still working closely together on providing more features to our common users.

PineTime and InfiniTime 1.0: an enthusiast-grade end-user product

A few weeks ago I was talking to Lukasz about the new features we just added to InfiniTime. During the conversation we both realized that InfiniTime already provides a solid set of features, and that very few are missing before the PineTime running InfiniTime could be considered an enthusiast-grade end-user product. With this realisation, the race to releasing InfiniTime 1.0 was on, and here we are today at the finish line.

What did we achieve? InfiniTime is a fully-featured open source firmware for the PineTime, built for the community by the community.

Its main features include:

2 clock faces - digital and analog
Multiple apps (stopwatch, music control, navigation, heart rate) and games (Paddle and 2048)
User settings (display timeout, time format, wake up conditions)
OTA upgrades with the help of a FOSS bootloader based on MCUBoot
Heart rate monitoring and step counting
3 - 5 days of battery life
And much much more!

The project reaching version 1.0 does not automatically mean that it’s completely bug free nor that it can compete with mainstream commercial products. I see InfiniTime 1.0 as a firmware version that enthusiasts (people who like to discover new things, use cutting-edge technology, and maybe also contribute to FOSS projects) can use as a daily driver without needing experience in software development. In result, InfiniTime 1.0 is also the first version of the firmware which allows PINE64 to sell sealed PineTimes as an enthusiast-grade end-user product!

InfiniTime has a functional heartrate monitor app capable of displaying heartrate on the default watchface

_There are many options to tailor your experience, including waking the display on wrist tilting or tapping the display
_

InfiniTime is only one of your options

As any true open source project, the PineTime does not rely solely on one community or a single firmware. There are many other projects available that are currently under development and all of them deserve attention from the user base.

The most advanced firmware among those on the list is probably Wasp-OS - the Micropython firmware. It provides many functionalities and is really easy to use and program for thanks to the Python language.

I would also like to highlight Pinetime-Lite, a fork of InfiniTime by Joaquimorg. Joaquim added a lot of nice features and improvements, and has already contributed a lot of his work back into InfiniTime.

Wasp-OS is a popular alternative firmware to InfiniTime, with a lot of functionality and great features

Pinetime-Lite is an InfiniTime fork with many watchfaces, advanced features and complete end-user functionality

Acknowledgements

I would also like to thank everyone who participated, directly or indirectly, in the development of this project. This is an open source project with a strong community emphasis, and every contribution counts. A typo correction in the documentation, a major feature to be merged into the firmware, helping others debug issues or just words of encouragement on the chat and social media - we built this together, and it is something we can be proud of.

And I would also like to thank PINE64 for initiating the PineTime project and for trusting the community to build such an amazing firmware for it.

Download InfiniTime Buy the PineTime

April Update: New Developments

Thu, 15 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Before we start, I’d like to acknowledge that this community update was written collaboratively, with contributions from 7 developers. I hope that moving forward we maintain this dynamic and more developers, as well as community members, partake in the write-up process. If you’d like to participate in the next update then please make sure to reach out.

Now, let’s get to this month’s news.

I’d like to thank JF, Alex (clover), Bhushan, Dalton, Peter (pgwipeout), Biktor, Konrad, Brian (33YN2) and PizzaLovingNerd for their contributions to this community update.

N.B. Comments on the blog post need to be in English and follow our Community Rules and Code of Conduct.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Video synopsis of this month’s update

TL;DR

Housekeeping - PinePhone BE & Pinebook Pro orders prior to April 12th ship out this month & orders made after the 12th mid-May; follow the shipping update thread
Housekeeping - we’re giving 100+ OG Pinebooks to a good cause; thank you for all the suggestions!
Housekeeping - we’re Linux App Summit sponsors (again) this year.
Quartz64 - a close look at Quartz64 model-B; feature run-down and more
Quartz64 - model-A delayed by a month+, as GbE PHY chip cannot be sourced and will therefore be replaced
Quartz64 - incredible software progress; board boots both BSP and Mainline Linux now!
PinePhone Hardware - keyboard back April 16th, I’ll cover it separately later this month
PinePhone Hardware - wireless charging + fingerprint reader back case in production - prototype shown
PinePhone Hardware - LoRa back case entering production
PinePhone Software - Plasma Mobile status & day 1 patch for PinePhone BE
PinePhone Software - Ubuntu Touch on the PinePhone, a look at the progress made
PinePhone Software - Further work on the modem; better thermals + GPS now works in custom firmware, and progress with mainline Linux on the modem
PineTime - motion sensor now works in InfiniTime; wake on wrist rotate & pedometer
PineTime - InfiniTime UI overhaul underway and new features, including CNC
PineTime - working towards 1.0 release later this month - keep an eye out for blog post
PineTime - WaspOS progress report
Pinebook Pro and PineTab - production outlook for the year, hurdles and uncertainty
Pinecil - The Hammer was an April fool’s joke, but it is actually real
Pinecil - Thermal resistant USB-C cable & mat coming
Pinecil - We hear ya’ a see-through case will be available soon
LoRa - PINE64 LoRa gateways now with developers; a look at the hardware
LoRa - We’ve got big plans for LoRa - a list of end-nodes and add-ons already with devs

Housekeeping

Let’s start with some good news. As many of you are surely aware, we have both PinePhone and Pinebook Pro production-runs currently on pre-order. We don’t expect any major delays in the production and dispatch roadmaps of either device, and by the time the next community update goes live we’ll be seeing many new faces in our community. Granted nothing happens in the final days of production, and nothing unforeseen happens during dispatch, the first round of laptops and smartphones should be departing Hong Kong late this month or early in May. Those of you who pre-ordered prior to April 12th will receive your units in early-to-mid May. The second round of shipments will start in mid-May. Under normal circumstances, reporting on production and shipment is pretty mundane, but given the current circumstances it’s something that has taken center stage. As always, I’ve opened a shipping update thread on the forum, which I’ll update regularly. I look forward to welcoming all of the new Pine64 device owners to the community.

I’ll provide detailed production outlooks for individual devices in their respective sections, but here I wish to give you a general overview of how the silicon shortage will affect us, and consequently also you, moving forward. Frankly, we don’t expect production circumstances to improve prior to Q1 2022 - in other words, we’ve got a challenging 8 months ahead of us. Last month we explained our strategy for only taking pre-orders for the PinePhone, PineTab and Pinebook Pro once production is securely underway. We’ll maintain this strategy moving forward - likely for the rest of the year. As a result, the gaps between pre-order windows are going to be longer than they were in 2020. At the same time, due to the pre-order windows being effectively ‘squished’, I expect the time from the moment an order is placed until the device ships will be reduced.

Devices which can be bought outright will frequently drift in and out of availability in the Pine Store. This is because highly popular devices, such as the Pinecil or the SOPine, will only be added to store inventory once they are physically received from the factory; given current production uncertainties, only units in physical possession of the store will be sold. I’ll do my best to keep you all updated on availability throughout this year - make sure to follow the various news sources, listed at the beginning of the update, to receive updates.

The original Pinebook - my kid loves her’s

We also have some awesome community news to cover. As you may know, Pine64 has a commitment to giving back to society at large. To reflect this, we announced that we’ll be donating 100+ original Pinebooks to an established nonprofit (or more than one). Since the announcement earlier this month, we’ve been thrilled to see such an enthusiastic response from many community members. Thank you all for the great suggestions. We have now selected a few prospective candidate organizations, some of which I’ve already been in touch with, and will be making our final decision in the coming weeks. Once again, I would very much like to thank all of you who took the time to submit a suggestion.

Via Linux App Summit Twitter

Lastly, we’re once again sponsoring this year’s Linux App Summit, taking place May 13-15. It is a virtual event co-hosted by the GNOME Foundation and KDE Community, which spans multiple time zones and features some of the industry’s and open source community’s brightest minds. The purpose of LAS is to help grow the Linux application ecosystem by bringing together people from various segments of the Linux world. The conference features talks, panels, Q&A sessions in which attendees share their ideas on how to build a sustainable and competitive Linux app ecosystem. Attendance is free of charge and everyone is welcome to participate; registrations are now open. I hope to see many of you there!

Quartz64: Hardware

Before we move onto all the good news concerning development as well as the unveiling of Quartz64 model-B, we need to get some bad news out of the way. During the model-A production we learned that the Gigabit Ethernet PHY we intended to use is completely out of stock, with a projected lead time of 12 months. Moreover, the price per unit has increased by 850% (yes, that’s right, that isn’t a typo) making it unviable. We obviously have no intention of waiting a year for the PHY to become available again, nor to pay nearly 10 times more for the chipsets, so we will be replacing the original PHY with a different chip. We are currently weighing in on our options and collecting opinions from developers. As a result, the launch of the model-A will be pushed back by a month or more. By the time the next update goes live I’ll surely have a much clearer picture of Quartz64 model-A production status, so for the time being I have to ask you to be patient and to stay tuned.

As you probably gathered from this and the past community updates already, all things related to production remain in a constant state of flux. Last month I wrote that the Quartz64 model-B won’t be seeing a release anytime soon, and now here I am a month later showing off the model-B and announcing that we intend to bring it to the market at around the same time as the now-delayed model-A. This roadmap is, of course, based on our current understanding of available parts and present production circumstances, and therefore subject to change. Next month, when more is known, I’ll make sure to provide a joint model-A and model-B production update. If you haven’t checked out model-A yet, then make sure to read the February community update where I showcase and discuss it at length.

Top and bottom of the Quartz64 model-B single board computer

Now that I’ve given you a general insight into the production schedule, let’s overview the model-B itself. The board shares the ROCK64’s footprint and features all of its I/O, so for those of you using the ROCK64 in your projects, or in an industrial setting, the Quartz64-B will surely be a nice upgrade. The engineers did, however, manage to squeeze more I/O into the model-B than the ROCK64 offers; apart from the full GPIO, Gigabit Ethernet, micro SD, eMMC slot, 2xUSB 2.0, a single USB 3.0 port, IR R/X, digital video and an audio jack, you also get DSI, CSI and an M.2 (PCIe). The Quartz64 model-B also features onboard wireless connectivity. We’ll be offering the board in two versions: with a Realtek Bluetooth/WiFI chipset and a BL602 from Bouffalo, the latter of which is undergoing open-sourcing in our very own Nutcracker Challenge. For more details, you can find the schematics for the Quartz64 model-B (and A) on the respective subsection of the PINE64 Wiki.

Nice little board, isn’t it?

Closing this section off, I have some excellent news concerning software development. Thanks to the work of many people, notably pgwipeout, gamiee and Xalius as well as ezequielg and ndufresne from Collabora, we now have the board booting both mainline and BSP Linux. The fact that they collectively achieved this in just a short month’s time is very impressive. I’ve asked Peter (pgwipeout) to write a short but detailed development-status update for you, to which he kindly agreed.

Quartz64: Software [by Peter (pgwipeout)]

We are currently using the public facing development branches of Rockchip’s repositories. For Quartz64, this means Rockchip’s heavily customized U-boot-2018 and Linux-4.19 customized for Android. We are presently stuck using the pre-built SPL and Trust binaries from Rockchip-Android until mainline ATF is released. The boot system has changed significantly from earlier Rockchip generations - the new system is simpler, but will require retooling the mkimage tool to compensate for the new format. Here is what works as of today: for starters, U-boot allows booting from micro SD cards as well as eMMC, although the latter hasn’t been tested. We can load kernels, device-trees and initrd images. USB-OTG works partially too. As for Linux itself, we are now able to boot both BSP Linux 4.19 as well as mainline Linux.

Top: Quartz64 booted into mainline Linux / Bottom: Quartz64 booted into BSP 4.19 Linux

Linux 4.19 boots into userspace and some core I/O is functional, including the GbE controller, USB 2.0 and serial. It is noteworthy that GbE performance is above that seen on the RK3399. USB 2.0 works, albeit it is unstable with long cables, and Serial works only though FIQ-Debugger. As for mainline Linux, as of today we’ve got working clocks, GPIO, micro SD, eMMC (although it hasn’t been tested) USB 2.0, USB 3.0 and the GbE controller. Similar to the Rockchip provided BSP, USB 2.0 only works with short cables and USB 3.0 currently doesn’t function when cables are plugged in.

This is a very promising start, but much is yet to be enabled. For instance, PCIe interrupts are broken at this time. Using downstream Linux-4.19, PCIe cards are eventually detected through polling, but they are not functional; mainline detects the problem beforehand and doesn’t permit the driver to probe. It’s a mapping problem, see above. The USB3.0 problems are possibly related to the USB2.0 issues, as this appears to be a PHY problem. Lastly, reboot - which is handled through PSCI, that is provided by the ATF binary, is currently not functional. Everything else is untested as of now.

Compiling Linux kernel on an 8GB RAM Quartz64

There are significant challenges still ahead of us. We are working off the rk3568 documentation, which the rk3566 is a watered down version of. Unfortunately there are differences that take a bit of trial and error to trace out. The rk3568 GIC-V3 required Rockchip to implement significant changes in the irq driver due to architectural limitations. These changes will have to be ported to mainline Linux in a way that will be accepted. The Rockchip Linux drivers are incomplete and the mainlining effort has only just begun. We also need the source code for ATF to fix the reboot bug as well as work out other issues.

PinePhone Hardware

Let me start with some good news. We have the PinePhone production under control, at least for the foreseeable future, and despite the component shortages we’ve managed to secure at least 3 more large production-runs this year. Keep in mind that each pre-order and shipping cycle takes approx. 2 months. Hopefully, by the tail-end of the year the component availability will improve somewhat, and extensive logistics gymnastics will no longer be necessary to assure product availability. There may, of course, be some hiccups along the way, but here is the take-away: there shouldn’t be any issues with getting a PinePhone this year.

I’ve also got some good peripheral hardware news for you. For starters, the last parts of the PinePhone keyboard should be back from the factory tomorrow. This, obviously, means that the keyboard will not be featured in this update. But stay tuned, I will keep you informed on the keyboard later this month via another blog post or a thread on the forums - I haven’t decided yet. Regardless, we are finally going to see the keyboard fully assembled soon, and I know that many of you are very excited to see it in its completed form.

In other hardware news, I have an update regarding LoRa as well as the combined fingerprint reader and wireless charging back cases. Both back cases have been shipped off to be manufactured now, which means that we’ll see the finished versions in the near future. The lead time on the chosen fingerprint sensor is currently 6 weeks, so that plus the manufacturing time means we should see the built prototype this summer. The LoRa module will enter assembly shortly after, but may become available for purchase at about the same time as the fingerprint and wireless charging back case.

Left: fingerprint reader / right: wireless charging coil and circuitry

But let me back-track slightly; the new custom back case can house the wireless charging circuitry or the fingerprint reader. Both already work with the PinePhone. The wireless charging coil works because it is a ‘dumb’ peripherial, which doesn’t reqire any code to function, while the fingerprint sensor works thanks to the work by Zachary Schroeder. As some of you may remember, Zachary is the person who built the original prototype back case featuring a fingerprint scanner. The code already works and you are able to unlock the phone using your fingerprint. I suspect that this case will prove highly popular in the community. Also, since I know someone will ask, we will likely make it possible for you to obtain both the charging coil and fingerprint reader without purchasing two separate cases. The beauty of the PinePhone is that it allows for this sort of functioning. Lastly, I can well imagine that someone will probably find a way to cram both peripherals into the single case, but we do not officially support such a combination.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

PinePhone opened using fingerprint reader

PinePhone Software [by Bhushan, Dalton, Biktor and Konrad]

Plasma Mobile - by Bhushan

After the image was shipped to the factory several important changes were made in Plasma Mobile upstream. For one, Jonah Brüchert removed the workarounds added for angelfish, as a result the angelfish browser performance was improved quite a lot. Moreover, Devin Lin and Marco Martin made several changes in the user interface, like the top sliding panel that can be opened in 2 stages, and various other visual improvements.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

The performance of Angelfish is really quite impressive

On the low-level side, there’s an ongoing effort to improve the modem stability from the kernel side - you can read more about this in the bugtracker. There is also pending work in progress patch from NetworkManager, which allows to connect to Mobile data easily when using Ofono based systems like Plasma Mobile and Ubuntu Touch.

You can now pull down the top sliding panel partly (pictured) or fully

If you want to stay up-to-date with Plasma Mobile news, you can follow Plasma Mobile blog, and if you would like to provide a feedback or report issues to Plasma Mobile team, the please create an issue at https://invent.kde.org/teams/plasma-mobile/issues or head to our chat rooms.

Ubuntu Touch - by Dalton

I’ve seen some sentiment in the community that Ubuntu Touch for the PinePhone is not being worked on – and that could not be further from the truth!

Our big project at the moment is updating from the pine64-org kernel that many projects maintained for 5.6 to megi’s 5.10 or 5.11 kernel. This has been months coming, but we can see the light at the end of the tunnel. We’ve almost got all of the phone’s hardware working on the new kernel as well as or better than the old kernel. There are some great improvements coming with this update:1) Improved mobile network reliability; 2) Hardware-accelerated camera viewfinder – it’s no modern Android phone, but it’s much improved! 3) Call audio works much more reliably.

There are still some things to take care of, though. For example, it fails to boot very occasionally, instead sitting at the splash screen. This has caused many users to reflash their devices, expecting it to be broken when really they just needed to reboot. Obviously not in a releaseable state.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Performance with the updated kernel is really good

If you want to try out the new shiny after the more extreme issues are resolved, you should switch to the “Development” or “Release Candidate” channels in Ubuntu Touch. If you’d like to test out the absolute newest, though, join us in the “kernelupgrade” channel! You can switch update channels on your device by browsing to Settings -> Updates -> Update Settings (at the bottom of the screen or a gear in the top right corner, depending on your current Ubuntu Touch version) -> Channels. Select a new channel there and give your device some time as it downloads the new update. If the Settings app seems stuck, make sure the screen stays on and it stays in focus. Once the download has finished, you will be able to browse back to the Updates page and click Install on the downloaded update.

Modem part 1 - by Biktor

Work on the open source user space side of the modem had led to three milestones these past few weeks: better power handling and thermals, and reliable AT interface as well as GPS.

As for the prior, first of all credit where it’s due, the modem is already quite optimized in terms of power consumption, but being inside of a phone wasn’t it’s primary purpose. While the modem stays in low power mode when the Pinephone is asleep, it gets out of that mode when you turn on the screen. Latest changes to the userspace and kernel turn down CPU clock to 100MHz from stock’s minimum of 400MHz, but also try to keep it at that frequency even when the phone is active. This means the modem now produces less heat and consumes less power in any scenario, while maintaining the same data transfer speeds.

As for the AT interface, the modem has two ways of communicating with the Pinephone - the QMI protocol and the AT interface. While the primary communication channel with the modem happens through QMI, userspace daemons also need AT commands to adjust some parameters, so this needs to be done to ensure all the different applications receive the responses they’re expecting, and to provide additional functionality in the future. At this point most of the commands only emulate the expected response from factory firmware, but work is being done to reimplement all the needed commands and add some new ones that can be helpful.

Last but not less important, standalone GPS now works in the open source firmware, which brings feature parity with the stock firmware, allowing to direct the efforts to optimize and fix the remaining bugs.

The news of the modem running an open stack got media’s attention - article in screenshot

Modem part 2 - by Konrad

My previous work on mainlining the modem has found its way into the now released PMMS (PinePhone Modem Mainline Suite) - a set of scripts gathered from both other community members and created by myself. These scripts allow for quick deployment of the mainline kernel onto the modem. It is a non-destructive process, as the image is only “fastboot booted” and not written to the NAND. PMMS provides a set of prebuilt binaries, including a modified postmarketOS ramdisk, so that developers can quickly confirm whether it works on their devices and play around with the hardware via telnet. It’s obviously not production-grade, but should things go well, the modem will be able to run the same - if not a newer - kernel version than the PinePhone itself… eventually. Presently it is only meant for development purposes and regular users should not attempt to run it.

Pinebook Pro & PineTab

I am devoting the entirety of this section to discussing the Pinebook Pro and PineTab production outlook this year. If you’re interested in learning about Pinebook Pro software developments then please read the Pinebook Pro section in last month’s update, where I listed some of the more notable recent developments. Back to the subject on hand; as many of you are probably aware, the Pinebook Pro is currently available for pre-order on the Pine Store, with an estimated shipping window late this month. Production is currently proceeding well and, unless we encounter unforeseen issues with assembly or dispatch in the next two weeks, many of you will be receiving your Pinebook Pros around this time next month.

Moving forward, following the current batch, the production of the Pinebook Pro does look quite difficult. Many of the key components we require to assemble the laptops have either skyrocketed in price or are nowhere to be found. This forces us to actively monitor and evaluate production viability, and given the constantly changing market situation it is very difficult to predict when we’ll be able to schedule the next production-run. It could be as early as in two month’s time or much later in the year, or even early next year. There simply is no saying. Moreover, further price increases may occur, although we are very aware that the Pinebook Pro makes for a less attractive option at a much higher price-point.

Don’t worry, we know many of you want the PineTab back in stock

The good news is that the current production-run is quite sizable, and there are still many units available (which I expect will last us for quite some time). That said, If you’re on the fence, but think you may want a Pinebook Pro eventually, then I strongly suggest you get one now.

As for the PineTab, we’ve made it no secret that we’re prioritizing PinePhone production at this time. With very few available components, including the A64 SoC itself currently in short supply, we are opting to produce the much more popular device. Furthermore, if we were to open PineTab pre-orders at this time, it would have to be at a much higher price-point, which I believe makes for a far less attractive proposition. With all that said, we will seek to seize a window for a production opportunity opening this summer, and we will attempt to produce another batch of PineTabs. At present time it is impossible to tell if we will succeed in securing all the necessary components, negotiate sensible pricing, and ultimately offer the PineTab at an attractive price-point.

Before I close this section off, I want to make it abundantly clear that while this is the outlook as of today, April 15th 2021, and it is a subject to change. While the situation may seem less than ideal, it may change any day. The situation is so dynamic that everything I wrote above may be completely invalid in a day, week, or month’s time. Stay tuned for updates.

PineTime [by JF & Brian (33YN2)]

The activity on the InfiniTime project was quite intense these last couple of weeks. Firstly, we’ve finally enabled the motion sensor, which allows to add step-counting and wake up on wrist rotation functionality, both of which are long-awaited features in InfiniTime. This is a major milestone as the motion sensor was the last part of the PineTime hardware that wasn’t integrated into InfiniTime.

PineTime waking up on wrist rotation

Once these features were finally enabled, we quickly realised that there is a need to allow users to enable and disable the wake up on wrist rotation, and for some kind of “Do Not Disturb” mode, where the vibrations of the notifications could be disabled. It took only a couple of days for Joaquim to contribute to these functionalities and… a lot more! His pull-request named BigRewrite is basically a major rewrite of the UI, which adds a lot of functionality, settings as well as apps to InfiniTime. Here’s a summary of his work: 1) Visual changes and improvements; 2) New UI navigation - swipe up to open the notifications, swipe right to open the new “quick action” menu, swipe down to open the applications menu; 3) The quick action menu allows the user to set the display brightness, disable notification vibrations and enter into the settings menu; 4) This settings menu allows users to configure the display sleep timeout, how the device can be woken up, the time format (12/24h), the default watchface and much more; 5) The watch can be woken up by a single or double tap on the display, or by wrist rotation; 6) The settings are saved in flash memory so they can be restored every time the watch reboots

This pull request is pretty big, but it brings so many features and improvements that we will work to merge it as soon as possible.

A sneak peek at the new user interface

Now, there is no need to rush to the release page to find a new version of InfiniTime to flash on your device, as those changes have not yet been released. All these changes mean a lot of modifications to the code, and we are still in the process of fixing integration issues and bugs, as well as ensuring users will be able to install this new version without any issue on their devices. This will take some time, but we’ll do our best to release a new version by the end of the month. I’ll make sure to notify you all, here on PINE64’s blog, once our first firmware release goes live - so stay tuned for that.

In the meantime, I would like to thank everyone who’s helped with these developments. Joaquim did a tremendous job with the UI refactoring, and many other people helped testing the new features, fixing I²C bugs, measuring power consumption, and also encouraging the whole team to continue their hard work - it really shows how helpful and dedicated our community is!

Companion apps developers were also busy these past few weeks. In the last community update, I introduced Siglo, a GTK based companion app for the PineTime which, at the time, was able to sync the time of the watch. Now, Siglo 0.6.0 supports multi-device functionality, allowing the user to choose which PineTime it should connect to (useful for people working on multiple dev kits and sealed devices). Moreover, you can now easily update your PineTime thanks to the integration of the OTA (Over-The-Air updates) and the Quick Deploy Mode, which allows users to query github releases and let them choose, pull and flash assets all from within the app!

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Siglo v0.6.0 by Alex Robinson - original video

We also welcome a newcomer in the PineTime ecosystem - the PinetimeFlasher is a GUI app to help flash firmware into the PineTime using OpenOCD on Windows. It’s written in Python using PyQT5. This project is at its very beginning, but I trust Electr0Lyte to continue working on this app in the near future.

Flashing PineTime on Windows 10 - via Sravan Senthiln

Last but not least, WaspOS has seen some recent interest from developers, with work in progress feature pull requests such as a screen timeout setting, weather application, and a new phone application for showing incoming calls. Aside from that, two notable features that managed to be merged include a new word clock application, and the ability for wasptool to read battery levels. There’s also been a few minor bug fixes and improvements.

Pinecil

It is safe to say that the Pinecil has reached an unprecedented level of success - no matter how many we produce — and trust us, we produce many units — they immediately get snatched up. In terms of volume of units sold per day, the Pinecil is only second to the SOPine - and that is an industry-oriented device where orders frequently range in 10k+ units per order. To this end, we’ll strive to produce large batches of the Pinecil at regular intervals - at least for as long as the necessary components are available. The next production run of the Pinecil should be available any day, and many of you will surely be glad to hear that a number of cool accessories will be available at check-out this time around.

Those of you who visited the Pine Store on April 1st were likely amused to find the Mjolnir hammerhead tip for the Pinecil in the inventory. This was obviously an April fools joke, but there is the plot twist - a Pinecil hammerhead has been in the works for some time now and will be available for purchase soon. The accessory offers a large surface area capable of heating a sizable area of a PCB. The primary function of the hammerhead is desoldering surface mounted PCB components, but I can imagine it also being used for a number of other applications. I don’t currently have an ETA for the hammerhead, but it should find its way into the Pine Store this month.

See, we told you, it is real!

Many of you will also be thrilled to learn that a transparent Pinecil case will be available once the new production-run becomes available for purchase. Many of you have requested a transparent case for some time now, and we are happy to finally make it happen. That said, we haven’t yet decided if the transparent case will become a permanent addition to the store’s offering - so if you really want one, then I suggest you get one now.

The transparent silicon grip is a nice touch, don’t you think?

Lastly, we will also offer a thermal isolation mat (pictured above) and a high quality heat-resistant USB-C power cable capable of delivering 4A power. The mat and cable are both capable of withstanding exposure to a temperature of 350*C, and I personally think both are great accessories for anyone doing substantial amounts of soldering with their Pinecil. The cable is particularly interesting, as it is completely custom made to our spec and will be the first cable with such heat resistance on the market (at least to our knowledge - but we first attempted to source a cable such as this, and came up empty handed). I don’t presently know when exactly these items will be available in the Pine Store - possibly at the time of publishing or sometime soon after.

LoRa

As I mentioned in the February community update, and as I’ve been alluding for nearly 6 months, we’re very interested in using LoRa and LoRaWAN for connectivity in PINE64 products. I invite you to read the February update to learn about some of the things we’ve envisioned for the future. At this stage we internally already have a detailed and extensive roadmap for our LoRa implementation, which you can expect to unfold over the course of next 6 months. I’ll be sharing details as things start taking shape; there are other parties than just ourselves, so as much as I’d like to explain everything outright I also need to consider others who are involved. I trust you all understand.

Above you see a picture of an open PINE64 indoors LoRa gateway. Before moving onto discussing what’s actually there in the picture, let me just quickly mention that an outdoors version will also be available with an aluminium, rugged and water resistant case. As a base for the gateway we use the PINE A64-LTS, fitted with a purpose built hat (adapter) which choses the LoRa module by RakWireless. If you’re a LoRa aficionado, you’ll be happy to hear that the chosen chipset is the modern SX1302, offering increased range and speed over its predecessors. The module interfaces with the PINE A64 LTS via the SPI interface, and as you can tell from the picture we have two leads to the outside of the casing - one for LoRa the other for GPS.

Internals of PINE64 LoRa gateway prototype

Over this past month we built up a handful of these prototype LoRa gateways and shipped them to (sometimes unsuspecting) developers with an interest in the field of communications. While they work on getting the gateways up-and-running, we’ll be turning our attention to the end-nodes. I have already mentioned the LoRa back case for the PinePhone earlier in this update, but we’re also working on a standalone USB dongle-type end-node adapter, a PineTab adapter as well as a SPI module, which can also be configured as a USB LoRa dongle. We will also be releasing a LoRa stick powered by a single 18650 battery. It will use the BL602 WiFi/BLE RISC-V module (currently being open sourced in the Nutcracker Challenge), and can be fitted with GPS, an low-power OLED panel and additional sensors. All the end-nodes will be using the SX1262 chip.

Left: USB LoRa end-node / Right: SPI, breadboard compatible end-node

But this is just the beginning. We’ve got more LoRa-related products in the pipeline. In the meantime, I am attaching a video by Privacy & Tech Tips, who made an overview of the kit we sent him earlier this month. Lastly, Discord, Telegram and Matrix chats for LoRa on the PINE64 platform should be added at the time this community update goes live, or shortly afterwards.

Lastly, we’re looking for a name for the LoRa project and we’re open to ideas; please leave them in the comments section below.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

That’s all for this month’s update, I’ll catch you next month!

Help us help others

Sat, 03 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

During a community meetup in 2019, before the entire world got turned upside down by the COVID19 pandemic, we announced our commitment to financially support Linux and open source development as well as to promote open source software whilst contributing to closing the digital gap. I believe we’ve done good on the first portion of this commitment - over the past 12 months we made donations to 5 mobile Linux projects, financially supported a number of FOSS initiatives (most recently the upcoming Linux App Summit) and helped individual contributors in their endeavours. As a side-note, I’d like you to know that this is just the beginning - we have extensive plans pertaining to community support in the near future. Stay tuned.

We did, however, have to set aside our scheme to give back to society due to the chaos that the pandemic stirred up. For the past 18 months the key focus of PINE64 and the Pine Store was to keep production going while actively facilitating development. This effectively left very little space for any other activities. Now, whilst the manufacturing situation isn’t exactly great, we at least have a good idea where we stand. As a result, we also feel that there is a little more wiggle-room for extracurricular activities; it is time to do good on the second portion of our commitment made in 2019.

We have 100+ original 11.6” Pinebooks which we wish to donate to a worthy cause. The Pinebooks are running an excellent mainline OS image by Manjaro, featuring an accelerated KDE Plasma desktop. While the Pinebook is no speed demon by any stretch of the imagination, this tailored build makes it rather snappy and perfectly viable for light workloads, such as: running educational software, browsing the web, using the LibreOffice suite, terminal work, etc,. It is also a sturdy laptop, one which you wouldn’t worry about handing to a child, with a long battery life and all the necessary connectivity for completing aforementioned tasks.

We’re now turning to you for ideas; we’re looking for a suitable partner - a not-for-profit organization, which would get these Pinebooks into the hands of people who will benefit from them the most. Anything goes, and all ideas are welcome. There are, however, two things you need to be aware of making your suggestions: 1) the not-for-profit organization needs to be recognized by the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and 2) have some degree of logistical capabilities, as the laptops are in the US, State of California.

We obviously would much prefer to work with an organization that shares the open source community’s values and ideals, but ultimately we’re open to working with anyone striving to better the circumstances of those in need. Any organization working towards closing the digital gap is worthy of a consideration.

Please, leave your suggestion in the comments. We will make sure to review all viable suggestions thoroughly.

If you represent an organization which you believe fits our criteria and fulfills the cooperation requirements, please contact us directly: info@pine64.org.

Thank you in advance!

- - -

Want to learn more or have additional questions regarding this scheme? - you’re welcome to reach out to me directly in the chats:

Discord

Telegram

Matrix

Beta Edition Pre-Orders

Fri, 19 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I am pleased to announce that pre-orders for the PinePhone BETA Edition will open on March 24. The PinePhone BETA Edition is powered by KDE Plasma Mobile and Manjaro Linux.

To learn more about the BETA Edition please read the March Community Update.

PinePhone BETA Edition will be made available in two hardware configurations:

$149 — 2GB RAM; 16GB eMMC
$199 — 3GB RAM; 32GB eMMC (includes a USB-C dock)

Both configurations feature the newest PCBA revision (1.2b). The $199 hardware variant, called convergence package, also includes a USB-C dock equipped with 10/100 Ethernet, 2x USB type A ports, HDMI digital video output and power-in via USB-C.

We currently expect to start shipping the PinePhone BETA Edition in late April.

Go to store

The Dual-Screen Pinebook Pro

Fri, 19 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

In this project, I’ll turn my Pinebook Pro into a portable multi-monitor Linux laptop and show you how to do the same.

Introduction

In this post, I’ll share how I turned my Pinebook Pro into a dual-screen Linux laptop. It’s a rather inexpensive upgrade, and what parts I didn’t personally have on hand I was able to manufacture myself.

This post is not meant to be an exhaustive guide. I simply want to put the bug in your ear and show you how I did it, confirming that a dual-screen setup for the Pinebook Pro is not only possible, but entirely functional (and looks slick too).

It’d be nice to have a portable multi-monitor workstation. And that’s where this project comes in.

A Quick Disclaimer

I can’t promise this will work as well on every Linux distro, nor can I assure you every USB-C screen will work. So I’ll say this: The Pinebook Pro is a laptop for makers. Projects like this may or may not work, and may take troubleshooting and time to figure out. There are so many variables. But to me, the process is all part of the fun, and the risk is thrilling.

Keep in mind as you dive into this project that drawing too much power from your Pinebook Pro could cause problems, or even damage. While I’ll cover my power requirements below, it’s important to note that you do this at your own risk. If in doubt, speak with someone who is confident about this stuff, or post your questions in the forum to request help from the community.

Don’t miss the video at the bottom of this post!

My Dual-Screen Pinebook Pro

_Mmmmmmm_ulti-Monitors

As a coder, I love multi-monitor setups. It’s not unlike me to have my IDE up on one screen and a test environment on another. Or, when working on graphics, I prefer to move the GIMP tools to one screen and the image to another, maximizing the visible canvas. When producing my videos, multiple monitors is an absolute requirement.

Good luck fitting my usual multi-monitor setup in a carrying bag!

My Distro

I’m not suggesting you install the same distro as me, but if you do have trouble getting up and running on your version of Linux, it might help to know that I am running a custom-compiled Debian 11 on my Pinebook Pro, pretty much stock. You can learn how I did that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WSqcmuJjCM

Selecting My Display

The project began with selecting which external display I would buy. You can choose whichever screen you like, but for reference, here is the criteria I had for my display selection:

Minimized Connectivity Requirements - A single USB-C cable from the Pinebook Pro to the screen should provide both video and power to the monitor. As noted by Tobias Mädel on our YouTube video about the project (below), the USB-C mode we’re looking for is called “DisplayPort Alternative Mode”, or DP-Alt-Mode,
Matching Aesthetic - The color and physical dimensions of the screen should closely resemble those of the Pinebook Pro’s screen,
Portable - It should fold down flat, making it easy to transport both the Pinebook Pro and the external screen in the same laptop bag without excessive bulk,
Application Dimensions Match - A 16:9 aspect ratio and resolution that matches that of the Pinebook Pro screen (1920x1080) so dragging windows from one screen to the other does not result in perceptual shifting in window size,
Highly Affordable - Price of the external display should be less than that of the Pinebook Pro itself.

You can spend more if you like. I wanted the additional challenge of seeing if an ultra-affordable display would work. They can be hard to come by under ~$160, but I was fortunate to find one for just $100 USD … which promptly sold out at that price and is no longer available (sorry). As my criteria is brand agnostic, you shouldn’t have any trouble finding something similar. Just be particularly mindful that your power requirements may differ from mine.

My production workspace on “The Bridge” at Category5 Technology TV. Yes, I enjoy multi-monitor setups.

Connecting The Display

Out of the box, I connected the external display to the Pinebook Pro via a single USB-C to USB-C cable which came provided with the monitor. The screen powered on showing the vendor logo, but then displayed “No Signal” and eventually went to sleep.

I opened the Display settings on the Pinebook Pro, and it didn’t even detect the second screen. I tried the quick and obvious: Reboot the Pinebook Pro while the display was connected. It still didn’t detect.

I didn’t want to dig too deep into the system right away, just in case my issue was a simple one that had already been dealt with. So I got onto the PINE64 Community Forum and sure enough, I quickly found a thread mentioning a similar issue. DrYak posted a reply last June suggesting the user simply unplug the USB-C cable, turn it over, and plug it back in.

Wait a minute - I thought USB-C did away with the old Superposition feature of USB-A!

But … It worked! To my surprise and delight, the display powered on as before, but this time, my Pinebook Pro display flashed, and my desktop suddenly and instantly extended itself to the external display.

When first connected, the display didn’t do anything more than this, but DrYak’s suggestion worked.

A Note About Screen Orientation

When you first connect your external display, your Pinebook Pro has no way of knowing whether you’ve placed it physically on the left or right of the built-in screen, so you may need to adjust the screen position within your Display settings. Simply drag the monitors to the correct orientation and apply the changes.

Power Requirements

The DC power supply for the Pinebook Pro is 5V 3A, so I’ll use that as my baseline. Of course, PINE64 left some room for connected peripherals, NVMe, and so-on, but it’s unlikely they intended users to power an external display.

Along that vein, I don’t suggest running your dual-screen setup from the Pinebook Pro’s battery. Doing so could damage the battery or other components of your Pinebook Pro.

The monitor you buy may be different than mine, so be sure to look at the power requirements in the documentation provided by the manufacturer. In the case of the one I purchased, the power requirements are listed as 5V 8W. The formula to find Amps is an easy one. Simplified, it is Watts / Volts = Amps. So 8 divided by 5 in my case, which gives me 1.6 Amps.

Based on the 3A baseline for the Pinebook Pro and the 1.6A required by my display, I can see that I will want a minimum of 4.6A to power the two together. So I’ll round up and opt for a 5V 5A power supply.

Power Supply Peripherals

Here are some examples of what you might want to use to get you up and running with a single 5A power supply. The DC power supply goes to an adapter, and that goes to a USB cable that has the proper barrel connection for the Pinebook Pro on the other end. This will provide more than enough current not only for the Pinebook Pro, but the external screen as well.

5V 5A DC Adapter

DC 5V USB-A Male to 3.5mm x 1.35mm Barrel Plug Cable

Adapter to Connect The Two

(Make Sure the Barrel Jack Matches Your AC Adapter)

In my case, I already have the 5V 5A DC power supply on hand (a spare for LED lights), and I bought the USB to barrel plug previously for my Pinebook Pro to power it from a wall wart. But I don’t have one of those fancy adapters on hand to connect them together. Plus, I don’t really want to wait for one to arrive in the mail. So, I’ll instead fire up my 3D printer and have some extra fun!

Getting Started: Slicing my quick and simple design.

Soldering A Custom Adapter: Using my Pinecil for the first time to create my own 3D-printed Barrel to USB adapter.

After this simple project, I officially LOVE the Pinecil!

The Final Result: Not as sleek as store bought, but it works, and is something I can be proud of.

Of course, you can just buy the adapter if you’re not as nerdy as me. Granted, if you want to take a crack at it, you can download my simple design here.

Putting It All Together

By matching up my choice of monitor so closely to that of the Pinebook Pro built-in display, I get a strikingly seamless multi-monitor experience from my dual-screen Pinebook Pro. Because my custom power supply is allows me to increase the brightness of the external display, I’m able to very closely match the brightness and color as well.

I now have a gorgeous dual-screen Pinebook Pro, ideal for coding, photo manipulation and design, working online through the browser, or even remotely connecting to my powerful video editor to work from home.

Is It Really That Easy?

Your experience may vary, but for me, it really was that simple to get up and going! I hope it works for you too.

The Pinebook Pro is a fantastic Linux Laptop for those of us who love to tinker. Don’t fret if you have trouble. The community is here to help, and I’m confident that with some patience and tinkering, you’ll get there too.

Watch The Video

There’s nothing quite like seeing it in action. Please give my short video a watch to see how I devised the project, and learn even more about my custom Pinebook Pro power supply hack. I’d also be grateful if you’d consider giving it a “thumbs up” on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOA6hWiXfAo

Further Improvements

The next practical step for me is to simply tie-wrap the USB-C cable to the Pinebook Pro’s power cable, giving the appearance that it’s just one cable, making it look even neater. It would be fun to design and 3D print a connector to actually mount the second display to the Pinebook Pro and hide that single USB-C cable entirely within by soldering a ribbon cable directly between the two in place of the USB-C. Oh, the options are truly endless with a hackable device like the Pinebook Pro.

Conclusion

I’m really happy with this setup. I reminisce about those pre-pandemic days when I could sit in my local coffee shop all afternoon with my Pinebook Pro and do my work over WiFi. I’m excited for the time to come when I can do that again, but this time I’ll pull out the second screen and look entirely 1337 as I sip my latte.

If you end up trying the dual-screen Pinebook Pro setup, I’d love to read your comments below!

Thanks for reading, and remember, if you’re not having fun, you’re doing it wrong.

About The Author

Robbie Ferguson is the host of Category5 Technology TV. He enjoys creating fun but approachable tech projects that can be accomplished by people with varying levels of skill and experience.

Subscribe to his YouTube channel for more content.

March Update: Status Report

Mon, 15 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to this month’s community update. We’re now facing one of the most challenging electronics manufacturing circumstances in years, and possibly even in all of electronics history. Despite this, I’ve got some good news to relay this month, including a Quartz64 pilot production-run, SOEdge being available next month and plenty of community news. Last minute update: looks like we will have the PinePhone and Pinebook Pro for pre-order next week too, hurrah!

You can watch the synopsis of this month’s community update on YouTube (embedded below) as well as on LBRY and Peertube. Stay up-to-date with PINE64 news and make sure to subscribe to this blog (subscription widget at the bottom of the webpage), follow PINE64 Telegram News channel as well as our Twitter and Mastodon.

I’d like to acknowledge JF, Marek (Gamiee), Alex (clover), and PizzaLovingNerd for their contributions to this community update. Thank you!

Let’s get to it.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Video synopsis of this month’s Community Update

TL;DR

Housekeeping pt.1: we’re facing difficult manufacturing circumstances - pre-orders for Pinebook Pro & PinePhone will open after production is underway.
Housekeeping pt.1: stock availability of SBCs, SOMs and other devices will likely change on a weekly basis
Housekeeping pt.2: we’re working on a stock and pre-order tracking system for the Pine Store
Housekeeping pt.2: the PineOne riddle was solved in record time
Housekeeping pt.2: I was on FOSS-North podcast talking about PINE64
Housekeeping pt.2: fourth episode of PineTalk is out; PineTalk has been listed on Podcast Index
SOEdge: SOEdge AI module now fully functional thanks to Marek (Gamiee); runs BSP Linux and build is tailored to support existing PINE64 hardware / peripherals
SOEdge: the SOEdge baseboard and USB 3.0 adapter are currently being produced, and will be back next month, at which point they’ll go on sale; expect availability in April
Quartz64: The current situation forced our hands - we started a Quartz64 pilot production-run; available in April
Quartz64: 8GB RAM Quartz64 units started shipping to developers this week
Quartz64: e-ink panel now works with Quartz64, and the performance is really good from what I’m told
Quartz64: model-B of the SBC placed on temporary halt, due to component shortages
Pinebook Pro: we’re aiming to start production later this month, at which point pre-orders for the new Pinebook Pro batch will open [last minute edit: pre-orders likely to start next week]
Pinebook Pro: a price increase forced by the market situation - $220 for current PBPs, may further increase in the future
Pinebook Pro: phenomenal Armbian with GNOME desktop OS images are feature complete and utilize Panfrost FOSS GPU drivers for desktop acceleration
Pinebook Pro: postmarketOS for the Pinebook Pro is now available, looks awesome, and features a neat installer utility with disk encryption
Pinebook Pro: Manjaro now offers a MATE OS image alongside KDE, XFCE and tiling managers (Sway / i3)
PinePhone: production hurdles at the time of writing; an explanation of the situation [last minute edit: pre-orders likely to start late this month]
PinePhone: we’re still hoping to start taking pre-orders soon, however we need to wait for production to start; presently difficult to define when exactly factory can source missing component
PinePhone: the upcoming production-run, and subsequent few, will be called Beta Edition to indicate software status
PinePhone: the keyboard is progressing well - but we’re still waiting for the keycaps; they should be delivered later this month
PinePhone: the fingerprint scanner case is coming along as is the Qi-wireless charging case, but those will first be introduced when the manufacturing situation eases
PineTime: InfiniTime has seen 3 releases in a matter of a month; new firmware functionality and a new bootloader
PineTime: WaspOS has also seen a new release and is now supported by Gadgetbridge
PineTime: two new companion apps for the PineTime, which can be used with the PinePhone and an update to Amazfish

Housekeeping pt1: production hurdles

Last week we notified our user base that we will only start taking pre-orders for our popular devices like the PineBook Pro and the PinePhone, once production is securely underway. Pine Store inventory items such as the Pinecil, the PineTime dev kits, and the SOPine modules have also drifted in-and-out of Pine Store’s stock over the course of past weeks. This is the result of very severe manufacturing circumstances that have affected the entire electronics industry, and our neck of the woods is no exception. As things stand, all components, down to discrete transistors, have lead times of 40 weeks or more. RAM and eMMC memory, as well as key parts such as LCD panels, are in severe shortage and have in some instances seen their prices double since March 2020. The lead time on LCD panels, just as an example, is currently 60+ weeks, so the expected delivery date falls well into 2022. Silicon is not exempt from this: SoCs such as the A64 are also in short supply and have seen their price increase by a third.

This now affects much of the electronics industry, including tech giants - via Reuters

I am trying to find a suitable analogy, which would somehow illustrate the situation. The best I can do is this: do you remember the toilet paper and hand sanitizer shortages at the beginning of the COVID19 pandemic in the West? - it’s like that, but with transistors, PC/phone parts and silicon. Similarly to the spineless scalpers who sold hand sanitizer for $10+ on eBay to the panicked public in 2020, many component vendors are exhibiting out of character behaviour, preying on factories and businesses in distress. Quoting the words of a factory head we work with: “I haven’t seen anything like this in the 15 years that I’ve been in the business.” Worst of all, there isn’t a clear path out of this situation for factories or businesses. The situation is currently growing more severe and there is no end in sight.

So, why am I writing all this? Because I want to put out the word that we at Pine64 will be more cautious with taking pre-orders for devices, as well as actively monitor Pine Store stock. With regard to devices such as the PinePhone or Pinebook Pro: we don’t want to open pre-orders today just to find out in a week or two that the factory doesn’t have the means to deliver stock for weeks or months. I’m sure that you ultimately prefer to patiently wait, and have certainty that the device will be delivered in a timely manner, rather than have us hold onto your money for an extended period of time. As for single board computers, compute/AI modules and smaller devices such as the PineTime or Pinecil: since we cannot assure a steady flow of such devices from the factory, we’ll only sell things we currently have in our inventory. We currently keep selling units whilst awaiting delivery (usually every week or two), but for the foreseeable future we’ll halt the sales until the next production-run is physically delivered. So expect to see such stock pop up every couple of days or weeks as new deliveries arrive at the warehouse.

I hope this clarifies the situation. At the same time I ask you not to bombard info and sales with questions about availability - they don’t have up-to-date insight into the production status. Instead, please subscribe to the Telegram News Channel. It isn’t a chat, it is just a stream of announcements, and presently the best way to be notified of device availability. We’re working on an availability tracking solution (read pt.2 of the Housekeeping section for details) but it will take some time to implement.

Housekeeping pt. 2: community insight

We are working on a system that would allow users to track product availability and expected pre-order windows. If you read pt.1 of Housekeeping, then you already know that this wouldn’t really be of any help to us now due to production uncertainty, but it is something that end-users will benefit from in the future once the world returns to normal (whenever that may be). Frankly speaking, we also hope that this will unburden support, info, and sales teams currently spammed by questions of availability. We will be testing out the system next month, or the month after that, and we’ll likely start with one of two devices which aren’t at production risk. If you know of a company that has a good product availability system in place, then please share it in the comments section - I’ll make sure to take a look at it and show it to Matthew (fire219) and Marek (Gamiee).

Last week I posted the PineOne riddle, and to my surprise it was cracked in record time. I’d like to congratulate Dalton who was the first to solve the cyphre and provided a detailed explanation of his thought process. I must say I was shocked by how fast this riddle was deciphered - I really expected it would take hours, or even days, for someone to correctly identify the solution. This is the third riddle we’ve done as a community and judging from the response I feel that people find it to be good fun. There aren’t any other announcements on the horizon currently, but once the next opportunity arises I’ll make sure to involve people with some knowledge of riddles to come up with something more challenging. I may also rethink how we select the winner(s) - time zones make it difficult for some people to participate, making the exercise a bit unfair to our friends in Asia and Oceania.

I was recently on FOSS-North podcast talking about PINE64, our strategy of community engagement and our plans going forward. I encourage you all to take a listen when the episode airs. In the meantime, FOSS-North has an extensive backlog of tremendous content with some of the most insightful industry insiders. The podcast is a part of a FOSS conference taking place in Gothenburg, Sweden; they have put out a call for papers and everyone is welcome to submit written material. Check them out.

On the subject of podcasts, our very own PineTalk podcast has recently been added to the Podcast Index. There is now also a PineTalk Mastodon account to make it even easier for you to interact with Peter and Ezra, ask them questions, offer feedback and suggest discussion topics. Their most recent episode aired last Friday - the guys discussed video calls on the PinePhone, RISC-V GPUs, offered their views on your suggestions for future PINE64 gear and responded to community questions. Have a listen to the latest episode here.

SOEdge

For those of you who do not know, or do not recall, the SOEdge is a powerful AI module in a SODIMM form-factor; you can learn more about it here. Thanks to Gamiee’s hard work, the SOEdge is finally ready for prime-time, as we can now run a fully functional BSP Linux on the AI module. The Linux build is capable of utilizing the SOEdge’s powerful NPU and includes enablement for all core functionality of the module. This includes, but is not limited to, Gigabit ethernet, USB, PCIe as well as the LCD DPI interface with touch input. I am told that, when inserted into a model-A sized SOPine or SOEdge baseboard, the SOEdge is also able to utilize either of our WiFi and Bluetooth SDIO modules. Getting the SOEdge build operational was a monumental undertaking and Gamiee did a phenomenal job not only in bringing Linux to the platform, but also in having the software support existing PINE64 hardware. As you can see in the attached video, the SOEdge Linux build has been customised to also work with existing PINE64 hardware, such as for instance the 7” Pine A64 LCD touch panel.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

SOEdge Linux test image booting with a LCD touch panel attached

While the SOEdge is capable of working on the SOPine baseboard, thanks to pin-out compatibility of both the SOPine and SOEdge modules, we’re currently in the process of producing a SOEdge-specific baseboard which, among others, will expose PCIe - not present on the SOPine mainboard. Thanks to the SOEdge’s pin-out compatibility with the SOPine, it can also be inserted into the Clusterboard. You can even mix and match SOEdge and SOPine modules on the Clusterboard to achieve a very interesting computational and AI setup. Indeed, the possibilities are truly substantial. You could, for instance, also populate all Clusterboard slots with SOEdge modules, and equip each module with a USB UVC camera. I’ll come clean and say that I know very little about AI, but I can imagine that from a machine-learning enthusiast’s perspective the prospect of having 7 AI modules, paired with 7 cameras, in a compact mini-ITX enclosure is quite compelling.

SOEdge and SOPine modules in the Clusterboard

The SOEdge baseboard should be back from the factory next month along with a USB 3.0 adapter board allowing the SOEdge to couple with any USB 3.0 enabled X86 PC or single board computer. We’re currently planning on having the SOEdge, the SOEdge baseboard and USB 3.0 adapter board available in the store mid-April.

Quartz64

We decided to produce a pilot batch of Quartz64 model-A single board computers (SBCs). The current manufacturing situation has, in a sense, forced our hand. We originally planned on a much slower roll-out of the board(s), with an extensive development cycle proceeding the launch, but with the production window closing rapidly, we ultimately decided to take a leap of faith and push the ‘go’ button. As a result, the first boards will be available late next month. I cannot stress this enough - this production run is aimed strictly at developers, not end-users. If you want a fully functional SBC at present time, then I encourage you to pick up a ROCKPro64 or PINE A64-LTS (depending on how much performance you require) instead. It will take time for Quartz64 to reach its full potential, and if you’re not interested in participating in the bringup development process then you’d be wise to look elsewhere for SBCs for your computational or project needs.

First 8GB RAM Quartz64 SBCs heading out to developers

Speaking of development, the first 8GB Quartz64 boards have just been dispatched to contributors participating in the early bringup process. With more people participating in development, I expect to have more early software progress to relay next month. As things stand, the product team managed to boot Rockchip’s Board Support Package (BSP) Linux with kernel 4.19 on Quartz64 and enabled some of the board’s basic functionality for testing. Community developers, however, haven’t been able to boot the board into Linux yet. It’s still very early days, so we’ll need to wait a little longer to see Linux running on the device.

The product and engineering teams have been evaluating various e-ink displays that can be used in conjunction with the board. The e-ink display has now been brought up to work with the Rockchip SDK and the stock Android build. The performance, I’m told, is better than devices with a similar power and thermal envelopes currently available on the market. This is obviously a very exciting prospect, not only for the Quartz64 but also for the devices that it may give birth to. We have obviously seen many of you suggest we use the board as a base for an e-ink type device, and we have given this suggestion a serious thought. But it is one thing for the e-ink panel to work with the default SDK and another thing to have it work with BSP Linux. Yet another thing is mainlining this e-ink protocol. So, yes, we do share your enthusiasm for an e-ink based device built upon the Quartz64, but at the same time recognize that the road ahead of us is likely long and winding.

Quartz64 with an e-ink display attached running stock factory Android

As for Quartz64 model-B, which features a smaller footprint than model-A, it will have to wait a little longer to see the light of day. We’re very happy with the model-B design. However, despite being in possession of approx. 70% of all RK3566 SoCs on the market, we don’t have enough to produce both model-A and model-B simultaneously. This, in conjunction with what I wrote in the housekeeping section, should give you an idea of how severe the silicon shortages truly are. In the end, model-A needs to take priority at this time due to its development focused nature. As a result, the model-B may be delayed for quite some time.

Pinebook Pro

We are hoping to open Pinebook Pro pre-orders this month, however as I explained in Housekeeping pt. 1, this is wholly dependent on production proceeding without a hiccup. As things stand, at the time of writing, the factory plans to begin the manufacturing process the week of 22-28 March [Last minute edit: it looks like we’re on track to open pre-orders next week, however only ANSI units will be available at this time]. This gives you a general sense of when to expect Pinebook Pro pre-orders, granted everything goes according to plan. This Pinebook Pro production-run will be introduced at a revised price-point of $220, reflecting the component price-hike. As I explained in the January update, when faced with the dilemma of whether to increase Pinebook Pro’s price point or further postpone production (awaiting component prices to decrease), we will proceed by increasing the price point. At this time, our priority is to resume production, even if the price needs to be increased by 10%. I simultaneously would like to make you aware that the price will likely increase further in future batches. We don’t like increasing the price of our devices but at this point it is simply unavoidable.

Armbian with GNOME DE runs great on the Pinebook Pro

The good news is that this is a great time to pick up a Pinebook Pro. Armbian has recently released new OS images featuring Panfrost acceleration. This includes a version of Armbian that ships with the GNOME desktop environment. I have now spent over a week testing out the image featuring GNOME and I have to say that it has been a very pleasant experience overall. I need to come clean at this point, and admit my preference for Manjaro and Plasma desktop, but the GNOME on Armbian runs just as fast as Plasma on Manjaro and all applications, including firefox, are just as responsive. Overall, I must say that I am highly impressed. So to those of you who have been longing for a traditional (and well supported) Ubuntu-like experience on the Pinebook Pro, I finally get to say that this is now a reality. If you already got a Pinebook Pro, then you can get the Armbian Focal with GNOME here. I should mention that Armbian also offers OS images with XFCE and MATE, as well as testing images with Cinnamon and Budgie desktops.

In other Pinebook Pro software news, we now have a postmarketOS image featuring kernel 5.11.x and GNOME desktop for the Pinebook Pro. Both a ‘live’ and an ‘installer’ OS image is available. The installer OS image allows you to encrypt your filesystem, set your user name and password as well as tweak a few other variables. Although postmarketOS is primarily a mobile operating system, it is lightweight and tailored to run on ARM systems thanks to its Alpine Linux base. This makes it a natural candidate for running on the Pinebook Pro. I encourage you all to have a look at postmarketOS on the Pinebook Pro - images can be found here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjzNr7wnBpk

Installing postmarketOS on the Pinebook Pro by Martijn Braam

Last but not least, I ought to mention that our friends at Manjaro recently released the Manjaro Arm 21.02 build which will ship with the new production run of the Pinebook Pro. While the Pinebook Pro ships with Plasma Desktop by default, Manjaro now also offers an officially supported MATE OS image for the Pinebook Pro. We have also seen a lot of Pinebook Pro related experimentation on the Manjaro base, most notably a build by Alex (clover) which features Lomiri (formerly Unity8). From what I’ve been told, Lomiri runs decently on the Pinebook Pro and offers a pretty unique experience on the platform. I should also mention that official Manjaro builds with tiling managers such as i3 or Sway are also available in the Manjaro repo.

PinePhone

[Last minute edit]: just prior to publishing the update, I got word that we will be replacing the elusive part we cannot source with an alternative; granted no other issues arise, pre-orders will begin late this week or sometime next week. Mind you, uncertainty remains high, so this is still subject to change, but things don’t look quite as dire as they did when I wrote this section. A placeholder pre-order inventory item has been published already on the PineStore. I am leaving the rest of the PinePhone section unchanged because it gives you an insight into current hurdles (and I don’t have time to rewrite it extensively).

As soon as we get word that production started, you’ll be able to pre-order one

Let me start by writing extensively about the production status. If you haven’t done so yet, then please backtrack to the beginning of this month’s update and read pt.1 of Housekeeping - it will provide you with the necessary context for understanding the following section. As many of you know we were initially planning on launching PinePhone production last week and opening pre-orders this week. We had all our components (both discrete and key parts) ordered months in advance and the production floor reserved as well. In short, everything required to produce the next PinePhone batch was in place by the time we entered the Chinese New Year in February. At that time we couldn’t have predicted that vendors would not hold up their end of the agreement. I’ll spare you the details, they aren’t particularly pleasant nor interesting, but it boils down to this: components we booked in advance were sold to other parties (presumably at a much higher price). We managed to source many of the components we lost, but we’re currently short of one discrete component (usually very easy to obtain) which is nowhere to be found.

The production team is continually looking for the said component, and the moment they’ll find it production will be able to begin. However, at present time, I simply cannot tell you whether that will be later today, tomorrow, in a month or in 3 months time. I’m sure you can appreciate that we want to open pre-orders for the next batch just as much as you want to place one; but, as I already explained earlier in this community update, this will only only happen once we know that the production is well underway and there are no obstacles in sight. The announcement of PinePhone pre-orders starting will likely drop quite suddenly, without a prior warning as there is no scheduling. Please subscribe to our Telegram news channel, follow us on Mastodon or Twitter to be notified.

How do you like the default PinePhone presentation box?

On the flipside, the good news is that aside from the one missing component we’ve got everything lined-up and ready to go. The upcoming production-run, as well as the next two or three following it, will be referred to as the Beta Edition. The term “Beta” indicates the present software status. Despite huge strides made by Manjaro and KDE Plasma Mobile teams in the past 3 months, the software isn’t yet at a stage where we’d be comfortable selling the PinePhone as an end-user ready product; even if the target end-users of the PinePhone are informed Linux enthusiasts. It will be yet a couple of months before the software reaches a status where we’d be willing to pitch the PinePhone as a “completely functional smartphone for advanced Linux enthusiasts”. That said, let’s take a moment to appreciate the fact that the software has moved out of an Alpha-stage and that core smartphone functionality has now reached considerable maturity, thanks in large part to the Community Edition (CE) scheme which ran throughout 2020.

The Manjaro KDE Plasma Mobile build has already been submitted to the factory, alongside the default presentation box and documentation. Below you’ll find a render of the default PinePhone presentation box - personally I think it turned out great. I am also attaching the ‘READ ME’ note that will ship in the box alongside the ‘Quickstart Guide’ for those of you who wish to read it. Since someone will surely ask: the hardware remains unchanged from the past three community editions, and will feature the 1.2b revision of the PCB.

Some assembly still required, but we’re getting there

Before finishing the PinePhone section, I want to touch upon the status of the much anticipated keyboard accessory as well as the fingerprint back case. As for the prior, we’re still waiting for the keycap molds to come back from the factory. We were told in the latest communication to expect the keycaps in the second half of this month. The moment I get an update on the keyboard, I’ll make sure to put out a tweet alongside pictures of the PinePhone in a PDA-like configuration. Assuming no issues are found with the molding, we could see the PinePhone keyboard in the Pine Store as early as mid-May. Keep your fingers crossed! As for the fingerprint back case, I’m glad to let you know that considerable progress has been made: the PCB and case design have been submitted for manufacture. We had to make some alterations to the original design by Zachary because of availability and pricing of the chosen sensor. I don’t have an ETA for you at this time, but the case should be ready at some point in Q2 granted the manufacturing situation doesn’t worsen even further.

PineTime (by JF)

This month I have a lot of news to share about the progress of the PineTime project: we have a new bootloader, InfiniTime and WaspOS released new firmware versions, two new companion apps were created, and Amazfish and Gadgetbridge continue to improve their integration with InfiniTime. Let’s start with the bootloader and the release of the new MCUBoot bootloader for PineTime. I’ve already written about this bootloader in the January community update, and since then we performed numerous tests to ensure that it works correctly and that the upgrade procedure itself is as safe as possible!

Let me explain. The bootloader is a very critical piece of software that is run when the watch boots up. It’s responsible for upgrading the firmware when a new version becomes available and for loading the firmware (InfiniTime, for example). We use MCUBoot as the base of the bootloader. MCUBoot ensures that the upgrade of the bootloader is 100% safe by swapping the old and new version of the firmware in memory. In the event an unexpected error occurs, it is able to revert to the old version of the firmware. Any issue with the bootloader could temporarily or permanently brick the PineTime, and that’s why we put a lot of effort into the bootloader.

Upgrading the bootloader is also a critical operation as there is no fallback in the event an error occurs during the upgrade. From the feedback I received until now, it looks like everything is working well and that it’s fairly safe to apply the update. You just need to read and apply the instructions carefully.

See the video here.

Video of the new bootloader

All of this would not have been possible without Lup Yuen’s work. Lup was the first to dare work on a bootloader for the PineTime, and this new version is mostly an improved version of his original work. We fixed a few bugs and added some features like a basic UI and a recovery firmware. This recovery firmware can be loaded by keeping the button pressed while the bootloader is running and allows the user to OTA a new firmware in case the current firmware does not work correctly and/or does not provide the OTA functionality.

Since last month 3 versions of InfiniTime were released; InfiniTime 0.12 and 0.13 improved the BLE connectivity by a lot! While it is still not perfect, BLE connection is now more reliable. Users should notice less unexpected disconnections and fewer failed OTA firmware upgrades. Version 0.13 also added vibrations on notifications and notification on call - when your phone receives a call, the companion app sends a notification to InfiniTime with the name of the caller. The notification app allows the user to accept, reject or ignore the call on the smartphone.

InfiniTime 0.14 “Green Avocado” brought the first UI update of InfiniTime, thanks to Joaquim’s work! Joaquim did an awesome work updating LVGL, the open source graphics library we use in InfiniTime. This new version brings many features that will be useful to create nicer apps and watchfaces. Joaquim did not stop there and also improved the UI of many applications, like the notification app, which is really looking good now!

InfiniTime 0.14 UI element redesigns look phenomenal

WaspOS, the MicroPython based firmware also released a new 0.4 version. The main focus of this version was the integration of the watch with the phone. WaspOS worked with Gadgetbridge and the last version of the Android companion app now supports WaspOS. Version 0.4 also added a nice analog clock face, new UI widgets and a brand new theming engine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nps8Kd2qPzs

Wasp-OS doesn’t just look great, it also features a tonne of functionality

Companion app developers did not rest this month either; clover aka Alex Robinson released Siglo, a GTK based companion app for the PineTime. It’s capable of synchronizing time with InfiniTime and I heard that Alex is working on adding the OTA flashing functionality to the app. Another new companion app (yes, a second one!) appeared in the PineTime ecosystem. WebBLEWatch is a web based application that uses WebBLE (on Chrome) to connect and set the time on InfiniTime. Martin, the developer of this app, describes it as a proof-of-concept, but I do really hope he’ll continue the development and will add the OTA functionality in the near future ;)

You can try this web application online if you are using the Chrome web browser.

Gadgetbridge, the Android companion app released version 0.55, which fixes the music controller app (we broke it by changing the BLE UUIDs in a recent upgrade of InfiniTime…) and also adds the support of the call notifications. Finally Amazfish, the Linux companion app by Adam, also added the support for call notifications and improved the way notifications are displayed. Now, the name of the application pushing a notification and the full text message is displayed in the notification app in InfiniTime. I am attaching a video from Adam showing Amazfish in action, upgrading the bootloader and InfiniTime, displaying a text notification and a call notification.

I’m really amazed by all the work the community achieved this month, and I look forward to seeing what we’ll accomplish next month!

See the video here.

A look at PineTime InfiniTime functionality

That is all for this month. Make sure to subscribe to the blog and follow PINE64 Telegram News channel as well as our Twitter and Mastodon. Until next month!

RISC-V SBC Riddle

Tue, 09 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The riddle has been solved by DALTON. I’ll be contacting the winner in the coming days.

Thank you to everyone who played along!

The correct answer is: PINEONE

In the event you’re interested, you can learn more about this and previous riddles here.

It is time for a bit of community fun. Below you’ll find a riddle, or a cypher to be precise, pertaining to the name of our upcoming affordable RISC-V single board computer (SBC) announced in the February community update.

The previous riddles were solved in a matter of hours, so I put in a bit more effort into crafting this one.

Correctly deciphering the riddle will reveal the name of the SBC - please enter your answer in the comments section. Only answers submitted on this blog post will count, as they are time-stamped, which makes it easy to verify who was first. You get bonus points if you explain how you arrived at your answer.

The person to solve the riddle first will win the RISC-V single board computer*.

Latin slant

Under the scorching sun

An old Roman senator sat

Studying it all

And slowly came to realize that

He bears witness to the empire’s fall

And so began his intricate plan

For the imminent end

So savage and so cruel

Was this strive to mend

It lay waste to the Roman rule

_*****The winner will receive the first production version of the SBC. Prototype devices destined for developers will ship first. _

The Pine Store cannot ship to countries under international embargo (North Korea, Iran, etc.,).

February Update: Show and Tell

Mon, 15 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to this month’s community update. As many of you know, we have now entered the Chinese New Year (CNY) period, which means that all manufacturing and related business activities have ground to a halt. It is always a mad rush to complete ongoing work prior to CNY, but now that the festive period is upon us we get a chance to catch our breath and evaluate the progress made.

In this month’s update we’re going to take a close look at the Quartz64 model-A, showcase headway made on the PinePhone keyboard, discuss our first RISC-V single board computer and introduce plans for making LoRaWAN a staple of the PINE64 ecosystem.

You can watch the synopsis of this month’s community update on Youtube (embedded below) as well as on LBRY and Peertube. Stay up-to-date with PINE64 news and make sure to subscribe to this blog (subscription widget at the bottom of the webpage), follow PINE64 Telegram News channel as well as our Twitter and Mastodon.

I’d like to acknowledge JF, Marek (Gamiee), Alex (clover), PizzaLovingNerd, Konrad, Biktor and Dylan for their contributions to this community update. Thank you!

This may just be the most news-packed update since July last year, so strap in for some PINE64-goodness and let’s get to it.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Video Synopsis by PizzaLovingNerd

TL;DR for this month’s update:

Housekeeping: Two PineTalk episodes are out!
Housekeeping: Pinecil back in stock late Feb/ early March
Housekeeping: Shipping status of PinePhone Mobian CE
Housekeeping: Manufacturing difficulties expected after CNY and for much of Q2/Q3 this year
Quartz64: Detailed specs listed and pictures of the SBC shown
Quartz64: Comparison to ROCKPro64 connectivity & performance
Quartz64: Generic benchmarks on par with most popular SBC on market
Quartz64: More than a stand-alone SBC - a dev platform for future devices
Pinebook Pro: Production resumes in March; pre-orders mid-March
PinePhone pt.1: End of CEs; PinePhone to ship with Plasma Mobile on Manjaro from now on.
PinePhone p.1: A close look at the PP keyboard; fitted with 6000mAh battery
PinePhone p.1: We decided on the keyboard layout with community - the keyboard will be programmable, for those who wish to alter keyboard functionality
PinePhone p.2: Opensourcing the modem - a status report by Biktor, Konrad and Dylan
PinePhone p.2: Modem - work done on kernel 5.11; running open userland on kernel 3.18; making phone calls from open firmware
PinePhone p.2: Expected modem improvements using FOSS firmware
PineTime: 3 versions of InfiniTime released in short succession in last 30 days
PineTime: Blob-less heart rate monitoring working on InfiniTime + improvements to OTA flashing
PineTime: Navigation on PineTime synced to Linux or Android Phone
RISC-V PINE64 SBC: We’re entering the RISC-V SBC game
RISC-V PINE64 SBC: Starting with an entry-level SoC combined with a RISC-V WiFi/BLE currently being opensourced (Nutcracker challenge)
RISC-V PINE64 SBC: Goal to make RISC-V accessible to all at a reasonable price; fun SBC with multiple potential applications; sub $15 SBC
RISC-V PINE64 SBC: Stay tuned for a name reveal via riddle
LoRa & LoRaWAN PINE64 integration: we are doubling down on LoRa integration - coming to all PINE64 devices
LoRa & LoRaWAN PINE64 integration: we will build our own base stations based on next gen technology with better range, lower power consumption & higher transfer-rates
LoRa & LoRaWAN PINE64 integration: Novel use of technology - text-based communication without a middleman

Housekeeping

I want to start by giving Peter and Ezra - our PineTalk Podcast hosts - a huge shutout. They’ve worked really hard on the first two episodes of the podcast and, judging by the number of episode downloads, so far their style has resonated well with the community. In the last episode they spoke to Dalton Durst from UBports, discussed the recent announcement of PinePhone Community Editions coming to a close and answered some questions from the community. PineTalk is now available on all major platforms, including Spotify and Apple’s Podcast app, and I highly encourage you to subscribe to the RSS feed.

Yes, of course, you can listen to PineTalk on your PinePhone too

Over this past month we received a significant amount of feedback concerning the new PINE64 website. This included suggestions on improving the site’s responsiveness, functionality as well as a variety of various minor bugs encountered by community members. As a result, responsiveness has been significantly improved and sections of the site have been reworked to offer a better experience on mobile devices. There is now also a dedicated blog button (honestly, I was surprised to hear people had issues finding the blog on the new site) and the blog itself received some much needed tweaks to improve navigation. A number of fixes were also made to make the page less taxing. Thank you to Gamiee for his continued work on the community site and to all of you who submitted feedback and suggestions.

As I mentioned in the opening bit of this blog entry, CNY is now upon us and there will be no manufacturing or shipping activity until late February. All Pine Store contractors in Malaysia, China and Hong Kong are now enjoying time off with their families and close ones (where permissible, of course, given COVID19 is still rampant). To those of you awaiting a response from the support or info teams, please be aware that you will not receive a reply until after CNY. If you have an urgent query concerning your shipping or order status, i.e., a query which cannot wait, then please reach out to me or one of the moderators in our chats.

I’d like to quickly touch upon the Pinecil’s availability. I get bombarded with questions about when it will be back in stock, so I’m answering the query here: stock will be available again late this month or early the next. Don’t expect it to show up in the store before the end of CNY.

I must say, the Pinecil looks good in red - picture via Dan Lien on Twitter

Before proceeding to the main topic of this month’s housekeeping section, I want to write a few words about the Mobian Community Edition PinePhone shipping status. As some of you are aware, we ran into issues with DHL shipments in late January and early February. Long story short, we effectively had to reship an entire palette of KDE CE PinePhones twice due to a DHL error. This threw a wrench into our schedule; the shipping team worked hard to dispatch as many phones as possible prior to CNY, but unfortunately most Mobian CE units ended up waiting at the warehouse to be shipped to their rightful owners. Only phones destined for Europe were successfully shipped before work ceased. Please follow the dedicated forum thread to stay up to date on the shipment process.

I’d like to finish this housekeeping section by making you aware that difficult times are ahead of us manufacturing-wise. It was a year ago to the day when I first wrote about the impact the COVID19 pandemic would have on the supply chain and manufacturing process in China. I reported on the situation more than a month before any big brand even murmured a word about the severity of the electronics shortages, which we all witnessed mid-and-late last year. You see, big brands don’t really want customers to know that their devices will not be available or in short supply. So here I am, a year later, once again being a bearer of bad news (edit: since originally writing this passage, 10 days ago or so, some reporting of the issues already begun in the media). We expect severe component shortages and major component price hikes after CNY. I am writing this to prepare you for what is to come. Production-wise, we’re entering a difficult phase and compromises will be made - there is no doubt in our minds that the emerging market situation will have a significant negative impact on PINE64. However, the extent of the impact won’t be known for at least an entire month, so let’s not worry too much about the unavoidable and hope for the least disruptive outcome. Keep your fingers crossed! I will, of course, keep you up to date on how things pan out.

Quartz64

It is finally time for us to take a look at Quartz64 model-A, the first installment in our ‘Quartz-line’ of next generation single board computers (SBCs). The doc page for Quartz64 is now available for those of you who wish to study the schematics and datasheets. Keep in mind that photos of the Quartz64 depict a prototype device and some modifications to the hardware may prove necessary prior to the SBC’s release. Any changes made, however, will be very minor at this point and only implemented to remedy issues identified by developers, if such arise. In other words, although this is an engineering sample, production units will look indistinguishable from it. With the board’s layout now finalized, we’re happy to share all the details you’ve been waiting for with you.

Top view of Quartz64 model-A

Many of you will immediately notice the close resemblance, in terms of both the available I/O and general layout, that this board shares with the ROCKPro64. Both boards feature USB 3.0, alongside 2xUSB 2.0 ports and have an open-ended 4xPCIe slot, which can be populated by a variety of peripherals. The similarities don’t end here: the Quartz64 features un-populated IR and SDIO headers (current IR and WiFi/BT modules are compatible), has HDMI capable of 4K output at 60FPS as well as a DSI and CSI output and MiPi interface. There is also 128Mb of onboard SPI flash, just as on the ROCKPro64. The eMMC and mSD card slots too can be found in the exact same position on both boards. There are also FAN, VBAT and 12V power headers, situated in the same model-A layout locations. A RTC connector is also located on the PCB. The 12V header is capable of powering up-to two 2.5" SSDs or HDDs when using our 12v 5A power supply, just as on the ROCKPRo64.

While the SBCs share many similarities, there are some significant differences between the two. For one, as you have likely already spotted, the Quartz64 has a native SATA 6.0 port located right behind the USB ports. The Quartz64 has one USB 3.0 port, while the ROCKPRo64 has one USB 3.0 and one USB-C port. The Quartz64 PCB also features an integrated battery charging circuitry. This means that, similarly to the PINEA64-LTS, the board can be completely battery operated. A unique feature of the Quartz64 is its native e-ink port; as I already mentioned in last month’s update, we hope to have a 10" e-ink panel available in the Pine Store when the SBC releases to the public. Perhaps most importantly of all, Quartz64 is capable of supporting up-to 8GB of LPDDR4 RAM.

Front view of Quartz64 model-A

Back view of Quartz64 model-A

Performance-wise, early testing indicates that the Quartz64, with its 4 cortex A55 cores clocked at 1.8Ghz, is only 15-25% slower in computational tasks than the ROCKPro64. Do keep in mind, however, that the Quartz64 isn’t a Pro-grade PINE64 single board computer. The intended purpose for it is to eventually supersede the PINE A64 and ROCK64, rather than the higher-end ROCKPro64. If anything, the fact that I am comparing a non-Pro next generation SBC to a Pro-grade current generation board should be rather exciting. Lastly, since I know that many of you are curious, the Quartz64 delivers computational performance that is very similar to the most popular single board computer on the market (based on generic benchmarks). Do keep in mind, however, that such benchmarks do not always translate well to real-life tasks, so one board may be superior to another depending on the nature of the scenario. I also ought to mention that from our initial testing, the RK3566 runs really cool - under load, without a heatsink, it rarely spiked above 60*C.

Don’t read too much into these generic benchmarks

Designing the Quartz64, we envisioned that it will serve an additional purpose in the future. Aside from being a stand-alone SBC, it will also be used as a development platform for future non-Pro devices. We have been thinking about democratizing development for some time now, and we intend to start the process with the Quartz64. Creating dedicated development platforms, such as the Don’t Be Evil PinePhone kit, is expensive and time consuming. Such kits also limit the number of people who can participate in the bring-up process, as usually a very limited number of such devices are manufactured. The Quartz64, however, features all the necessary circuitry to start work on a next generation phone, tablet or laptop. Plug a display into the DSI port, a modem into the USB port and add a battery - voila, you’ve got yourself a next-gen phone dev kit. So to those who aren’t usually interested in SBCs in general - it may be worthwhile picking one up and helping the Linux bringing-up process on the RK3566.

Speaking of the bringing-up process, a small number of Quartz64 boards have now been shipped to low-level developers. I am looking forward to seeing how Linux takes shape on this RK3566 platform in the coming months. A major encouraging factor in the bringing-up process is that the Panfrost open source GPU driver ought to ‘just work’ once Linux is brought-up and functional to a point where video output is possible. GPU drivers are always tricky and usually take a long time to open source, so the fact we already have a FOSS GPU for this SoC is a major boon.

Under high load it manages to stay cool, even without a heatsink

It is too early to talk about general availability at this point. A lot will depend on how quickly rudimentary Linux support can be brought to the Quartz64. That said, I place a lot of trust in the developer’s abilities. You can expect an update on Quartz64 in the next community update.

Pinebook Pro

I am happy to let you know that we will be resuming production of the Pinebook Pro shortly after CNY. We were fortunate enough to secure A-grade LCD panels and the necessary RAM (currently in short supply) for the production to begin, and we already have an allocated slot at the factory for the assembly process. I presently do not have a pre-order date for you - that will be announced at a later time. But if you’re interested in picking up a unit then I strongly suggest you follow our Telegram news channel and/or social media for pre-order news (links in the opening paragraph of this post). I know, however, that many of you would appreciate a ballpark idea of when stock will be available, so to this end: based on our current schedule, pre-orders are set to open sometime mid-March 2021.

The Pinebook Pro is now a mature platform with a lot of fun development - image by Clover

PinePhone Part 1

Earlier this month we announced the end of the Community Editions. The Community Edition program was a vital step not only in bringing support to the PinePhone, but also in bringing attention to mobile Linux outside of our immediate bubble. Countless people worldwide were made aware of alternatives to the duopoly of Android and iOS, and I’m sure that we can all agree this is a good thing. This exposure is obviously good for PINE64, but I’d argue that it is equally good for the entire Linux community. Promotion of the Community Edition PinePhones propelled mobile Linux development like nothing else in recent years and gave birth to multiple new projects. With tens of thousands of PinePhones in people’s hands, it is no longer an unlikely possibility that a mainline Linux smartphone will take hold, but rather an inevitable certainty. Before moving on, let me once again thank all the projects and their developers who participated in the Community Edition scheme. You all did a great job.

While the Community Edition program is now closed, we’re working on a plan to actively support mobile Linux projects moving forward. Talks are held with all major projects and we already have some ideas on how to provide developers with ongoing support. Aside from projects which received a Community Edition, we are now also talking to Maemo Leste, LuneOS, openSUSE, DanctNIX and Fedora developers. While we haven’t settled on a means to achieve this type of support just yet, I hope that a part of the strategy will be an introduction of branded back-covers to the Pine Store. In short, the idea is to sell back-covers with projects logos at approx. a $15 price-point, out of which $10 would go towards the donation. I think that this is a good and fun way of supporting development, which provides end-users with a tangible benefit for submitting their donation. It will take a couple of weeks for us to figure this out, or maybe even longer, but once we do arrive at a suitable arrangement I’ll write a dedicated blog entry about it.

At this stage I know many of you are wondering what the future of the PinePhone holds. A question that I frequently receive concerns the default operating system and user interface that will ship on the PinePhone. Today we are very pleased to announce that the PinePhone will ship with Plasma Mobile on a Manjaro ARM base from this point on. We have a long-standing relationship with Manjaro and KDE Community, and both projects have supported us and our efforts since the dawn of PINE64. I’m not sure if I wrote about this publicly in the past, but the promise that Plasma Mobile held in its early stages was the deciding factor for us to proceed with creating a Linux smartphone in the first place. Needless to say, we have been excited to see the UI environment mature and flourish on our platform over the past 12 months. Manjaro is our core partner, offering support for all our flagship Linux devices, including the ROCKPro64 and the Pinebook Pro. Their work on the PinePhone has been indispensable, and their current OS images are among the best and most fully-featured for the platform. Working with both projects on the PinePhone has been a pleasure and I am convinced that together we will reach new heights in the months to come.

Manjaro and Plasma Mobile is just a great combination (picture of widget on main page)

Earlier this month we also received the PinePhone keyboard, perhaps the most anticipated accessory of them all. It literally arrived a week ago from the factory. Looking at the pictures below, those eagle-eyed of you will probably notice the missing key caps. The key caps and the keyboard’s PCB are the two outstanding parts we’re still waiting for - we expect both to be delivered shortly after CNY. The molding is completed however, and has now been submitted to us for review. I’m happy to let you know that our initial impressions are very positive and we’re convinced that you’ll be pleased with it too. Please keep in mind that the pictures are of an early preview unit, and everything you see is a subject to change before they keyboard becomes available in the Pine Store.

PinePhone in the keyboard chassis from the front and side

PinePhone in the keyboard chassis from the side

PinePhone in the keyboard chassis closed top

PinePhone in the keyboard chassis closed bottom

From the very inception of the keyboard design we wanted to include a large battery in the base of the chassis. Aside from the obvious benefit of significantly extending the PinePhones operating time, a large battery also serves as a counter balance to the PinePhone placed in the top section of the keyboard’s body. We wanted to cram as much battery power as possible into the keyboard, and we were lucky to find a 22Wh 6000mAh battery which fits the bill perfectly. From my estimates, the PinePhone fitted with the keyboard will be able to remain in standby mode for nearly a week with the modem active. With the modem disabled, however, it will last you more than two weeks on a single charge when placed in deep-sleep. Due to the battery’s size taking up the bulk of the space inside the keyboard’s bottom section, the charging circuitry had to be shrunk down to a tiny PCB. But don’t be deceived by it’s tiny size, this charging circuit can simultaneously charge the keyboard and the PinePhone via the keyboard’s USB-C port. Since I know someone will ask: the USB-C port on the keyboard can only be used charging, it doesn’t support data or any alternate modes.

PinePhone keyboard charging PCB

Look at the size of that battery!

This effectively completely frees up the USB-C port on the PinePhone. You can plug a convergence dock into it or use it for any other common USB-C devices, e.g. thumbdrives. A quick web-search revealed to me that there are now a number of USB-C wireless mice available on the market (something I wasn’t aware of!). So you can pick one up and plug it into the PinePhone, thereby transforming it into a pocketable Pinebook. Many GUI environments available for the PinePhone - including Phosh, Plasma Mobile and Lomiri - already work well in a desktop mode, but I am sure that the keyboard accessory will entice people to bring MATE, XFCE, GNOME and full-fledged Plasma to the device. And why not - after all the keyboard converts the PinePhone into a PDA capable of running full-blown Linux.

Before moving onto discussing software, I quickly wish to touch upon the keyboard’s layout. We spent a weekend in January ping-ponging ideas about the layout with the community. After some push and pull we finally arrived at a compromise that most end-users should be happy with, given the space and design constraints. The illustration attached below depicts the layout we arrived at and submitted to the vendor. I know that not everyone will agree with every design decision made; to those of you who would prefer a different layout, or really need a CAPS key (for whatever reason), rest assured that eventually you’ll be able to flash your own firmwares to the keyboard via the i2c pins, and thereby change the keys functions. This will, however, require input from the development community - an effort similar to that made on the Pinebook Pro will be needed. The time it took to get the community’s approval of the design led to a delay in delivering the keycaps prior to CNY. But even without its keys, doesn’t it just look awesome?

Here is they keyboard layout we agreed on with the community

PinePhone Part 2 [by Konrad, Biktor and Dylan]

We are currently working on three different fronts modem-wise: 1) porting the mainline (kernel.org) kernel; 2) open-sourcing the userspace and; 3) improving the way incoming calls and texts are handled while the phone is suspended.

The modem can now boot version 5.11 of the Linux kernel with minimal functionality (serial, USB and NAND). Konrad has been working hard on all the low level drivers that are needed (PMIC, clocks etc) so the rest of the devices inside the SoC can start. There’s still a lot of work to do, since the SoC has never seen an official release from Qualcomm ever since kernel 3.18.x, so even if some pieces can be adapted from other mainlined Qualcomm models, there’s a lot of code that needs to be written from scratch. Work is being done by Konrad to send his existing patches upstream, so that they can get merged and so that he can further continue the work.

VoLTE blobless audio calls will be possible in the future. Original Twitter post By Biktor

On the present factory firmware, there are about 150 closed source binaries and libraries that make the modem work. Biktor is working on replacing all of them with 3 open source alternatives that will hopefully get 90% of the required functionality. At this point we can initialize the modem, establish data connections and make both CS (normal) and VoLTE calls without any binaries, although sometimes audio fails, and call reception doesn’t work yet. Stay tuned for more information about the open sourced userspace in near future.

Dylan has been tackling one of the biggest complaints concerning the modem, namely the slow recovery from suspend and its USB resets, making the PinePhone lose incoming calls and texts when using ModemManager (since it cannot reconnect to the modem fast enough after suspend). These patches, currently in a testing stage, should make the PinePhone wake up and start ringing on the first dial tone when there’s an incoming call or text, as well as fix intermittent USB resets that show up when resuming from suspend.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

We currently have: i) An open-source bootloader, allowing us to flash and boot custom software; ii) A temporary, open 3.18.140 kernel with minimal patches, that gives the same functionality as stock with less vulnerabilities and the chance of debugging drivers while moving to 5.x. iii) Open userspace options, with or without blobs, giving varying degrees of functionality, based on Yocto 3.2, or postmarketOS. iv) Modem SDK which serves as a playground for anyone who wants to build his or her own firmware based on Yocto. v) Initial support from the postmarketOS team that allows to create flashable pmOS images for the modem.

The end goal has always been the same, to have the modem as open source as possible. We aren’t touching the modem’s ADSP firmware, because in addition to the inherent difficulties that come with it, modifying the ADSP firmware could lead to problems with RF regulations or certifications.

PineTime [by JF]

January was a prolific month for InfiniTime: we released no less than 3 versions of InfiniTime in this short period of time. The biggest release was InfiniTime 0.11, which came with 2 major features - the long awaited integration of the heart rate sensor and a brand new navigation application from Adam.

Why did it take so long to integrate the heart rate sensor in InfiniTime? Well, in fact, I implemented a working demo of the HR sensor more than 6 months ago but couldn’t release it because it was based on a non-free/proprietary library. This library implements the algorithm that converts raw data coming from the sensor into human readable values (beat per minute).

From the beginning of the InfiniTime project, I always wanted it to be fully open-source. That’s the reason why I chose the GPLv3 license for InfiniTime. One of the implications of this choice is that we cannot include non-free/closed source modules into the codebase. This heart rate processing library was then conflicting with the license of the project and one of its main values.

But still, many people were asking for the heart rate sensor in InfiniTime, and fortunately, Daniel from WaspOS implemented a brand new algorithm for WaspOS and released it under the LGPL license, which allowed me to port his code in C++ and integrate it into InfiniTime. Thanks again to Daniel for his amazing work!

Heart rate measuring in-app (left) and displayed on watchface (right)

I teased the Navigation app in the last community update. I’m happy to announce that it’s now released! This app, written by Adam works in conjunction with Amazfish and PureMaps, and InfiniTime displays the navigation instructions from PureMaps when it’s connected to Amazfish. Best of all, these apps run on many Linux devices, such as the Pinebook Pro and the Pinephone!

See the video here.

Navigation instructions displayed on the PineTime

Speaking of Amazfish, Adam has also improved the integration in non-SailfishOS Linux distributions like ManjaroARM and Ubuntu.

The BLE connectivity has been greatly improved in InfiniTime 0.12 by updating NimBLE, the open source BLE stack integrated in InfiniTime. With this upgrade, you should expect less failed OTA and less unexpected disconnections from the companion app.

This month, I would also like to highlight Nico’s blog. In his blog, Nicolas writes about SailfishOS, smartwatches and… the PineTime! The first article is an overview of PineTime with SailfishOS. In a second article, Nico explains how to upgrade InfiniTime using Amazfish on SailfishOS. Finally, he reviewed InfiniTime 0.11 and 0.12 in this 3rd article. I really appreciate these blog posts, they are short, easy to read and give honest and accurate opinions about the progress of the project.

RISC-V PINE64 Single Board Computer(s)

It will probably come as no surprise to anyone following our project that we’ve been watching the RISC-V space very closely in the past 18 months. Many of you correctly concluded that the Pinecil, our recently released and very popular RISC-V soldering iron, was our first foray into the world of RISC-V SoCs. Indeed, the choice of the RISC-V SoC for the Pinecil was not mere coincidence. That said, Pincil’s SoC is rather rudimentary and incapable of running an advanced operating system such as Linux. We’re now at a point where we’re willing, and indeed keen, to dip our toes in the RISC-V pond and build our first single board computer capable of running full-blown Linux (and possibly also other FOSS operating systems). I’m not sure about you, but we’re rather excited about the prospect of this decision and its importance moving forward.

While we’re not quite ready to talk about the specifics of the SBC at this point in time, in part because many PCB-design decisions haven’t been set in stone yet, I do nonetheless want to give you a general sense of the sort of hardware that we’ll be delivering. Our first SBC will feature two RISC-V CPUs, the main one being a C906 64-bit SoC coupled with an auxiliary 32bit BL602 SoC for WiFi and BLE. The C906 is already capable of running Linux and, from what I understand, is completely open while the BL602 is in the process of being open sourced (including firmware) in our Nutcracker community challenge. The SoC has solid I/O, including USB 2.0 and Gigabit Ethernet, and I see it as a great entry-level Linux-capable RISC-V platform.

The C906 feature list for those very tech savvy of you

I am making the specifications known well ahead of time to manage your expectations. The overarching idea behind this board is to make an inexpensive board, accessible to all who wish to explore the RISC-V architecture, and to get it into the hands of as many people as possible. We’re aiming at a sub-$15 price point. We also want it to become a gateway to more powerful RISC-V SoCs in the future. While it’s our first entry into the world of this particular architecture, it most surely isn’t our last. The board will allow you to create fun IoT, learning and DIY projects, but I won’t be surprised to see someone make Doom, Sonic the Hedgehog or MarioKart run on it in a matter of weeks. In a month or two, I’ll share more details concerning the board-design and the exposed IO. Lastly, as you noticed already I haven’t mentioned the name of the SBC - you can expect a riddle in the coming weeks.

LoRa and LoRaWAN PINE64 Ecosystem Integration

In the past 6 months I’ve mentioned LoRa and LoRaWAN on many occasions and in multiple posts. If it wasn’t clear until now, we have been quite interested in the technology and its potential for novel applications. After extensive internal considerations, we now feel ready to double-down and make LoRa an integral part of the PINE64 ecosystem. I’ll explain a bit more about the core premises of our vision further down in this section, but let me start by writing about the actual equipment we’re planning to deliver. For one, we will offer next generation modules for all our devices - this includes, but is not limited to, the PinePhone, the PineTab and Pinebook Pro. We will be using next generation LoRa chipsets in our expansion modules, which deliver better performance while consuming less power. We will simultaneously introduce LoRa modules for North America, Asia and Europe, that conform to the respective regional regulations.

We will also build our own LoRaWAN base station, which too will utilize next generation LoRa technology. This chipset does not only allow for higher efficiency and lower power consumption, but also for an improved data-transfer rate when compared to presently available technology. We intend to introduce two versions of our base station, the first of which is intended for deployment indoors, while the second arrives enclosed inside an aluminum waterproof container for use outdoors. The theoretical range of the base station is measured in tens of km’s, at least in unobstructed line of sight. That said, a range of 5-6km is much more realistic in most scenarios due to terrain and other obstructions found in urban areas. As you have come to expect from us, the brains of the base-station will be running FOSS software atop of mainline Linux.

We aren’t the first ones to think of using LoRa for communication - source

So, then, why are we doubling-down on this? While LoRaWAN is usually used for a variety of IoT type deployments, we wish to use it for text-based communications. In its implementation we expect the functionality to be more akin to HAM radio rather than SMS or instant messaging. Most importantly of all, however, we see LoRaWAN as a means for communication without a middleman. To allow communication over vast distances, each base station can be connected to the internet. We hope that, in time, urban areas will see some degree of coverage and that people will be willing to join in on the fun. And yes, in the initial phase of this experiment, the purpose of LoRaWAN stations is to have a bit of fun, whilst simultaneously exploring the limits of the technology’s application for communication. Needless to say, getting developers onboard to support this novel implementation of the technology will prove crucial. Over the next months I’ll do my best to convince relevant parties that it makes sense to explore this LoRaWAN application and that it may be a first step in rethinking secure communication mediums.

That is all for now, I’ll catch you all in a month!

The end of Community Editions

Tue, 02 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Today marks the end of the PinePhone Community Edition scheme. On behalf of myself, the Pine Store crew and the entire PINE64 community I’d like to thank the UBports Foundation, the postmarketOS project, Manjaro Linux, KDE e.V as well as the Mobian project for participating in bringing the PinePhone to tens of thousands of FOSS enthusiasts worldwide. We literally couldn’t have done it without you.

We are also grateful to all those who believed in our vision of a Linux smartphone and purchased a Community Edition PinePhone. Over the course of the last year we - all of us - propelled mobile Linux development forward to new heights and proved that a real Linux smartphone is not only possible but also viable if done right.

From the very start, the main goal of the PinePhone was to provide an affordable, open source and development-friendly platform, which would be accessible to all. A platform that would allow users to experiment with, and contribute to, the plethora of existing OSes, and for developers to build their operating systems on a native Linux platform. But the PinePhone was also meant to show our commitment to the future of Linux on mobile by promoting established Linux on mobile projects, while fostering new ideas and financially supporting our software partners.

Although this is the end of the Community Edition scheme, it is just the beginning for the PinePhone as a project. Over the next 12 months you’ll see many exciting developments concerning the PinePhone as a platform. Hardware-wise, we believe that the keyboard add-on, alongside an array of planned back-covers that enable additional functionality, will change how people interact with and think about mainline Linux smartphones. As for software - it won’t be long before an OS worthy of being your daily driver becomes ready.

I’d like to end this blog entry by letting you all know that a very small number of Mobian Community Edition PinePhones is still available in the Pine Store at the time of writing. I also expect that a handful of PinePhones will become available at the end of February from cancelled orders or failed transactions, so you’ll have a last chance to pick one up later this month.

In the upcoming community update I’ll be discussing our plans for a default PinePhone operating system as well as the PinePhone’s immediate future, so make sure to subscribe to the blog and follow the Telegram News channel to be notified of the post. [edit February 3] A number of KDE Community Edition PinePhones from cancelled orders or failed transactions is now available in the Pine Store.

Once again, I wish to thank all of those who were a part of the PinePhone Community Edition scheme - I feel we collectively made a difference to furthering the Linux on mobile cause.

Mobian Community Edition

Sun, 17 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Mobian Community Edition (CE) PinePhones are now available for pre-order in the Pine Store. This edition of the PinePhone ships with Mobian, a Debian-based Linux distribution tailored to run on smartphones. The project came to life on our platform and has now grown to become one of the community favorites.

To learn more about the Mobian please visit the project’s website. To better understand the state of the software and what to expect when you get your unit, I encourage you to read the development team’s blog post on this subject matter.

This community edition will ship in a custom presentation box designed by Mobian’s team, and the PinePhone itself will feature a Debian swirl logo on the back-cover (see renders for reference).

This PinePhone CE will be available in two hardware configurations:

$149 — 2GB RAM; 16GB eMMC
$199 — 3GB RAM; 32GB eMMC (includes a bundled USB-C dock)

Both configurations of the Mobian CE PinePhones feature rev. 1.2b of the PCBA. The $199 hardware variant, called convergence package, also includes a USB-C dock equipped with 10/100 Ethernet, 2x USB type A ports, HDMI digital video output and power-in via USB-C.

We will donate $10 per unit sold to Mobian. To learn more about this scheme please click here.

To learn more about PinePhone Mobian CE please read the original announcement.

January Update: Happy New Gear!

Fri, 15 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Happy New Year everyone! Let us all hope that the difficulties brought about by the COVID-19 virus are now waning and that more aspects of our lives will return to normal soon.

We start this year with announcing the last community edition of the PinePhone, an update on the Quartz64 single board computers, and with some good news regarding PineTab and Pinebook Pro production.

You can watch a synopsis of this month’s community update on Youtube (embedded below) but also on LBRY and Peertube. Stay up-to-date with PINE64 news and make sure to subscribe to this blog (bottom of the webpage), follow PINE64 Telegram News channel as well as our Twitter and Mastodon.

I’d like to acknowledge JF, Marek (gamiee), Alex (clover), 33YN2 and PizzaLovingNerd for their contributions to this community update. Thank you.

Let’s get to it.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

January Community Update Video Synopsis by PizzaLovingNerd

TL:DR

New website it up!
Chats have been reworked and IRC bridged back up; more work on chat infrastructure soon
Thank you to those who’ve been making documentation for Wiki
PinePhone KDE CE slightly delayed but shipping soon; issues shipping to the UK
PineTalk podcast starts next month! Hosted by Ezra from Elatronion and Peter from LINMOBnet
Pinebook Pro and PineTab LCD panel availability looking better; production to resume after CNY
Pinebook Pro OpenMandriva and AOSC Linux builds are now available
Pinebook Pro FreeBSD 13 build brinds a lot of functionality to the platform
Pinebook Pro alt DP display mode available in Manjaro & coming to other distros. Enables DockingDeck and other USB-C dongles
Pinebook Pro to get Panfrost GPU driver with OpenGL 3.0
Quartz64 is the name of our next SBC line
Quartz64 model-A detailed spec and availability roadmap
PineTime important work done on the bootloader and release of InfiniTime 0.10.0
PineTime InfiniTime fork brings colourful icons, multiple watchfaces and additional functionality (HR + step count)
PineTime GPS navigation via Amazfish App; Amazefish app has now been ported to Manjaro Linux for the PinePhone
PineTime WaspOS improvements including theme engine and much more
PinePhone Mobian CE available on January 18. Two hardware configurations 2GB RAM/ 16GB eMMC & 3GB RAM/ 32GB eMMC + USB-C dock (Convergence Package)
PinePhone’s modem runs kernel 5.10; first step in open-sourcing
PinePhone keyboard update and keyboard layout; projected availability April this year
PinePhone major improvements to KDE Plasma Mobile improvements
PinePhone - a new OS join the pack; OpenMandriva is now available for the PinePhone
Pinecil - new firmware is available; Pinecil gets a dedicated update utility
Pinecil - a red shell version available exclusively in China; you can get the red shell for your Pinecil from the Pine Store
Pinecil - next production batch before CNY
PinePower - desktop PinePower details and availability; addressing generic design
PineCube - software updates and first attempts at streaming video

Housekeeping

As I’m sure you’ve already noticed, we’ve got a new website. Let me start by thanking Marek (gamiee), Lucia Zverkova, Chris (Funeral) for getting the page into shipshape for today. Getting it done in time over the holidays was a sprint, but the final result is a page that will serve us well for many moons to come. If you find any typos or broken links, make sure to report them to us - thanks.

Over the holidays we also completed work on the chat protocol bridge. It is my understanding that all issues concerning the transfer of messages from one protocol to another should now be resolved. However, the entire chat infrastructure will see further alterations in the coming weeks, as developers requested a higher granularity of conversation options. More specifically, we’ll create separate chats for development, so that end-user support questions and general conversation don’t get in the way of dev chat. A dev-chat for PineTime has already been set up and will be bridged to other platforms shortly. More device-specific dev chats will follow shortly.

I also want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who did their share in tidying up, editing information and adding resources to the Wiki in the past few weeks. Documentation is a vital part of any open source project, and I am very pleased to see many people now actively contributing to the maintenance of existing development resources.

The Wiki really looks nice and tidy now

PinePhone KDE Community Edition should start shipping shortly following a two week delay due to a component shortage. This means most of you who pre-ordered a unit should receive your smartphone at the end of this month. That said, we’re facing issues with delivering the PinePhone to the United Kingdom following Brexit. If you live in the United Kingdom and have pre-ordered a PinePhone KDE CE make sure to check your email - we have given you two options to resolve the situation, which we’ll need you to act on now. We apologize for the inconvenience.

PineTalk Podcast Logo

Lastly, I am happy to announce that Ezra from Elatronion and Peter from LINMOBnet will be hosting the PineTalk - a PINE64 podcast by community members for the community. Episodes of the podcast will be available bi-weekly - as in, available every other week - and will be available on Youtube, Peertube, LBRY, Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Peter and Ezra are working out the details at this time, but you can expect the first episode to drop sometime in February. Make sure to check out the PineTalk page for more details.

Pinebook Pro

I finally have some good news to report concerning Pinebook Pro and PineTab availability. LCD availability is looking better now, and that means we’re confident that both the Pinebook Pro and PineTab will be back in store shortly after the Chinese New Year. That said, LCD prices are currently very high.

Because we have always avoided increasing the price point of PINE64 devices, we will do our best to avoid a Pinebook Pro/PineTab price point increase. However, if the choice is between no stock or a slightly higher price point, the latter may be the only way out. This will likely not happen, but I want people to be aware of some choices that might be made down the line. I do not have a specific date for when the production will resume at this point in time, but I’m sure the situation will crystallize over the coming weeks.

I’d like to put the spotlight on a few Pinebook Pro releases. For starters, we’re happy to announce OpenMandriva Lx 4.2, a Linux distribution using the package manager urpmi which installs .rpm binaries. This will be available for download shortly from the project’s sourceforge repository. It ships with KDE Plasma desktop environment and offers a wide range of default apps to get you going. Please visit OpenMandriva’s website for more information about the distribution.

See FreeBSD on the Pinebook Pro via SleepWalker on Twitter

I am also certain that many of you who have been waiting for a new FreeBSD OS image for the Pinebook Pro will be thrilled to hear that a recently released preview image (FreeBSD 13) fixes a keyboard issue that plagued the system on the Pinebook Pro. My knowledge about FreeBSD is highly limited, so rather than me trying to convey the current state of development I strongly suggest you read through the thread on FreeBSD’s forum prior to downloading the image. From what I gathered, the thread includes instructions on enabling audio and enabling external networking cards. The first entry in the thread includes the download link.

Lastly, I’d like to bring everyone’s attention to AOSC Linux, a Debian-based distribution that supports most PINE64 single board computers and devices, including the Pinebook Pro. The reason I wish to highlight this distribution is the wide range of default desktops it offers for the Pinebook Pro, including but not limited to GNOME, Cinnamon, MATE and XFCE. Needless to say, the OS images are mainline and run open GPU drivers, just like the default Manjaro KDE image. I have actually spent some time with the Cinnamon edition of the AOSC build, and I am happy to report that it is snappy and I experienced no apparent issues. You will find the complete list of OS images featuring the various desktops in the AOSC download section on their website.

AOSC on the Pinebook Pro via PizzaLovingNerd

Ending this section of the update I’d like to notify you of two other important developments related to the Pinebook Pro. Firstly, USB-C alt DP mode has now been merged in Manjaro’s default OS image for the Pinebook Pro. This means that the Docking Deck and other USB-C docking stations and dongles should now output video, at resolution up to 4K, via USB-C. So if you’re running Manjaro KDE on the stable branch, all you need to do is upgrade your installation via terminal or the GUI package manager. If you want to try Manjaro KDE, then you’ll find up-to-date builds here.

The last thing which I find worthy of reporting is that OpenGL 3.0 will be enabled on the open source Panfrost GPU driver used by most OS distributions on the Pinebook Pro. It will obviously take some time before these patches find their way into every single distribution, but you can rest assured that OpenGL 3.0 will be available on your distribution of choice in the foreseeable future.

Quartz64

Let me start by congratulating Sundog on being the first to correctly solve the riddle I uploaded last month. He correctly deciphered that “Quartz64” will be the name of our next line of single board computers. It took him just a few minutes from the moment I posted the riddle to submit the correct answers, which tells me I need to step up my game and create more complex riddles in the future. Sundog will be receiving the first production board once those are ready. For those of you who want to learn more about PINE64 products riddles, I opened a thread on the forum to discuss the topic at length.

Still can’t believe how quickly this riddle was solved

Back to the subject on hand; Quartz64 will be the first RK3566 board on the market, and the model-A prototype of the board is already being evaluated internally. We aren’t quite ready to show it off just yet, as there are some design decisions which may need reworking before it gets shipped to devs, but we promise that the reveal is coming soon. We do, however, have some information to share - please keep in mind that all the following refers specifically to the model-A Quartz64. The board will be available in two configurations, more specifically a 4GB and 8GB RAM variant. You will be able to fit the model-A Quartz64 with one of the heatsinks designed for the ROCKPRo64, as both single board computers share both the footprint as well as IO layout. The board will feature multiple USB 3.0 and a USB-C ports, as well as: 4x PCIe, eDP and MIPI display output options alongside a standard GPIO header you’d come to expect. Some of you will surely be excited to learn that the Quartz64 model-A will also feature a dedicated e-ink panel interface capable of supporting a capacitive pen. We will have a 10” e-ink display available in the Pine Store at the time the Quartz64 boards launch.

Let me say a few words about the roadmap; at present time we aim to have a limited run of both model-A and model-B versions of Quartz64 in a matter of weeks, so that developers can get their hands on the board and start the bringing-up process sometime after the Chinese New Year. We expect that both versions of the Quartz64 will be available more broadly to developers sometime in late Q1 or early Q2 2021. We are also working on a system to fast-track established developers to get their hands on a Quartz64 board. I suspect that, in short, developers interested in getting their hands on the Quartz64 SBCs early will be asked to send an application email similar to the process for acquiring PinePhone development units in November 2019.

PineTime (by JF and 33YN2)

In December I finally got some time to work on the bootloader. The bootloader is the first piece of the software that is run on PineTime as it boots. It is responsible for loading the application firmware (InfiniTime, for example) and also safely applying upgrades, once the OTA update transfer is finished. The current version of the bootloader was written mainly by Lup Yuen Lee. Lup is also the one who hand drew the greenish PineTime logo you see when the bootloader is running. Since last September, we also detected and fixed a few bugs and wanted to add a few additional functionality, such as recovery firmware and a more refined user interface.

Video of the upgrading process on JF’s PeerTube

As this is the most critical part of the software, we requested the help of the community to test it, and received a lot of positive feedback and reports of successful upgrades of the bootloader, which is very promising!

Earlier this month I also released version 0.10.0 of InfiniTime. This is a special release because it is mainly composed of contributions from other developers. Additions which will be most apparent to end users are the 2 games which have been added: Paddle, a solo Pong game, and Two, a 2048 clone.

2048 clone via JF on Twitter

Recently, a new fork of InfiniTime appeared on GitHub. This fork, named JoaqTime by the chat community, created by joaquimorg includes a complete overhaul of the UI, which includes nice and colorful icons, multiple watchface, a step counter as well as a functional heart rate monitor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiiajWmhpfQ

A video of “JoaqTime” in action

WaspOS has been on a roll, having many new commits in the past few weeks. A major change is the new theming engine, which has been added to WaspOS recently, allowing you to change the colors of the different components of the UI to your liking. Moreover, something many of you will enjoy is the addition of a software toggle in the menu that lets you dynamically disable/enable applications which could make development much easier. You will also find the two new applications; a haptic alarm application, and a calculator application, which are quite the addition. Expect much more on the horizon with WaspOS, as for example there has been discussion about optimizing the display rendering for a smoother experience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nps8Kd2qPzs

Showcase of WaspOS features on the PineTime

In last month’s update, we talked about Amazfish, and announced that Adam has been working on making Amazfish easily portable on other Linux distros and devices. This is now done with Amazfish 1.8.5, and I really hope we’ll see Amazfish built and packaged for many Linux distro in the near future. Indeed, it has already landed in Manjaro, and will likely appear in some of the most popular PinePhone distributions in a matter of weeks.

Adam did not stop there, however, and is now working on a navigation app for the PineTime, based on Amazfish and PureMaps. Here’s a picture of navigation working.

PinePhone

We’ve thrilled to announce that the last PinePhone Community Edition will feature the Mobian Project. Mobian is a Debian distribution tailored to work on smartphones which came into life on our platform, and has now grown to become one of the community favorites. The operating system ships with the Phosh user interface and a mainline Linux kernel with the necessary patches. This edition of the PinePhone supports all core functionality, including phone calls, 4G LTE, WiFi and Bluetooth, deep-sleep suspend state, both cameras as well as GPS. The convergence feature, which turns the PinePhone into a pocketable computer when a monitor, mouse and keyboard are connected via USB-C dongle, also works great on this distro. Lastly, it features an on-device installer, allowing you to determine your username and password, as well as the option to encrypt your installation.

PinePhone running Mobian in convergence mode via LINMOB on Twitter

Despite the relatively high level of software maturity, the shipped build should be considered pre-release grade software, with known bugs and issues. In other words, this is still very much a work-in-progress. By the time you receive your Mobian CE PinePhone a long time will have passed since the phone left the factory floor, and many improvements will have been made to the system. Make sure to update your PinePhone the moment you receive it.

Pre-orders for the Mobian Community Edition PinePhone will open in three days time, on January 18, 2021. This community edition of the PinePhone will be available in two hardware configurations:

$149 – 2GB RAM + 16GB eMMC

$199 – 3GB RAM + 32GB eMMC Convergence Package with an included USB-C dock

You can expect a blog post entry on the day this community edition goes live, followed by information on Twitter, Mastodon, our Telegram News Channel, the PINE64 forum and elsewhere. As was the case with all previous community editions, we will be donating $10 per unit sold to the Mobian project, to support development of mobile Linux on all platforms. Now head over to Mobian’s blog and read what they’ve got to say about the state of their operating system and development for the PinePhone.

I’d like to thank all projects who participated in the community edition scheme: UBports Foundation, postmarketOS, Manjaro Linux, KDE Community and the Mobian Project. Thanks to your efforts we’ve managed to breathe new life into the dream of Linux on mobile and started something completely extraordinary. We’ve on track to ship a staggering number of PinePhones, and fully appreciate that the success of the PinePhone is as much yours as it is ours. Congratulations on a job well done!

For a change, I will start with discussing software news this month. There is much to write about since important progress has been made in the past 30 days, but the most important development of all (at least in my view) is that the PinePhone’s modem is now capable of running mainline Linux. Thanks to work by Biktor and Konrad Dybcio the first step in opening up the modem has begun. I spoke to Konrad, who asked me to emphasize that presently this is very much a proof of concept, but that an effort is being made to have a community-built mainline Linux which will equal the modem’s proprietary firmware in terms of functionality. This means that users will, eventually, be able to replace the modem’s firmware with a community-built one on their own. Be aware, it is unlikely that we’ll be able to ship it on the device due to various legal constraints. Some parts of the modem, such as DSP firmware, will most likely have to remain closed. Regardless, these implications are obviously massive. At the time of writing this, you can install an operating system, such as postmarketOS, on the modem and even run a Minecraft server on it!

The news of the modem running mainline kernel made quite the splash

We also saw a new OS release for the PinePhone this month - OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 is now available for download. The OS uses a package manager called urpmi, which makes it easy to install .rpm binaries on your system. It ships with a slightly older build of KDE Plasma Mobile on kernel 5.10. I have not had an opportunity to test it myself, but it is my understanding that all core functionality found on other Plasma Mobile OS builds is also functional in OpenMandriva Lx. The release candidate image is now available for download from the project’s sourceforge repository.

OpenMandriva LX 4.2 running on the PinePhone by 33YN2

On the subject of Plasma Mobile, we’ve seen a lot of developments of this particular user interface in the past weeks. The team behind Plasma Mobile lists all the user experience improvements in a dedicated blog post (which I highly suggest you read), so I will not reiterate platform-agnostic changes here but rather focus on PinePhone-specific improvements. Aside from the quality-of-life and usability improvements, the most important change is responsiveness. While it may not be instantly apparent at the desktop, a significant performance boost can be felt in all default applications. This includes browsing using Angelfish browser, the Discover store and, in more general, when scrolling through long lists or pages. I’ve been testing this Plasma Mobile extensively recently and it’s been a great experience all-around; even convergence now works as expected with my monitor, although I’ve heard reports that others still experience issues. If you haven’t tried Plasma Mobile in recent months, I strongly suggest you give it another go. You can download the newest Manjaro KDE development images by clicking here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkOVWh6WDww

Performance of KDE Plasma Mobile has been significantly improved recently - by Bhushan from Plasma Mobile team (original video on Twitter)

Before moving onto hardware, I also need to let you know about the excellent new Manjaro OS images with Lomiri. The Manjaro team, in cooperation with Marius Gripsgard from UBports, have released the next preview OS image, with many more functional elements as well as support for traditional X11 applications! This Lomiri UI is certainly one of the most polished experiences for the PinePhone and the new additions of GPS navigation, GPU accelerated browser, functional Bluetooth (just to name a few) on Manjaro as a base make for a compelling experience. Just yesterday Dalton Durst from UBports also announced the release of a new Ubuntu Touch RC update for the Pinephone that fixes automatic 3G call switching.

In terms of hardware, we’re well on our way to build the keyboard prototype. We’re currently exploring and prototyping options for including a large battery into the body of the keyboard. In short, we’re working on squeezing in as large of a battery as possible into the keyboard body. We have also finally been given a time-frame for delivery from the design-house and factory; as things stand today, the PinePhone keyboard should be available in April this year. As most of you already know, the keyboard will interface with the PinePhone using the pogo pins, which means that it will attach and replace the back case. We realized that this will be cumbersome to remove and insert SD cards, so we’ve sourced a breakout board for SD cards that will make the task easier with the keyboard attached. For the time being, I leave you with render of the keys and a suggested keyboard layout. Please let us know what you think in the comments section.

Picture of the key layout (top) and render of the keys (bottom) on the PinePhone keyboard

Closing off this section, we’ve made the decision to alter the design of the Qi charging case so that it will also be able to accommodate the fingerprint reader. Rather than making two separate back-cases - one for the fingerprint reader and another for the Qi coil, we will spare money and time creating a single mold to host both. Now, I am aware that some people will only want one and not the other additional piece of functionality, so we’re exploring a way to give you an option to choose. Regardless, working this out will take a little time. Hold tight - more information is coming in the next two months.

Pinecil

For Pinecil news, we have new firmware available for the Pinecil. Instructions for flashing the new firmware is available on the Pine64 Wiki page. We also now have a new red Pinecil case available in the Pine64 store for $6. The reception from early adopters has been very good, as have reviews from sites such as Hackaday, and we opened a second production run on January 6th although this second run has already sold out. This was a large production-run, and we were not prepared for it to sell out quite as quickly. As a result we’re in the process of producing an even larger production run of the Pinecil, which should be available for purchase in early February.

Picture of the Pinecil update utility by Gamiee

For those of you who already got a Pinecil, you can now update your firmware to the newest iteration of IronOS. The newest firmware brings multiple bug fixes over the firmware which shipped from the factory, so we highly recommend you upgrade. The process of upgrading is straightforward and has been outlined on our Wiki. Moreover, thanks for the work by Marek (gamiee) the Pinecil now has its own firmware update utility, which even features multiple language options. Pretty nifty!

Pinecil Chinese special edition

We also announced that we’ll have an exclusive version of the Pinecil for the Chinese market. The body and packaging on this version of the Pincil are red, but otherwise no different in form of function to the Pinecil available in the West. We do realise, however, that people like to tinker and personalize all their electronics, including their soldering irons, so we’re making the red shell available for everyone to buy in the Pine Store. I am including a video by Peter Feerick - a PINE64 old-timer and a professional kangaroo wrangler - in which he swaps out the Pinecil shell for the red one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXSRw1YoMSI

Peter exchanges the default black Pinecil shell for a red one

Lastly, the break-out board is also available for purchase in the Pine Store alongside the default black shell, a small and portable stand as well as the two tip sets. Since many of you asked, we’ve also added some high-quality USB-C to USB-C cables to the store; those can be found in the Makespace section of the Pine Store, alongside the PinePower PSUs.

PinePower

Both the portable and desktop PinePower power supplies are now in the Pine Store. I’ve described the portable PinePower extensively in last month’s update, so this month I’ll instead focus on the desktop power supply. We made the decision that the desktop PinePower will also include Qi wireless charging, since some may wish to use that for their PinePhone in the future. The desktop PinePower contains two 65W switching power supplies, one of which serves USB-C power delivery port while the other delivers power to the 18W QC3.0 USB-A port, 3 individual 5V 3A USB-A ports as well as 10W wireless QI charging. In other words, it is capable of delivering power to all your PINE64 devices, and even capable of powering the Pinecil while charging the Pinebook Pro, PinePhone and the PineTab simultaneously.

PinePower front view showing output values

Let me also address comments that I’ve seen online inquiring whether we used existing power supply unit designs. Indeed, as I wrote last month “both PSUs are based on reference designs, but we have made significant improvements to the internals so they are more performant than existing offerings”. Despite both designs being generic, the PSUs have had improvements made to their performance and undergone certification. For instance, the generic design experiences a component failure after 2 hours of sustained full load; we’ve made significant adjustments to this PSU, and it can sustain a full load for over 12hours, based on lab testing.

PineCube (by 33YN2)

For the PineCube there has been some progress in the form of a new Community-made Armbian build available which has the Motion daemon preinstalled. Further, a community member has said that they were able to get Motioneye to run on the board at 1-2 FPS. While that low of a framerate is perhaps disappointing, motioneye is a heavy software. There will likely be more luck in regards to something lighter such as Moonfire-NVR or a PineCube-specific software solution that likewise can better leverage the hardware. Last thing regarding the PineCube which is small, but nevertheless interesting is that there is now wiki documentation on how to interface with it using an Arduino Uno (And other Single Board Microcontrollers) as the USB serial connection. Seeing as the Pinecone is simply a Risc-V microcontroller board, it is likely that a PineCone could also be used as a serial interface by jumping the ground and reset pins exactly like you would on an Arduino to isolate the microcontroller.

PineCube connected to Arduino by 33YN2

That’s all for this month! I’ll catch you all online.

I owe you a riddle

Fri, 18 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The riddle has been solved and we’ll be contacting the winner in the coming days. The comments section has now been locked until January. Thank you to everyone who played along!

The correct answer is: QUARTZ64

In the event you’re interested, you can learn more about the riddle here.

In the November Community Update I promised you a riddle concerning the naming of our upcoming range of RK3566 Single Board Computers.

The person to solve the riddle first will receive the first board straight from the production line. Leave your guess in the comments section.

If no one guesses correctly by then Monday, December 21, when the blog comments will get turned off due to the website being overhauled, then we’ll continue this community challenge on the forums. I’ll edit this post with a forum link if need be.

Good luck!

Wistyx

Between a Pine and a Rock

My origins are to be found

Heritage of the sun and sand

Locked in cogs circle round

Now here alone I stand

It all makes sense

Shifted one to the right

Look down and ahead

In your line of sight

The solution can be read

December Update: The Longest One Yet

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to the last community update of the year. I want to start this month’s update by thanking everyone who helped us make this challenging year a fruitful and successful one. A special thanks goes to the core community team - our mods and admins - who keep the cogs spinning on a daily basis. Marek (gamiee) and Matthew (fire219) have done an incredible job this year reworking our community-facing infrastructure; this is something which was long overdue and is now appreciated by tens of thousands of end-users. I also want to thank our partner projects - UBports, postmarketOS, Manjaro and KDE Community in particular - for working with us tirelessly to make the PinePhone, PineTab and Pinebook Pro a success. We literally couldn’t have done it without you. Special thanks also goes out to the independent contributors whose work continuously assists partner projects in building OSes for our platforms. Finally, I want to say thank you to the Pine64 community at large. We deeply appreciate you all for being the end-users who make this project thrive.

I would be remiss not to acknowledge and thank the members of Pine Store’s logistics, sales and shipping teams who delivered tens of thousands of PinePhones and Pinebook Pros throughout 2020; this was no small feat I assure you.

You can watch a synopsis of this month’s community update on Youtube (embedded below) but also on LBRY and Peertube. To stay up-to-date with PINE64 news make sure to subscribe to this blog (footer at the bottom of the webpage), follow PINE64 Telegram News channel as well as our Twitter and Mastodon.

I’d like to acknowledge JF, Marek (gamiee), Alex (clover) and PizzaLovingNerd for their contributions to this community update. Thank you.

From all of us at PINE64, a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all!

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Video synopsis of the Community Update by PizzaLovingNerd

TL;DR for this month’s update

RK3566 boards available to developers next month; more info in January
Community page (.org) getting a make-over & chat bridge will be worked on over the holidays.
An apology to early KDE CE pre-orders who received refunds and an explanation of what happened
A word about retail stores coming early next year
Look back at 2020 - our shortcomings and accomplishments discussed
PineTime - classy analogue watch faces available for InfiniTime
PineTime - InfiniTime receives many fixes including wake-up time, battery readout and call notifications
PineTime - new WaspOS version has been released
PineTime - Amazefish companion app now runs on multiple distros, including KDE Plasma Mobile; you can now sync your PineTime to the PinePhone running Manjaro KDE & more!
Pinebook Pro - production resumes after Chinese New Year, late February/ early March 2021
Pinebook Pro - is now supported by official Debian Installer (Alpha 3)
Pinebook Pro - the Docking Deck receives a warm response from end-users and reviewers
PinePhone - software and firmware news: Megi’s 5.10 kernel and new firmware for the modem result in improved power management + thermals
PinePhone - Megapixels camera app now supports smooth 30FPS viewfinder; works on multiple mobile UIs.
PinePhone - We signed a contract for a PSION5-like keyboard with a specialized vendor(!); developers will receive keyboards already in January 2021
PinePhone - Qi charging back case entered production (molding process)
PinePhone - We’re working on a fingerprint reader back case with a community member who created a working prototype
PinePhone - showcase of awesome PinePhone hacks and DIY projects
PinePower - a range of power supplies (PSUs) for PINE64 products coming soon
PinePower - portable 65W GaN PSU due in late Jan/ early Feb and a 120W desktop PSU coming later in 2021
PineCube - we now have Armbian support (Debian & Ubuntu) for the PineCube
PineCube - we created a case for the PineCube and released STL files for it
Pinecil - initial batch sold out incredibly fast, more units are being produced for January 2021
Nutcracker Challenge - more evaluation boards shipped
Nutcracker Challenge - we’re getting more source code soon & early community developed flashing tools now available

Housekeeping

Just before finishing up this community update I received word that our next generation of RK3566-based single board computers will be available to developers next month. In case you’ve missed it, I wrote about our future strategy and non-Pro devices in last month’s update. You can expect more information about these boards to follow in the January community update.

Work will be carried out to the pine64.org community webpage over the coming holidays. This shouldn’t have an impact on the website’s functioning, but we will likely have to disable blog comments at some point in the next two weeks. Blog comments will be reenabled once the new site goes live. I am looking forward to hearing your feedback in January when the new page design is revealed.

Farewell old friend!

In related community news, protocol chat bridge maintenance will begin soon. We will attempt to minimize chat room downtime, but a degree of disruption is unavoidable. The current bridge will need to come down and a new one will be erected in its place. In short, expect things to break. As for the time-frame, I don’t know if the process will take an hour or an entire day; regardless, on the day of maintenance a proactive outage warning will be posted on social media and the Telegram news channel.

Due to a database software error earlier this month, we had to refund people who pre-ordered the KDE Community Edition PinePhone within the first 18 hours of orders going live. The error applied incorrect shipping charges at checkout and affected orders #159750 to #159962. We sincerely apologise for this mishap - if you have been affected, please re-order your PinePhone now. This will not affect when your PinePhone KDE CE ships.

Lastly, earlier this month we announced that we’ll be launching regional online retail stores in 2021. These online stores will offer a more traditional purchasing and support experience to the Pine Store, and are aimed at people who are less familiar with PINE64 as a project and Linux communities in general. The Pine Store isn’t going away, however, and neither are the community oriented price-points. To learn more about this topic please read the full blog entry.

2020 Retrospective

I’ve chosen a handful of shortcomings and accomplishments of PINE64 as a project for us to look back at. Much has happened in the past 12 months, and since I only have 2 pages allocated for this topic, I had to be rather selective. Feel free to let me know in the comments if I’ve overlooked some key shortcoming or achievement.

This was a difficult year for everyone, and when I write ‘everyone’ I literally mean that everyone has been affected by the COVID19 virus in some way. The pandemic brought much of the world to a complete standstill - indeed the production and the supply chain in China are still reeling from the virus outbreak. Much of the present component shortages and price hikes, such as those preventing us from producing the Pinebook Pro and PineTab, can be directly linked to the January - May period, when most factories were forced to close their doors for business. Moreover, the border crossings to Hong Kong - where our most popular devices such as the PinePhone ship from - remains closed, with an expected reopening date of April, 2021. Despite these massive production and logistic challenges, the Pine Store managed to continually ship devices in 2020. Tens of thousands of phones and laptops shipped via an exceptionally difficult logistic route to reach the end-users. All this is something I wish you keep in mind as I proceed to discuss the successes and shortcomings of this year.

Shortcomings:

At FOSDEM 2020 we announce a sizable number of devices to hit the Pine Store this year. While all the announced devices suffered a set-back, there was one particular one which unfortunately got axed. The HardRock64 (HR64) was meant to be small in size (B-type), have fewer I/O options and serve as a complimentary board to the RockPro64. Unfortunately, by the time we were able to start production of the HR64 the increase in component price, and introduction of competition’s hardware to the market, made the HR64 a much less interesting value proposition. Simultaneously, at this time we already began investigating future SoCs - a topic I touched upon in last month’s update. In result, the decision was made to scrap the HR64 and create an A-type and B-type board based on future architecture of SoCs instead. These new boards will be available to developers next month - something to keep in mind while mourning the HR64.

Picture of the unreleased HardRock64 SBC

Despite having received a positive reception, I sadly need to list the PineTab as our second shortcoming this year. In short, the device has suffered constant delays since its inception and only saw a limited production run this year. We are currently waiting for LCD and digitizer panels to become available to rectify this situation; hopefully a sizable batch will be produced following the Chinese New Year. We know you guys want it - more PineTabs will be available in 2021.

Third on my list of shortcomings is our failure to deliver the OG Pinebook-to-Pinebook Pro-like upgrade kit. In the end we were never able to overcome thermal management issues with the RK3399 in the plastic enclosures of the 11.6” and 14” OG Pinebooks. It also turned out that flashing the keyboard firmware, allowing the chassis to seemingly work with the Pinebook Pro mainboard, sadly isn’t a completely straight-forward process. I personally tried a number of times and never got it to work. Following these obstacles we reallocated the available time to deal with other issues we faced this year. We may come back to this topic at some point in 2021, but I can no longer promise a pro-like upgrade kit will be available for the OG Pinebook. Sorry.

Original Pinebook chassis fitted with a Pinebook Pro mainboard

Lastly, I want to address the shipping difficulties we encountered with the Braveheart and UBPorts CE PinePhone batches. Following COVID19 lockdown and the border closure between Hong Kong and mainland China, we had to establish a very complex logistic process to ship out battery operated devices. We chose to ship the first two editions of the PinePhone at the height of the pandemic, which led to significant shipping problems, and in turn gave rise to frustration among a portion of our end-user base. I still maintain we had no way of foreseeing all the difficulties we encountered, nor could we remedy the situation once the devices shipped; that said, I wish to once again apologize to those who had a bad experience with initial PinePhone shipments. Thankfully, since postmarketOS CE we’ve perfected the logistics process and acquired a transition warehouse in Europe, which effectively resolved all our problems.

Accomplishments:

At the end of last year, I wrote that I foresee PINE64 transitioning in 2020 from a rather niche FOSS project to a more mainstream one. And indeed I think that this has happened. For one, we were invited to become Arm’s strategic ecosystem partner - a real distinction and privilege. Our community of active participants has more-than doubled in the past 12 months. In the PinePhone chat alone we have nearly 10k participants across the different protocols. But active participation is just one measure of the project’s growth, with the other important one being official software device support. The PinePhone and Pinebook Pro - arguably our flagship devices - are now supported by all major distributions and some notable *BSD systems. We are also regularly approached by new projects interested in shipping their OSes on our platforms. This is obviously of major benefit to our community and all those who are considering PINE64 devices for industrial applications or personal use. This transition from a niche tinkering project to a mainstream FOSS one is undoubtedly our biggest accompaniment this year.

We are Arm’s Ecosystem Partner

This year we made the decision to self-host all of our community-centred services and resources. The server move included the pine64.org community website, our IRC and Matrix chats, the PINE64 Wiki as well as the community forums. As many of you know, for this purpose we’ve built a massive RockPro64 cluster that is generously hosted at BBXNET’s server farm in the heart of Europe. Despite some teething problems, this has proven to be a major success for us and all the aforementioned services have been running problem-free for months now. Truth be told, we couldn’t be happier to dogfood our own hardware. As a side-note, to our knowledge we’re the only one’s relying on our own hardware to host the core infrastructure of the project; I trust this stands as a testimony to the work we and all our contributors do.

This website and all our community services are running on this cluster

At the end of last year I publicly asked about feedback regarding what you felt we did well and where we came up short in 2019. Two of the major gripes reported by our community were the Pine Store’s website (looks and functionality) and shipping options. This year we redid the Pine Store from the ground up. Not only does the new page look good, but it is also much more functional. Two of the functions that we managed to incorporate are shipping options and an Import Tax / VAT calculator. We already had some feedback regarding the store, and are actively working on getting more features ready. A store refresh was a much needed change - one which I believe most users are grateful for.

The old Pine Store wasn’t exactly easy or pleasant to browse

It probably will come as no surprise that the PinePhone has proven to be a huge success for us. Not only have we managed to ship an astounding number of PinePhones this year, we also had the privilege to work with and support 4 well established smartphone Linux projects. We built a community platform, from the ground-up, for developers to cooperate and share resources. We’re really proud of this. Thanks to the PinePhone efforts we now have an unrivaled cooperation framework for future devices. The PinePhone wasn’t the only success story of the year - the Pinebook Pro and other auxiliary devices (e.g., the PineCube, the Docking Deck and the Pinecil) were met with a lot of enthusiasm and widespread interest. Despite the global pandemic this year, we’ve noted a significant increase in interest in our devices by people within, and outside of, the Linux community.

First 3 of the 2020 Community Editions of the PinePhone

The last accomplishment I wish to outline here isn’t really ours to boast about - the PineTime. Truth be told, the PineTime has significantly surpassed and exceeded our expectations. It is a completely autonomous project, largely informed by JF, Daniel Thompson and Lup and their community’s work, which has now gained a lot of traction and established its own sub-community. We’re very impressed by how far the PineTime has come this year, and that it is almost at the brink of being a fully functional smartwatch, now capable of pairing with Android and Linux smartphones. This is a success story that belongs solely to the community which is backing the PineTime project - hats off.

PineTime (By JF)

As always, I’m thrilled to see the work done by the PineTime community! First, I would like to highlight the work done by Electr0Lyte, who designed the gorgeous and classy analog watch faces based on InfiniTime and wrote documentation about them. This is proof that it’s possible to design a nice and clear user interface even on low powered embedded system like the PineTime.

Chrono watch face for the PineTime by Electr0Lyte

I’ve lately had less time to devote to the PineTime community and the InfiniTime, but fortunately this didn’t prevent other developers from contributing to the project! Great pull requests are now being reviewed and merged, including ones that: reduce the wake up time, fix battery level readout, add call notification as well as a new ‘paddle’ game. Perhaps the most noticeable addition to InfiniTime is this PR from AirHamster, which adds Cyrillic alphabet support for notifications. This is not a complete translation of the firmware, but it’s a first step for the support of multiple languages in InfiniTime.

Cyrillic alphabet / Russian language support for the PineTime by AirHamster (original image)

A new version of Wasp-OS, the micropython firmware has also seen a release in the past 30 days. This is a great release which adds cool functionalities like the heart-rate monitoring, step counting as well as notifications. Moreover, this release improves the support for over-the-air updates and adds the ability to install wasp-os from InfiniTime, which is the default firmware the PineTime ships with. I like wasp-os very much (it’s very satisfying to enter the Python REPL running on the PineTime) and everyone interested in working with Micropython on embedded systems should really have a look at the project and its extensive documentation.

Now let’s look at the PineTime ecosystem, and more specifically at Amazfish. This companion app for smartwatches and fitness trackers was originally designed to run on SailfishOS. Adam Pigg, the creator of Amazfish, worked hard on making the application easily portable to other Linux distros and various devices. With his help, we managed to build and run Amazfish on a x86 desktop computer (running Manjaro), the PinebookPro (running ManjaroARM) and on the Pinephone (running ManjaroArm with KDE)!

PineTime running InfiniTime paired with Manjaro running KDE Plasma Mobile (original post)

This is great news for the PineTime project and an achievement that opens up the PineTime ecosystem to a lot of Linux distribution and Linux devices such as the PinePhone.

Consider this also as a call for contributions - Amazfish really needs your help to package the application for multiple Linux OSes. Wouldn’t it be nice to have Amazfish easily installable on Manjaro, PostmarketOS, UBPorts and the many other operating systems of the PinePhone?

Pinebook Pro

Let me get the bad news out of the way first: we’ve been unsuccessful in securing LCD panels for the Pinebook Pro. That said, we’re still actively working on finding a reliable source of panels for both the Pinebook Pro and PineTab, however it appears that the component shortages in China are only getting worse. I don’t own a crystal ball, so I cannot predict with certainty whether or not the situation will reach a successful resolution by next month. Given the current state of affairs, we’re planning to resume production of the Pinebook Pro after the Chinese New Year in late February or early March 2021. I fully understand this information will come as a disappointment to many of those waiting to get their hands on a unit. We’re sorry, and there is very little we can do at the present time. For more details about this unforeseen extended halt in Pinebook Pro and PineTab’s production please read the September and October community updates.

On a positive note, we’ve seen an important software development, namely the Pinebook Pro will be supported in the Debian Bullseye Installer. This means that you’ll soon be able to install official Debian Bullseye on your Pinebook Pro (and OG Pinebook). While the Pinebook Pro already has really solid Debian support, thanks largely due to a community built installer by Daniel Thompson, it is obviously a whole different thing to have official support directly from the Debian project. We’re looking forward to the third Alpha release of the installer. When it finally gets released make sure to give it a shot.

Debian on Pinebook Pro (image from Category5 Technology TV - video link)

Lastly, I am happy to report that the Pinebook Pro Docking Deck has received a very favorable response from the community. Early reviews have painted a very optimistic view of our USB-C dock. The Docking Dock has been long in the works, so it’s a real relief to us that it has received this much praise upon its initial launch. For those of you who have experienced issues with getting the Docking Deck working with the default Manjaro OS image, please switch over to the unstable branch. This can be achieved by editing pacman-mirrors.conf and upgrading your installation:

sudo nano /etc/pacman-mirrors.conf

Change from:

arm-stable to arm-unstable

Then run:

sudo pacman-mirrors -f5 && sudo pacman -Syyuu

You can expect Docking Deck support to be added to the stable branch of Manjaro Arm in the next major software update (to kernel 5.10). As for other OS images for the Pinebook Pro, enablement of the Docking Deck will depend largely on developers. If you are a developer and want to incorporate Docking Deck support in your Pinebook Pro OS image, then please see this merge request by ayufan.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

A review of the Docking Deck by LearningLinuxTV

PinePhone

I’ll mostly have hardware-related topics to discuss this month, but there are a few noteworthy software and firmware subjects worth reporting on, since some of the recent developments affect the phone’s core functionality. Earlier in December, Megi released his version of kernel 5.10 for the PinePhone, which is now available for testing in a handful of OSes, noteworthily in Manjaro Phosh and Manjaro KDE. The new kernel brings a number of general improvements to the modem driver, WiFi as well as USB-C dock support. Regarding the modem driver, the time to resume from deep sleep has now been significantly reduced from 1.2 seconds to 400 milliseconds. As for dock support, not only should more docks be supported now, but the power delivery via the dock itself should be more reliable. For more information please read Megi’s news log.

Another piece of important software-related information concerns modem firmware. A new firmware for the Quectel EG25-G, which improves power management as well as call reliability, is now available for flashing. It significantly improves the thermal performance of the modem, reducing the operating temperature and power consumption. The new firmware also adds profiles for Sprint and Telus VoLTE and support for select German and Spanish GSM providers. Our thanks go out to Biktor, who contributed to this firmware. We initially were hoping to have the KDE CE PinePhone ship with the new modem firmware, however due some issues with the automated flashing process integrated into the factory-test OS image (and a lack of time to troubleshoot what was wrong with it) all PinePhone users will have to flash their modems manually. Martijn Braam is currently looking into creating a simple and safe utility for flashing the firmware. I expect more information about this will follow shortly.

Lastly, I want to report on the progress of the Megapixels, the PinePhone-specific camera application developed by and for postmarketOS, but used by many operating systems - including Mobian, Manjaro, KDE Neon, Manjaro with Lomiri and numerous others. The newest version of the application offers autofocus, manual controls for exposure and shutter, back-and-front camera switching, and now also a smooth 30FPS viewfinder. Although the application is still in beta, it shows a lot of promise and has continually exceeded everyone’s expectations. Moreover, the camera pictures have also shown a lot of improvement in recent months, and using manual controls, you now can take pretty good looking pictures. For more details please see Martijn Braam’s Megapixels documentation.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

The viewfinder in Megapixels running at 30FPS

Next up we have a lot of hardware topics to cover. Let me start with some good news for all of you who have been waiting for a PinePhone keyboard. After a lengthy back-and-forth and numerous design changes, we have now firmly settled on a design and signed a contract with a highly reputable and specialized keyboard vendor. Design-wise, we’ve gone a full circle and in the end decided on a PSION5-like ‘Vulcano’ key type keyboard, which will attach and interface with the PinePhone via the pogo pins. The keyboard will also feature a high-capacity (5000-6000mAh) battery. Aside from the obvious attribute of extending the device’s operating time, the battery also acts as a counter-balance for the phone when it is fitted with the keyboard and sat on a flat surface. This will be a high-quality peripheral and we expect it to be a highly desirable add-on for the PinePhone.

PinePhone mounted to keyboard when open (disregard USB-C port)

PinePhone with keyboard when shut

Original PSION5 keyboard for reference - the PinePhone keyboard will be very similar in form and function

Due to the keyboard vendor’s expertise and manufacturing capabilities, we expect preview units to already be available in January. These early production units will be shipped out to developers so that the keyboard can be enabled across most if not all operating systems. Granted this enablement goes well, I think it is reasonable to expect the keyboard to be available in the Pine Store and regional stores sometime soon after the Chinese New Year (late February or early March 2021). We expect the PinePhone keyboard to cost somewhere in the $50 range in the Pine Store.

In other hardware news, the Qi wireless charging case has now entered production. While we don’t have a price-point to announce at this time, we ought to have one by next month’s update since the back case should be available prior to Chinese New Year. The back case is 2mm thicker than the stock cover and can accommodate small add-on and accessory boards, such as for instance a LoRA module. We are still thinking of other applications apart from LoRA that could fit in the extra space offered by the case, but I’m sure end-users will find many interesting ways to make use of it. Personally, I cannot wait to see what functionality people will be able to hack into this case.

The wireless coil design used in the back case

Speaking of hacking-in functionality into the PinePhone, these past 30 days have seen some of the coolest end-user add-ons ever created for the device. There are three which I want to highlight here: a functional fingerprint reader back-case, a DIY keyboard and the PineEye thermal camera. Let me offer some information about the latter two first, as I have some exciting news concerning the fingerprint reader back case. The PineEye uses a custom breakout board and PCB designed by jnavarro. The PCB hosts a Panasonic AMG8833 sensor which interfaces with the PinePhone’s pogo pins, more specifically the I2C port. The project is open and the sensor can be interacted with on most OSes by installing i2c-tools via OS specific package managers. It is my understanding that currently the add-on board does not function with Megapixels nor any other application, and could - at least in theory - be supported by a custom application, as illustrated by Marijn Braam earlier this year. I hope this project will expand and see more adoption. It is worth mentioning that the project is open hardware, so you can get your PineEye PCB today.

PineEye PCB attached via flex cable to pogo pins (picture source)

Similarly to the PineEye, the DIY keyboard created by James Williams is something you could replicate on your own, granted that you have the technical mastery and tools. All you need is a 3D printer, some off-the-shelf components and a fair amount of time to complete the build. Just as the official PinePhone keyboard due early next year, the DIY keyboard by James snaps into the back of the PinePhone, replacing the default back case, and utilizes the I2C protocol on the pogo pins. The keyboard features small mechanical switches, a kickstand and a really nifty hinge design allowing the entire contraption to sit flush when closed. I really admire the effort and engineering that went into making this keyboard and wish I had the skills to replicate it on my own. To learn more about the project, please read the original reddit thread.

DIY PinePhone keyboard (picture source)

Last, but certainly not least, late last month we were absolutely blown away by Zachary Schroeder’s work, which resulted in a functional (!!!) fingerprint reader back case for the PinePhone. Soon after the original reddit post appeared I reached out to Zachary. We have since established a working-group consisting of numerous parties to help bring this design to fruition. His original design, while really cool, is not something we could help with manufacturing since the original sensor used was very expensive and large; this would result in a bulky and pricey back case. We have since managed to find a suitable replacement sensor, which not only is much more affordable but also smaller, thereby much simpler to implement. Zachary is currently in the process of enabling the new fingerprint reader and making it operational in software. It may still be a couple of months before this project reaches a production-ready status, but this will happen eventually. We’re really thankful to Zachary for wanting to work with us on this - it is a truly great and fun project.

Prototype fingerprint reader back case; production sensor candidate pictured atop of the case

PinePower

Early next year we’ll launch a line of PINE64 branded power supplies (PSUs). Both PSUs are based on reference designs, but we have made significant improvements to the internals so they are more performant than existing offerings. The portable version of the PinePower - the name we chose for our line of PSUs - is a 65W (total output) Gallium Nitride (GaN) design capable of delivering 5V 3A; 9V 3A; 12V 3A; 15V 3A; 20V 3.25A over two USB-C and one USB-A port. It will be able to easily simultaneously charge the Pinebook Pro, the PinePhone and PineTime at the same time. It can also be used to power the Pinecil. We currently hope to have the portable PinePower available in late January or early February 2021, with a price tag of $24.99 in the Pine Store and $29.99 in regional retail stores.

The portable PinePower PSU will look like this

The desktop version of the PinePower, due sometime later in 2021, will be capable of 120W total output. This PSU will feature 4x power delivery USB-A ports and a USB-C port. We will incorporate a LCD panel allowing for detailed and active monitoring of the power draw of each of the ports. We are currently debating whether we should incorporate a 10W Qi charging platform, situated on top of the Deskto PinePower’s chassis, so that the PinePhone fitted with Qi charging case or an Android phone could be placed on it. I’d really like to hear your feedback about this feature - good or bad idea, what do you think?

I’ll have more information about the PinePower next month when the first samples roll off the factory line.

PineCube

There are two pieces of PineCube information which I’d like to share with you this month. First, Armbian now offers a mainline (kernel 5.9) Linux build for the PineCube. There is an Ubuntu Focal and a Debian Buster version of the Armbian build for you to choose from. This is obviously great news, and we are very thankful to the Armbian project for supporting the PineCube so quickly after launch; a special thanks goes out to Moe Icenowy for making this happen. The support for the PineCube was added yesterday (from the time of writing) and I have not yet personally had an opportunity to test it. I am, however, very much interested in hearing people’s experiences with the PineCube running Armbian - if you’ve tried it, make sure to let us know your impressions in the comments section

PineCube case

Secondly, we’ve created a housing for the PineCube. We will, eventually, make it available in the Pine Store for purchase. Meanwhile, we’ve decided to release the STL files for the housing so that anyone with a 3D printer can print their own. If you would like to upload it to Thingiverse, then you’ve got my blessing to do so. You are also allowed, and indeed even encouraged, to alter and improve the default design.

Pinecil

The first production run of the Pinecil has sold out in under 3 days. While we knew that it would prove popular, we weren’t quite prepared for such an enthusiastic response. Mind you, this wasn’t exactly a small production run either. Taking this into account I am sure many of you will be happy to hear that the next batch is currently being manufactured, and we expect to receive the next shipment of Pinecils sometime in January. I’ll make sure to give everyone a heads up when the next shipment becomes available on PINE64 Telegram News channel as well as our Twitter and Mastodon.

First Pinecils are now in the wild - photo by Mozzwald (original source)

Over the past few weeks we’ve been closely monitoring Pinecil feedback from the community. As always, we’re thankful for the input received. We’re also glad to see that the device has been met with such good reception from end-users. We’ll keep on reviewing incoming feedback, and granted that no major issues are reported, we’ll probably have a steady Pinecil production flow post Chinese New Year.

To those who already got their Pinecils, please share your experience of the device with others.

Nutcracker Challenge (by gamiee)

Closing out this month’s community update, here is a short update on the current state of the Nutcracker challenge - our effort to bring a fully open source firmware Bluetooth and WiFi module to current and future PINE64 devices and single board computers. Since last month’s blog post another 19 developers have received their PineCone evaluation board (EVB), and we have seen many new contributions to the project. Bouffalo, the company behind the BL602 RISC-V BT/WiFi silicon used by the PineCone, has made a promise to us that more source code related to the WiFi and Bluetooth blobs will be released shortly. While we wait for the code, the community has started exploring other parts of the SoC. More specifically the present efforts are concentrated on exploring the flashing mechanisms and internal BootROM code. This resulted in early open-source flashing tools, written in Python and Rust, being released. Moreover, we released an initial Arduino support for the BL602, with working hardware serial, GPIO, PWM and I2C peripherals - please see our PineCone GitHub for more details.

Lastly, Lup Yuen - whom you may know from his excellent work on the PineTime - has been writing phenomenal articles about the PineCone. We strongly recommend you give them a read if you’re interested in the Nutcracker Challenge; the articles can be found on Lup’s Github.

That is all for this month’s update - catch you all in 2021!

Pine Store Community Pricing & Online Retail Stores

Wed, 02 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In 2021 you’ll see online retail Pine stores open in Europe, North America and possibly also worldwide at a later stage. Let me start by making one thing clear - the current Pine Store isn’t going away and the pricing in the Pine Store will remain unchanged. You’ll always be able to buy and pre-order your devices from pine64.com at a community-oriented price point. The retail stores will function alongside the Pine Store, not replace it, and offer a different customer experience. In this blog I’ll explain the rationale behind this strategy.

PINE64 is not a business

First things first - PINE64 is a community, not a business, and the Pine Store’s sole purpose is to serve this community by providing FOSS development-friendly hardware. Sales numbers and revenue are not, and never were, a driving force behind this project; making the next fun and often experimental device was and still is. Some devices, such as the original Pinebook, were even sold at a loss at times - simply because we knew people wanted one. Seriously.

Victims of our own success

Our strategy was always clear - work with developers to design a product, have partner projects and community developers work on the software and sell the device at a community-oriented price point. This approach has proven to be a great way forward for us, and one that, dare I say it, ultimately distinguished us from the other FOSS-vendors and manufacturers. That said, we’re slowly falling victim to our own success. News of our devices have reached people outside of our target audience, and enthusiast-grade products now frequently end up in the hands of non-technical customers.

I have just been looking at the incoming support tickets these past weeks, and the majority of incoming queries are by people who are not comfortable troubleshooting software problems, have little Linux experience, and do not understand the nature of our devices. In a nutshell, they are general tech-consumers unfamiliar with the intricacies of Linux, FOSS communities and our goals.

Pine Store isn’t meant to deliver software support

The Pine Store’s support structure is designed to help with lost shipments, RMAs, part-replacement and other similar queries. However, much of today’s work actually consists of software troubleshooting, detailed walkthroughs and explaining basics of how the devices operate. In other words, the Pine Store support performs tasks that our community Wiki, forums, and chats are intended for. More frequently than before, support staff also encounters customers completely unaccustomed to troubleshooting hardware issues or participating in identifying the nature of experienced problems. For reference, the Pine Store receives in excess of 3000 support emails per month - this give you an idea of the scale and volume of such support tickets.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t blame such customers. In their minds we’re no different to any other tech company, our products no different from their existing phones, laptops and PCs. It is a case of misaligned expectations and a fundamental conceptual misunderstanding.

A suitable solution

The simplest solution would be to prevent users unacquainted with Linux, FOSS communities and our strategy from purchasing devices such as the PinePhone. We could, for instance, have people explicitly agree to using community resources for software support, declare an understanding of the community-driven nature of the project and acknowledge the work-in-progress nature of the device.

But this would be ultimately unfair - we believe that everyone should have a go at Linux, its community as well as devices such as the Pinebook Pro and PinePhone, which are a great way for people to get involved.

So the resolution we settle on instead is offering a retail experience to those who require it. Let me explain exactly what this means; devices purchased from regional online retail stores will usually ship out within a few days of the purchase date, come with region-specific warranties (inc. RMA) and a guarantee of traditional retail customer support (e.g. software troubleshooting). There may be more benefits to buying from online retail stores too - that remains to be seen.

This will come at a cost - the devices will be more expensive. Devices sold in online retail stores will need to make a profit to maintain this level of support, cover RMAs and put food on people’s tables. As some of you have already noticed, the Pine Store now lists both the community price - available exclusively in the Pine Store - as well as a retail price that will be used in online retail stores (see images below).

Examples of listings including both the community and retail pricing.

Consider it a choice

Ultimately we wish to offer people a choice. The Pine Store, in its current form, isn’t going anytime soon and the current community-oriented price point will not change. If you are a Linux adept with an understanding of the intricacies of enthusiast-grade devices, then the Pine Store will be there for you just as it has these past five years. However, if you are a curious bystander or simply someone keen to learn and experiment with Linux, then the retail options may prove a better choice.

More information about this topic will follow in January 2021, at which point we’ll explain in more detail how the relationship between the community-oriented Pine Store and online retail stores will function in practice.

KDE Community Edition is now available

Tue, 01 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce that the KDE Community Edition (CE) PinePhone is now available for pre-order. This edition of the PinePhone ships with a tailored build of Plasma Mobile built upon Manjaro Linux, and it is the culmination of ongoing efforts to bring the popular Plasma desktop environment to the smartphone.

To learn more about Plasma Mobile please visit the project’s website. To better understand your options for running Plasma Mobile on the PinePhone and the current state of development (at the time of writing) I encourage you to read the development team’s blog post on this subject matter.

This community edition will ship in a custom presentation box designed by the Plasma Mobile team, and the PinePhone itself will feature a KDE logo on the back-cover (see renders for reference).

This PinePhone CE will be available in two hardware configurations:

$149 — 2GB RAM; 16GB eMMC
$199 — 3GB RAM; 32GB eMMC (includes a bundled USB-C dock)

Both configurations of the KDE CE PinePhones feature rev. 1.2b PCBA. The $199 hardware variant, called convergence package, also features a USB-C dock equipped with 10/100 Ethernet, 2x USB type A ports, HDMI digital video output and power-in via USB-C.

We will donate $10 per unit sold to KDE e.V. To learn more about this scheme please click here.

To learn more about PinePhone KDE CE please read the original announcement.

November Update: KDE PinePhone CE And A Peek Into The Future

Sun, 15 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to this month’s community update! We’ve got exciting news to share, but before I proceed in doing so I’d like to thank Gamiee, JF, and PizzaLovingNerd for contributing to this blog entry and Clover for the final edits and proof-reading. As the PINE64 device-family grows larger and becomes more diverse, I find myself more reliant than ever on other people’s insight and expertise when writing up these updates. To this end, I’d very much like to thank the aforementioned community members and, at the same time, invite others to take part in shaping future updates. If you’ve got something you would like to contribute to an upcoming community update, then please reach out to me in the chats.

In this update we’re happy to announce the next Community Edition of the PinePhone, which will ship with KDE Plasma Mobile. We will also take a look at the Pinebook Pro dock and talk a bit about future hardware.

For those of you who are averse to reading long blog entries or simply prefer receiving news in an audio-video format, then you’ll be glad to know that we now have a complimentary video edition of the monthly community update. It can also be watched on LBRY if Youtube isn’t your thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4su-YdjTYtY&feature=youtu.be

Video synopsis of the November Community Update

TL;DR for this month’s update:

We’ve donated to postmarketOS; thank you to those who supported the pmOS CE!
Sub-forums and Wiki entries for PineCube and SOEdge are now up
Problems with chat protocol bridge to be addressed soon(TM)
Notice re. Small number of Manjaro PinePhones with postmarketOS -sorry!
Nutcracker Challenge - working towards a blob-free WiFi and BT. Get your PineCone EVB now
Let’s talk about the future; sneak peak at RK3566 SBCs in early 2021
Thrilled to announce PinePhone KDE Community Edition!
PinePhone KDE CE pre-orders start December 1st. 2GB RAM/ 16GB eMMC and 3GB RAM/ 32GB eMMC + USB-C dock (Convergence Package) will be available.
PinePhone 3GB RAM/ 32GB eMMC mainboards now available in the Pine Store; early adopters get a major discount
PInePhone Qi wireless charging back case taking shape - available nearly next year
Megi’s PinePhone kernel improvements are a big deal; we’re getting closer and closer to daily-driver readiness
PinePhone convergence working well now
Pinebook Pro ‘Docking Deck’ USB-C dock available later this month for $39.99
Armbian on the Pinebook Pro is great; if you’re in need of Ubuntu on the PBP, then give it a spin - highly recommended
FydeOS for Pinebook Pro is a ChromiumOS fork capable of running Android and Linux applications; coming soon!
PineTime InfiniTime updated to 0.9.0; fixes a major bug and brings new music player
PineTime firmware can now be upgraded via Gadgetbridge!
PineTime reloader tool to switch bootloaders, and firmware, in the works
Pinecil entered production and will be available later this month or late the next; a look at the packaging and extra tips
PineCube running Debian and NixOS; software progress is coming along well
PineCube subforum, chat and Wiki now available - join in and contribute
SOEdge will be available for “Developers only” to start with
SOEdge Wiki and subforum is now live

Housekeeping

We have now made a donation to the postmarketOS team for their work on the Community Edition of the PinePhone. We firmly believe and trust that this sizable donation will be put to good use and benefit all Linux on mobile development to come. Working with the postmarketOS team has been nothing short of great and since their phones shipped we’ve seen significant improvements to the software. I’d like to once again thank those of you who chose to support them by purchasing a postmarketOS PinePhone.

In other community news, there are now PineCube and SOEDge sub-forums on the PINE64 forum. Both devices, which I’ll write about later in this month’s update, will benefit strongly from community engagement early on. A PineCube chat is also available on our Discord server, and will eventually end up bridged up to other protocols. On a similar note, the Nutcracker challenge which began this month has now also found its way onto our Discord and will, in all likelihood, also be bridged to other protocols. We’ll soon also be adding sub-forums and chats for the SOEdge and Pinecil - you can expect them to be available to the community sometime later this year, perhaps even this month.

On the subject of chats, I’d quickly like to touch upon the situation with the chat-protocol bridge. For those who aren’t in the know, we currently have multiple chat protocols bridged with many thousands of users relying on it for cooperation, knowledge dissemination and software support. In recent months we’ve started to experience issues, which subsequently led to IRC being disconnected from current chat infrastructure. We have also experienced a significant increase in response delays across the bridge - likely due to the high volume of messages and people participating. In result, the entire bridge will have to be reworked in the coming months - as early as this month or as late as early January. This will obviously cause a disruption to chat communications for a day or two, so consider this a heads-up; a notice will be issued when work on the chats begins.

In other community news, I am happy to report that the shipping progress for the Manjaro Community Edition PinePhones is proceeding well without any major hiccups. Indeed, Manjaro CE started shipping earlier than we anticipated, with thousands of people having already received their devices. For those of you still waiting for your unit to arrive, I encourage you to follow the shipping thread over on our forum; we still expect to have a handful of shipping updates for the Manjaro CE between now and mid-December.

Lastly, a few days ago it has come to our attention that a number of Manjaro CE PinePhones have shipped with postmarketOS preinstalled. Following a brief investigation, it turned out that one out of 100 SD cards used for testing and subsequent flashing at the factory did, indeed, contain the postmarketOS image. If you Manjaro CE shipped with postmarketOS, then please see this blog post and please accept our apologies for this situation.

Nutcracker Challenge [by Marek “Gamiee” Kraus****]

The PineCone - by Martijn Braam

As many of you have probably already heard, we recently launched the Nutcracker Challenge - a reverse-engineering effort of WiFi and Bluetooth on the BL602 chip with a RISC-V core. The intention of the effort is to eventually have a 100% open-source WiFi and Bluetooth chip for PINE64 devices including current and future single board computers, smartphones, tablets and laptops. This is an important project for us and one which we believe will directly benefit not only our user base but also others who care about privacy.

Following the announcement of the Challenge we immediately received a lot of attention, and at the time of writing this article we have received 86 pull requests, out of which 49 have already been merged. All this effort was made by 37 contributors who will be rewarded with a free PineCone Evaluation Board for their work. The first very small batch of PineCone Evaluation Boards - or EVBs - has been already shipped, and the second batch is being manufactured. We expect to ship a total of 1000 PineCone EVBs over the duration of the challenge.

Despite developers and contributors not having access to the hardware, they made great progress on analyzing the blobs, improving documentation or fixing bugs in the SDK. We are also happy that the company which designed the chip - Bouffalo - have promised more documentation and low-level code, which they already provided to us alongside an improved datasheet and reference manual. There is still much to do and a long road ahead of us, but we expect to see a tremendous contribution boost once the hardware reaches its new owners. For all of you interested in participating in the Nutcracker Challenge, I invite you to read about how you can contribute and receive a free PineCone EVB.

Let’s talk about the future [Part 1 of many to come]

Next month’s update will include a full review of the year 2020; we will look back at how far we’ve come since December 2019. Today, I will give you a sneak-peak at the future and what’s to come. Before I proceed, I’d like to make it clear: what I am about to share with you is just a small portion of our strategy for the months to come. Consider this the first of many steps which we will begin taking in the next 6-to-12 months to further PINE64’s cause. With that out of the way, let me introduce you to the next SoC to enter the PINE64 lineup at one point early next year, the RK3566.

Rockchip RK3566

You can think of the RK3566 in terms of a spiritual successor to the RK3328 currently used in the ROCK64 single board computer - our most popular device to date, at least in terms of units sold. It is, however, not only more powerful than the RK3328, but also considerably more flexible in terms of potential use-cases and implementations. Featuring four fast A55 cores running at 2.0 GHz, a modern G52 GPU, fast I/O (including PCIe, USB3.0, GbE and SATA) and up-to 8GB of [LP]DDR4 RAM, it is our choice for NON-Pro PINE64 devices to come.

Next year you will see us introduce two single board computers based on the RK3566 - they will be available in two configurations, more specifically in the model ‘A’ and the model ‘B’ form-factor. For those that do not know, ‘A’ -sized PINE64 SBCs are larger in size, sharing the ROCKPro64’s and PINE A64-LTS footprint, while the ‘B’ form-factor SBCs are smaller, such as the ROCK64 or PINE H64. It is noteworthy that the new generation SBCs will be a part of a new line of devices, and hence not share the ‘ROCK’ naming scheme of current Rockchip boards. More on this later.

We envision the two boards to serve somewhat different purposes within the PINE64 eco-system. The ‘B’ board will be just that, a stand-alone single board computer, while the ‘A’-sized board may offer the opportunity to be used as a development platform for future non-pro devices due to all of the SoC’s I/O being exposed on the larger PCBA. Both the ‘A’ and ‘B’ form-factor RK3566 single board computers will, of course, be software compatible so you may choose either for your new project. As a fun fact I’ll add that the SoC has a dedicated e-ink protocol - so the possibility for creating the most outrageously overpowered e-reader is now upon us.

Finishing this section off, I’d like to make you aware that it will be a long time before the future RK3566-based SBCs will be useful to regular end-users or serve as a basis for next-gen PINE64 devices. Mainlining, patching, as well as exposing all interfaces (making them functional) in the Linux kernel takes time and a lot of work. In other words, don’t expect the A64 and RK3328 - both of which are well supported in Linux - to be phased out anytime soon. Indeed, I expect that this will be a long transition period, but at the same time I am excited to announce this new beginning.

Later this month I’ll release a riddle pertaining to the naming of this PINE64 product-line. The person to crack the riddle first will receive one of the first boards from the production line.

PinePhone

We are thrilled to announce that we’re teaming up with KDE to bring you the next community edition (CE) of the PinePhone. We have a long-standing friendship with the KDE Community, going all the way back to the original Pinebook which shipped with KDE Neon as it’s default operating system. For more than a year now, the Pinebook Pro, which features Manjaro with KDE Plasma desktop, has been receiving widespread acclaim from the media and end-users alike. It is also because of this close relationship that the KDE team were among the very first we approached when envisioning the PinePhone. Fun Fact: during the initial conceptual stages of the PinePhone’s development, KDE were also the ones to accidentally leak that the PinePhone was in the works!)

KDE Plasma Mobile on the PinePhone

For the past year now, Plasma Mobile (which, for those who don’t know, is KDE’s mobile user interface) has made major strides and achieved a new level of polish. I believe that this is, at least in part, thanks to the broad adoption of the PinePhone as the default Linux-on-mobile development platform. Just in a recent blog post on Plasma Mobile’s website, the development team mentioned major improvements to the overall user experience, ranging from significant shell and lockscreen improvements, to improved support for vital mobile apps. I strongly encourage you to read the linked blog post to learn more.

We currently plan to have pre-orders for the KDE CE to go live on December 1, 2020 - you can expect an announcement blog post once the phones become available. I also encourage you to subscribe to this blog, follow us on Twitter and join the PINE64 Telegram News Channel so you do not miss the news. The PinePhone itself will be available in the same two HW configurations as the previous two editions:

$149 - 2GB RAM + 16GB eMMC

$199 - 3GB RAM + 32GB eMMC Convergence Package with an included USB-C dock

Please head over to KDE’s website and read the announcement to learn more about what the team got in store for this community edition of the PinePhone.

3GB RAM / 32GB eMMC Flash PinePhone Mainboards

We’re happy to let you know that stand-alone 3GB RAM / 32GB eMMC flash mainboards are now available for purchase from the Pine Store. We made the decision to sell the mainboards at a significant discount to BraveHeart and UBPorts CE owners who wish to upgrade the device. Consider it a ‘thank you’ for being early adopters; we really appreciate you supporting us in our quest to bring Linux on mobile to a wider audience. For those who wish to learn more about this newest revision of the PinePhone mainboard, I point you to the schematic for details (no major change from 1.2a).

Last on the PinePhone hardware discussion list for this month is the Qi wireless charging caseback for the PinePhone. The wireless charging back case is soon to enter production and we expect it to be available early next year. The Qi wireless implementation we’re using is pretty cutting edge; it incorporates all components, including the copper coil on the actual PCB itself - which, in turn, is incorporated into the back case. It is over my head, so I am including an engineering picture for you to take a look at.

Qi wireless charging coil and PCB for the PinePhone to be embedded in custom back case

Software-wise, the last month has seen some of the most impressive improvements in months. Ondrej (Megi) Jirman has made substantial progress on his kernel and usability patches, which have now become adopted by the majority of PinePhone operating systems. Among other refinements and enhancements made, the PinePhone display now runs at 60Hz - 1/3x faster than before, resulting in an all-around much snappier experience. This is particularly noticeable when typing or otherwise interacting with the touchscreen. I consider this a major boon from an usability standpoint.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

KDE Plasma Mobile with Megi’s patches ~ via KDE and Manjaro dev teams

Moreover, docking the PinePhone for desktop convergence - in OSes that support this feature and use the new kernel and relevant patches - now works like a charm. I’ve tested Manjaro with Phosh and Plasma Mobile, and both worked well in the docked mode. Docking the phone for a convergence experience now also works with just about any TV or display, and the phone will even output to a 4K@30FPS monitor (although, the convergence feature is not usable at this resolution). To be clear, when I say that ‘it works’ I mean that all of the dock’s features now work well, including power input, HDMI out, USB ports and the Ethernet connection. I found that I can genuinely be quite productive whilst using the PinePhone in this configuration - case in point, I am writing this section of the update on a docked PinePhone. But productivity obviously is just a portion of the potential - you can have some fun with this feature too, check out the video below.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Docking your phone can be used for so much more than productivity!

Lastly, I also found that the PinePhone now resumes faster from suspend on incoming calls, and that the Bluetooth adapter functions reliably. Both of these features, while relatively minor when compared to the major strides made in the past month, are actually very significant in terms of making the PinePhone viable as a daily driver. This, combined with the much improved voice call audio quality in the newest kernel, means that my SIM card now resides exclusively in the PinePhone, while I keep my Android phone for auxiliary tasks. We’ve come a long way since January 2020 and at this pace I feel the PinePhone may become a viable daily driver for many users early next year - I truly believe this.

Pinebook Pro

I have some good Pinebook Pro hardware and software news to share with you this month. Let’s begin with hardware; the Pinebook Pro USB-C dock, which we have christened “The Docking Deck”, has now entered production and ought to be available in the Pine Store in a week’s time. It will be coming in at a price of $39.99. I’d like to thank ayufan for making The Docking Deck work with the mainline Linux kernel with patches - without his work we likely would have not decided to proceed with making the deck. The default Manjaro OS build that ships with the PBP will be updated to support The Docking Deck out-of-the-box in the future.

Picture of Docking Deck from factory

The deck features a wide array of I/O including: 1) a full sized SD card slot; 2) a mSD slot; 3) 2x USB-C ports; 4) 3x USB 3.0 ports; 5) a Gigabit Ethernet port; 6) VGA out socket; 7) as well as HDMI out. It uses USB-C for power and is capable of accommodating high Wattage power supply units capable of delivering power to the Pinebook Pro as well as all peripherals attached to The Docking Deck. The picture below shows the exact layout of the entire I/O. Mind you, the picture below is of a prototype sample we received from the factory; the final production version will be perfectly color matched the Pinebook Pro and even share a near identical metal feel of the laptop’s shell. There will be a small laser etched PINE64 logo at the bottom of the deck, alongside the required certification.

A closer look at the Docking Deck’s I/O - Picture of Prototype

Software wise, there are two things I’d like to write about this month, the most recent Armbian build and FydeOS for the Pinebook Pro. Armbian now offers a well supported Ubuntu Focal OS image for the Pinebook Pro, based on a mainline kernel with patches and FOSS GPU drivers. I’ve recently spent some time with this operating system and I am happy to report that it is a phenomenal option for all those who want to run Ubuntu on their Pinebook Pro. Armbian is snappy, responsive and has a good selection of software to get you going. I had no issues with watching 1080p video content locally, playing retro games in retroarch or browsing the internet.

If you’re not a fan of Manjaro and have a strong preference for Ubuntu over Debian, then I highly recommend this build - it’s very good.

FydeOS on the Pinebook Pro

The other operating system I’ve been trying out on my Pinebook Pro is FydeOS - a ChromiumOS fork capable of running Linux and Android apps. I found the operating system to be very snappy and capable. Playing back Youtube movies, even at a 1440p, was a perfectly smooth experience and Android apps - including some popular games - ran exceedingly well. I am not suggesting it instead of Linux or BSD, but if you or your kids need a Chromebook then this OS may just be worthwhile looking into. I am presently not certain as to when a build will be publicly available, but the beta I had the privilege of trying out was already really polished, so I expect we’ll hear more news from the FydeOS development team soon. Stay tuned!

PineTime [by JF]

These last few weeks, the InfiniTime project received a lot of feedback from users (in Github, Twitter and in the chat) and contributions from fellow developers. It’s really amazing to see that people are actually using InfiniTime and even devoting their time to working on improving it!

InfiniTime version 0.9.0 was released a few days ago. The new firmware version fixes some annoying bugs, including one that prevented the bootloader from running correctly after a reset. This bug would temporarily brick the device, and some people had to wait for the battery to drain completely before being able to get PineTime up and running again. It’s not something I like to tell to the users, so I’m glad we’ve been able to identify the underlying cause of the bug and fix it.

Version 0.9 also brings a new Music app. This app allows you to control the music playback on your phone (play, pause, volume up and down,…). Avamander improved the previous version of the app with a new UI with a nice animation, and even added new information on the display like the song progression. This app still works nicely with Gadgetbridge and Amazfish!

Music app on the PineTime connected to Android smartphone

Speaking of Gadgetbridge - an Android companion app - has seen a release of version 0.48.0 just a few days after last month’s community update. With this version of the app, you can use InfiniTime to upgrade your PineTime over-the-air (OTA) from Gadgetbridge. To my knowledge, Gadgetbridge is the first open source companion app to provide this functionality!

PineTime OTA firmware update via Gadgetbridge

Another piece of great news in the PineTime ecosystem is that Piggz is working on porting Amazfish to Linux desktop. Amazfish is a companion app for several smartwatches and fitness trackers. It runs on SailfishOS and already supports InfiniTime. Amazfish should eventually be easily portable to multiple Linux distros and UIs (like plasma-mobile and UBPorts), and run on many devices like the PinePhone and the PinebookPro!

Now, what’s next? I’m working with Daniel from wasp-os on a tool that upgrades/switches the bootloader of the PineTime. The bootloader is a critical piece of code that initialises the device and starts the firmware. It can also provide interesting functionalities like firmware upgrade and OTA. Since the beginning of the PineTime project 2 bootloaders have coexisted - the one based on the NRF Softdevice (NRF is the manufacturer of the microcontroller at the heart of the PineTime, the NRF52832) and the one based on MCUBoot, mainly written by [Lup Yuen Lee](https://twitter.com/MisterTechBlog). Both bootloaders have their characteristics, their functionalities, pros and cons, and they are not compatible with each other. You cannot install a firmware built around the NRF SoftDevice on a PineTime running the MCUBoot bootloader, and vice-versa. Wasp-os and ATCWatch are running on the NRF bootloader while InfiniTime, Klok, and Hypnos use the MCUBoot one.

This reloader tool Daniel and I are working on (and honestly, Daniel is doing most of the work :)) will allow users not only to upgrade the bootloader they are using, but also to switch from NRF to MCUBoot and from MCUBoot to NRF. This will give more choices to the users and allow both communities to work together, which is, in my opinion, a really great thing.

Daniel shot a video that demonstrates a complete OTA roundtrip (wasp-os -> InfiniTime -> wasp-os) that will give you a better understanding on the subject!

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Installing Wasp-OS from InfiniTime ~ by Daniel Thompson

For those who don’t know it yet, wasp-os is a “MicroPython based development environment for smart watches”. It provides many Python applications such as a clock, stopwatch, step counter and heart rate monitor. Anyone interested in extremely geeky timepieces should be sure to check out the Fibonacci watch face that was recently contributed to wasp-os by Johannes Wache.

Pinecil

The Pinecil has entered production a couple of weeks ago and will be available for purchase late this month or early next month. Much work has gone into polishing the tooling for the soldering iron’s molding, and we trust that the final version of the Pinecil will not only function but also look great. Check out last month’s update, in which I shared a couple of prototype pictures as well as a render of the final device.

Aside from getting the Pinecil into production, time has also been spent on getting relevant certifications, figuring the least intrusive way of branding it, and deciding on the device’s packaging. Below you’ll find renders of the Pinecil’s packaging and the 4 complementary soldering tips which will be sold separately in the Pine Store. As you’ll notice, we decided to place branding and all required certifications along one side of the device - I subjectively feel this looks quite nice.

Pincil presentation box (top) and 4-tip presentation box (bottom)

As soon as the Pinecil starts rolling out of the factory we’ll make sure to let you know when it is available for purchase. I’ll make sure to post a blog post, tweet / toot it and share it on our Telegram News Channel. If you’re interested in picking up a Pinecil, then make sure to follow us on your platform of choice to be notified when sales go live.

PineCube

I’m happy to report that PineCube’s early software efforts are progressing well. We already have an internal Debian build running mainline kernel with patches, which shows a lot of potential. This isn’t to say that it is ready for use - to the contrary, considerable effort on developers part will be required to get all core functionality working. It is my understanding that this build will be released soon; massive thanks to Gamiee for making strides on the PineCube.

There is now also a NixOS build available for the PineCube thanks to Daniel Fullmer. A quick look at his GitHub reveals that this OS build is quite far along, with many core functions of the device already working. This includes: Booting from SPI, enabling the IR LEDs, Ethernet, WiFi as well as USB. Perhaps most importantly, it appears that video streaming and recording from the camera already works, and if I am reading the documentation correctly then even the microphone is already functional.

NixOS booted on the PineCube

I am also told that Elimo Engineering has integrated support for the PineCube into Buildroot. Their GitHub account contains build instructions in the board support directory readme if you’re interested. It provides support for the S3’s DDR3 in u-boot, which is an important development for the device. This means that the system is capable of booting really fast - apparently in under 1.5 seconds from cold boot to login prompt.

These are all very significant developments, and the software will take shape over the next few months until we have a handful of usable operating systems for the PineCube. As I already mentioned in the Housekeeping section, a PineCube subforum has been created earlier this month, and development discussions are already taking place on the PineCube Discord chat. So if you pick up an early unit, you know where to direct questions and contributions. Speaking of contributions, you are also encouraged to submit entries to the PineCube documentation; we’d appreciate that.

SOEdge

We’ll soon be getting ready to make the SOEdge available in the Pine Store. When it launches, it will be advertised as “strictly for developers”, since the software has a very long way to go before it can be considered as viable for end-user’s implementations. To speed up the development process, we’ve now created an information-rich SOEdge documentation, which includes not only the BSP Linux SDK alongside core software documentation, but also a complete datasheet of the SOM, the baseboard and other components.

Late last month Gamiee managed to get the module up and running using the Rockchip-provided BSP kernel. It is my understanding that this is an internal build - meant as a tool to determine the SOM’s and baseboard’s functionality, rather than an OS that will be shared publicly. It is my experience that information-exchange at such an early stage of development is crucial to a project’s success; to this end, we now have a SOEdge subforum, a Wiki page (please contribute) and there will soon be dev-chats set up to accommodate participating devs.

I cannot wait to see what the community manages to do with the SOEdge SOM in the coming months.

SOEdge slotted in it’s baseboard

That’s all for this month. Make sure to subscribe to this blog (at the bottom of the page), follow us on Twitter and Mastodon and stay up-to-date with PINE64 News on the Telegram News Channel.

Update: new hacktober gear

Thu, 15 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Let me begin this month’s community update by teasing the November update, in which I’ll talk about the next generation of SoCs and our plans for the future. If you haven’t done so yet, then now is the right time to subscribe to our blog and follow the news on the PINE64 Telegram news channel.

I’ll be mostly focusing on hardware in this month’s update, I’ve been out of the software development loop for much of the month due to personal reasons. This, however, gives me an opportunity to talk to you at more length about the PineCube, Pinecil and SOEdge as well as some community-centric things.

As always, massive thanks to JF for contributing the PineTime section of the update!

Much has happened in the past month so let’s get to it.

TL;DR

New store and its features; store move to .com domain
I’ve been working towards setting up an EU store
Community-created content for PINE64 Youtube and LBRY channels
Pinebook Pro and PineTab LCD shortages continue; hopefully panels become available in December
Manjaro PinePhone CE OS build is finished & sent to factory yesterday
Manjaro’s build closest to end-user ready yet; ships with Phosh
Work on PinePhone back-covers adding functionality started
First two back-covers will add: wireless Qi charging (already works) and NFC
PinePhone keyboard design green-lit and started; clam-shell design with large battery
SOEdge modules are ready!
Chicken-and-the-egg problem, the SOEdge needs Linux devs
PineCube is available for purchase; software development is coming along
PineCube lens selection coming to the Pine Store
Pinecil firmware is coming together very well
Pinecil will ship with a B2 tip, but two packages with four tips each will be available ($24.99 each)
We created a breakout board for the Pinecil … it is now an SBC (sort of anyways)
PineTime with InifiniTime FOSS firmware is now available and shipping!
PineTime music control in Android with gadgetbridge and playing games on the watch
PineCom - a small PDA-style device relying on alternative communication protocols
Addressing the PineCom push-back from the community (thank you for your feedback)

Housekeeping

There are a handful of important housekeeping topics to discuss this month. For starters, let’s talk a little about the new Pine Store. We hope that the new store not only improves the browsing experience but also addresses much of the feedback that we received from our community. Feature-wise, you are now also able to pay using credit cards (as well Apple Pay and similar services) and calculate shipping and import-related costs, such as VAT, for various items. We have also implemented a system to notify customers about DHL’s Remote Area Surcharge (RAS) payments if their geographical location is deemed as ‘remote’ by DHL. Massive thanks to Marek (Gamiee) for getting this working - it was a difficult feature to incorporate. A quick word of caution about the RAS notification feature; our implementation of the RAS notification is based on a location list we received from DHL. The list includes thousands of entries and we cannot guarantee that it will always be up-to-date at all times despite our best attempts.

Checkout and payment options in the new Pine store

Seeing as I know someone will ask about this; we are still working towards a cryptocurrency payment arrangement that would work well for us and our community members. We are talking to multiple parties and trying to find some sustainable arrangement - I hope that one can be reached in the coming weeks.

As many of you have noticed, the Pine Store has also moved to a dedicated .com domain - pine64.com - from its previous subdomain at store.pine64.org. The purpose of moving the store to a commercial domain is to denote its separation from all community-run services and subdomains at pine64.org. We hope that this will help distinguish the two sides of PINE64 - that of a business and a community run project.

I’ve also been working towards setting up a dedicated European Pine Store for a couple of months. Under normal circumstances the process would be relatively trivial, but unfortunately current travel restrictions are making it difficult to complete all formalities involved with getting this off the ground. Without getting into unnecessary detail - the store will be registered in a different EU country to where I reside, and physical presence is required to complete portions of the paperwork submissions. Given current travel restrictions in Europe, I think it will be a couple of months before I get everything sorted - I’ll make sure you know when it is all ready to go.

Before I head off and talk about another topic, there is one more thing I’d like to mention with regards to the store. Apart from upgrading the store front-end, we also did a lot of work on the store’s backend. You should now reliably receive store order and shipping notifications in your mailbox; if you do not, however, please make sure to reach out to myself, Marek (Gamiee) or Matthew (fire219) in the chats.

Lastly, I have been in talks with a handful of community content creators for the past couple of months regarding our existing Youtube and newly started LBRY channels. I have now reached an agreement with PizzaLovingNerd, who will create monthly videos to compliment the written monthly community updates. I also hope to develop a show-and-tell Youtube/ LBRY series - perhaps one that would actively engage with the community and involve the developers. If you’re interested in creating content for the PINE64 Youtube/ LBRY channels and have other ideas, then please make sure to reach out to me in the chats or elsewhere.

Pinebook Pro and PineTab availability status

I feel like a paragraph concerning the Pinebook Pro and PineTab is in order given the frequent questions about pre-order availability. As things stand, we have all the bits and pieces - bodies, mainboards, other electronics, etc - to manufacture PineTabs and Pinebook Pros, but we’re still missing the much needed LCD panels. As I mentioned in last month’s update, back-to-school programs run by large companies created a severe LCD shortage on the market. The market, which already suffered from low panel volumes (caused by the COVID-19 pandemic), has now been practically drained of grade-A LCD panels within the target price-range. As I explained last month, purchasing from the open market isn’t an option. Open market LCD panels come without warranty or reliable quality assurance that vendors always offer.

According to some projections LCD panels ought to be available again in December. Granted this projection is accurate, we may see new batches available prior to the Chinese New Year (February 2021). I will, of course, keep you updated on the situation in future community updates.

PinePhone

Manjaro CE presentation box design

The Manjaro PinePhone CE OS image, which will ship with the upcoming PinePhones, was sent to the factory just the other day (congrats Manjaro team!). Personally, I feel that this is the most end-user ready OS image to ship on the PinePhone thus far. This isn’t exactly surprising given that the Manjaro team has had the most time to create an OS image and benefited from the overarching development on the platform. The OS image ships with Phosh and is probably the smoothest experience on the PinePhone to date. Moreover, to my knowledge - and I’ve tested the software extensively - all major features of the phone work with Manjaro. It also features a solid variety of well-tuned applications to get you started, including Firefox, GNOME Maps and Megapixels camera application, just to mention a few. Don’t get me wrong, the software will still require a layer of polish to be considered ‘daily-driver’ worthy by a broader audience, but I have been running it exclusively on my phone for weeks and it has been a great experience.

Before moving onto talking about hardware, let me quickly mention the awesome work Martijn Braam from postmarketOS has been doing with the camera. His Megapixels application now supports both the front and back cameras, a smooth viewfinder (at 720p), manual ISO and shutter user-facing controls, autofocus (!!) as well as various forms of post processing. This application has greatly benefited the community as a whole, including the upcoming Manjaro CE. Frankly speaking, I’ve been blown away by the camera’s performance. Please read Martijn’s blog for more technical details; I am attaching two pictures taken on the Manjaro CE device for you to check out.

No one wanted to pose for pictures, so its my kid’s dinosaur (main camera, picture down-scaled) and me (front-facing camera). Higher quality main camera picture here

I have a handful of exciting hardware-related topics to discuss, including news about back covers with additional functionality and the physical keyboard for the phone. Let’s start by talking about the custom back-covers. As we said from the start of the PinePhone project, we’re planning on adding functionality to the phone via custom back-covers that will communicate with the phone via the pogo pins. The first two covers will introduce Qi wireless charging and NFC to the PinePhone. Qi wireless charging already works since it doesn’t require software, but NFC implementations will obviously require software enablement. The Qi charging back-case has been ready to go for some time, but as it turned out the coil and electronics couldn’t fit into our current cover design. The back-cover design had to be retooled slightly to accommodate the new functionality - the physical space was increased to accommodate the additional electronics - and you’ll be happy to know that we’ll release the new STL file on the Wiki so you can experiment with creating your own add-ons. This is just the start, we have more ideas for future add-ons which I’ll be sharing with you in the coming months.

Here is the Qi wireless charging coil we’ll be using

I’m also happy to let you all know that 3GB/ 32GB PinePhone mainboards will be available in the Pine Store in November. If you already have a PinePhone and want to upgrade to the higher capacity and RAM variant, you don’t have to buy a new unit - just the mainboard. We also have a little token of appreciation in store for early adopters (Braveheart and UBports CE) owners who wish to upgrade their mainboards, but I won’t spoil the surprise in this post.

Lastly, we have given a hardware vendor the green light to start preparing a prototype of the keyboard for the PinePhone, and the vendor has informed us that they’ll strive to have the prototype ready by the end of this year. We find this schedule for delivering the prototype difficult to achieve, but at the same time we (all of us) are looking forward to being pleasantly surprised if they manage to pull it off. I am including the renders for you to check out below.

PinePhone keyboard render

After some consideration we have opted to go with a clamshell design for the keyboard. The PinePhone is large and heavy enough to be unwieldy when held by a thin slab of plastic such as that of a slide-out keyboard. This clamshell design can, however, be folded practically flat so it is comfortably used without placing the device on a surface. The keyboard section also holds a large (probably 5000mAh) battery, which not only more-than-doubles the phone’s stand-by time but also acts as a weighty counterbalance. Many of you will also recognize that we decided to use the keyboard layout we proposed and discussed with the community in August. From a mechanical standpoint, the keyboard clamps onto the phone (for which you need to remove the back-cover) and interfaces with the device using the pogo pins.

I’m sure this news will get many of you excited, but please keep in mind that presently it is impossible for me to guarantee that this particular plan for the keyboard will pan out and that the vendor will come through on their promises. But I think there is a good chance it will happen, so I decided to share it with you.

SOEdge

The SOEdge AI modules and the accompanying model-A baseboards have now been delivered to us from the factory. However, the SOEdge currently suffers from a chicken-and-the-egg problem: there is no Linux software running on the device. This, in turn, means that it cannot be sold to end-users (even enthusiasts). What the SOEdge needs at this point in time is a group of developers keen to lay the foundations for getting the module up and running. I took a look at the BSP offered by Rockchip and it seems like a good starting point (unless there is already an ongoing mainlining effort I am not aware of).

Consider this a call to action; if you’re interested in working on the SOEdge make sure to reach me in the chats or the forum (start a public thread).

Needless to say, the device has a lot of potential and not only in the realm of AI but also more traditional computational applications. The SOEdge offers fast IO, including PCIe 2x and USB-3.0 as well as Gigabit Ethernet, making it ideal for a variety of high-throughput and low-power applications. Aside from its powerful NPU, the device also features 2GB of PC-2133 RAM and a dual-core cortex A35 running at 1.6Ghz.

SOEdge socketed in model-A baseboard

The development model-A baseboard features all key connectors and I/O, including USB 3.0 and PCIe 2x (either PCIe or USB 3.0 can be used at the same time), Gigabit Ethernet, MIPI DSI, MIPI CSI, SDIO (compatible with current WiFi/ BT modules) as well as touch panel input and CSI. You also get a full GPIO header, RTC, SPK and bootable SD card slot (there is also an eMMC mount on the SOEdge module). As you can see, the range of possibilities the module offers is quite extensive and I trust that a group of interested developers will pick it up.

PineCube

In the event you’ve missed it, the PineCube is now available for purchase in the Pine Store. If you’re interested in helping to get this little FOSS IP camera off the ground, here is your chance. I am told that software progress on the PineCube is coming along well but it’s all in very early stages. From a development standpoint, the goal at this point is to build a mainline Linux (Debian) OS image. Marek (Gamiee), who is currently working towards making such an image, is currently waiting for some u-boot patches that will allow the PineCube boot from SD card as well as writing a video encoding library for the mainline kernel.

The PineCube

By the time this post goes live the PineCube chat and forum infrastructure should be available, and I highly encourage you to engage with others at this early stage of bringing the PineCube up. I’d also like to point out that the PineCube Wiki page is now up with some very rudimentary information to get you started. Anyone can create a Wiki account and contribute to any of the existing device subsections; as per usual, it will take a community effort to get this project up and running.

PineCube compatible m12 lenses

We will soon also offer a wider range of m12 mount lenses. We’ll make sure to provide a wide selection of lenses for a variety of applications, including a long range zoom and a fisheye 185 degree lens. I’m not exactly sure when these will become available in the store, but it shouldn’t be long until you can pick up a set alongside the PineCube itself.

Pinecil

The Pinecil is proceeding well and, thanks to the hard work of Ben Brown on porting the firmware to RISC-V, for the most part operational. The firmware will still need some degree of tuning, but the all features of the soldering iron have now been enabled and are working which means it will be available for purchase soon. Hardware-wise, the molding for the Pinecil is now finished and the pre-production units feel great in the hand. I am attaching a picture and a render below: the picture shows the Pinecil prototype running (powered via USB-C in this particular picture) while the render shows the final look of the iron that we settled on, with a PINE64 blue accent on the rubber grip.

Fully functional Pinecil prototype

Render showing final look of the Pinecil, with the blue rubber handle

The Pinecil will ship with a B2 tip, but two additional tip sets will be available for purchase on launch day - each priced at $24.99, the same price as the Pinecil itself. I am attaching a picture of both tip sets below so you can check them out. If you already have a TS100 iron and an accompanying set of tips, then you’ll be happy to learn that your existing tips will work with the Pinecil.

Set 1 (left) and Set 2 (right) of soldering tips for Pinecil

Lastly, something admittedly a bit crazy - we have created a Pinecil breakout board which exposes all of the SoCs available pinouts and protocols. To be precise the breakout board exposes ADC/DAC, SPI, UART. SPI, USB and JTAG. The board attaches to the USB-C port on the Pinecil, allowing the device to be fully operational and fully assembled when tinkering. So yes, the breakout board converts the Pinecil into a single board computer of sorts… or, at the very least, a tinkering device. I am sure that many of you will find some type of valid application for this breakout board and come up with innovative applications for the device. I am attaching a picture of Pinecil mainboards and the breakout board below.

Pinecil mainboard PCB (top) and break-out board PCB (bottom)

PineTime

This month, the PineTime project reached a new milestone - the new PineTime development kit is (finally) available in the Pine Store. This new batch of PineTime development kits now ships preloaded with InfiniTime, the very first FOSS firmware to be programmed at the factory into the smartwatch! I’ve already seen many people have received their new PineTime devkit and quickly began to test InfiniTime, flash new firmwares and even develop new functionalities and projects.

PineTime running InfiniTime - picture by JF

As the maintainer of InfiniTime, I noticed this new crowd of PineTimers by the number of bug reports, questions, suggestions as well as pull-requests the project received this last couple of weeks. I’m really happy to receive all this feedback from people all around the world, and I am proud that people actually help me build and improve the project I started nearly 1 year ago! I would like to thank anyone who has already contributed to the project, and I’m sure that this is just the beginning of a great journey.

Around the same time as the devkits became available in the store I released a new version of InfiniTime. This version has been tested by many members of the community, so it should be safe to upgrade (OTA via BLE) your development kit. This new version of the firmware brings many improvements and a music control application. That’s right, InfiniTime paired with the new version of Gadgetbridge adds support for the music and playback control on your Android phone directly from the PineTime. I’ve also heard that even more new features like OTA are in the works thanks to @Avamander.

Avamander is also working on improving the music application of InfiniTime by adding a nice animation, song progression and support for touch gestures.

PineTime music control on Android smarphone

I was also amazed to see people writing games for the PineTime! Here is a Pong game by @Electr0Lyte https://twitter.com/SravanSenthiln1/status/1312961476580175873?s=20 and a breakout game by @TT_392 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rt6C1FeglM. This last video also introduced you to Lupyuen’s new innovation - the remote pinetime. Lup wrote a Telegram bot that allows people who haven’t received their devkit yet to flash their firmware into his own PineTime. This development kit is streamed H24 on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4EhPuKqEG8. Crazy idea, but it works!

One last project I would like to highlight this month is the test framework of @maiden. This test framework will ultimately run automatic test sequences on new versions of the firmwares for the PineTime while measuring the power consumption of the device. This tool will be invaluable to ensure that new versions of our firmware work correctly prior to release.

The PineTime community is literally boiling with activity and new ideas pop out every day, it’s really exciting!

PineCom

Abstract PineCom illustration

Earlier this month we asked what you’d like to see in a small PDA-style IoT device, which will rely on LoRaWAN, WiFi and other alternative protocols for communication. We envision the device to be small in size - with a 5” or smaller LCD panel - and possibly quite modular. The PineCom would also be based on the same underlying architecture as the PinePhone, sharing many of its core features and making it pin-for-pin software compatible. As the name of the device indicates, the idea behind the PineCom is to explore alternative communication methods, but I can also see it being used for a variety of IoT applications, as a portable media player as well as a Point Of Sales device. I’m sure that you can think of other applications too.

I also need to note that the idea for the PineCom has been met with a fair bit of push-back from the community. Browsing the comments, those who oppose the introduction of a new device appear to think that it may detract from PinePhone development. There is also another group of people, lobbying for having PineCom’s features implemented into the PinePhone via custom back-covers and the i2c protocol. Let me address both points. The PineCom will not detract from PinePhone development because the new device will be compatible with existing PinePhone OS images. If anything, PineCom may bring new developers into the our ecosystem; but even if not, I cannot see it being a hindrance or draining existing resources. Secondly, having LoRaWAN and other alternative protocols enabled and working in Linux on the PineCom may actually convince us to create custom back-covers with these protocols for the PinePhone.

At any rate, I am really happy to have received so much feedback regarding this device. We will monitor the thread for weeks and will, most certainly, take all reasonable feedback under advisement. On a personal level, I don’t find the fears grounded in reality, and I’ll do my best to persuade you about it in the months to come. Ultimately however, if the community decides that the arguments are unconvincing and remains adamantly against the device then we won’t make it.

That’s all for this month, make sure to subscribe for some really exciting news the next month!

PSA: Vulnerability Disclosure 2020/09/17

Thu, 17 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

PINE64 (both the business and the community around it) prides itself on transparency. Often, this transparency is used to give you a behind the scenes look into our operations.

But today, we’re afraid we must be transparent about something else.

As of approximately 4:30am GMT on 2020/09/17, we discovered an intrusion to our Pine Store web instance. This took on the form of spam/scam pages hidden on our web server, with scripting to only be visible to crawler bots. After discovering this, we immediately shutdown the web server and began investigation.

To our knowledge, this happened via an exploit in one of the Wordpress plugins on the Pine Store, with initial attempts logged as early as 2020/09/05. It appears this was not an active malicious attack on our server, but merely automated bots tasked with placing scam store pages.

Needless to say, we remedied the situation and took extensive steps to prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future.

Due to the nature of the attacks we’ve reviewed, we do not suspect that customer information was a target, nor we expect any was exfiltrated. We can guarantee that, without a doubt, no credit card or other financial information was placed at any risk of being exposed.

We hope that this event does not damage your trust in us beyond repair, as we work to recover from this event.

-- Lukasz Erecinski, Community Manager

September Update: Let it sink in...

Tue, 15 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

We have been fortunate to welcome many new members into our ranks over the past 30 days. This is in large part due to the continued interest in the Pinebook Pro and PineTab, which have just shipped, as well as the ongoing massive demand for the PinePhone. By my estimate, come December we will have shipped more PinePhones than OpenMoko and the original Ubuntu Touch smartphones … combined. Let this sink in for a minute.

I’d also like to thank JF for once again providing this month’s PineTime community update.

There is plenty of stuff to get to, so let’s get to it!

This month’s TL;DR:

Shipping is coming along quite well; stay tuned to shipping updates on the forum
New Pine Store in the works; not only will it look better but will also support more payment options
We’re an Arm ecosystem partner now; Pinebook Pro laptops will be give-aways at this year’s Arm Dev Summit
Pinebook Pro: production halted temporarily due to LCD panel shortages (hopefully will resume in 2 months time)
Pinebook Pro: check out the Fedora 32 community build with a choice of multiple DEs
PineTabs are being delivered; positive initial reception
Mobian and Arch Linux builds are now also available for the PineTab
PineTime dev kits with InfiniTime ought to be available in Pine Store September 20
PineTime Hypnos - a Zephyr based firmware spotlight
PinePhone Manjaro CE available for pre-order September 17
PinePhone software development: 13 OSes, multi-boot, and the p-boot bootloader is awesome
PinePhone camera implementations on Ubuntu Touch; 30FPS viewfinder and Qt 5.12 updates
PinePhone Megapixels camera postmarketOS app; both main and front cameras working, and taking higher-resolution pictures
PineCubes are awaiting assembly; should be available in the store later this month

Housekeeping

The first topic on the housekeeping agenda concerns shipping. Generally speaking, this round of shipping is proceeding pretty well. Most DHL shipments have already been dispatched and delivered, as have regular shipments for most destinations bar Europe. For those of you waiting for your device to show up, please make sure to follow the forum shipping thread; I’ll keep posting updates until the dispatch process comes to an end. In summary, I think that the grand majority of devices will be shipped and delivered before the month is up. If you have any questions concerning shipping, make sure to post your question in the aforementioned forum thread.

Second subject I’d like to touch on in this segment is the announcement that we’re actively working on a new store. It will be a couple of weeks yet before it goes live since we’re redoing everything, including the store database, which means adding all entries and accompanying descriptions manually. Apart from a facelift, the store will also feature alternative payment methods. At this point we’re happy to announce that Stripe will be available when the new store launches. Other services may also be available at the time of launch or shortly thereafter. We’re also working on implementing crypto currency payments - however, for reasons I will not get into, at this time we’re experiencing issues with implementing coin payments. More information concerning the store and available payments will be made available prior to the store’s launch sometime next month.

New Pine Store sneak peek

Another major piece of news is that last month we became an Arm ecosystem partner. This is obviously huge for us, and we are both honoured and thrilled to be invited by Arm to take part in this program. Just this past week additional information about PINE64 has been added on Arm’s website, with annotations to the Pinebook and Pinebook Pro laptops, as well as an entire dedicated sub-section concerning our hardware solutions, project’s philosophy and the community. But this isn’t all. For the past month we’ve been working with Arm Software Developers representatives to make Pinebook Pro laptops this year’s give-aways at the Arm Dev Summit 2020. Up-to ten lucky developers being part of the Arm Innovator Program will receive a Pinebook Pro as recognition for their ongoing efforts on the Arm platform. Speaking of the Arm Dev Summit, I suggest you sign up for the event and attend the Linux AArch64 Laptops BoF talk scheduled for October 6, 11:00AM PDT. Lastly I want to give Robert Wolff from Arm a huge shout-out for being so helpful, accommodating and easy to work with - cheers!

PINE64 on Arm’s website

Lastly, we’ve been making upgrades to the PINE64 cluster which now powers most of our infrastructure. The most recent upgrade to the cluster will, on the one hand, significantly increase individual nodes’ stability (iSCSI implementation) while, on the other, improve our ability to remotely control and reboot individual ROCKPro64 nodes. This is a significant step forward as we hope to get more services added to our infrastructure in the coming months. I’d like to give Marek (gamiee) a huge shout-out for the time that he put into getting the cluster setup at the datacenter - well done!

Pinebook Pro

I am afraid I have some bad news. Back-to-school programs of large laptop manufacturers, in conjunction with the pandemic-induced production freeze earlier this year, resulted in LCD panel shortages. This in turn has now led us to halt production of the Pinebook Pro for a month or two. We have the laptop chassis, all the components and the PCBAs, but we do not have the LCD panels. To continue production at this time, we would have to buy LCD panels from the open market, and we’re not keen on doing that. Let me explain. When we buy panels directly from a vendor, then we receive a quality assurance that the batch we purchased measures up against standard LCD panel rating. Quality assurance of this sort is impossible when buying from the open market rather than from the vendor directly. Not only would we be paying more for the panels, but we would also be taking a considerable risk that the LCDs will be of a poor or varying quality.

We suspect that it will take a month or two for the LCD manufacturers to replenish their stock, at which point we’ll acquire suitable panels and Pinebook Pro production will resume. We currently hope to offer pre-orders for at least two batches prior to the Chinese New Year, which begins early February 2021. There is still a sizable amount of ANSI Pinebook Pros available in the Pine Store, which I suspect will last until the end of September; ISO units will, however, remain unavailable for the next two months or so. I will make sure to keep you up-to-date on how the LCD situation looks in the upcoming community update. Were the situation to change suddenly - which is unlikely but not impossible - then I’ll make a separate short post on the subject.

In other news, I am still waiting for information from developers on whether they can successfully enable HDMI output on the Pinebook Pro’s dock. The HDMI output has been confirmed to work on the BSP kernel, so it is just a question of the mainline kernel supporting the dock’s hardware. It is my understanding that currently, in the newest Manjaro release (which I highly suggest you check out or upgrade to), the DP alt mode is broken (to fix it - manually install linux-pinebookpro via pacman), which may further slow things down. Regardless, we will not release the dock until we know that it works well with the default software. Simply put, we fear people emailing support or requesting RMA for what they would view as dysfunctional hardware.

Fedora 32 with GNOME - image via Radek Pawlinski

Software wise, we keep looking forward to the release of elementary OS 6, which was announced in last month’s update. If you want to support the elementary project and get your hands on daily builds of elementary OS for the Pinebook Pro, then consider entering their early access scheme. The OS has now been added to the Wiki and will be made available once elementary OS 6 rolls out. In other software news, I’d like to talk about Fedora for the Pinebook Pro. It has now been 5 months since Fedora’s announcement of support for PINE64 devices, but an official Pinebook Pro build has not been made available to date. Thankfully there is now an excellent community build, which features all core functionality of the Pinebook Pro and uses (from what I can tell) very few patches to achieve this. You also get a choice of desktop environments - including XFCE, GNOME, KDE Plasma and Cinnamon, all of which performed really well in my testing. So, If you are a Fedora fan, then I recommend you give this community a go.

PineTab

Earlier this month PineTabs were sent and, in most instances, delivered to early adopters. Let me begin by apologizing once again for the 2 week delay in delivering the PineTabs; shipping from Hong Kong remains a burdensome arrangement under the current regulatory regime. The process is a real jigsaw puzzle, where the variables of time, quantity and weight all need to be precisely synced for shipment. With that out of the way, let’s talk about the device itself. For starters, we’ll be monitoring hardware-related feedback over the coming weeks so that if any unforeseen issues are found we’ll have the head-room to apply alterations to the design. Thankfully it appears that there are no major issues - as these would have surely already been documented and brought to our attention. As things stand, all the issues I’ve seen reported are directly related to the work-in-progress status of the available software.

Speaking of PineTab software, we’ve seen a lot of development in the past two weeks. For starters, Mobian - one of the most popular and fastest growing OSes on the PinePhone - announced support of the PineTab earlier this month. I am told (seeing as I don’t have a PineTab myself at this time) that the operating system works really well in both stand-alone tablet mode and when paired with the keyboard. Nightly Mobian releases are available for download and can be booted from either the onboard eMMC flash or a SD card. But there is more; we have also received a great community build of Arch thanks to Danct12. For those of you who do not know, Danct12 is a community developer who brought Arch to the PinePhone. The Arch image is - as you’d probably expect - very cutting edge, and includes much of the quality-of-life improvements present in the PinePhone image. You can find the latest pre-release of Arch for the PineTab by clicking this link.

Mobian on the PineTab - image via devrtz from Mobian Project

While we’re already on the topic of software, let me squeeze in a quick PSA and offer some advice pertaining to the Ubuntu Touch build with which the PineTab ships. As many of you have noticed, the build only reports ~15GB of free flash storage. The reason for this is that the development tablets only feature 16GB of eMMC, as opposed to the 64GB found on the production PineTab units. If you switch over to the Release Candidate channel in the system menu, and apply the update, you’ll have the User Data partition resized to take up all remaining unallocated disk space. Thanks to Dalton from UBports for getting this day-one fix out quickly!

Arch Linux on PineTab - image via Danct12

Lastly, I currently do not have a date for when we’ll resume production of the PineTab. As I already wrote, we want to gather users’ feedback and wait until the current LCD shortage passes (see Pinebook Pro section for details). Since I know many will ask for an approximation - let me tentatively say that the next pre-order round will start no earlier than in one month’s time. In the meantime, I encourage you to sign up to this blog and follow us on our social media accounts to stay up-to-date on the PineTabs software development.

PineTime

The PineTime dev kits have been out of stock for quite a long time, and many of you have been waiting for the new batch for a long time. Here is some good news: the wait is almost over!

Last month, I explained that we had encountered some difficulties with the programming of InfiniTime on the PineTime at the factory. These issues have now been solved, and the factory sent a sample to Lup and myself to check them out in the picture below.

New PineTime dev kit - image via Lup Yuen Lee

And it turns out that the result is nearly perfect - the PineTime running InfiniTime works as expected, all the devices are working correctly and the upgrade to a new version of the firmware was also successful!

The only issue encountered involved the memory protection, which was still enabled. This feature is enabled in production devices so that people can’t snoop into an nRF52 gadget and tamper with the ROM, but it is absolutely not relevant in the context of open source software. So we wanted to take this opportunity to disable it at the factory, so that future developers do not need to buy expensive equipment to disable it themselves.

A new sample is en route to Lup’s. He should receive it one of these days and hopefully confirm that everything is now alright, and that the memory protection has been removed.

If all goes well, PineTime dev kits should be in stock on September 20 along with the new pogo pins, a new tool that eases the connection to the SWD pads on the mainboard of the watch.

New pogo pin programming tool

This month, I would like to showcase Hypnos, a Zephyr based firmware for the PineTime by endian-albin. He made a lot of progress these last few weeks and the first version of the firmware was released a few days ago. The most interesting feature of Hypnos is that it supports the same bootloader and OTA procedure as that used in InfiniTime. It means that it is now possible to switch from InfiniTime to Hypnos and vice-versa using BLE. In the future, PineTime users will be able to choose the firmware they want to use and even easily switch from one to another as easily as Pinephone users distro hop between many Linux distributions!

Hypnos running on the PineTime

PinePhone

Let’s get the piece of information everyone is waiting for out of the way first: the Manjaro Community Edition PinePhone will be available for pre-order this Thursday, September 17. In the event you didn’t catch the announcement, here is a quick recap: the Manjaro community edition will ship in a custom presentation box designed by Manjaro’s development team, and the PinePhone itself will feature a sleek-looking Manjaro logo on the back-cover (see renders for reference). The device will also ship with the newest PCB revision (1.2a) and be available for pre-order in two hardware configurations:

$149 standard version — featuring 2GB RAM and 16GB eMMC internal flash storage.
$199 convergence package — equipped with 3GB RAM and 32GB eMMC flash storage as well as a bundled USB-C dock.

Our friends at Manjaro currently offer three different flavours of their mobile OS for the PinePhone - with Lomiri, Phosh and Plasma Mobile. While it remains to be seen which the Manjaro team will settle for, all images are great and if you are a fan of the project you probably will want to try all three, regardless of which build ends up shipping with the device. For those of you who already have a PinePhone, I strongly suggest giving all these builds a go - click here to head over to Manjaro’s PinePhone CDN. Now, onto other software news.

There is currently so much ongoing software development that I will not be able to cover all the important strides made in the past month. There is simply too much stuff happening across many projects on a nearly daily basis. So, instead, I will focus on the three things I found the most interesting. To this end, hands-down the coolest of all recent developments is Ondrej (megi) Jirman’s multiboot image, which allows one to boot multiple phone distros from one installation (eMMC flash or SD card). It features a very snappy, intuitive and surprisingly polished bootloader - called the p-boot - that appears instantaneously after you power on the PinePhone. All installed distros share the newest kernel (5.9), modem power management and latest Crust firmware. Needless to say, I feel that this a very valuable tool, especially at this early development phase of bringing the software up, as it allows users to check out numerous popular OS builds; moreover it exposes users to builds they would otherwise likely omit, such as Lune OS or Maemo Leste. It currently only supports PinePhones with PCB revisions 1.2 and 1.2a, but megi has publicly stated that future iterations of the image will also support Braveheart (1.1) PinePhones soon. I strongly suggest you give it a go.

p-boot details - screenshot of megi’s website

The second thing I’d like to bring to your attention is the array of improvements made to the camera. In this respect there are two OSes that truly stand out right now - Ubuntu Touch and postmarketOS. While many distributions already have the camera enabled, the viewfinder experience and picture quality remain suboptimal. This, however, is about to change thanks to the awesome work from the UBports development team, which demonstrated the viewfinder running at steady 30FPS and taking better-looking pictures. Moreover, Ubuntu Touch - which already received an incremental performance improvement patch recently - will be seeing a move to QT 5.12 in the foreseeable future. This will result in a major performance improvement of the operating system; this is something I can vouch for, since I got a chance to experience Ubuntu Touch with QT 5.12 just the other week.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Viewfinder on Ubuntu Touch - via Marius Gripsgard

Going back to the ongoing camera enablement efforts - Martijn from postmarketOS has been working on a camera application that supports both the main shooter as well as the forward-facing selfie camera. But there is more, not only does the front and main shooters work, the app allows the main camera to take higher resolution pictures (1080p) by default. You can also change the camera settings by editing /etc/megapixels.ini t_o your liking,_ which also includes altering the front camera’s setting, allowing it to capture 1600x1200 still images. The application, which Martijn called Megapixels, should be making an appearance on postmarketOS today, and I suspect that other distributions will be porting it to their builds soon enough.

Front and back camera on the PinePhone - images via postmarketOS

Lastly, I want to give a shoutout to Adam Pigg, who has been working on a port of SailfishOS for the PinePhone (Yes, I know, it’s not fully FOSS - put the pitchfork down and keep on reading). I have recently given SailfishOS a try and I must say that I am very impressed with both how smooth, functional and all-around polished the PinePhone build is. Opening applications, swiping between active panels, pulling up and down the application and task drawers all feel very smooth. Same goes for browsing the web (including LTE) or watching local video playback. It is clear to me that a lot of work has gone into this community port of SailfishOS, and I think more people ought to give it a proper go. The latest build of SailfishOS can be easily flashed using a special script to a SD card or Jumpdrive-mounted PinePhone.

PineCube

A large stack of PineCube PCBAs is currently awaiting assembly. All that is currently missing is a delivery of the plastic frames, which keep the three PCB elements in their respective positions and give the device its cube-like appearance. This last piece of the puzzle should be arriving this week, which means that PineCubes should be available in the store next week! As is the case with many of our devices - especially ones that need to build up a community around them - the PineCube will initially be sold with a disclosure that it is strictly meant for developers and enthusiasts, willing to work on software enablement for the device. To learn more about the PineCube and its features I invite you to read last month’s update, where I went into details listing the device’s specifications and planned add-on peripherals.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

PineCube presentation box

I leave you with a short movie showing off the packaging box the PineCube will ship in. I trust you’ll enjoy it.

That is it for this month!

PinePhone Manjaro Community Edition

Mon, 31 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I am thrilled to announce that the next Community Edition (CE) of the PinePhone will feature Manjaro. For those of you who do not know, Manjaro is an Arch-based Linux operating system designed with user-friendliness in mind. But Manjaro is more than just an operating system, it is also a large and vibrant community of contributors and end-users, which I highly encourage you to join.

Manjaro has offered support for PINE64 devices since the very beginning - with high-quality OS builds now available for nearly all our SBCs and devices - and the PinePhone is no exception in this regard. There are currently three Manjaro PinePhone build variants (Lomiri, Phosh and Plasma Mobile) for users to try out - all available for download from Manjaro’s downloads repository.

To learn more about Manjaro’s plans for their edition of the PinePhone, please read the complimentary announcement post on their forum.

This community edition will ship in a custom presentation box designed by Manjaro’s development team, and the PinePhone itself will feature a sleek-looking Manjaro logo on the back-cover (see renders for reference).

This PinePhone CE will be available in two hardware configurations:

$149 – 2GB RAM; 16GB eMMC
$199 – 3GB RAM; 32GB eMMC (includes a bundled USB-C dock)

Both configurations of the Manjaro CE PinePhones feature rev. 1.2a PCBA, introduced with postmarketOS CE that is currently shipping. The $199 hardware variant, called convergence package, also features a USB-C dock equipped with 10/100 Ethernet, 2x USB type A ports, HDMI digital video output and power-in via USB-C.

We will donate $10 per unit sold to the Manjaro development team. To learn more about this scheme please click here.

Pre-orders for the Manjaro Community Edition PinePhone open mid-September. To be notified when pre-orders go live make sure to subscribe to this blog, the Telegram PINE64 News Channel (not chat) and follow us on Twitter and Mastodon.

August update: getting into a rhythm and not slowing down

Sat, 15 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

elementary OS 6 Odin on Pinebook Pro - image via Alan Pope

I am currently traveling and have a limited amount of time to write, so I’d like to apologize in advance for not covering all topics and not answering outstanding answering questions that some of you are waiting to hear about. I also had less time to review chat backlogs, tweets, the forum and other information sources, and in result it is possible that I missed some information which ought to be covered.

I’d also like to thank JF for covering the PineTime progress leading up to the early adopters edition of the PineTime, which will be available for purchase in the coming weeks.

TL;DR for this month

New and clear rules of community engagement are coming
PINE64 logo and brand-name infringements
Pinebook Pro production is on schedule; factory will deliver PBPs to us on 24 August
Pinebook Pro is getting elementary OS 6 Odin support!
A look at the Pinebook Pro USB-C docking station; waiting for software support
PineTab delayed one week; volume button flex cable mistake
A look at RTL-SDR and LoRa expansion expansion boards for the PineTab
PineTab pre-orders reopen late this month
Last chance to get the postmarketOS CE - sold out any day now.
PinePhone: we’re on a roll and we’re not slowing down (until CNY)
PinePhone community hardware mods and awesome projects
We’re exploring keyboard options for the PinePhone
Notable PinePhone software developments
Pinecil coming in September; a tipset will be available at launch
PineCube positive response; available in September/ early October
PineCube accessories - LCD panel and battery

Housekeeping

A recent series of events led me to rethink our formal rules of community engagement. As the community grows - and at a rapid pace at that - moderators and community members need to have clear guidelines to reference concerning the type of engagements we, as a community, are willing to accept. Before I write anything else, let me start by saying I am not a fan of heavy-handed moderation; I believe that just as in everyday life you’ll eventually run into a jerk in any community. This is just how life is, and I don’t believe that it’s the role of moderators to educate people about civil conduct. But there are certainly some new and worrying trends that need to be addressed, so I’ll be writing up a new code of conduct / community rules in the coming weeks. The reason why I am mentioning it in this section, is because I’ll be posting the draft of the new rules on the forum so that we can debate various aspects of the rules and (hopefully) agree on some of the more nuanced points I intend to make.

The second topic I wanted to touch upon in this section concerns the use of the PINE64 logo and brand-name. We have recently experienced three types of infringements: 1) online resellers selling PINE64 hardware pretending to be Pine Store Ltd.; 2) merchandise sellers using our logo on swag without consent and; 2) our logo being used and misused without our consent in undesired contexts. In result, we are currently working on precise guidelines pertaining to the use of our logo and brand-name. This will arm PINE64 community and Pine Store Ltd., with the necessary documentation to tackle instances of infringements (e.g. when sending out Cease and Desist notices to parties at fault) and when seeking legal recourse. This documentation will be available on the PINE64 Wiki next month. For those of you who wonder, here are the general rules concerning the use of the PINE64 logo and brand-name. You are allowed to use, alter and replicate both the logo and brand-name for non-commercial use without any prior consent. This extends to both software and non-software material. If you are one of our partner projects you’re welcome to use our logo alongside your own in commercial software or in promotional materials. For small-scale commercial use benefiting the community - such as, for instance swag, hardware add-ons or embellishments (e.g. protective vinyls) - you’ll receive consent after contacting us. All other use of the PINE64 logo or brand-name in a commercial context requires consent which can only be granted by Pine Store Ltd., in a legally binding document.

Lastly, if you haven’t done so yet I’d like to invite you to watch Matthew (fire219) Petry’s talk on Matrix’s Youtube channel. Matthew spoke about the PINE64 community, the separation of competences between the community and Pine Store Ltd., as well as his hurdles with getting the ROCKPro64 cluster fully functional.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJ8tthkVAOQ&t=1s

Open Tech Will Save US Meetup #5

PineBook Pro

Let me start by assuring you that the current Pinebook Pro batch is still on schedule and will be delivered to us, from the factory, on August 24. This is yet another large batch of Pinebook Pros, and it will surely bring in new developers to the existing talent pool as well as draw the attention of prospectus partner projects. As you will find out further on in this section, this is also arguably the best time to be getting your unit as support for the device is growing. As for the hardware itself; for this batch of Pinebook Pros - as well as for all future production-runs - we are using a third-party QA service to give the laptops a thorough check prior to shipments going out. This is an arrangement which we reached via a mutual understanding with the new Pinebook Pro factory. We trust this will further reduce reports of DOA units and other types of hardware failures.

The big news of this month is that elementary is currently testing a pre-release of elementary OS 6 Odin for the Pinebook Pro. For those of you unfamiliar with elementary OS, it is a sleek distribution built on Ubuntu LTS, which ships with a (subjectively) beautiful and simple GTK desktop environment called Pantheon and a tailored store - the AppCenter. When the build becomes publicly available, it will offer a tailored experience for the Pinebook Pro, featuring countless tweaks to make Pantheon run well on the hardware. I also feel it is worth mentioning that the Pinebook Pro is the first Arm device to receive support from elementary. Needless to say, we are thrilled to see another highly requested OS land on our platform, and we’re thankful to the devs for all their effort in making this happen. I have now been running elementary OS on my Pinebook Pro for the past couple of weeks and I am happy to report that the experience is already very solid. I highly encourage you to visit elementary’s website and join their friendly community. If you can’t wait to try the build out, then please consider supporting elementary via GitHub sponsors - builds.elementary.io - as this will grant you early access to the OS image.

Docked Pinebook Pro running elementary OS pre-release

Lastly, I know many of you are waiting for an update on the Pinebook Pro dock. Let me premise this section with an explanation that we’re ready to pull the trigger on production for the dock literally any day now. Developers have, however, been struggling with making the digital and analog (VGA) video outputs work properly and this has held back our decision to start the manufacturing process. That said, this past Tuesday I met with ayufan over a pint of beer in Warsaw and asked him to help the current efforts to make the dock fully functional. I hope and trust that his input will speed the enablement process along. As mentioned in previous community updates, I have been internally torn whether to show the dock or not because there is still an uncertainty whether we’ll proceed to manufacture this design, but ultimately I feel that the community waited long enough to see what we’re contemplating. I am including a picture of a docked Pinebook Pro below, with all the ports of the dock exposed. Please keep in mind that until we know we can have all of the functionality worked out this is still just a tentative design which may change.

Proposed Pinebook Pro Docking Station

PineTab

Let me get the bad news out of the way first - PineTab has suffered a 7 day production delay. The delay is caused by a mistake, which caused the volume buttons to be swapped around (vol - and vol +) on the flex cable. This is something which could easily be remedied is software, but we decided to do it properly from the get-go. In result the small cable hosting the volume buttons had to be scrapped and redone from scratch. Based on the present production schedule, the PineTabs will be delivered to us on August 21, and we will see to it that they are shipped out as soon as possible. We apologise for this slight delay.

On a positive note, I have a handful of good hardware news to cover. We have now received the RTL-SDR and LoRa expansion board samples for the PineTab. The RTL-SDR expansion board comes from a highly reputable vendor and uses 0.5ppm TCXO as well as tantalum capacitors. The LoRa expansion boards can either be fitted internally or attached to a USB port. We hope that the addition of a USB header on the expansion board will broaden its development opportunities as all of our hardware, and just any other computer with USB, can interface with this module.

PineTab RTL-SDR expansion board

The LTE expansion board is still under development, but when completed it will feature the same LTE EG-25G modem found on the PinePhone. We’re also happy to announce that GPS functionality will work on this interface board just as it does on the PinePhone. In fact, we expect modem features which work on the PinePhone will function on the PineTab fitted with the LTE expansion board.

LoRa expansion board/ USB dongle

The last bit of news I wish to cover concerns the Ubuntu Touch OS build that will ship with the PineTab. The build is still very much a work-in-progress piece of software, but it has benefited greatly from all the PinePhone development as both devices share core components. That said, a handful of quirks remain to be worked out; notably, PineTab’s trackpad doesn’t currently work - at least not well - with the Ubuntu Touch build. In short, the trackpad behaves erratically making the cursor ‘jump around’ instead of tracking as it should. Rest assured this is not a hardware issue - we checked and confirmed this already. We hope that one of you early adopters will help in solving this mystery.

Lastly, for those of you who did not pre-order an early adopter’s units and hoping to get their hands on a PineTab, you’ll be glad to know that we will reopen pre-orders later this month. Before proceeding to production we will, however, want to hear back from early adopters so that their testing and experience can be accounted for prior to commissioning the next production-run. Please stay tuned to this blog and follow us on Twitter or Mastodon to be notified when the pre-orders go live.

PinePhone

I feel like we have finally gotten into a good production rhythm; it was only last month we announced the postmarketOS Community Edition of the PinePhone, and this month I am here to tell you that the factory will deliver the phones to us at the end of this month. Moreover, the presentation boxes featuring the (top secret) postmarketOS artwork and USB-C docks have all been delivered. I don’t know about you, but I think that this is a rather good production pace. At the time of writing, and based on current sale rates, the postmarketOS production-run will sell out in a matter of days - so if you’re on the fence whether to pick one up, then this is your last chance to make a decision. While I have no further announcements at this time, what I will say is that we have no intention of slowing down the pace now until February 2021 (when Chinese New Year begins). So if you’re interested in the PinePhone, then I strongly suggest you subscribe to this blog for any future hardware announcements.

Some really awesome projects related to the PInePhone have surfaced this month. We have literally seen a boat-load of cool and innovative things people have attempted at tackling, but three stand out as particularly ambitious - at least to me. The first of which is a fingerprint scanner for the PinePhone, which will interface with the phone via pogo pins. I know very little about how far along this project is, however the person working on it assured the community on our subreddit that the software is coming along but the hardware is still a way off. If his implementation works well, then we may see a custom PinePhone back-cover with a fingerprint scanner in the future.

Picture showing fingerprint scanner icon on PinePhone - image source

The second project that caught my attention was Martijn Braam’s video showcasing the addition of hacking a thermal camera into the PinePhone. To be precise he added a MLX90640 thermal camera module, with a 32x24 pixel resolution, making use of the standard Linux i2c driver. The module, Martijn writes, is similar to the Flir lepton module you can get commercially to attach to your existing Android or iPhone smartphone. While this mod will never become an official add-on (since I cannot see any broad demand for this in the community) it is yet really quite awesome. Also, both the PinePhone and Pinebook Pro in the video are running postmarketOS - pretty cool right?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFsQpd0bLTY

Martijn Braam’s video adding a thermal camera to PinePhone

Lastly, via a community effort (I have been specifically asked not to credit one particular person), numerous users have begun creating their own PinePhone cases. I have now seen numerous people who replaced their PinePhone mid-sections and back-covers with their own 3D printed versions. I hope that in the future we’ll see many community-made variations of the PinePhone body, and I truly hope that some of them will be capable of housing new hardware additions.

PinePhone 3D printed mid-section

In other hardware news, you’ll be happy to hear we have three solid candidate options for a PinePhone keyboard. We’re currently investigating which out of the three choices are something we could invest in and move forward with. All the options can be configured as a slide-out or clam-shell design and they all offer different functionality. There are many pros and cons to weigh in on so the process of selecting the right reference design may take another month or two. In the meantime, we’re looking forward to hearing and seeing what you can come up with. We’re always waiting for community submissions, so if you come up with a design that is both innovative and holds the potential for mass-produce then make sure to let us know - we’re all years.

As a closer for this section, here is a quick run-down of some (not all! - apologies to devs if I left something out) notable software developments in the past month. For starters Ondrej (Megi) Jirman has been working on power consumption optimisations which include the modem and the LCD panel. I believe that work on the LCD is still very much still a work-in-progress, but modem’s power management has already been published. In Ondrej’s own words, power management of the modem comprises “letting the modem sleep when it’s not in use, and waking it up when it’s needed for something, and letting the host sleep, and configure the modem to wake the host up, when some important event happens (incoming call, sms, …)” This is a development, which we expect will push the PinePhone well beyond a 24hrs battery standby time soon.

In other exciting news, postmarketOS developers have released and shared a mobile configuration for Firefox 78, which allows all projects that allow installation of Firefox to scale the browser properly on the PinePhone. Until this point in time, projects had to rely on Firefox ESR 68, because scaling on newer software versions presented the user with tiny UX elements. This config comes just-in-time as Firefox 68 is about to reach EOL.

Ubuntu Touch fans should rejoice as UBports developers have managed to enable both GPS and the camera. These features are currently available in the development channel, which can be switched to in the Software Update settings panel. Moreover, I have been told that GPU acceleration for the Morph browser is coming to the PinePhone soon. Earlier this month Marius from UBports tweeted a video showcasing the browser smoothly scrolling through a lengthy section of search results, rendering a webGL demo and playback of youtube videos. These changes will surely make the next stable OTA update for the PinePhone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OARRK6bEgiE&feature=youtu.be

Accelerated Morph Browser on Ubuntu Touch - via Marius Gripsgard (UBports)

Manjaro have released new alpha builds featuring both Phosh and KDE Plasma Mobile. The Phosh build is really far along and offers all core functionality, including telephony, GPS, LTE, BT and even the camera. It is also, subjectively, one of the snappiest experiences on the platform. That said, the Manjaro team is also planning to release a Lomiri (formerly Unity8) build for the PinePhone, which is said to run spectacularly well. To me, however, the most important aspect of this build version concerns the cooperation between UBports and Manjaro, which started on our community platform.

Manjaro Running Lomiri UI - via Spikerguy (Manjaro)

Lastly, I feel like it is worth mentioning that multiple operating systems now support Anbox. If I understand the technology correctly, Anbox is basically Android running inside a container on the PinePhone. This will, in time, allow users to access some native Android applications unavailable on Linux. I suspect that this will become a common solution for those who need their city transport, shopping, banking or other Android applications available on the go. I do not have an up-to-date list of all distributions that currently support Anbox, but some of the favorites including Mobian, postmarketOS and the community built Arch Linux now all have the capacity to run Anbox.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v06KUrfs69k

Anbox on PinePhone running Mobian - via LINMOBnet

PineTime [***authored by* JF**]

In the last community update, we announced that the next batch of Pinetime devkits will be programmed at the factory with my project (now renamed InfiniTime, more about this further in this post). Since then, the devkits are not yet available on the shop, what happened?

Well, I sent the binaries from the latest release to the factory. Many people from the chat rooms installed this release on their device and checked that it was working correctly, with positive results, yay!

But… It was not working so well at the factory. One important thing to know is that we are all working as hobbyists, amateur embedded software developers using hobbyist hardware and setup. To give you an idea, here is a picture of my desk with my Pinetime devkit and its debugging wires on the left, and my NRF52-DK board hooked on my small digital logic analyzer on the right.

I didn’t visit the factory, but I’m quite sure that the production line does not look like my desk, and they most certainly use other tools and softwares that are more appropriate for mass production than mine.

A good example is the external flash memory. Yes, the Pinetime has 2 flash memories : one integrated in the MCU (512KB) and one external (a huge 4MB) connected to the MCU via a SPI bus. For me, the only way to program this external memory is by writing a special firmware that writes data to the flash memory. This is time consuming, and not practical at all, but that’s all I have. At the factory, they use another hardware to program this SPI memory: a SPI programmer. This tool, connected to test points on the PCB, is able to program the SPI memory easily and at high speed. So I had to convert my little firmware that writes data to the external memory into a file that this SPI flash programmer understands… without having the means to check that this file is actually working!

And this is just an example of the difficulties we encountered. We also had to find the correct file format for the firmware, merge the bootloader and the firmware into a single file so that they can actually use the files on their setup and use their procedure.

Last but not least: time zones and language barriers did not help this process. The factory is located literally on the other side of the planet and when I sent screenshots of my software setup in French, they would answer me with screenshots in Chinese. We needed some time to understand each other :) There is good news however: David, the production manager, told me yesterday morning : “It looks like it’s working again. I will test a few more times”. Let’s hope it will work correctly with many pinetimes so that they can start the production of the new devkit!

Aside from production issues, here are other news.

I have (finally) decided to release Pinetime-JF under the GPL3 license, and to rename it “InfiniTime”. I want this project to be a community endeavour and not just “JF’s firmware” and I think it was the right move to achieve that goal! We are investigating solutions to reconcile our MCUBoot based bootloader with SoftDevice based firmwares which could make the OTA from one to another possible. Without going into details, for now, it is not possible to go from ATCWatch or Wasp-os to InfiniTime and vice-versa. In the end, our goal is to be able to switch between completely different platforms.

New people keep on coming in the community chat and they start working on new features. For example, some of them designed shiny new boot logo and new watch faces.

PineTime boot logo and watchface - via Lup Yuen Lee

Wasp-os found a way to implement step counting and heart rate monitoring using free software/open source drivers and Hypnos, a Zephyr-based firmware is making great progress and is looking to implement the OTA functionality.

Finally, as long as I have the floor, I take this opportunity to encourage all developers who are interested in developing an open-source firmware for an open source smartwatch to join us in the chat rooms or forums! There are many projects to join, and a lot of work to do to change the world and create a complete ecosystem around the Pinetime and the Pinephone!

Pinecil

We’re well on track to start production of the Pinecil at the end of September. We have already received the PCBs and assembled a small number of (PCBA) units for testing and development purposes. In my last community update I mentioned that the Pinecil is a truly open platform, and for those of you up to a challenge, it can be made into a completely different device. To this end, we’re happy to report that the Pinecil’s memory has been doubled for the production version, which further increases its versatility; given the ease with which you can program the device, you can truly think of the Pinecil as something much more than just a soldering iron.

Pinecil PCBA

Presently we’re waiting for the factory to deliver the first samples of the Pinecil body to us. Many of you have correctly identified that the Pinecil will be quite different to the TS100 in terms of overall layout and ergonomics. The buttons on the device will be located on each side of the display; we found that users tend to hold the iron horizontally when accessing settings, so this button placement makes it more sense from a UX perspective. The device will also be slightly longer - to accommodate the USB-C and power jack - and feature a rounder and rubberised segment where you rest your fingers. These are small tweaks in the grander scheme of things, so the iron should feel familiar to those who use a TS100, but we think they will go a long way to improving the overall experience of using the device.

We will also be selling a high quality 4 tip set for the Pinecil upon release. At this point I need to come clean and say that I know very little about soldering irons and tips in general, so you’ll have to wait a little longer to hear exactly what variety of tips the kit will include. That said, I have been told these will be high quality tips which, as you have come to expect from us at this point, will be priced lower than anything else on the market.

PineCube

We were really surprised by how many of you showed an interest in the PineCube when I initially announced that the device is making a return from a two-year-long hiatus. Since the PineCube is really the first (that we know of) dedicated FOSS IP camera, we had no idea that there were so many of you awaiting this type of device. Today we’re happy to let you know that the PineCube has successfully passed CE/FCC certification tests and production of the device has already begun. We presently expect first units to roll off the factory line at the end of September or early in October and be available for purchase soon thereafter.

With so much interest in the PineCube we already started preparing peripherals and add-ons for the device. The first two things that ‘just work’ with the current Linux build are a 40 pin LCD panel and a 1350mAh battery. Combined with the PineCubes GPIO pins and networking, these two accessories really extend the device’s versatility. I can well imagine people using the PineCube in conjunction with the battery to make an ‘action cam’ for a quadcopter or a scientific experiment, such as a weather balloon. Batteries sold in the PINE Store will likely only be available to community members in the US, but similar batteries are already available from reputable tinkering or hardware online shops.

PineCube with battery in chassis

As the name entails the PineCube comes assembled into a small cube. But the device is actually constructed out of 3 PCBA pieces connected via flex cables: the front PCBA (with sensors and IR LEDs), the camera module in the middle and back PCBA (with networking, SoC and GPIO). If required these can be detached from the plastic frame; this is something we imagine can be useful when embedding the device, especially in an industrial or project scenario. I am including a picture of the PineCube pieces detached from the frame and a LCD displaying camera feed and debugging information attached.

PineCube disassembled and LCD attached

We do not have any announcements concerning LCD panel and battery pricing but as I am sure most of you have come to expect the pricing of both items will be more than fair. More information about the LCD panel will be available closer to the date as we reach an agreement with the vendor.

This is all for this month, hope you too are somewhere nice and sunny!

Invitation to Play Along

Wed, 29 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Image from: Дмитрий Куртуков - Keyboard for PinePhone

We are currently in talks with a number of hardware vendors regarding a Nokia N900-style, slide-out-design keyboard for the PinePhone. They’ll have to produce mock-ups or prototypes for us to consider in the next few weeks. The requirements specify that the new device needs to:

Interface with the PinePhone’s rear pogo pin expansion connector
Fit the PinePhone’s form factor
Seamlessly replace the current back cover and snap onto the phone
Be similar, mechanically and functionally, to the Nokia N900 keyboard

We are simultaneously also exploring a gamepad for the PinePhone. The criteria we’re seeking in a gamepad are much vaguer than those of the keyboard:

The gamepad must use the PinePhone’s pogo pins (at least for power)
It must attach mechanically to the phone. Preferably in an elegant way – velcro or adhesive are not an option.

This add-on project is at an earlier exploratory stage than the keyboard, and therefore there is also some leeway regarding the general direction and shape it can take.

Now, we’d like to invite you to play along. While we’re waiting to see what the commissioned vendors will come up with, we’d also like to give you a chance to go at it. For the keyboard, we have settled on a 5-row key-arrangement design - a STP of the layout can be downloaded here. If you’ll have a go at creating a keyboard then do keep in mind the general guiding points outlined above, but at the same time do not take them as commandments carved in stone. I guess what I am trying to say is - don’t let the criteria restrict your creative vision.

Suggested keyboard layout (filled in by hand)

Regarding the game controller; since we’re at a very early exploratory stage, you’re welcome to explore a variety of approaches to creating such an add-on for the PinePhone. In other words, ‘anything goes’ as far as the controller’s design is concerned. Functionality wise, the controller will have to be powered via the pogo pins but I think it’s just fair to investigate the feasibility of alternative interfaces (BT/ USB) for the actual input.

In terms of other restrictions - keep in mind that this is something we’d potentially want to manufacture, so it has to have a sensible mechanical and electrical design, which cannot be a plagiarized copy of an existing device.

If you decide to have a go at it then be aware of the following: there is a very cool reward for the project - or projects - which will be chosen, but there is no financial compensation for the design(s). If you submit your design to us then you automatically acknowledge that we may choose to proceed and manufacture it. You will be fully credited on the Wiki and elsewhere (where appropriate) for your design and we will - as we always do with our community - work with you to deliver the end product.

We are most keen on functional prototypes, so that it will be possible to evaluate the feasibility of the design. Something may look cool but be unergonomic or simply dysfunctional when applied to reality, not to mention that certain designs may cost too much to mold and manufacture.

I’ve been thinking about the best way for submissions and after some asking around I’ve been advised to just use the forum for this purpose. This way people can also discuss and offer feedback to others.

Forum Thread

If you have any further questions then do not hesitate to ask in the comments section or on the forum. Lastly, while there is a cool reward involved in this challenge to entice you to give this a go, please consider this a fun community hacking activity.

All about the PineTab (Update)

Fri, 24 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This is a supplementary post to this month’s Community Update - if you haven’t read this month’s news, then I suggest you go back and have a read since we’ve had a handful of interesting announcements. Regarding the PineTab, I am happy to let you know that production is well under way and we are mostly on schedule with the manufacturing and shipping processes. To be precise, we are just a week behind the original schedule; the cause of the delay is our decision to change the LCD panel driver (or perhaps more accurately, we were convinced to exchange the panel driver by the vendor) as the driver we originally chose is reaching end of life (EoL). We ultimately decided that a week’s delay is worth it. The alternative scenario would likely result in developers supporting multiple LCD drivers in their operating systems, which is not ideal.

Here are the details of the current timeline. Finished PCBAs will be released to us from the factory on the 27th and, granted we’re happy with them, fully assembled tablets should be dispatched from the production line on August 6th or 7th. The PineTabs will make their way to Hong Kong soon after and I expect that shipping will commence the week of August 17-21. Closer to the shipping date, sometime early next month, I’ll open a shipping thread on the forum which you’ll be able to follow.

I am also pleased to announce that CE, FCC and RoHS certifications for the PineTab have already been finalized and the reports are now being written up. All reports will be completed in time for shipping and relevant certificates will be submitted to Wiki as soon as they are made available to us.

As I mentioned in the past, we have significantly improved the battery from earlier hardware iterations. The PineTab ships with a 6000mAh Cobalt in lithium-ion battery, which not only provides a long battery life for the tablet but also superior discharge-cycle battery longevity. Investing into core components such as the battery is part of our commitment to seeing it adopted in both private and corporate (e.g. point of sale) environments, where it will be used for multiple years. We have also received PineTab m.2 LTE/SSD and LoRa adapter samples from vendor partners. Before these become available in the PINE Store we want developers to give them a proper spin so that all necessary functionality these adapters provide can be enabled in software. I presently cannot tell you when they will be available for purchase in the PINE Store, but I suspect that the m.2 LTE/SSD adapter will be the first to become available in the next 2-3 months time.

Lastly, UBports developers have been working hard on getting the Ubuntu Touch build for the PineTab ready. Software progress made on the PinePhone has also directly contributed many features to PineTab’s functionality. Among others, the operating system now supports Over the Air (OTA) updates and real convergence, which allows you to switch between tablet and desktop mode on the fly when the keyboard is attached. Despite the software still being a work-in-progress, the experience of transitioning between one input state and the other already feels very good, and it will only get better from here. I hope that many of you who will be getting these early units will want to contribute to the development process by submitting reports, testing and helping resolve issues.

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Pinebook Pro pre-orders open with shipping in August 2020.

Mon, 20 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Hello everyone,

I’m sure many of you will be happy to hear that the next round of Pinebook Pro pre-orders have now opened. This production-run is expected to ship in late August, 2020. Both ISO and ANSI keyboards are available. If the Pinebook Pro is something you’ve been waiting for, then click the button below.

In case you missed it, we’ve had some big announcements earlier this month.

Have a lovely day and a great start to the week!

Go to store

July Update: biggest update in months!

Wed, 15 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I cannot remember the last time I had this much to report. With so many announcements and highlights, I ran out of time and didn’t cover a handful of topics that happened this month. If I find the time, I’ll make a complimentary post later this month to cover the outstanding topics. Before we get into it, I’d also like to thank JF for his contribution to the text.

The big announcement of the month is that we’re introducing the PinePhone Convergence Package and that postmarketOS Community Edition (CE) pre-orders open today. The Convergence Package features a PinePhone with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of eMMC flash storage as well as a USB-C dock tailored for the PinePhone.

This month we’re also unveiling the Pinecil RISC-V soldering iron and reintroducing the PineCube (formerly CUBE) FOSS IP camera into our product line.

There’s plenty of ground to cover, so let’s get to it.

TL;DR for this month

We’re trying out a new shipping arrangement to EU with postmarketOS CE; expect it to benefit end-users in Europe
We are presently unable to ship any devices to Russia or India (doesn’t apply to SBCs & peripherals)
PinePhone postmarketOS CE pre-orders open today!
Introducing PinePhone Convergence Package with postmarketOS CE featuring 3GB RAM/ 32GB eMMC and a USB-C dock for $199; available alongside regular PinePhone postmarketOS CE for $149
PinePhone spare battery charger and protective tempered glass are now in PINE Store
The PinePhone can now achieve 100hrs standby time without modem; over 24hrs with modem enabled (!)
PinePhone state of software, including postmarketOS, Manjaro, and Mobian
Pinebook Pro - finally good news from *BSD community; FreeBSD is coming together
Lomiri (formerly Unity8) running on Manjaro on Pinebook Pro
No (OG) Pinebooks being produced right now; we’ll wait for component prices to come down
Next round of Pinebook Pro pre-orders at the end of July/ beginning of August
Pinebook Pro dock is being evaluated by developers; it will be a little longer before we show it
Pinebook -to- Pinebook Pro-esque upgrade kit is finally coming soon
PineTime software and development status; working towards an early adopters edition [authored by JF]
Pinecil is a TS100 compatible RISC-V soldering iron. Improved device ergonomics and firmware from original TS100 firmware creator Ben Brown; coming late September for $24.99
PineCube (formerly CUBE) going into production soon, with improved hardware specs; available in 6-8 weeks for ~$24.99
Personal note: I’ll start getting back to your emails now that I’ve got some spare time.

Housekeeping

Let’s start with a handful of shipping notices. With the upcoming postmarketOS CE we’ll introduce a new shipping arrangement for the EU (please see the PinePhone section of this post for details), which we hope will result in significantly reduced shipping costs for end-users. We’re always looking for the best arrangements and new ways to deliver our hardware, and we hope that this route will eventually grow to encompass other devices. We will have more news concerning servicing EU end-users in coming months, so please stay tuned and subscribe to this blog for further updates. On the subject of shipping, we also have bad news for our end-users in Russia and India. We are currently not able to fulfil postmarketOS CE PinePhone nor upcoming Pinebook Pro orders to said destinations since there currently aren’t any available shipping routes for these devices at our disposal.

In anticipation of someone writing “but I can get product X into Russia/India using service Y”, let me elaborate on the situation a little further. We have been informed that we’re not allowed to ship devices with the encryption capabilities of the PineTab, PinePhone and Pinebook Pro into the Russian Federation. Shipping these devices could (and has multiple times in the past) lead to confiscation of the devices at the border by customs and even to being outright banned or barred from entering the country. There are avenues for us to explore in this regard, however, and we will do so in the coming weeks. Once a suitable shipping option is found, shipping to Russia and India will be reinstated immediately. I’ll make sure you’ll be notified of this as it happens.

Lastly, we will be looking into improving the PINE Store layout and shopping experience in the coming weeks. While we’re considering the store’s potential layout and structure, we’d appreciate hearing your views and ideas on how we can improve its front-end. I deem the comments section of the blog not the best place for this discussion, so I have opened a thread in the community section of the forum where we can exchange ideas. I am really looking forward to hearing from you.

PinePhone

The PinePhone UBports Community Edition campaign has now come to an end. Earlier this month we donated our financial contribution to the UBports Foundation and became listed as one of the Premium Sponsors. We would like to thank the entire UBports community - and especially Marius, Dalton and Ricardo - for their work and cooperation during the past couple of months (Editor’s note: Thank you to PINE64 and the community for making this possible! - Dalton).

I must admit that despite the difficult circumstances that surrounded this campaign - everything from manufacturing to shipping - this has been a valuable exercise for us as a project. We have learnt a lot from the problems we encountered, and as a result of this we will be trying out new shipping strategies as well as altering how we tackle shipping periods. As I already mentioned earlier in this blog entry, we are setting up a warehouse in the EU (Poland), which will service European customers. This warehouse will, at least presently, only be used for PinePhones. If this setup proves to be as convenient and beneficial to the community as we think, it may end up hosting our remaining devices in the future. Using this new shipping arrangement, EU customers will not be asked to pay import tax, but rather the PinePhone price, $20 shipping charge as well as local VAT. Please note that this is a trial - something we’re testing out with this Community Edition production-run - and we may choose to fall back on previously established shipping arrangements in the future. Shipping arrangements for users in the US and rest of the world remain unchanged.

Before moving to this month’s big announcements, I’d like to thank all of you for your patience - I know that it has been a long wait for some of you (and that many of you are still waiting). If you are just getting your UBports CE PinePhone now, then please consider joining the dedicated Ubuntu Touch on PinePhone telegram group.

Cleverly reworked box for the PinePhone Convergence Package

Pre-orders for postmarketOS CE open today and I am happy to announce that alongside the standard PinePhone CE hardware configuration priced at $149, we are launching the PinePhone Convergence Package. The PinePhone Convergence Package features a PinePhone with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of eMMC storage as well as a compatible USB-C dock. The dock that is included with the Convergence Package is capable of delivering power to the phone via USB-C power-in (3A 5V), outputting digital video via HDMI, 10/100 Ethernet connectivity and two USB 2.0 ports (for e.g. external storage / mouse and keyboard). The spec bump and inclusion of the dock comes at the price of $199. We presently do not know whether the Convergence Package will become a permanent option, something we’ll do on occasion or simply a one-off (although the last option is unlikely). It obviously largely depends on people’s response to this PinePhone variant and how much demand we see for it.

Both the regular (2GB RAM/16GB eMMC) and Convergence Package (3GB RAM/32GB eMMC) postmarketOS CE PinePhone versions will ship with a mainboard designated 1.2a. The ‘a’ in the mainboard’s designation refers to a minor alteration, allowing for better power delivery negotiation (which will result in improved charging performance under some circumstances), as well as the possibility to connect USB devices to the phone and output video to an external monitor.

Head over to the PINE Store to pre-order your postmarketOS CE PinePhone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBeza4UNOm8

PinePhone running postmarketOS docked by Martijn Braam

While we’re discussing this topic, let me tackle the elephant in the room and acknowledge that a design flaw in PCBA rev. 1.1 and 1.2 prevents this functionality (please see relevant documentation related to CC pin) on Braveheart and UBports CE phones. This issue was originally identified, and the fix for it was found, by Ondřej (megi) Jirman. His work on the anx7688 makes USB-C features, such as PD charging, video output or other functions of the docking station work. Thankfully the fix to the problem - the removal of two small components from the PCBA - is relatively simple to perform for someone with good soldering skills. At the same time I recognize that many community members, myself included, are not capable of completing this operation. To this end, we will set up a chain of local (in your geographic area) workshops, makerspaces or individual technicians capable of performing this fix, so you can send your 1.1 / 1.2 phone to them to complete the repair.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xf8OJtjNWUM&feature=youtu.be

Quick Look at the required CC fix on PCBA 1.1 / 1.2. By Mozzwald

When we sold Braveheart PinePhones we made a promise to the early adopters that we won’t leave them behind, so I’d like to extend the offer for fixing the CC pin issue to all Braveheart owners too. More information will follow about the process later this month - I have to figure out the smartest way to set up the infrastructure about it first. In my dedicated post on this topic, there will be a sign-up for individuals and shops who would like to make their services available. So, if you’re handy with a soldering iron then please subscribe to the blog and watch for a post later this month.

In other hardware news, there are now two new PinePhone items available in the PINE Store. We have a tempered glass screen protector (it’s very good, I use it on my phone) and an external PinePhone battery charger. The charger makes it possible for you to charge a PinePhone battery externally, so you do not need to disassemble your phone to charge a spare battery unit. Both items come in at $4.99 and I suggest you at least pick up the glass screen protector alongside one of the phone cases for your phone. Both items can be found in the PinePhone spare parts section. One last little bit of hardware news I’d like to let you know about is that now, with access to vendors in China becoming easier, we have resumed exploring the creation of an external keyboard for the PinePhone. To be precise, we have approached a vendor and began exploring our options for a slide-out keyboard akin to those used on the Nokia N900. If the talks come to fruition then I’ll make sure to ask for your opinions - as I did with the Pinebook Pro - regarding the keyboard layout and features (no, there won’t be multiple layouts).

Battery charger and tempered glass protector

I have already used up all the time and space reserved for the PinePhone section in this blog, but I feel strongly compelled to cover some software updates. For starters, I know many of you are curious about the software status of the postmarketOS build that will ship with the postmarketOS CE PinePhone. The build will include a phenomenal out-of-the-box user setup and installer, which will not only allow you to fully encrypt your eMMC storage but also enable services, such as SSH. Our friends from postmarketOS have posted a very detailed post detailing the state of software. I strongly suggest to head over to their blog and have a read.

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postmarketOS initial user setup. By Martijn Braam

The other big software news of the month concerns the amazing work of Samuel Holland on Crust advanced power management; the PinePhone is now able to idle for ~100hrs (that’s not a typo, I wrote 100) using as little as 110mW in deep sleep. This is, of course, with the modem switched off. With the modem ON, you can expect the PinePhone to achieve an idle run-time of approximately 24hrs, which we feel brings the device firmly into the realm of what we’d consider a daily-driver smartphone being capable of.

The second bit of software news I’d like to cover is Mobian’s implementation of camera functionality on the PinePhone. This implementation builds on work by Ondřej (megi) Jirman, who has been working on both the ov5640 rear and gc2145 front cameras. For those of you who do not know, Mobian is a dedicated Debian distribution for the PinePhone which I happen to be a fan of. The camera implementation is rather slow and the photos aren’t the best quality, but what is important is that we’ve seen this goal being achieved in a relatively short period of time. Somewhat noteworthily, I’d also like to note that I’ve had no problems using GPS on Mobian, and even did some navigating on foot with phone-in-hand finding my desired destinations and best routes. I’m really impressed.

Camera now works on Mobian

Lastly, I want to give a shout-out to the Manjaro team and their work on the PinePhone over this past month. Manjaro are such an integral part of our community and one of the main driving forces behind end-user facing development. That said, perhaps because of their dedication to the Pinebook Pro hardware and the time they put into it, their Alpha OS images for the PinePhone were lacking in comparison to some of the dedicated cutting-edge distributions. This, however, is a thing of the past. It appears Manjaro have now settled on Phosh as their default UI (as opposed to Plasma Mobile) and achieved a lot of software parity with other distributions. Their most recent OS image, at the time of writing, has LTE functionality, places phone calls, has the newest Phosh features (including auto-scaling) and even apparently the newly released Crust power management improvements. I know there are many fans of Manjaro in the community, so I suggest you give their most recent pre-release a go.

Pinebook Pro

We know that many of you are waiting for the next Pinebook Pro batch to open. I currently cannot offer you a precise date for when the next batch will become available, but we’re working towards starting pre-orders at the end of this month. The next production run will be produced by a new factory, which we are still in talks with. Therefore, it’s taking a little longer than usual. Regardless, we’re set to start producing Pinebook Pros in August, so you will not have to wait for much longer to get into the queue for your unit.

The Pinebook Pro has seen quite a few software developments over the past month. For starters, we finally have some progress coming from the *BSD communities. Although the Pinebook Pro has already been shown running *BSD months ago - and NetBSD has been available for install for some time - there haven’t been any guides or tutorials on how to get Open or FreeBSD working until now. In fact, very little information about Open and FreeBSD has been made available on our forum or Wiki. I believe this is about to change, however, as nrgmilk - a FreeBSD developer (who also booted FreeBSD on the PinePhone!!!!) - tweeted that FreeBSD 13.0 now boots on the Pinebook Pro with LCD output. Just a few days later, Vincent Milum Jr. shared information that he successfully implemented big.LITTLE support for the Pinebook Pro on FreeBSD 13.0. I have been told that while there is still a lot of work to be done on FreeBSD, and indeed all *BSDs, the movement we saw this month may be the breaking point which will propel work on our platform forward.

FreeBSD booted on Pinebook Pro by nrgymilk

In other software news, we saw Manjaro booted with Lomiri (formerly Unity8) on the Pinebook Pro. While this is fun to see from a technological standpoint, I am mostly glad to see PINE64 as a platform facilitating the growth and cooperation of projects. Ubuntu Touch and Manjaro are fairly distant relatives of the Linux family tree, and yet they found a common (and innovative) ground to work on within the premises of our community. I am told that you can already install Lomiri alongside KDE Plasma on the Pinebook Pro if you switch to the unstable repos.

Lomiri on Manjaro via Manjaro Linux

This month we’ve also seen the first proper graphical U-Boot implementation on the Pinebook Pro thanks to the work of Samuel Dionne-Riel from NixOS. Samuel writes that this version of U-Boot still has some issues with booting the most current mainline kernels (5.6+) - including Manjaro’s Pinebook Pro kernel (5.7) - but this is surely something that can and will be fixed in nearby future. This is an important step in Pinebook Pro software evolution, as it makes booting and installing alternative OSes from SD, USB 2.0, USB 3.0 and NVMe trivial. I am including Samuel’s quick video showcasing the U-Boot video init working below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdosT2yyA4g

U-Boot visual output via Samuel Dionne-Riel

We have sent the Pinebook Pro dock to a handful of partner project developers for evaluation. The process of enabling all of the dock’s functionality on the Pinebook Pro is ongoing, and we’re still missing video output implementation. We also want to redesign some minor bits and pieces before showing it off, so you’ll need to wait a little longer before I post a picture of a prototype we’re happy showing off publicly. I also have some news regarding the redesigned OG Pinebook. At present component prices - especially prices of LCD displays - the BOM cost of the Pinebook significantly exceeds our asking price. In other words, we’d have to significantly subsidize it, which is not something we’re willing to do with all the cost-inducing activities we engage in. Once the post-COVID19 market stabilizes and prices come down, I assure you that we will resume production of the Pinebook.

Finishing on a positive note, we’re now moving forward with the OG Pinebook-to-Pinebook Pro-esque upgrade. The upgrade will require you to be moderately handy with a screwdriver and the command line. It involves removing the A64 board, applying the heat-dissipation material to the case bottom and lastly installing the RK3399 mainboard in the chassis. On the software side, you will have to flash new firmware to your keyboard and trackpad (similarly to how it is done on the Pinebook Pro). I’d also like to make you aware that thermal performance of the upgraded OG Pinebook - even when using a graphene layer - will be poorer than the Pinebook Pro. That said, this doesn’t entail that the thermals are bad, and kernel 5.7 and allegedly also the upcoming 5.8, improve the RK3399’s thermal profiles, so you don’t have to worry about heat-related issues under regular load. Here is a thermal test using the graphene heat-pad used in an upgraded Pinebook; please disregard the 18*C read-out and focus on the core frequencies - all you need to know is that the SOC throttles at 72*C. We aim to have the upgrade kit available in a few weeks time in the PINE Store.

OG pinebook with the upgrade installed

PineTime [***authored by* JF**]

Here is the latest news from the Pinetime community!

First, a big announcement: PINE64 has decided to move towards an early adopter edition of the PineTime, and I’m really excited that the community chose my project as the first FOSS firmware to be flashed at the factory for this early adopter edition! Until now, the Pinetime dev kits were programmed at the factory with what we call the stock firmware - it implements most of the features of the watch but it is closed source. Moreover, the flash memory is read-protected to prevent anyone from reading the binary file from the memory.

When this early adopter edition is available, you’ll enjoy the result of months of work by the PineTime community (I’m not the only one working on this firmware, but I still have to find a better name for it…), and you’ll be able to hack, debug and flash your watch more easily than before because you won’t have to disable the memory protection.

The firmware is still under development but it already integrates basic features like displaying the time, synchronizing the date and time with a companion application on a smartphone, and receiving notifications. Right now we are in the process of testing and debugging this firmware as much as we can, and everyone is welcome to come and help us in this exciting task!

Another great achievement for the project is the development of Over The Air (OTA) update capability. Not only are we now able to update the firmware running on the Pinetime over BLE, but we can also switch from one firmware to another! We’ve successfully ran a demo showing an update from my firmware to Lup Yuen’s.The OTA feature is still experimental, but it gives really promising results!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFm_cGP3AHw&feature=youtu.be

PineTime OTA update via Bluetooth

In a previous community update, Lukasz announced that Amazfish - a companion app running on SailfishOS and on the PinePhone - was able to communicate with the PineTime. Since then, Gadgetbridge (Android) joined the team. And, last but not least, Lup is also working on a companion app and one of his goals is to make it run on the Pinephone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myMUNepyB5I&feature=youtu.be

PineTime receiving notifications via Gadgetbridge

What else happened in the community? A lot of work has been done on the heart-rate sensor and the accelerometer and power consumption, with very good results from ATCWatch. I’ve seen interesting discussions about the design of a dev cradle that would make it easier to connect the pinetime to the SWD debugger. There are also a lot of people interested in Python development thanks to WaspOS, and the community keeps on welcoming new developers that are excited to learn and work on Pinetime.

Pinecil

Let me start by thanking all those who played along last month and took a shot at my riddle. I must admit I was quite surprised how quickly people correctly identified what the Pinecil is. I was also blown away by the accuracy with which the clues were deciphered. Next time I’ll know to make my riddles more cryptic and difficult to decipher. Before we proceed to talk about the device itself, let me just list the names of the three winners (first to correctly identify device type; first to accurately identify SOC type; first to correctly identify all clues). If your name/ handle is on this list then please email me directly (l.erecinski@pine64.org) using the email registered on this blog. The first three production Pinecils are going to:

Andrew Stoehr
Jonas
Ignas Kiela

The Pinecil is a RISC-V based soldering iron - it is inspired and compatible with the widely acclaimed TS100, which is used by tinkerers and makers worldwide. The Pinecil maintains compatibility with TS100 tips and delivers performance identical to its muse, but at a community friendly price of $24.99. Having spoken to, and gathered feedback from, people who are experts in the field, we have made a handful of improvements to the general design and functionality of the soldering iron. In terms of ergonomics, compared to the original TS100 design, the Pinecil is more comfortable to hold and features a grippy rubberised texture where you place your fingers. It is also slightly longer and can be powered via either USB-C or a barrel jack. This makes the soldering iron more versatile, especially if you intend to use it for in-field repairs. The USB-C connection also includes embedded UART, i2c, SPI, and USB signals for ease of development. We know some of you want to play Tetris on your soldering irons … for everyone else, yes, it’s actually a thing. Speaking more seriously however, this means you can use the Pinecil as a platform to create something completely different based on this platform, such as a drill or a multimeter.

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Pinecil renders and mockup

Obviously the one crucial bit of having the Pinecil actually functional is having software support for the device. This effectively means porting an existing firmware to the RISC-V platform. Thankfully we’ve been able to interest Ben Brown - the person behind the original TS100 firmware - to take a look at the Pinecil. Sending him a prototype just a little over a month ago, all we hoped for was for him to take a look at it and evaluate the design’s feasibility. Suffice to say Ben exceeded our expectations by practically porting all essential functions to RISC-V, thereby making the Pinecil functional.

As of today, the following is working:

PWM tip drive
OLED
Accelerometer (ish - needs work somewhere)
FreeRTOS
Basics of all of the code

Still needs work:

Tune PWM timings
FLASH for saving settings
DMA for I2C (to make screen updates smoother)

Pinecil hardware running (prototype)

We hope that you guys are as excited about the Pinecil as we are. We are currently aiming to make the Pinecil available for purchase sometime in the next 3 months. I will make sure to keep you up-to-date on how the project is progressing until then.

PineCube

This will likely come as a bit of a surprise to many of you, but production of the PineCube (originally CUBE) open source IP camera will be starting soon. Some of you may recognise this project as it has been well over a year in the making - we first announced it at FOSDEM 2019. The thing that originally held the PineCube back was a lack of camera integration in the software. Other projects took priority and, eventually, the project was shelved until we had the time and free resources to tackle it again. With all major disasters now behind us for this year (*knocks on wood 3 times*), and with all the big devices shipping, we feel the time has come to revisit the much anticipated PineCube.

The PineCube is a compact and completely custom built IP camera that runs mainline Linux. It features an m12 mount, which accommodates various lenses for different use-cases (wide-angle, zoom, fisheye, etc.,), and it comes equipped with IR LEDs for night vision. The small device also bundles a microphone, GPIO, USB 2.0, 10/100 Ethernet, Bluetooth and WiFi. It’s worth mentioning that the PineCube can be passively powered over Ethernet. All these features allow for a high degree of versatility, making the PineCube suitable for a wide array of use-cases, ranging from a baby or security camera to a drone or robot camera.

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A look at the new PineCube

Since its original announcement in 2019, a number of changes have been made to PineCube’s core hardware. The original camera module has been switched out for the OV5640 5MPixel sensor used in the PinePhone and PineTab. Progress made on the OV5640 on the big devices will hence directly translate to the PineCube. The IR LED array has also been altered to allow for better and further-reaching night vision. Perhaps most importantly, however, the SoC has been upgraded to the S3 (up from S3L), which is paired with 128MB of DDR2 RAM. The upgraded RAM as well as the Cortex-A9 running at up-to 1Ghz make for quite a powerful platform.

In the coming weeks I’ll be reaching out to developers and project maintainers to get early PineCube units into their hands. We have commissioned the factory to start production and been informed that the lead-time is approximately 6-8 weeks. We expect to be able to offer the PineCube for $24.99.Let me know if you’re planning to get a PineCube and what you’ll use it for in the comments section. I expect to have more updates for you about this project in a month’s time.

Personal note

This has been a busy period for us - and I’ve also been working on my own PINE64-related project that I’ll be unveiling soon (shameless plug) - and my inbox is literally filled with queries from community members, media and potential partner projects. I’d like to apologize to you all for being so unresponsive and at the same time promise to start going through the pile of correspondence starting today.

That concludes this month’s update - I am looking forward to your comments!

June Update: postmarketOS CE PinePhone, Shipping & PINE64 Cluster

Mon, 15 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Hello everyone! It has been a really busy time for us here at PINE64 as we’re working hard to deliver outstanding PinePhone UBports Community Edition and Pinebook Pro shipments. The big news of this month is that we’re excited to announce that a postmarketOS Community Edition PinePhone will be available for pre-order early next month.

There are a lot of topics to cover this month, so let’s get to it.

This month’s TL;DR

All PINE64 services on our own hardware; the cluster move report
Shipping delays and Pinebook Pro QA issues addressed
Shipping status update & where to find up-to-date information
An apology for PineTab pre-orders delay & no heads-up on blog
PineTab pre-orders sold out in under 72 hours
PineTab to ship late July 2020; more batches coming
PineTab add-on board reengineered for LoRa and RTL-SDR modules; available for next pre-order batch
PinePhone postmarketOS Community Edition announcement; pre-orders start early July
Check out postmarketOS announcement blog post!
PinePhone CRUST advanced power management status
A community initiative; a PinePhone pogo pin breakout board
PineTime; Lup Yuen Lee will write a series of PineTime articles for our blog!
Solve the riddle!

Housekeeping

We’re proud to announce that starting this month all our community services, including this very website you’re currently visiting, are all running on our PINE64 cluster of 24x ROCKPro64 single board computers. The process of migrating services to the cluster began on June 5 and finished on the 10th without any major dowtimes or hiccups. As of right now the cluster hosts the main PINE64 website, the Wiki, forum, IRC server (and chat bridge) as well as all our Matrix channels. To our knowledge we’re the only organization in this neck of the woods to dogfood hardware in this way. I like when things speak for themselves, and so I hope and trust that this is a testimony to our faith in our own hardware.

I know many of you are very keen to learn more about the cluster, so I already have asked Matthew (fire219) and Marek (gamiee) to write a technical blog post about it once the dust settles. I know that there are at least two other services that the guys want to host on the server, and once that’s done you can expect a progress report directly from the people involved in making it happen. What I can tell you is that the cluster is running mainline Debian and the nodes are network booted from a 1TB NVMe SSD. All databases are backed up and mirrored to another 1TB SSD. We’re currently using 8 of the 24 nodes at our disposal so there is plenty of room to grow in the future. We’re also aware that not everything is working 100% flawlessly just yet, but we’re going though the bugs list and hope that the minor issues will not detract from our systems’ overall usability.

Network boot node with 1TB storage via Gamiee

Shipping Status and Pinebook Pro QA

As many of you are already aware, we ran into shipping problems which resulted in delays. We are presently approximately 2 weeks behind our original schedule (NB. this only relates to some shipments, since a fourth of all PinePhones UBports CE and half of Pinebook Pro laptops already went out). It is important to note that the reasons for the shipping delays are different for the two devices, so I’ll take a minute to explain the situation. The Pinebook Pro shipments have been put on halt since additional and more stringent QA of the devices is now underway. This follows an abnormal amount of issues reported from the first two shipments. I feel like I owe you an explanation, so here it goes: the higher-than-normal number of Pinebook Pro issues reported is, by and large, a case of the factory not doing their job properly. A cascading number of events underpin this situation, and I won’t get into all the details, but the starting point of these issues is the COVID19 pandemic, which effectively prevented us overseeing the work done at the factory.

We have now taken steps to make sure this doesn’t happen again. Factory workers have been better instructed on how to perform some of the error-prone tasks, the factory has agreed to improve their QA protocols and we’ve set up an independent review of the laptops as they leave the factory. Regardless, I am now happy to let you all know that the remaining Pinebook Pro laptops will clear our warehouse this week and that shipping resumes today. This means that the grand majority of those still waiting for their Pinebook Pro will have their units by late-next week. I’d like to apologize once more to everyone who received a faulty unit - we’re working as fast as we can to resolve reported problems.

As for PinePhone shipments, the cause of the delay is Asendia’s inability to fulfill shipment at this time. Unlike DHL - which has a fleet of aircraft and local couriers at its disposal throughout the world - Asendia relies on third-party logistics and national postal services to fulfill orders. Seeing as many borders are still closed and, at times, carriers or postal services Asendia cooperates with have not returned to normal operation, it is simply impossible to accept our shipment. Earlier this month we gave everyone the option to change their shipping from Asendia to DHL, and we have now reached the required number of orders to commence a DHL ‘upgrade’ shipment in a matter of days. Those who have not yet changed their Asendia shipment orders to DHL still have the optionto do so via pine64.com.

If you want to receive your PinePhone UBports CE this month then I strongly recommend you switch your Asendia shipping to DHL. However, if you’re not in a rush then you are welcome to stick to Asendia - borders around the world are slowly opening up and logistics chains are slowly returning to normal. Just today the service resumed operation to two more countries - Brazil and Australia. In result, I suspect that the more Asendia shipments will commence in a matter of 3-4 weeks, as more shipping destinations become available. If you wish to stay up-to-date on PinePhone and Pinebook Pro shipping, you can find a shipping update thread on the forum, where I post new information as it becomes available to me.

PineTab

Pre-orders for the PineTab pilot batch went live on June 10th - 12 days later than we initially planned. We apologize for this delay. The delay in launching pre-orders was caused by two factors: the PinePhone and Pinebook Pro shipping situation, as well as migration of our services to the PINE64 cluster. We initially planned for the pre-orders to go live well before the migration of services, but with aforementioned shipping problems the date slipped and we deemed a pre-order launch right in the middle of moving services to our cluster too risky. I’d also like to personally apologize to all those who waited for a heads-up post on the forums and the blog; I know this is something I promised, but forgot about it due to high workload. If you missed out on placing a pre-order rest assured - this is just the beginning. Once we receive feedback from early adopters, we’ll produce a much larger PineTab batch and everyone who wants a PineTab will surely be able to get one.

Previous Next

Production PineTab and keyboard (not renders)

Speaking of sales, the pilot batch sold out in under 72 hours, which means that multiple hundred units were sold daily. I’m not going to lie, I am surprised by the sheer volume of traffic and general level of interest in the PineTab, and I am curious if the fast sale rate is a result of the extensive media exposure that the PineTab received or a genuine need for this type of device (or a combination of both). Feel free to share your thoughts about this - I am really interested to hear what you make of it. Regardless, it was a real pleasure to see so much positivity and excitement around the PineTab online at the time the pre-orders dropped. The numbers speak for themselves, the PineTab video Marius recorded last month has now received 26k.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ii6lAjgfW3c

If you missed the video last month - here’s the PineTab Running Ubuntu Touch

Seeing as PineTab pre-orders sold as well as they did, we’re now looking into ways to extend this production run or start another one in the immediate future. We cannot promise that this will happen for certain, but if our production request will be accepted by the factory then I will make sure to let you all know on Twitter, Mastodon, the forum, the chats and also on this blog. I promise I’ll remember about making a blog entry this time.

The shipping date for the PineTab is late July, which means that we’re internally aiming to start sending out units in the latter half of July. As the shipping date draws nearer we keep on improving and polishing the device so it will be the best it can be when it lands in early-adopters hands. I have already written at length about some improvements already made to the device in April’s community update, so I won’t be repeating myself here, but just because we addressed all known issues doesn’t mean we stopped researching our options to improve the PineTab yet further while preserving the $99 price-tag. In example, we just managed to secure a higher quality battery for the PineTab; something that will be a major benefit 2 or 3 years after your Pinetab purchase.

Lastly, I see a lot of questions concerning the PineTab add-on adapter announced last month. In its original inception, the adapter only allowed for LTE and SSD storage, while now it will also have to accommodate LoRa and RTL-SDR modules. Seeing as we already have our hands full with other equipment and the abnormally difficult shipping situation, the process of re-engineering the adapter will take a few weeks longer. In result, the adapter will first be available in the PINE Store when the second production-run of PineTabs becomes available for pre-order. I’ll make sure to keep you up-to-date on this topic in future updates.

PinePhone

We’re happy to announce that the next Community Edition of the PinePhone will ship with postmarketOS. The pre-orders will start in early July and we currently aim to have the pre-order window open for at least a month and a half. I am sure that many of you are thrilled to see another Community Edition of the PinePhone available so soon and branded with one of PinePhone’s flagship OSes. Similarly to our friends at UBports, postmarketOS developers have been with us since the very start of the PinePhone project and their OS has been instrumental to our hardware production process. For those who don’t know, the factory test image used for handset QA at the factory runs postmarketOS with a custom UI. It will therefore, in a sense, be the second time we ship postmarketOS on the PinePhone - as some of you will recall, Braveheart Edition PinePhones shipped with the aforementioned factory test image. It is probably evident but I’ll write it anyways; unlike the factory test image that shipped with Braveheart phones, the postmarketOS Community Edition will feature a fully fledged postmarketOS mobile system.

Render of postmarketOS Community Edition PinePhone

I expect you will also be glad to learn that production of this Community Edition has already been scheduled at the factory, and we’re hoping for record turn-around time for this production-run. In general, I feel like we’re just getting into the manufacturing stride after the long downtime which began in January with the Chinese New Year and was followed by the now dwindling COVID-19 pandemic. This is obviously good news for you, the end-users, but it is also good news for postmarketOS developers who will benefit from the donation we’ll be making on your behalf to their project. I have already stated this many times in the past but I’ll write it again - the principal goal of the PinePhone as a project is to give Linux on mobile a chance to grow and prosper. Early on we recognized that donating to our partner-projects was a key component in helping Linux on mobile flourish. The team behind postmarketOS has just recently set up a financial back-end to their project. The donation we’ll be making - for those who don’t know - will come in the sum of USD $10 for each unit sold during this PinePhone campaign. You can learn more about our partner-project donation scheme by clicking here.

I am sure many are curious to find out more about the hardware and software that will accompany the postmarketOS edition of the PinePhone. More information will be available in the coming days, but in the meantime I strongly encourage you to head over to postmarketOS announcement on their blog, which offers a detailed look at the software set to ship with this edition of the phone. As for the hardware, we will be making an announcement closer to date; presently we are working on the assumption that the PCB to ship with this edition will still be version 1.2. We may, however, decide to make some further tweaks to this PCB design. We will, of course, document and inform you of any changes to PCB 1.2 there may be in the future. Lastly, as you have surely already spotted, the postmarketOS edition of the PinePhone will feature the project’s branding on the phone’s caseback. Subjectively, I must say I love the render of the caseback and think it will turn out looking fantastic.

PinePhone running Ubuntu Touch with GPS and CRUST enabled

In other PinePhone news, we’re seeing a lot of progress across all software distributions. So much in fact, it would be impossible for me to cover it all. The one thing that the various PinePhone projects are working towards collectively, however, is implementing CRUST advanced power management in such a way that modem events, e.g. as phone calls and SMS messages, would wake the phone up from the deep sleep state. Just recently, Marius from UBports has managed to achieve just this in Ubuntu Touch. Perhaps most importantly, his implementation allows both Community Edition and Braveheart PinePhones to wake up from deep sleep. This is something others have speculated may prove very difficult on Braveheart phones due to GPIO assignment, so I figured it is important to underline - once again - that if you have a Braveheart phone, you shouldn’t feel like you’re missing out on upcoming software features. CRUST on the PinePhone, at least in its current state when coupled with an active LTE modem connection, allows for approximately 14 hours stand-by time. For most people, this will be just enough to get you through a work-day. This number will eventually be extended by another 10 hours as developers tweak the modem to enter a lower power mode.

I know that developers from other projects are already looking into how they can implement this solution in their distributions, but for now you can try it out on Ubuntu Touch by switching over to the Developer channel under system settings. I have started a thread on the forum with instructions on how to enable some of the more experimental features on Ubuntu Touch. In the coming weeks you can see this feature, as well as many others, to be incorporated into what was meant to be the day-one OTA update. As is customary in software development, the day-one OTA has been delayed by a few weeks, due to bugs which need to be worked about before a new stable build is deployed. If you’re not one to tinker or keen on experimenting with work-in-progress features, then stay on the Stable Ubuntu Touch branch and wait for the update to drop.

pogo pins breakout board for the PinePhone via SMR404 GitHub

Lastly, I’d like to showcase a community hardware initiative I found quite ingenious, namely a breakout board for the PinePhone’s pogo pins. The board makes it easy to access I2C pins and to interface with the protocol in a convenient manner. I hope and trust that someone will create a caseback for the PinePhone which could also house this breakout board. The STL for this project is available on SMR404’s GitHub, and I’d like to encourage others interested in hacking and tinkering with the PinePhone to actively contribute.

PineTime

It feels to me that the PineTime, as a project, has greatly matured in the past couple of months and is now entering a new stage. As I have mentioned on many occasions in the past already, I am not the best person to bring you coverage of the PineTime seeing as I do not fully understand the complexities of its software and development process. To this end, I’ve asked Lup Yuen Lee to post PineTime development updates on this blog on a need-be basis, and I am happy to report that he agreed to do so. I’d also like to point you to his Medium blog, which is a treasure trove of PineTime articles. I am more than certain that having Lup Yuen cover the PineTime from now on is for the better, and I cannot wait for his first post on PINE64’s blog.

The Riddle

Before we start, consider the following just a bit of fun. Let me give you the border context first however; I have been tasked with teasing an upcoming device due to be announced next month. I have been thinking for some time how to make this a fun community exercise and came up with a rhyming riddle for you to solve. The first person to solve this riddle will be rewarded with the mystery device. Just to make it clear - even if you solve the riddle correctly, I will not acknowledge the answer until July 15th when the official announcement will be made. You get bonus points (which translate to beer if I meet you at a convention) if you correctly identify clues embedded in the poem. Lastly, I have not written a word of poetry since highschool, so please spare my fragile ego. And yes, I’m aware it breaks at least one convention of writing Quintets.

Pinecil

With the Pinecil we take a risk

Spelling the latter with the letter c

Breaking with current conventions

And having the device run hot

As hot as it will ever be

This may be too perplexing

So for the sake of simplicity

What does 82 and 26 have in common

As defined by a man

Born North-East of Caspian Sea?

ROCKPro64 Cluster Move June 5-10

Fri, 05 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The process of moving our end-user services to the ROCKPro64 cluster will be taking place in the coming days (5-10 June). I am not going to pretend like this is the best time for the move to be taking place, since it is not. Many users are relying on our infrastructure for information and community support, particular now that people are receiving their devices and many more are waiting for their units to ship. But things are what they are, and we have a strict deadline we need to adhere to.

In practice, this means that at different times during this move key parts of the infrastructure will be down. This includes: the forum, the Wiki, the chats bridge and IRC, portions of the support system, PINE Installer mirrors as well as this website. It is not possible for me to say with certainty when exactly each of these community-facing services will be moved nor how long it will be down for. Obviously we’ll aim to complete the process as quickly and painlessly as possible but unpredictable things can, and likely will, happen.

I’ll do my best to give you a heads-up when portions of the system are scheduled to go down for maintenance on Twitter and Mastodon. I’ll also issue notices in the news section of the forums.

Lastly, I’d like to note that the PINE store and ticket filing system, as well as our info and support emails will remain operational though the entire server move.

Thank you in advance for your patience.

[edit June 11, 2020] All key community based infrastructure has now been moved to the cluster. Moreover, the move went went surprisingly well and without any major hiccup.

In the coming weeks and months we’ll be adding more services to the cluster. I have already spoken to FireTwoOneNine about writing a short blog post about the cluster, its present utilization and future applications in the project.

Lastly, I’d like to thank all those who offered advise and were directly involved in this project.

Welcome New Community Members!

Thu, 28 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

With thousands of Pinebook Pro laptops and PinePhone smartphones shipping in the next days and weeks, I felt that a short introductory blog post aimed at newcomers was in order. To this end, the primary purpose of this entry is to give you an overview of all the resources at your disposal.

Shipping Information and Updates

You can follow the shipping progress of both devices in a dedicated PINE64 forum thread.

I will update the thread on a need-be basis as new information becomes available. Support and Info teams receive the same status updates that I post on the forum, so there is no need to email them for general shipping queries.

If your device ships using DHL Express, then you’ll most likely be notified of shipment via SMS and/or email immediately as your order gets scanned into the DHL database. You will also receive a shipping confirmation email from us in days following the DHL shipping notification.

If your PinePhone ships via Asendia then you’ll receive your tracking number directly from us. Due to the high volume of shipments, it may take a couple of days before the dispatch team emails you your shipping number. Please be patient.

The Pinebook Pro With Manjaro KDE Plasma

A quick PSA first**:** the factory left the WiFi privacy switch (as well as potentially also other privacy switches) turned ON during testing on some Pinebook Pro laptops, so you may have to disable the switch to re-enable WiFi**.** We apologize for the inconvenience this may cause. The Pinebook Pro ships with Manjaro which features the KDE Plasma desktop. Manjaro is a phenomenal Linux distribution with an equally great and thriving community. The developers are our friends and colleagues, and they can be reached on their and our forums as well as in our chats.

To learn more about the Manjaro build which ships with your Pinebook Pro please see the following:

For more general information about Manjaro Linux distribution please see:

Manjaro is just one of many options at your disposal. The Pinebook Pro is able to run a vast number of other Linux and BSD operating systems, which can be booted from a SD card or installed to internal flash storage instead of Manjaro. For instance, you can boot Recalbox from SD (or USB) for recreation and retro gaming while keeping your full operating system on the Pinebook Pro’s internal flash storage.

You can find an up-to-date list of available operating systems on PINE64 Docs.

The Pinebook Pro sub-section of the PINE64 Docs also contains a wide variety of information concerning the laptop’s hardware, including:

The greatest resource we have to offer, however, is our community. There are literally thousands of community members willing to help you out with getting started at any given time. Regardless of if you’re just interested in asking a quick question or wish to engage in testing and development on a daily basis, there are numerous ways to get in touch.

Here are your options:

The PinePhone UBports CE

This Community Edition of the PinePhone ships with Ubuntu Touch, a popular Linux community maintained smartphone operating system. While still a work in progress, Ubuntu Touch is one of the fastest progressing operating systems on our platform. We’re very good friends with the developers, and you can direct your questions to them both on their and our forums and chats (listed further down).

To learn more about the UBports Foundation and its history:

For general news and to follow ongoing development:

Although this Community Edition ships with Ubuntu Touch, you can use many different mobile OSes on your device. Most if not all well established Linux-based systems are represented on the PinePhone so there are plenty of options to choose from. You can give any - or all - of them a risk-free spin by booting from a SD card.

You can find an up-to-date list of operating systems on PINE64 Wiki

The PinePhone sub-section of the Wiki is a valuable community maintained information hub which, amongst others, includes:

The most important resource at your disposal, however, is the PinePhone community. We have fostered a sizable social platform that spans across multiple mobile Linux projects and is composed of developers, enthusiasts and end-users. Everyone is welcome to join in, be it to ask a quick support question or to actively engage with the project.

Here are the community platforms:

- PinePhone PINE64 subforum

Support and Queries

All software support queries should be asked on the forums or in the chats listed above. Usually, hardware related problems and questions are also handled quickest by the community.

There are, of course, instances where the community will be unable to provide support; for shipping related queries please email: info@pine64.org. For hardware support, please file a support ticket at https://support.pine64.org.

Lastly, I encourage you to subscribe to this blog to keep up-to-date on everything PINE64. Every 15th day of each month I publish a community update detailing what we have been up to in the past ~30 days and what we have in store for the coming weeks and months. I usually also take a look at the development status of the various devices and throw out ideas for you to comment on.

Once again - Welcome into the community! I hope you found this post useful.

May Update: PineTab pre-orders, PinePhone Qi charging & more!

Fri, 15 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

With the PinePhone and Pinebook Pro production well under way and shipping in just a few days time, we’ll now be turning our attention to the other projects we have in the pipeline. There is a fair bit of material to cover this month - the main piece of news, however, is that we’ll be taking pre-orders for the PineTab at the end of this month!

This may be the longest blog entry in some time, so let’s get to it.

TL;DR of this month’s community update:

Moving to PINE64 cluster will be completed by this time next month; expect community services outages
Shipping Pinebook Pros and PinePhones this month; don’t spam support/ info emails please
We’ll be accepting payments in cryptocurrencies soon
PineTab pre-orders start this month and ships with UBports’ Ubuntu Touch; please subscribe to blog for info when pre-orders go live
PineTab adapters for individual and industry users; LTE, SSD, LoRa and RTL-SDR available soon
PinePhone Ubuntu Touch OTA and factory image - a quick chat about the software
PinePhone multi-OS bootloader is coming; many OSes showing signs of maturing
Wireless charging coming to the PinePhone via add-on / using pogo pins
A large (5000mAh) battery case for the PinePhone is being explored
You will be able to support smaller PinePhone projects soon by buying their project branded case-backs
Pinebook Pro - one week shipping delay explained
Pinebook Pro you can now watch Netflix on Manjaro; many OS releases become available including official Debian support!
Pinebook Pro USB-C dock details locked in; spare parts are now in the PINE Store
Pinebook (original) gets a facelift; we’re committed to the $99 price-tag
PineTime can now sync on Sailfish OS; app will be ported to Ubuntu Touch

Housekeeping

Moving community services over to the PINE64 cluster has hit a couple of roadblocks. As a result the process has been much slower than originally anticipated. While our IRC has already been moved to the cluster (thank you fire219 and Gamiee!) all the heavy lifting is still ahead of us. The good news is that we’ve now ironed out many of the core issues and expect to have everything moved in a little under a month from now. Since this will be a big undertaking, you should expect disruptions to various community services as the process begins. I’ll make sure there is a sufficient heads-up for when the next part of the move takes place. Keep an eye out for updates in the news section on the forum.

One of the PINE64 Cluster nodes with a 1TB NVMe SSD mounted in the PCIe slot

The next topic on the housekeeping agenda concerns shipping of the current PinePhone and Pinebook Pro production batches. Both devices are currently being assembled and should be ready for shipping in a matter of days. We are currently expecting Pinebook Pros with Manjaro to start shipping after May 22 and UBports CE PinePhones after May 26. However, with the Hong Kong border opening first on 7 June (at the very earliest) we had to pull off some magic to make shipping happen in the first place. This means there is a completely different logistics process in place for current shipments; on a purely human level, this will be a stressful time for the logistics and shipping teams, and therefore it would be greatly appreciated if you’d turn to us in the chat, forums or social media for updates rather than bombard info or support emails requesting updates. Thanks!

PinePhone UBports CE being assembled

In other news, we recently ran a poll on Mastodon and Twitter asking whether you’d be interested in using cryptocurrency for PINE Store payments. On the whole, approximately a quarter of all respondents expressed interest in using such payment options. We’re now happy to announce that we’ll be accepting cryptocurrency payments (BTC, BCH, ETH and XRP) in the very near future. The payment infrastructure is currently being set up, and should be available as an option at checkout starting next month.

[edit] We no longer intend to support cryptocurrency payments at this time.

Lastly, a quick word about our Wiki. If someone would find the time for tidying and adding information to the relevant sections then I’d be very thankful (as I do not currently have time for that). More specifically, the ROCK64, PINE A64 and SOPine sections need a fair bit of editing and their OS release lists need to be cleared of ancient software and new OS’ should be added. Apart from this, I’d also appreciate it if someone would review the release sections for the Pinebook Pro and ROCKPro64 - many new OS options are still missing. Anyone can do the above using their forum login and password. Thanks in advance!

PineTab pre-orders

With the PinePhone UBports Community Edition and Manjaro Pinebook Pro batches now shipping, we turn our attention to the PineTab. If you follow this blog regularly, then you already know that the tablet has been stuck in a production limbo since summer last year. The decision to postpone PineTab production was made with the purpose to prioritize assembly and shipment of Pinebook Pro and PinePhone batches - as these are PINE64 flagship devices. In light of the global events, which caused subsequent logistics turmoil, production was pushed back nearly 9 months. With the COVID19 pandemic subsiding in China, and factory lines reopening for business, we’re now happy to announce that we’ll be taking orders for the PineTab later this month.

Although we’re skipping any formal naming of this PineTab batch, I need to underline that this is a limited-quantity pilot-production run. In other words, these PineTabs are similar in nature to Braveheart PinePhones - they are aimed at early adopters who understand the implications of purchasing an early production-run device. I have written a lot over the past 9 months about the PineTab, and about the gradual improvements we made to it and its keyboard while we waited for a suitable moment to start production. I suggest you go back and read the relevant posts for more details (https://www.pine64.org/tags/pinetab/).

PineTab With keyboard attached

Here is a quick run-down of the device’s specs; the PineTab has a 10” 720p IPS LCD panel and features the same quad-core A64 SoC and 2GB LPDDR3 RAM used in the PinePhone. It also features the same 2Mpx front-facing and 5Mpx rear cameras that the phone uses. It ships with 64GB eMMC flash storage, and capacity can be expanded using a SD card (which can also be bootable) or a SSD via an optional M.2 adapter. You also get a full-sized USB 2.0, a USB-OTG and digital video output. This is paired with a large 6000mAh battery that can be charged via Micro USB or the barrel plug. The tablet can be used in conjunction with a magnetically attached backlit keyboard that also doubles-up as a cover and stand.

Pricing Details:

The PineTab - $99.99
The magnetic backlit keyboard - $19.99

PineTab keyboard doubles-up as a cover case

Software-wise the PineTab is convergent with both PinePhone and Pinebook software releases. It will therefore, in time, run most mobile operating systems developed for our platform as well as popular desktop OS options. I am also certain that the number of choices will explode after the first batch gets into early adopters’ hands, and that we will see more desktop-oriented releases with touch input capabilities very soon. For this first batch however, we have decided to ship the PineTab with UBports’ Ubuntu Touch. The reason for this choice being that Ubuntu Touch works well for a traditional tablet use-case and, at the same time, converts into a more traditional desktop experience when the magnetic keyboard is attached. The transition is quite seamless and, frankly speaking, rather magical when you see it happen for the first time; check out the video Marius Gripsgard from UBports sent over showcasing this.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

UBports Ubuntu Touch runs so well on the PineTab - you need to watch this

We are also making an adapter board for the PineTab that will broaden its use-case application potential significantly. The adapter allows expansions to be mounted inside the PineTab chassis. Each module can be easily installed and swapped out by the end-user - all it takes is removing the tablet’s back cover and undoing a single screw. To make it clear, you can only add one type of additional functionality to the PineTab at a time. That said, multiple expansions can be installed onto the adapter board simultaneously - for instance, a SSD and LTE module can be simultaneously mounted, but only one or the other can be used at a time.

Here are the expansion options we have in store for the PineTab:

M.2 SATA SSD add-on
M.2 LTE (and GPS) add-on
LoRa module add-on
RTL-SDR module add-on

The PineTab expansion adapter board

We hope that this selection of expansion modules will make the PineTab not only interesting to private end-users but also commercial and industrial customers. Especially when paired with LTE or LoRa functionality, I can easily imagine the PineTab being used as a point-of-sales terminal or an in-field device. With its large capacity battery, and thanks to all the optimizations done for the PinePhone, the PineTab can easily last a full work day. You can expect the SSD and LTE adapter functionality to already work on the PineTab, granted you use the same LTE modem already supported by PinePhone software. Implementations of the LoRa and RTL-SDR modules into existing OSes will, as always, depend on developers from the different partner-projects. Pairing all this functionality with an accessible asking price, we cannot wait to see how end-users will employ this multifunctional device.

More information about the PineTab will be coming very soon, so please subscribe to this blog so you’ll be alerted when pre-orders go live later this month.

PineTab with LTE installed in the adapter

PinePhone

Let me begin by acknowledging the amazing work that the UBports team poured into delivering a great OS image to the factory. They really put a lot of effort into shipping a polished build. The most important feature of the OS image is the inclusion of OTA update capability. The PinePhone now officially supports OTA updates on Ubuntu Touch, which means that users will be able to update their devices without ever having to reflash the OS. All you’ll ever have to do is navigate to settings menu -> update and fetch the newest build. Moreover, if you decide to connect the PinePhone to WiFi on initial boot-up, then you’ll be prompted to update your Ubuntu Touch installation once you complete the setup wizard.

I’ll go into more details about Ubuntu Touch on the PinePhone closer to delivery date and in a separate post, or better yet I may ask a UBports developer to write the post; what I will say at this time is, devs expect the day-one update to include most if not all key features bar the camera functionality (which will take a little longer to implement properly). I have a strong sense that many of you will be very impressed with the quality and performance of this build. For those of you who have Braveheart PinePhones - you can download the newest Ubuntu Touch image for the PinePhone here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MXOgb-U2jI

Martijn Braam from postmarketOS showcases UBports CE edition factory image

Since we’re already on the subject of software, I’d also like to give a huge shout-out to Martijn Braam from postmarketOS, who has put together the factory test OS image. For those who do not know, the factory test image runs a custom build of postmarket OS with the newest Linux kernel. It is now a feature complete and comprehensive test suite, which includes all radio connectivity, all sensors and inputs as well as both cameras. In other words, it tests all aspects of the device before it flashes the OS internal flash memory. If you want to check it out, and I know many of you Linux geeks love this sort of stuff, then here is the link.

In other notable software news, Danct12 shared a photo of a multi-boot menu on the PinePhone. While this isn’t the first solution of this kind shown-off on the PinePhone, this one comes from the devs behind Jumpdrive, and therefore I find it likely this project will be brought to fruition and well maintained. The multi-boot implementation is said to also support both eMMC and SD. Multi-booting is a piece of functionality that many users have been asking for some time, and I expect that once DanctNIX folks make this available it will be universally used by most PinePhone owners. We may even choose to install it on the factory floor in the future for general (non-CE) PinePhones. Let me know what you think in the comment section.

PinePhone multi-OS bootloader via Danct12

We have also seen a lot of progress, including significant performance improvements, on a number of OSes. It would take me too long to list every single improvement made across all the available builds, so instead I’ll focus on some of the highlights: Sailfish OS and Nemo Mobile can now make phone calls and feature a working web-browser (and run remarkably well!); postmarketOS’ makes it now possible to boot X86 PCs (and theoretically also the Pinebook Pro) from a virtual drive on the PinePhone; a-wai, the developer behind the popular Debian+Phosh build, has christened the project Mobian - the recent Mobian build implements crust deep-sleep allowing the PinePhone to run for upwards of 12 hours with radio (WiFi and LTE) connectivity enabled; lastly, Jolla is asking you to let them know if you’d like official SailfishOS support for our platform - I gently suggest you do so if you’re remotely interested in running Sailfish OS on your PinePhone.

In PinePhone hardware news, we’re happy to announce that Qi wireless charging is coming to the PinePhone in the very near future. We’re currently working out the exact details of the charging coil implementation and making a series of related decisions, such as for instance whether we should bundle a charging plate with the add-on. If you have a suggestion then make sure to leave a comment in the section below. What is certain, however, is that this will be a universal Qi wireless charging implementation utilizing the PinePhone’s pogo pins. This also means that if you already have a Qi charging surface or station for your current phone then this implementation will, in all likelihood, ‘just work’ with the PinePhone. I should have more details regarding this subject in next month’s community update; we are currently expecting the wireless charging add-on kit to be available in approximately July this year.

Here’s the Qi charging coil we’ll be using

We have also begun exploring creating a battery case for the PinePhone. Although we’re confident that the PinePhone will eventually be capable of providing end-users with a full workday battery life, the reality of it is that - especially under heavy usage scenarios - battery life on the PinePhone may never match flagship Android devices. We understand that some users may require to use their PinePhone for hours at a time (on-screen time), and one way to remedy this situation is by adding a larger battery to the phone. To be precise, we’re currently exploring creating a 5000mAh battery case that would more than double the devices on-screen time. Keeping in mind that we will, eventually, reach ~16-20 hours standby time on the PinePhone via software improvements - let me know in the comments if such a battery case is something you’d be interested in.

One other hardware-related topic I wish to briefly touch on concerns the optional PinePhone keyboard, which we announced a couple months ago. Long story short, presently isn’t the right time for us to take on this challenge - molding for the keyboard is very expensive and face-to-face communication with the vendor is currently impossible due to the closed borders. Investing effort and money into this endeavour at present time, when we cannot evaluate the hardware’s progress remotely, would be a risk that we’re not willing to take. So instead we’ll focus on other hardware and peripherals, and revisit the PinePhone keyboard concept when these uncertain times come to an end. It will happen, I assure you, but not now.

The last topic in this section I wish to discuss regards support for individual PinePhone developers and smaller projects. We have been thinking about this internally over the past couple of months and arrived at the conclusion that it will be very difficult for us to run full-blown campaigns, such as the current one for UBports, for smaller projects. Here is our solution: we will sell custom back-covers for smaller projects featuring their logos in the store. We will charge $15 for such a cover, out of which we will donate $10 to the project. The regular plain cover, already available in the store for $5, will obviously remain an option to those who just want a replacement back for their phone. We hope that this will help smaller projects have a chance to grow and thrive.

Pinebook Pro

The Pinebook Pro production-run featuring the Manjaro KDE Plasma build will soon be heading out to end-users. We had to delay shipping by a week due to an unforeseen complication at the factory. If you’re interested in the details of the delay then read on, if you’re not the skip to the next paragraph; the factory testing image, which is built on a custom Android image booted from a SD card, failed to load up using the u-boot included with the Manjaro OS image which has already been flashed to eMMC. Prior to shipping the build out to the factory a couple of weeks ago, the developers and I diligently tested booting OS images from SD and encountered no issues. We did not, however, account for booting any Android images (this is my fault - I should have thought about it). Regardless, all Pinebook Pros now need to be disassembled so that their eMMC disable switches can be flipped for testing purposes. As you can well imagine, with many thousand units required to undergo the tests, this will require time and hence the shipping delay.

Apart from this short delay in shipping, I have nothing but good news for all of you waiting for your Pinebook Pros to arrive. Thanks to the work of Spikerguy and Strit from the Manjaro ARM team you are now able to watch Netflix, Amazon and other Widevine DRM protected content on Manjaro KDE Plasma in Chromium. I am happy to report that playback of both Netflix and Amazon content is smooth even when viewed at full HD resolution, and the process of installing the custom 32bit Chromium build running in a docker container has now been streamlined for end-users. This is a welcome addition to the already incredibly polished Manjaro OS image, which I wrote at length about last month. I can now say with complete confidence that the Pinebook Pro has become a daily driver for light-to-moderate workloads.

Netflix played back on the Pinebook Pro - via Strit from Manjaro ARM Team

On the subject of software, the single most important release for the Pinebook Pro this month is Debian. Yes, that’s right, the Pinebook Pro - alongside other PINE64 devices - now has official Debian support. This is obviously great news, but I still strongly suggest opting to use the Debian Installer for the Pinebook Pro created by Daniel Thompson instead. The installer allows you to build and run a feature-complete mainline Linux Debian OS image in no time without hassle. In other software news, ayufan has now a series of mainline Linux pre-release OS images available for the Pinebook Pro and other PINE64 devices. The notable addition to the Pinebook Pros line-up of available software is Ubuntu 20.04 with GNOME desktop. Please keep in mind that, at the time of writing, these images are in a pre-release state, which means that some (or all!) aspects of the software may not be functional. Lastly, since I am asked at least twice a week about Kali Linux on the Pinebook Pro, I am happy to report that new OS images have just been released and are bootable from both eMMC and SD. From the little time I’ve spent using Kali on the Pinebook Pro, I am happy to report that it runs well and smoothly and - from what I can tell - all the tools you expect this distribution to offer work as intended.

Both ANSI and ISO keyboards are available in the Pinebook Pro spare parts section

In hardware news, we’ve now settled on our Pinebook Pro USB-C docking station I/O connectivity and the general form-factor of the dock. I’d like to thank all of you for offering your suggestions and feedback in the comment section regarding the dock - we’ve taken your suggestions onboard. The dock will be attached to - or slid under - the bottom of the Pinebook Pro chassis, with all I/O facing towards the back of the laptop. The docking station will offer 3x full size (A) USB 3.0 ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port, full-sized and micro SD card slots, as well as both a digital video and a VGA output. The dock will also be capable of delivering power to the Pinebook Pro via the USB-C connection and it itself will be powered using a USB-C PD cable. We are currently waiting for the final design of the dock, and I hope to be able to show you photos of it next month.

Lastly, spare parts for the Pinebook Pro are now also available in the PINE Store. Both ANSI and ISO keyboard segments are available for backorder as we await for these spare units to arrive to us from the Pinebook Pro factory.

Pinebook

As I already wrote in last month’s post, the original Pinebook 11.6” will soon be making a return to the PINE Store. I do not have a firm date just yet, but it should be soon after the upcoming pre-orders of the PineTab come to an end. We’ll also be making a couple of aesthetic changes to it - both to freshen is up as well as bring its looks in-line with our remaining products. The Pinebook will now come in a sleek all-black chassis and, similarly to its big brother, feature no branding on the case except a PINE64 logo on the SUPER key. We’ll also be tweaking the keyboard layout slightly to bring it closer in-line with the one used on the Pinebook Pro.

In terms of other changes, future Pinebooks will ship with an IPS 768p LCD panel and Manjaro with XFCE. We feel that the 1336x768 resolution is a better fit for both the small Pinebook screen as well as the A64 SoC. This is a good quality 768p IPS panel and, when paired with the excellent mainline Linux build of Manjaro XFCE, it makes the Pinebook feel snappy and responsive. There is, of course, also a financial aspect to this decision - namely, component pricing has gone up significantly in recent months, and the $99 price-tag (which is already subsidized by the PINE Store) would be impossible to maintain with a higher resolution panel.

The $100 price-tag is important for us to maintain because we have already begun on building up a portion of upcoming OG Pinebooks for charity. More information on the Pinebook and how we will start on our project to help close the digital divide coming next month - stay tuned.

PineTime

I’ve written about the PineTime software progress at length in the past two months, showcasing the smartwatch’s OSes and the amazing community driving them. In March I wrote that we’ll be looking to have the PineTime supported across both Linux mobile OS and Android; two months later, the PineTime is able to communicate with both mobile and desktop Linux as well as Android. Pretty amazing, isn’t it? Adam Pigg, one of the developers working on the Sailfish OS port for the PinePhone, worked together with JF and other PineTime developers to include core smartwatch functionality into an existing Sailfish OS application called Amazefish. The PineTime can now sync time as well as receive notifications from any Sailfish OS phone, which includes the PinePhone of course.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

PinePhone and PineTime chatting away! - via Adam Pigg

This Sailfish OS application will be ported to Ubuntu Touch and, in time, maybe also other Linux mobile operating systems. I suspect that while it may be possible to port this application to other Qt based systems - such as KDE Neon, Manjaro or even NEMO Mobile - we’ll need something else for systems using Phosh and GNOME as front-ends. In a recent tweet Lup Yuen Lee implied that he will be using gotk3 to build a GTK3 companion app for the PineTime. In the end, I am certain that a number of solutions will be available to sync the PineTime with your PinePhone or Android phone. As for the latter, I’ve now reached out to the Gadgetbridge developers and they’ll be supporting PineTime on the Android platform.

That will be all for this month’s update - comment away!

April Update: CE & FCC, Software Update and DIY Router?

Wed, 15 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I hope and trust this update finds everyone well. Production in China is picking up pace and we expect to start shipping the Pinebook Pro with Manjaro and PinePhone UBports Community edition next month. I am happy to report that, for the time being, everything is proceeding smoothly and we’re on track to ship devices in accordance with our original plans. Still, I encourage you to sign up to this blog to stay up-to-date on shipping information since anything can happen in the next 30 days.

Here is the TL:DR for this month’s community update:

ROCKPro64 cluster is up and running; IRC and Matrix will be moved over to it soon
We’re shipping surgical masks to those in need in your local community
PinePhone UBports edition gets CE, FCC and RED certifications
UBports Ubuntu Touch shaping up nicely; major development milestones reached
Other PinePhone OSes begin maturing; state of development + new phone OS
CRUST suspend on the PinePhone; 15 hours battery now possible
Schematics for PCBA v1.2 available after testing; v1.2 will be available in the store for BH users eventually
Pinebook Pro Manjaro KDE build is very polished; development report
Docking your Pinebook Pro using USB-C; using Manjaro mainline kernel
We’re making our own USB-C dock; better ergonomics than most OEM options
RK3399 OG Pinebook upgrade kit testing and challenges; we’ll likely use graphene for cooling
PineTab delayed until pandemic over; ready for fabrication and report of improvements + tablet keyboard is ready
The PineTime is now a smartwatch; BLE notifications support; we need a Linux + Android companion app
OpenWRT on ROCKPro64; what do you think about a ROCKPro64-based router?

Housekeeping

The PINE64 ROCKPro64 cluster has finally made it to its location at BBXNET and the process of setting it up began. For those who don’t know, in November last year we announced that we’ll be moving our services over to a custom 24-node ROCKPro64 cluster. At the time of writing the cluster is already up and running but not quite ready for having services moved to it just yet. The set-up process was interrupted by stricter social-distancing restrictions in the country where it is hosted, but we expect that in a week or two the process will resume.

Once we have access to the server farm again we’ll slowly start transferring services. IRC and Matrix chats will be the first to be moved over, followed by other community-centric services such as the Wiki and forums. I’ll have more for you on this subject as it happens; in the meantime I invite you to enjoy the pictures of the cluster below.

ROCKPRo64 PINE64 cluster

PCB detailed look

This month we also announced that we will be contributing to COVID-19 relief efforts by donating surgical masks to where they are needed. This has been met with a phenomenal response from the community resulting in tens of thousands masks shipped. We still have some mask cartons left, so if you know of an institution in need of gear to protect their staff or dependants then make sure to contact me. The masks will be delivered in your name to a dedicated address charge free if you have been actively engaged with our community. Details can be found here.

Mask boxes

Depiction of masks on the box

Lastly, I’d like to point your attention to a PSA I was recently compelled to release, in which I ask community members to stay away from the r/pinephone subreddit. Unlike all other community run subreddits concerning PINE64 equipment, we find this particular subreddit to be run in bad faith and potentially for malicious reasons. I’d like to take this opportunity to also shut down the notion that we’re ‘after’ this subreddit because it encourages those subscribed to sell and buy second-hand PinePhones. Your PinePhone is yours to do what as you please - keep it, sell it, throw it into a lake or make it into a dollhouse dining table, we have no say in it either way.

PinePhone

As I’m sure you’re all probably already aware, the UBports Community Edition (CE) PinePhone is now up for pre-order with an expected shipping window of late May. We’re very excited for this first CE of the PinePhone - our cooperation with the UBports developers has been a cornerstone of the project from the very start and we’re happy to call them our friends. I won’t reiterate everything that has already been said and written about this edition in the past two weeks, and instead refer you to the official announcement on this blog.

This CE ships with Ubuntu Touch preinstalled and addresses some of the issues identified in Braveheart PinePhones. It also comes packaged in a box with custom artwork from the UBports team (I’ll keep a secret - I don’t want to spoil the surprise for you), includes UBports Yumi mascot etched on the back of the phone and includes a multilingual user manual and a charging cable. I’d like to give a huge shout-out to all those who helped in translating the user manual to their mother tongue; it never ceases to amaze me how people step-up in this community to make things happen and help us out. You guys are awesome.

Perhaps most important of all, this PinePhone edition includes CE, RED and FCC certification. Getting this certification ‘done’ has been a major undertaking and I’d like to thank all those who have helped in its completion. For those who are unaware, CE, RED and FCC the PinePhone is in compliance with regulatory requirements in all our key markets.

Label with FCC and CE markings

Development on the build that will ship with the UBports CE is coming along at a very rapid pace. Just in the past few weeks we’ve seen implementation of the proximity sensor (which activates when you’re on a call), a wake-up trigger for the screen on an incoming call, notification LED, Bluetooth integration, the vibration motor as well as audio auto-routing. The OS will also run much smoother with a newer mesa version (not in current image at time of writing), making the device feel considerably snappier. In a video I published on a whim, I also showcased the camera working on Ubuntu Touch; it is my understanding that the implementation I showcased is quite hacky, so it may not be present in the build that ships.

Currently the development is focused on improving battery life, proper camera implementation and OTA updates. I’d also like to assure everyone that OSes, including this one, will be supported by all revisions of the PinePhone - this obviously also extends to BH PinePhones. Developers are now starting to incorporate more advanced battery preservation methods, notably CRUST (suspend), into their OS images. Upcoming Ubuntu Touch and KDE Neon images will ship with CRUST, extending the PinePhone’s battery life past 15 hours with the LTE modem and BT/WiFi module on. This feature is currently in early stages of testing but it is already working very well overall; I expect you’ll start seeing OS images with CRUST suspend available in a matter of days. This is obviously an important development, as an improved battery life brings the PinePhone closer to achieving daily driver status for those who want to use it as their only smartphone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ne6G0-hn9g

A quick and crude look at Ubuntu Touch on the PinePhone

In other software news, we’ve seen a lot of improvement to popular OS choices as well as introductions of new ones. In the past few days I have used KDE Neon, Postmarket OS and Debian with Phosh. I found all of these OSes performing exceptionally well nowadays, especially in terms of UI fluidity. Let me start with KDE; I was very impressed with both its new features as well as how it performs even when running from an SD card. The most recent KDE Neon image supports autororation, incoming and outgoing calls, auto-brightness and all key functionality of the modem. Installing most common applications, such as Telegram, was a breeze and I was pleased to see the phone responding snappily to the power button being pressed to lock the screen. Little things, such as volume keys working and a power-dialogue showing when the power button is held down, have also been implemented since I tried the image last. The latest image has a significantly improved battery life, a reduction in battery consumption of 30-35% from previous OS iterations, thanks to Sameul’s work on suspend. It is a real pleasure to see Plasma Mobile mature, and I hope and trust the PinePhone has contributed to the maturing process in no insignificant way.

The two popular OSes using Phosh as the front-end are Postmarket OS and Debian with Phosh; despite sharing a common front-end, the two systems differ somewhat in terms of bundled applications and some features and functions. Postmarket OS exposes - for a lack of a better word - more options in the settings menu and ships with a cutting-edge kernel (5.6). Debian, on the other hand, has a couple more features implemented - such as auto-brightness and the proximity sensor. Both have functional GPS, incoming/outgoing calls (with great sound quality), SMS support and well as LTE - all initiated on boot. Both also ship with Firefox alongside the default GNOME browser; Firefox works really well on both and scales nicely to the screen-size of the PinePhone. I am including a short video from an end-user, showcasing the most recent build of postmarket OS on the PinePhone.

In terms of New releases, NixOS is now available for the PinePhone for those who wish to try it out. I have not yet had the chance to run it but it is my understanding that all NixOS core functionality works well out-of-the-box on the PinePhone.

It’s all about choice

Before moving on to the next segment, I’d also like to mention that the revised schematics for the v1.2 PCBA in the UBports CE PinePhones will be available in the Wiki once the new boards pass all required tests later this month. I know a lot of Braveheart owners also ask about availability of the v1.2 PCBA revision in the store - the answer to this is ‘yes’, it will eventually be available in the spare-parts store section, but we really do not see a point in getting a newer PCBA as v1.1 will be supported forever.

Pinebook Pro

The Pinebook Pro production is underway and it presently looks like shipments will go out at the same time or prior to the UBports CE PinePhones. Obviously the most important fact about this upcoming production-run is the preinstalled OS. I wrote about this at length in last month’s community update, so rather than reiterating what I already wrote I’ll offer a closer look at the state of Manjaro on the Pinebook Pro.

The Manjaro team has been working on delivering the most polished and tailored build of KDE yet. I am now confident that this effort will result in a true daily-driver device for light-to-medium tasks. I cannot overstate the level of testing and polish that has gone into this build; it extends to custom backgrounds for the Pinebook Pro, optimised trackpad settings, additional popular applications such as KODI and the right amount of opacity for the panel and menu. On first boot you’ll also be asked to complete an OEM setup, selecting your username and password, your keyboard layout, locale and language preferences.

The Pinebook Pro Manjaro wallpaper is pretty stunning in my opinion

I often use the Pinebook Pro for writing on-the-go and then revert to using my stationary computer at home. With the pandemic lockdown now in place, I figured that I’d try docking the laptop and seeing how it will hold up as a desktop replacement. To my surprise, even at 1440p, it worked extremely well. Apart from the obvious benefits of having a device that is mobile on the one hand and can perform the task of a low-load workstation when docked on the other, it’s worth pointing out that the Pinebook Pro can be powered from a 15W power supply - while my stationary PC requires a 650W power supply. So, for light tasks, I’ll keep using my Pinebook Pro from now on, as it’s better for the energy bill and the environment.

Pinebook Pro docked

We are currently in the process of making a custom USB-C dock for the Pinebook Pro, which will include all of the key features we expect everyone wants while delivering better ergonomics than most existing third-party docks lack. In short, after testing a number of common OEM USB-C docks, we arrived at the conclusion that we really don’t like how they handle cable management. Our dock will have all inputs and outputs stacked on one leading edge, so that you can have it sit nicely on your desk with the cables facing in one direction. As for functionality, you can expect power-in, HDMI out, USB 3.0 as well as a Gigabit Ethernet connection. These specs are not final, so if there is something you’d very much like to see added then make sure to let me know in the comments section.

Pinebook Pro-ish

Lastly, work on the upgrade RK3399 kits for the original Pinebook is underway. We already did a fair bit of testing to determine the best way to cool the SOC in the plastic chassis. Our initial ideas to cool the RK3399 using a thin sheet of copper fell through, as the SOC ran hot and throttled quickly under moderate load. We’ve now moved onto testing using a graphene cooling system, which we believe will deliver much better thermal dissipation performance. One issue I’ve encountered insofar is with getting the keyboard firmware to play nice with the Pinebook Pro board - as a result, I expect this is likely something developers will have to get their hands on prior to end-users.

PineTab

I wish I had some good news for you regarding the PineTab, but we’ve made the decision not to ship the device during the pandemic. With the two major devices - the PinePhone and Pinebook Pro - already proving difficult to arrange shipments for at this point in time, taking on additional burden is something we consider unwise. At the same time I’d like to assure you that the tablet is very much still in the works and something we sell this year, hopefully as soon as COVID-19 loosens its hold on the globe.

Much of the PineTab PCBA and body-work are, in fact, already at a fabrication stage. Even the backlit keyboard has now been customised to our spec and is ready for manufacturing. Speaking of the keyboard, we’ve made a number of improvements to it and its attachment mechanism based on feedback from developers. The keyboard has a white multi-level backlight and is branded with a PINE64 logo on the SUPER key in a similar fashion to the Pinebook Pro. The magnets that hold the keyboard attached to the PineTab have been considerably beefed up, so you can even lift the tablet up with the keyboard attached without it falling off (not that I advise or recommend doing so).

New and improved PineTab keyboard - look how many magnets!

We’ll treat this delay as an opportunity to further review existing OS images for the PineTab to determine which of the existing options would best suit an early-adopters edition. Earlier this year at FOSDEM I saw Ubuntu Touch running on the PineTab and I was very impressed at how well it performed. This was over 2 months ago and since then development has made significant strides in terms of both performance and overall functionality. Admittedly these advancements have been made on the phone, but I expect that all improvements are directly transferable to the tablet. There are, of course, other options including more traditional desktop OSes such as Manjaro to consider too. Regardless of what we decide on in the end, the delay - while unfortunate and unplanned for - can turn out to be good for the PineTab project, as we’ll be able to ship a better performing and more polished OS on it from the very start.

If you’re interested in the PineTab then I encourage you to subscribe to this blog. I’ll make sure to keep you updates as more information becomes available.

PineTime

Last month I reported on PineTime development in which I focused on JF’s incredible work. We currently feel that this firmware stands the best chance of becoming the first to ship with an end-user PineTime production-run later this year or early in 2021. Since last month’s update we saw another major milestone in PineTime development, namely BLE notification support. This effectively turns the PineTime from a ‘dumb’ watch capable of syncing with an Android or Linux phone, into an actual smartwatch capable of displaying notifications on your wrist.

However, for this functionality to actually work we need a companion app for the PinePhone and Android. I’ll be reaching out to relevant people whom I know of, asking if they’d be willing to work together with JF and other PineTime developers on porting an app to mobile operating systems. But consider this a ‘call for development’ - perhaps you’re interested in taking on the challenge? If yes, please reach out to me or JF and have a chat about what you’ve got in mind.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

JF showcases early work on notifications on the PineTime

ROCKPro64

I rarely focus on SBCs in my community updates because, well, I assume that most people who pick up a SBC know more-or-less exactly what the capabilities of a particular board are and what they want to use it for. Moreover, unlike the PinePhone, PineTime or Pinebook Pro, which are ultimately built to serve a particular purpose, SBCs are development platforms and deployed in a wide array of projects and scenarios. Covering all applications of a SBC, however interesting that may be, lies outside of the scope of community updates on the blog; that said, if someone wants to run a dedicated SBC segment on the blog then I’d be happy to accomodate this, as I think it’s a great idea. You know where to find me.

One recent project sparked my personal interest however, so I want to report on it here. Tobias (Manawyrm) from Manjaro managed to build OpenWRT for the ROCKPro64 and have it play nice with a PCIe GbE expansion board. The ROCKPro64 could even be used with a 10GbE card thanks to the PCIe connection. Tobias has already issued a pull request for his work on the ROCKPro64, and when accepted I can see us exploring this concept further. I have already voiced my interest in making a router in the past, and with reports of the ROCKPro64 performing well in this role, I will be asking TL to brainstorm this notion further. I am thinking of a special router-oriented enclosure and a 4xGbE expansion board, as well as u.fl cutouts in the case to mount high gain antennas for the AC module. What do you think, should we explore this further? Would you be interested in building your own ROCKPro64-based router? Let me know in the comments.

Photo via Tobia’s Twitter

PinePhone UBports Community Edition Pre-Orders Now Open

Thu, 02 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

PinePhone UBports Community Edition mock-up; final product may differ in appearance.

I am proud to announce that the PinePhone UBports Community Edition is now available for pre-order with an estimated shipping date of late-May, 2020. Community editions are meant to bring exposure to partner-projects operating systems and communities, as well as help finance ongoing development.

UBports were some of the very first to embrace our initiative and to offer support for the PinePhone. Together with their friends and colleagues from other projects, UBports developers have now become an integral part of PINE64, actively shaping our goals and aspirations. It is therefore fitting that UBports Foundation will be the first partner in our Community Edition scheme, in which we will ship a customized PinePhone with UBports’ operating system and donate all profit from sales to the foundation (more information on the scheme here).

The PinePhone UBports Community Edition ships with a customized case (etched with the project’s mascot - Yumi), a revised PCB (v1.2) featuring improvements based on feedback from Braveheart developers and testers, as well as CE and FCC certification.

To learn about the state of the software and to pre-order this community edition the PinePhone, please click the button below - you will be redirected to UBports blog.

UBPorts Blog Entry https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ne6G0-hn9g

March Update: Manjaro on Pinebook Pro & PinePhone Software

Sun, 15 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

COVID-19 recovery in China is underway and factory work is slowly returning back to normal. This is good news, and we hope to have a constant stream of updates for you in the coming weeks. That said, we’re taking it one step at a time, since factories are still at 20% of the normal manufacturing capacity and it’s hard to predict the recovery pace. So rather than offering you my guesstimates for particular device availability, we will make announcements once all stages of production are secured for each device. Frankly speaking, this also means that announcements will likely drop suddenly; so If you haven’t done so yet, this is probably the time to subscribe to this blog and be notified when it happens.

The big news of this community update is that Pinebook Pros are about to re-enter production and will be shipping with Manjaro KDE as the default operating system! Pre-orders for the new production run starts on Wednesday (March 18th) and shipping is planned for early May.

TL;DR for this month

Moving PINE64 services to the PINE64 cluster
Spare parts for the PinePhone and Pinebook Pro
OG Pinebook entering production for charity; closing the digital gap
PINE A64-LTS will be produced until 2025
Pinebook Pro pre-orders start March 18th; expected shipping date early May
Manjaro KDE is the new default OS for the Pinebook Pro!
mainline kernel 5.7 mainline Pinebook Pro support
Minor Pinebook Pro refinements and tweaks
PinePhone development is steaming ahead; new OSes and features
PinePhone soft and hard protective cases available soon
PineTime OSes start coming together; first glimpse at a fully fledged FOSS OS

Housekeeping

We’re getting ready to move PINE64 community services to our ROCKpro64 cluster. The IRC and Matrix are the first services on our list, which means disruptions to all chats are expected at some point this month. We obviously hope that the downtime will be minimal, but given the complexity of our communications setup - which spans across multiple chat protocols bridged together - we cannot rule out that things may be a bit iffy for a few days before kinks are ironed out. I’ll make sure to give everyone a few hours heads-up when we’ll commit to the move so as not to disrupt ongoing workflow in the chats without a notice. With IRC and Matrix successfully migrated over to the cluster, we’ll be looking at moving the forums and Wiki next. This, however, will likely first be happening mid-April.

The second piece of important housekeeping information concerns the availability of spare parts for the Pinebook Pro and the PinePhone. I recognize that this has been some time coming, but unexpected events - such as social unrests in Hong Kong and the COVID-19 outbreak - have made it hard for us to stick to initial production schedules. At any rate, spare parts for the PinePhone will be available in the PINE store within two weeks time, closely followed by parts for the Pinebook Pro later this month or in early April. Spare PINE64-branded batteries for the PinePhone will also be available but only in the USA. Further information about the parts and shipping options will be announced as items appear in the PINE Store.

We are also starting to look into resuming production of the original Pinebook. Last summer we announced that we will be contributing to closing the digital gap by producing subsidized Pinebooks and distributing them to groups of people in need of a simple, reliable and easily repairable laptop. These Pinebooks will be subsidized from sales of the soft silicone cases for the PinePhone (more on this later). In short, 10 PinePhone transparent silicone cases sold amounts to one subsidized Pinebook produced. Once production resumes and everything returns to normal at the factories I’ll be setting up a committee and installing some democratic process allowing us to collectively decide on who should receive these Pinebooks. I’ll have more information on this topic as we get closer to production date. Noteworthily, a sizable portion of the Pinebook production-run will also be available for purchase by end-users.

The last point on our housekeeping list is primarily aimed at our industry end-users; we’re happy to announce that the PINE A64-LTS production has been extended by 3 years. We recognize that the PINE A64-LTS is utilised in a wide variety of industrial and commercial applications, and that a sizable number of businesses rely on it to complete a job or deliver a service. We therefore commit to deliver the PINE A64-LTS until the year 2025 (N.B. the product page is yet to reflect this change). This date will, however, in all likelihood be extended further into the future if end-users decide to remain on the platform.

Pinebook Pro

As many of you know we have developed and fostered a truly special relationship with the Manjaro team over the course of past 3 years. Their OS images for our single board computers and the original Pinebook were and remain some of the best supported software options to date. It is therefore no surprise that Manjaro builds for the Pinebook Pro have also proven to be highly popular among our community members. Manjaro currently offers a KDE, XFCE and i3 variant of their OS image for the Pinebook Pro, each of which provides a highly tailored experience. These builds feature a cutting edge Linux kernel (5.6 at the time of writing), which supports all key Pinebook Pro functionality including USB-C charging, USB-C video out and are compatible with a number of USB-C docks. Out of the three, KDE version is arguably the most end-user friendly and polished, not in the least because Plasma makes use of the Panfrost open source GPU driver for desktop and application acceleration.

Original Pinebook showcased at Manjaro booth, Linux-Tage 2019

We’re excited and proud to announce that future Pinebook Pros will ship with Manjaro KDE as the default operating system. Pre-orders for the next production run of Pinebook Pros starts on March 18, 2020 with an estimated shipping date of early May, 2020 (once Hong Kong border opens to our shipping staff). The image that ships with the upcoming Pinebook Pro batch features an additional layer of polish, which extends to a custom set of wallpapers and tweaks to the default application list to include popular software. If you are a Manjaro enthusiast, then I probably don’t need to convince you any further, and if you haven’t gotten a chance to try Manjaro yet then I suspect you’ll really enjoy the out-of-the-box experience. Speaking of the out of the box experience, Manjaro ships with an OEM setup / installer that allows you to set your username and password as well as choose your keyboard layout and system locale on initial boot.

ANSI (left) and ISO (right) Pinebook Pros running Manjaro with KDE Plasma

If Manjaro isn’t your OS of choice, then you’re of course welcome to try any of the many options available for the Pinebook Pro. Nearly all available OSes can be booted from a SD card and, once you find what you’re looking for, the chosen distribution or *BSC can be installed to eMMC flash memory. The list of available software is continually growing with new, novel and interesting releases becoming available weekly. Two notable releases from the past couple of weeks include Recalbox (pre-release) by the one and only MrFixIt, as well as postmarketOS and Slackware. So if you’re keen on trying something different (and yet familiar - since posmarketOS is built on Alpine Linux), or experience Slack nostalgia, then here’s your chance. I am also sure that retrogaming enthusiasts will be happy to see a dedicated Recalbox image for the Pinebook Pro; the Pinebook Pro is able to run Dreamcast and PSP games at upscaled resolutions at full speed, making it a great on-the-go gaming system. One of the cool features of Recalbox is that if you boot with either an USB-C-to-HDMI dongle or a USB-C dock connected, then the output will automatically switch to the external monitor.

Recalbox on the Pinebook Pro via Vercas

I almost forgot to mention that there is now also a dedicated Kali Linux OS image (which happens to be something many of you have been asking about) so you no longer have to rely on the build script to generate your own image - all you need to do is DD the provided Kali image to a SD card and try it out for yourself.

Kali Linux on the Pinebook Pro

The OS choice for the Pinebook Pro will expand even further in the coming months since - thanks to efforts by Tobias from Manjaro and other developers - the RK3399, and many of the core Pinebook Pro features, will be included in the mainline kernel 5.7. This means that you’ll be able to download any generic ARM64 OS image provided by a distro and use it on the Pinebook Pro (!). I suspect that the generic builds will not be as feature complete or functional as those tailored for the Pinebook Pro (as well as ROCKPro64 and HardROCK64), but this is a very important step nonetheless as it significantly simplief OS porting to our platform.

The last bit I want to touch upon in this section concerns minor structural tweaks to the Pinebook Pro construction. I’ll write up a more complete list of these improvements this coming week and post them on the Wiki - here I’ll focus on the more significant changes: 1) stand-off height for pillars holding the keyboard and bottom of the chassis together has been improved; 2) kapton tape is used in places where electrical shorts can introduce interference to audio devices; 3) soft non-conductive standoffs are used around various parts inside the case preventing shorts and making it more sturdy; 4) screen bezels are now not only pressure-fitted but also held in place using adhesive tape - this prevents dust from entering the crevices between the LCD and the bezel; 5) the plastic formula was tweaked to make the plastic less brittle. In all likelihood, none of you would notice these changes unless explicitly told about them; I have a reason to believe so, since the ANSI batch already included most, if not all, of these changes.

PinePhone

Before I proceed to write about the current state of PinePhone software, I first want to write a few words about the PinePhone itself. Undoubtedly many of you are anxiously waiting to hear news concerning PinePhone production resuming following the novel coronavirus recovery. I want to assure you that the PinePhone is at the top of our out ‘to-do’ list, however there are yet a number of things we need to work out before the next production-run gets commissioned. In short, we’re working on it.

On a topic somewhat related to hardware, I’d also like to mention that both the hard (black) and soft (transparent) protective PinePhone cases should be available in the PINE Store within two weeks time. I have written about the cases in the past so I won’t repeat myself, but the one noteworthy piece of information that I wish to underline is that revenue from sales of soft cases goes to manufacturing the Pinebooks aimed at efforts to close the digital divide (please see Housekeeping section).

Transparent silicone case (left) and hard black case (right)

Software-wise things are moving quickly and starting to look good. As always, in a project that has so much depth and breadth as the PinePhone, it will be difficult for me to cover all aspects of development that have taken place in the past 30 days. Instead, I’ll focus on the key developments and some of the more interesting things that transpired recently. Let me start with what is undoubtedly most interesting to existing and prospective PinePhone owners, namely outgoing and incoming phone calls. The key development here, as I understand it, is that megi and smaeul - along with other developers - managed to get automatic audio-routing working in late February. This effectively means that the audio output can change dynamically when making or receiving phone calls. In other words, you can watch a video or listen to music with audio coming from the speaker and then make a phone call and have the audio automatically routed to the earpiece. This has now been implemented in most OSes.

As for phone call capability itself, from the OSes that I’ve seen and tested in the past 30 days, nearly all systems can receive and make phone calls. I have also noticed a quality improvement in audio quality on the receiving end in KDE Neon (after sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade) as well as in the newest Debian+Phosh image. I also know that various developers, from different projects, are currently attempting to enable the notification LED, vibration motor and to make the phone ring when the phone receives a call. These are obviously important features to make you notified of incoming calls as well as received SMSs or other messages. By the time I publish the next community update I expect some OSes will have these features either implemented or in the process of testing. Speaking of sensors, Marius from UBports and Bhushan, who’s working on KDE Neon, have demonstrated auto-rotation using PinePhone’s accelerometer on Ubuntu Touch and Plasma mobile respectively. Noteworthily, auto-rotation now also works on LuneOS, which remains a well performing and interesting alternative to more popular OS propositions. I expect to see the auto-rotate feature to also find its way into the next releases of the aforementioned OS images in the coming weeks.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Auto-rotate on Ubuntu Touch, originally posted by Marius

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Auto-rotate on KDE Neon, originally posted by Bhushan

A major development task currently concerns improving battery life in idle state. This is something which is something I already touched upon in last month’s community update. There are a number of different attempts at making the PinePhone last a day on battery, but perhaps the most impressive to date can be seen in the newest KDE Neon build. Running KDE Neon, with WiFi and the LTE modem turned on, the PinePhone can now last approx 10 hours on the battery alone. Now, I recognize that this may seem underwhelming compared to our Android or iPhone smartphones, but keep in mind that this device is nothing like your ordinary phone. Moreover, there are also many known areas that can be improved upon in this regard. I think that it’s fair to say that, given the length of time in development, a 10 hour stand-by time with connectivity enabled is very good improvement over the previous 4-6 hours.

Another topic I wish to touch upon is growing OS availability. Software options literally exploded in the past 30 days as Braveheart brought many new developers who began porting a variety of OSes, some of which have previously not been seen on a small form-factor device such as a phone. Among others, we’ve now seen an early port of Android 10 - running kernel 5.6 no less - as well as the much anticipated NixOS (much anticipated by me that is - not sure of its overall popularity). I have, sadly, not had any hand-on time with either of these systems, but from what I’ve gathered NixOS already works well, while Android 10 is mostly unusable at present time. As for the Arch Linux OS image, this one is clearly aimed at tinkerers and experienced enthusiasts; it comes with no desktop environment nor UI, and clearly invites you to build your own custom experience atop the bare Arch OS image. Last, but certainly not least, we’ve seen an impressive amount of work done on the PinePhone Fedora port. The port already runs great and has much, if not all, of the functionality that other OSes offer. This includes phone call functionality, SMS, LTE, GPU acceleration, etc., I’d like to give a shoutout to Peter Robinson from Red Hat, who actively helps and mentors the dedicated group of enthusiasts porting Fedora over to the PinePhone.

Fedora on PinePhone, picture via Tor.sh

Android 10 on PinePhone by Moe Icenowy

Lastly, across the board we’ve seen improvements in UI performance. For instance, the recently pushed Ubuntu Touch OS image runs much smoother than in the past and features a number of stability improvements. I also subjectively feel that Phosh and KDE front-ends have benefited significantly from recent development. That said, I have also experienced new bugs - such as stuttering in Angelfish on KDE Plasma - previously absent on the same OS images or front-ends. There is no denying that it’s all still very much a work in progress; with so much changing on a bi-weekly basis, testing new builds and providing structured feedback is important. So, if you happen to have a PinePhone Braveheart edition, I strongly suggest you visit the (well maintained) PinePhone software releases page on our Wiki and try out recent OS images.

PineTime

I usually pay the PineTime less attention in my updates than the other devices. This isn’t because I care less for it - quite to the contrary, I was the one who pitched the idea of making it in the first place - but rather because I have little to no knowledge regarding the software it is running. Besides, my posts simply could not measure up the publications by Lup Yuen Lee on the PineTime, which I encourage you all to read. Regardless, I do feel that the project is underexposed by us and that it deserves a bit more love. To give the project and the devs hard work a bit more spotlight we have now placed a large PineTime widget on the main page. I trust this will help in showing off the device and the work that has gone into it to prospectus users browsing our website.

And there truly is plenty to marvel at and appreciate. This month I want to take a look at the first piece of software that resembles a full FOSS OS for the PineTime created by JF, whose work I previously featured in community updates. Until recently all PineTime software developed by the community, while highly impressive, amounted to the functionality of a “dumb” watch capable of syncing with a smartphone. JF’s current work offers a first glimpse at what may become the first full OS for the device built by the community. In the video posted earlier this month, we see JF flip though (smoothly I may add) the various functional demonstration elements of his PineTime front-end. Among the demonstration applications shown are an information widget, a timer of sorts and an analogue watch counting down seconds. There are also other demo applications registering user input - finger taps specifically - and other such functions. All this functionality is accessible via a pull down drawer which appears over the watchface.

JF’s OS on the PineTime - different demo apps shown

The hardware limitations of the PineTime also invite some interesting work-arounds and implementations. For instance, due to the slow refresh rate, JF implemented a scrolling transition when the screen needs to be fully refreshed. It provides a perfect illusion of a fast and smooth transition when the app drawer is pulled down by the user. The experience is very reminiscent of what you may see on much more complex smartwatches from big brands. The OS itself is written in C++ and uses FreeRTOS as well as LittleVGL - a free and open-source graphics library - to provide the UI graphical elements. If you are interested in the project then please check out JF’s github and, if you’re able, contribute to his work - I’m sure he’d appreciate input.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Demo apps in action, originally posted by JF

I’d also like to mention that this is only one out of many ongoing efforts to build a fully functional OS for the PineTime. Many other developers are actively working on their own front-ends and/or applications. If you are interested in the PineTime, and wish to learn more about it from someone more competent than me, then I suggest you take the plunge and join the PineTime chat available via Discord, IRC, Telegram and Matrix (all bridged together), accessible from Forums And Chats tab on this website. The community there is very welcoming and will gladly help you with getting started. In the spirit of community development, the PineTime dev kits have now been available to all those who are interested in it for some time, so anyone can have a go at testing and contributing to the project.

That will be all for this month. We have a lot more news coming in the next few weeks, so subscribe to the blog and stay tuned!

February Update: Post CNY and FOSDEM Status Report

Sat, 15 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Nemo Mobile and Ubuntu Touch on the PinePhone at FOSDEM 2020

A lot has happened in the past month. PinePhones have finally begun arriving in the hands of their owners, we had a great showing at FOSDEM, and new hardware was announced. If you haven’t yet read my post about our trip to FOSDEM and the new devices, then I encourage you to do so. Behind the scenes, much work is currently being poured into consolidating and evolving current projects as well as exploring new ones. There are some really exciting months ahead of us!

In the meantime, we have plenty to discuss.

Here is this month’s TL:DR

Want to write something for the blog? - contact me
Production is at a standstill; hard to estimate how things unfold
CNY shipping backlog of SBCs & PineTime; HardROCK64 & SOEdge release dates
Expect production / order delay for Pinebook Pro, PinePhone and PineTab
Pinebook Pro NVMe adapter fix; new adapter manufactured
Pinebook Pro OS choice is growing rapidly; custom keyboard firmware
Pinebook-to-pro upgrade kit delayed (again)
PinePhone software status - 4 key areas discussed
PinePhone FCC/CE certification & hardware changes for production units
PineTab is coming; factory under lockdown, no insight how far along production is

Write something for the blog

I’d like to quickly remind everyone that this blog is open to everyone to publish on. If you are working on something exciting and wish to share it with the community then get in touch with me - I’ll set up an account for you. As an enticement I’ll add that this blog gets a lot of traffic, so it is a great way for get exposure for whatever you’re working on. It also provides you with an opportunity to receive detailed feedback on your work or even get people to join your efforts.

Housekeeping Part 1: 2019-nCov Pandemic

There were a couple of things I initially wanted to discuss in this section, but the situation warrants me to focus on the most important topic. And so the main topic on the housekeeping agenda relates to the outbreak of the 2019-nCov Coronavirus and the impact it has on the Guangdong province as well as Hong Kong. For those who do not know, PINE64 devices are produced in the city of Shenzhen located in the Guangdong province, and all equipment with batteries - such as the Pinebook Pro or PinePhone - ships out from Hong Kong.

As some of you may already know from my post on the forums, earlier this month Guangdong issued a restrictive order prohibiting work from resuming until February 10th. While, in theory, companies are now allowed to resume business, in practice everything remains at a complete standstill. In other words, our operations and those of our partners as well as factories have not resumed as of today. For a variety of reasons, there is also a limit to how much work our staff can do at the moment.

Factories producing the PinePhone, PineTab and Pinebook Pro remain closed because they need to undergo a long and complicated procedure that will allow them to resume operation. However, due to the huge volume of such government sanctioned procedures required province-wide, it may yet some time before people can even enter the factory. It’s worth pointing out that this issue can also be felt up the entire supply chain - manufacturers of components are also affected by this, and shortages are expected.

Sadly, this isn’t the entire extent of the problem; as I’ve already mentioned, all devices which contain batteries ship from Hong Kong. Earlier this month Hong Kong closed many key crossings to the region from mainland China, including the one which we rely on, and now there is a 2-week long quarantine for anyone arriving from mainland China to Hong Kong. This means that our shipping staff can’t reach the Hong Kong warehouse.

So, then, what does all this mean in practice? It means that we cannot produce anything this month and, even if we could, there is no way for us to ship any devices with batteries. I will refrain from speculating as to when things will return to normal. Expect shipping dates to slip considerably. I have a suspicion that the extent of this disturbance will be felt across the entire electronics industry for the rest of the year.

I will keep you updated the best I can in the previously linked thread; the moment I know something I’ll make sure to create a new post and update the original entry.

Housekeeping Part 2: Chinese New Year Shipping Backlog

We’re currently catching up on the Chinese New Year shipping backlog. While we’re unable to produce more devices at this time, we can ship existing single board computers as well as the PineTime dev kit from mainland China. Despite the shipping team being severely crippled by current circumstances and the resulting lack of available staff, I expect parcels to keep on steadily going out throughout next week. As I understand it, the process of clearing out the backlog has already begun a few days ago and should be completed shortly. If you’ve ordered a PINE64 single board computer or PineTime dev kit after January 20th then your order should be en route shortly.

As for the production and availability of the HardROCK64 and SOEdge AI module announced at this year’s FOSDEM - we already accounted for the disruption caused by the pandemic. We also purposefully provided approximate availability dates as it is literally impossible to predict how the situation will unfold. Regardless, the tentative availability dates of April/May 2020 are unaltered at this time.

Pinebook Pro

There is plenty of good news, but let us start with the bad. The bad news is that we need to postpone the production of the RK3399 upgrade kit for the original Pinebook once again. Don’t worry, we’re not shelving it, we’re just prioritizing other things - such as the newly announced HardROCK64 and SOEdge - due to the limited manufacturing capacity (caused by the aforementioned pandemic in China). Having already postponed the release of the upgrade kit thrice now, I rather not promise something for a fourth time. Instead I’ll say: it’s in the works, and as soon as I know something with a high degree of certainty I’ll make sure to let you all know.

On to better news. We now have a solution to the original NVMe adapter problems, where the adapter with an NVMe SSD would not fit properly in the laptop chassis. The solution was surprisingly simple, but required us to manufacture a custom holder for the SSD. I apologize for not keeping you up-to-date on the status of this solution; I didn’t post anything on the subject because I had no insight into the process. If you have the original NVMe adapter for the Pinebook Pro, please send an email to info@pine64.org with the following in the subject field:

Subject: New PBP NVMe adapter holder [original order number]

We have now also created a new optional NVMe adapter that will ship with all future Pinebook Pro orders. The new adapter is a little longer, but has a lower profile, and is perfectly aligned with the mounting holes inside the Pinebook Pro chassis. I am told that it has been fitted with a variety of popular NVMe SSDs and no issues were encountered.

New NVMe PCIe adapter top / old NVMe PCIe adapter bottom

The other piece of good news is that the past 30 days have seen many OS releases. We now also have a choice to run Kali Linux, Gentoo, OpenSUSE, Fedora, NetBSD and postmarketOS (Alpine Linux) on the Pinebook Pro. Most of these OSes have been added to the Pinebook Pro Software Releases subsection on our Wiki. I highly suspect that the coming days will see yet more software releases for the Pinebook Pro, including other *BSD systems. This is obviously good and welcome news, since broad support for the Pinebook Pro means more people interested in the project. Personally, I have been running Manjaro with KDE desktop in the recent weeks and the experience has been nothing short of great. If you’re considering running Manjaro KDE edition, I suggest you enable OpenGL desktop acceleration via the Panfrost FOSS GPU driver, it makes the installation fly. This can be achieved using this script.

Growing Pinebook Pro OS List

Lastly, I’d like to give a huge shoutout to Jack Humbert for his work on the Pinebook Pro’s keyboard firmware. Jack made it possible to create your own custom keymaps for the keyboard, significantly enhancing the potential functionality of the laptop. Just as an example, one user has created and shared theirs ANSI Dvorak layout that supposedly can be used without any problems. It is always exciting to see community members embrace and improve upon implementations which we have given considerable thought to. If you have any questions regarding the process of creating your own custom keymap then I redirect you to the dedicated forum thread discussing the custom firmware implementation.

Before I move onto the next section let me quickly address the elephant in the room; many of you are asking when the next production-run of the Pinebook Pro will commence. We initially intended for new Pinebook Pros to be produced this month, with pre-orders opening now(ish). As I already explained in the housekeeping section, this will not happen. I can only offer you my guess at this point - and that is that the next pre-order window will open mid-March.

PinePhone

Many Brave Heart edition PinePhones, with the exception of those slated for Germany, have already reached their destination. So far the reception from end-users has been very positive, which admittedly makes me rather thrilled. I’d also like to thank those of you who post previews, reviews, quick-looks, etc. online; every single written or recorded piece of content that I’ve seen insofar has rightfully included a mention that the PinePhone is a work-in-progress. This is important since, as I see it, the most important aspect of the project currently is showcasing progress while accurately depicting the current state of the software options.

Speaking of PinePhone software options and development status, there is so much information to cover that it would require an entire separate post. Not to mention that I am not the most competent person to cover the subject of software development in the first place. So, instead, what I will do in this section is highlight some of the vital developments of the past couple of weeks.

I want to address 4 main topics: 1) battery life; 2) voice calls; 3) camera implementation; 4) performance. Let’s go down the list one-by-one. There are many things pertaining to battery life that are currently being ironed out. On the one hand, a fair bit of work on the AXP803 power management controller and kernel behaviour. I only understand the latter, so I’ll comment on that. Marius from UBports has started experimenting with having the kernel downclock the core frequency, drop the CPU voltage and turn off 3 cores when the phone’s display is off (in its idle state). This early experimentation has resulted in a stand-by time of approximately 12hrs, which is rather impressive for a first battery-preserving attempt. This will only get better with time, as it becomes paired with more advanced power management. Another developer, Megi, has also managed to dramatically lower the WiFi module’s power consumption, which can buy users as much as another hour of runtime during active use.

Picture showing battery drain over ~11 hrs on the PinePhone running Ubuntu Touch

Megi has also demoed voice calls and camera implementation in the past few weeks. While voice calls already work, they also require manual audio routing (for those interested, here are the details). Getting voice calls functional with the individual OSes is being worked on, of course, but there is no telling when the functionality will be available. It could be soon or in a few weeks or months. The story is very similar for both the front and back camera. We have seen a successful demo of the cameras being used from the userspace, but this functionality remains to be implemented into the existing OSes. Out of the two highly desirable features, it is my understanding that voice calls will be easier to implement within a short-to-medium amount of time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12bsEtUEWbg&t=1s

Phone call from Arch Linux on PinePhone ~ Megi

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-Vt8-npTjc

Camera Test application on the PinePhone ~ Megi

Last on the PinePhone software agenda is the subject of performance. To be precise, the end-user experience of using the phone - the responsiveness of the UI. This is one area where you can expect a lot of changes from one week to another. As an example, KDE Neon from early February suffered from poor performance, making it borderline unusable. Less than two weeks later, the newest KDE Neon OS image is one of the fastest out there (despite it being highly unstable). Similarly, Ubuntu Touch suffers from a significant amount of slow-down in the main UI. This is caused, funny enough, by the wallpaper; replace the wallpaper (for the one with puppies as an example) and watch the performance significantly improve. Such performance issues are very much expected at this point in time, but I expect that their root causes will be found and ironed out relatively soon.

Many users have asked why there is little to no dev dialogue in the #PinePhone chat. For those who don’t know, the #PinePhone channel is very active. There are ~2400 users in Discord, ~100 (concurrent) users in IRC, ~800 users in Telegram and ~500 users in Matrix. This makes for an environment where it’s very difficult to hold a frequently complex and technical conversation. Development-related chat is very much ongoing, but it’s mostly taking place elsewhere. This does not mean, however, that you can’t ask devs questions or engage with them - they are still in the main channel if you need them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xI6AUFkQJU0

postmarketOS with Phosh performing rather well in newest OS image ~ Alexmitter

The last bit of information related to the PinePhone I wish to discuss before proceeding to the next section concerns consumer-grade PinePhone changes and CE/ FCC certification. We expect to have the certifications in place later this month, which means that all future PinePhones will ship as certified devices. This is good news, since some places such as Germany require this type of certification on consumer products. As for changes to the hardware, there is a list of errata on the Wiki. To be clear, most of these issues are imperfect hardware implementations rather than major problems. We’ll work though as many of these errata for the final phone as possible while striving to maintain complete software compatibility with Braveheart phones.

Similarly to the Pinebook Pro, we initially intended to start the production of the phones this month. As I’ve already explained in previous sections, it is much more likely that production will first begin in March. On the positive side, we have some super exciting things in stock for the PinePhone which we will be sharing with you shortly; we trust that this will more than make up for the pandemic-related manufacturing delays.

PineTab

This section of the update will be rather short since not much has changed since last month. Production of the PineTab early adopter units started prior to Chinese New Year, but due to the factory currently being locked-down and staff unable to access it, we do not know how far along the production process got in January. If we can resume PineTab manufacturing next month alongside the PinePhone and Pinebook Pro, then pre-orders may go live in March. I’ll make sure to amend this post with an edit once we know the state of production.

The good news is that we have now internally narrowed down OS choice for this early batch to two OSes. We’re in talks with the projects in question to determine which of the two will be the most viable for the first PineTab batch. I expect that we should be announcing what we agreed on next month, so if you’re interested in the PineTab now is probably the right time to subscribe to this blog. At any rate, there are now two good options for us to choose from with sufficient software maturity that early adopters have something to start with when they receive their unit.

This wraps it up for this month’s community update. I hope to be back with better news next month. In the meantime, we have some important and exciting things coming in the next couple of weeks, so make sure to subscribe to the blog and stay tuned for the upcoming announcements!

FOSDEM 2020 and Hardware Announcements

Mon, 03 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

PINE64 get-together with community devs and partner-projects at FOSDEM 2020

Sorry for the delay in delivering FOSDEM news and announcements to you - I was too occupied with great company, splendid beer and shouting at hundreds of people across our stall table. It was awesome to see so many familiar faces, meet new ones and socialise with projects we usually don’t get an opportunity to talk with.

Some of you may have already seen pictures or videos of our stall at FOSDEM overflowing with people; I am happy to say that we were one of the most - if not the most - besieged stall at FOSDEM this year. There literally was a wall of people at the stall at all times, and if not for our community members and partner-project devs we’d probably not cope. This also had the effect of being as much our booth as that of Manjaro, UBports, Nemo mobile, KDE, postmarketOS, Aurora, Meamo Leste and others :)

Crowd at the PINE64 stall FOSDEM 2020

In the January community update we announced that if you are attending FOSDEM, and already had a PinePhone on order or with you, then we’d have a surprise piece of swag for you. As some of you already know, the swag in question was a choice of a hard or soft PinePhone case. Over the course of ~8 hours that we were at the stall we gave well over 100 cases. It was really exciting to see so many PinePhone early adopters at FOSDEM.

Soft (silicone) case left, hard case right

Apart from our cramp little corner of FOSDEM, you could also check out PINE64 devices at the KDE and OpenHAB stalls. There was also a talk by Merlijn Wajer and Bart Ribbers (youtube video linked) concerning Linux phones as well as a joint BOF with Purism (my thanks go out to Dalton and Bhushan for taking the lead on this), where a significant portion of the time was dedicated to the PinePhone in particular. In other words, there were many PINE64 accents all over FOSDEM, which made me realise how much we’ve grown in the past two years.

KDE stall FOSDEM 2020

However, to us, FOSDEM means getting together, talking about how our current projects are coming along, nagging Bhushan about the KDE Neon image, and meeting with all the amazing developers making all this happen. But it is also the time of the year when we announce new devices. This year we’ve decided to tackle announcements slightly differently. What we’re announcing now relates only to our plans for Q1 and Q2 of 2020 and not the entirety of this year. That is to say, we have more exciting things coming in the second half this year, but we’re holding off from announcing these things at this time.

Let me explain. We’ve learned a lot from last year’s experience with Pinebook Pro and PinePhone production delays, which effectively means we understood that it is better to tackle fewer things at a time. In Q1 and Q2 we are yet to review PinePhone and PineTime status, release the PineTab early adopter edition and make good on our promises to deliver the upgrade-kit for the original Pinebook. That is a lot of work left over from last year. So at this point we’re only announcing things we’re confident we can deliver by early May. Once we clear everything we currently have on our table, we’ll be announcing plans we’ve got for Q3 and Q4. This is the pace of announcements will likely follow in the future too.

With that out of the way, let us talk about what we’ve got coming soon.

The HardROCK64

HardROCK64 (top)

It has been a little while since we did a single board computer (SBC). For the past year I kept on telling people that whilst we have now a wide range of devices (that you guys are clearly both excited and happy about) we’re still going to make SBCs, since that is our bread and butter. Therefore I am super happy to announce the HardROCK64 - a small form-factor SBC with a lot of umph.

The board features:

The RK3399 hexa-core SOC found in the Pinebook Pro and on the ROCKPro64
2xUSB 3.0
2xUSB 2.0
WiFi AC and BT 5.0
Gigabit Ethernet
Full GPIO pins
SPI flash
eMMC socket
mSD card slot
Fan & RTC headers
Heatsink mount
CSI connector
DSI connector
IR receiver
5V barrel jack for power
Digital video out

The board will ship in 3 LPDDR4 RAM configurations (tentative $ pricing):

1GB ~ $35
2GB ~ $45
4GB ~ $55

Tentative release date: April 2020

HardROCK64 (bottom)

The board will run all ROCKPro64 OS images with little or no tweaks (we checked) and probably most Pinebook Pro OS with a ‘simple’ device tree tweak. In other words, if you don’t need all of the ROCKPro64’s functionality - e.g. PCIe or USB-C - then this may just be the board for you.

The board does run hot so a heatsink is pretty much mandatory. A couple different options will be sold by us to match your needs and expected the SOC load.

SOEdge AI Module

SOEdge in USB 3.0 Adapter

The other thing we’ve been known for in enthusiast, industry and custom embedded device circles are our SOPine compute modules. The SOEdge is a 3TOPS compute module that can be paired with the SOPine base board or USB 3.0 and PCIe adapters for development. It can connect to a SBC, such as the ROCKPro64 or a regular PC. We initially planned the release of the SOEdge module last year, but Pinebook Pro and PinePhone delays pushed it back to this year.

Features:

Rockchip RK1808 dual-core Cortex-A35 processor with a 3.0 TOPS Neural Processing Unit
2GB DDR4 PC-2133 RAM
16GB eMMC flash
PMIC – Rockchip RK809-2
204-pin SO-DIMM connector (same as the SOPine modules)

Tentative price: ~ $30

Tentative release date: ~ April/May 2020

SOEdge in PCIe Adapter

Clusterboard with 4 SOEdge and 3 SOPine modules

The SOEdge can be used in a variety of scenarios and is compatible with current and future SOPine boards, including the clusterboard which can host up-to 7 modules clustered via Gigabit Ethernet. I can imagine that mixing SOPine and SOEdge modules in the Clusterboard can yield results in various applications. I’ll leave it up to your imagination :)

CUBE IP Camera

It was a year ago, pretty much to the day (except then I was more diligent and released information on time), that we announced that we’re working on the CUBE FOSS IP camera. We then encountered issues with the SONY camera implementation, and with the big devices such as the Pinebook Pro and PinePhone in the works, the project got shelved until further notice.

So, here is the notice, we’re working on the CUBE again. I’ll have more news regarding the CUBE, including what necessary changes were made to the camera, in the February community update on February 15.

That’s it … for now. As I’ve already stated, these are the new devices that we will strive to get in the PINE Store by May. But there many other product ideas that we have in the pipeline, and you’ll be hearing about them once all the PinePhones, early adopter PineTabs, HardROCK64s and SOEdges start shipping. Hope you’ll agree this is a better approach for this year.

Thanks once again to everyone who made it out to see us at FOSDEM and, of course, FOSDEM organisers and volunteers.

Original CUBE IP camera prototype (image from 2019)

N.B. All pictures of devices depict product prototypes; final version of device may, and likely will, differ in appearance or / and functionality.

Setting the Record Straight: PinePhone Misconceptions

Fri, 24 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I take no pleasure in writing this blog post. In fact, even as I am writing these words I am internally torn on whether this is the right approach to addressing the problem on hand. Whether I’ve chosen the right approach remains to be seen, but regardless, I now feel it’s time to confront misconceptions about the PinePhone.

What’s the misconception?

The misconception concerns the openness of the PinePhone. On numerous occasions I’ve seen the PinePhone being refereed to as closed-source on one level or another. I don’t know the origin of this misconception nor do I understand the reason why it has become propagated throughout the internet. What I do know, however, is that it has been repeatedly quoted in online articles covering the PinePhone or other Linux devices for over a year now.

So let’s set the record straight: the PinePhone is not ‘full of closed-source firmware’ and, moreover, is one of the most open devices out there.

Here’s what’s open

Let’s start with the Allwinner A64 SoC, which is the brains of the PinePhone; it runs mainline Linux, uses mainline ATF and u-boot and there are open source drivers for all main SoC components. This openness extends to the Lima GPU driver introduced in kernel 5.2.

Linux 5.6 will contain drivers for all major components of the SoC. The parts which still need to be upstreamed to mainline are HDMI audio and msgbox - both drivers are in the works. For more information on mainlining efforts, please refer to the A64 column at https://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort#Status_Matrix

It’s worth mentioning that LPDDR3 initialization is done by u-boot SPL, which is also open source. There are no blobs in there either.

Needless to say, the PinePhone itself is an open platform for any OS to run on. The grand majority of the OSes developed for the PinePhone are, in and of themselves, completely open too.

So, where are the blobs?

The non-FOSS parts of the phone are as follows: WiFi and Bluetooth firmware must be uploaded to the Realtek RTL8723cs on initialization, an optional auto-focus firmware (currently not used in any PinePhone OSes) can be uploaded to the rear OmniVision OV5640 camera, and the Quectel EG25-G LTE modem runs its own closed-source OS.

The WiFi module communicates with the CPU over SDIO and BT is over UART - neither of these connections provide direct access to CPU memory.

The LTE modem on the PinePhone is a ‘black box’, and runs its own Linux system internally. This includes all the proprietary modules (blobs) needed to run the actual cellular radios. However, this system is almost entirely isolated from the main system running on the A64 SoC. The only data contacts between A64 and modem are USB connection for data and I2S connection for audio. All data going in or out of the modem must go over these connections.

There is no RAM or flash storage shared between the systems. In short, unless you explicitly send data to the modem, it is never in contact with the blobs running inside it. The modem cannot send any data to the phone unless phone is willing to receive it (that’s the basics of USB).

Closing statement

I do not think that this misconception arose online as a result of someone’s ill intention or a conspiracy. I really don’t. I do, however, feel that if I were to leave this unanswered for much longer then this misconception would be further propagated.

PinePhones Start Shipping - All You Need To Know

Wed, 15 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to 2020. I expect this will be a productive year and one of exponential growth for our community. It was a busy beginning to the year and I expect that the pace will remain high with shipments of the Pinebook Pro and PinePhone Braveheart edition as well as FOSDEM announcements. Following this period there will be downtime due to the Chinese New Year. The past 12 months have been so intense that I am genuinely looking forward to this period of relative calm, which will allow everyone to catch their breath and review how things are going. I find that at times a forced downtime is one of the most productive things there can be.

Since I last wrote a lot of developments have taken place, so let’s get to it.

TL;DR for this month:

Community Updates released on the 15th this year
We’re at FOSDEM - come chat with us; something special for PinePhone BH owners
FOSDEM talk on Linux phones by Merlijn Wajer (Maemo Leste) and Bart Ribbers (pmOS)
New HW announcements at FOSDEM; watch out for blog post on Jan 31st
Pinebook Pro (ISO/ANSI) shipping; patience please - units still going out
Pinebook Pro OS variety grows; *BSD options incoming
OG Pinebook RK3399 upgrade kit coming after Chinese New Year
Pinebook Pro fun and games!
PinePhone Braveheart edition start shipping January 17th
Details on what you’ll find in the box; details on what software comes preloaded
A lengthy list of improvements & changes from dev phones to Braveheart
Important info regarding PinePhone shipping & tracking
Little or no staff over CNY; use the community for help and support
The PineTab early adopters edition production started ; where do we go from here?
PineTime development update; actual timepiece OSs /UIs emerge

Housekeeping

I have made the decision to post community updates mid-month from now on - on the 15th of each month to be precise. If you think this is a bad idea or have some other objections please let me know in the comments. Personally, to me it just seems like a more natural period to post an update than at the beginning of each month. As usual, I’ll also post shorter and more casual community updates when need be (especially when shipments go out) in the news section on the forums too.

Onto the core topic of this month’s housekeeping; we’re at FOSDEM 2020 and we’ll have a stall on Sunday. We’ll also have all sorts of swag for you to grab at our stall - including stickers of course - but if you happen to be rocking a Braveheart PinePhone at FOSDEM, then we’ll have something special for you. All you have to do to get the ‘special’ PinePhone accessory is show us your phone or the order confirmation (in the event yours arrives after the conference).

We’ll be showing off our not-yet-announced gear and the devices you already know about: the PineBook Pro, PinePhone, PineTime, and PineTab. If you’re on the fence about any of these devices, this will be your chance to get hands-on with them. I hope many of you will manage to make the trip and that I will get a chance to talk to you in person. Manjaro and UBports guys, along with many other developers from partner-projects, will be hanging out at our stall so make sure to talk to them too. Speaking of our friends from various projects, Merlijn B. W. Wajer from Maemo Leste and Bart Ribbers from postmarketOS will be giving a talk about Linux phones, which I highly recommend you go and see. If you won’t be attending then a video from the talk will eventually be available on FOSDEM’s website.

FOSDEM 2019: PINE64, Manjaro and UBports

In the past 2 years I only had time to take a quick walk around the event, so on Saturday I intend to just walk around and, for once, actually see something at FOSDEM. You’re more than welcome to say hi when you see me and I am always keen on company. Last year I also found a great food place nearby if you’re interested to join me for lunch. Later that evening we’ll be heading out to Tavernier with the rest of PINE64 folks, and we’d be happy to have you join us for beer (or soft-drinks if that’s your thing).

As we do each year, we’ll be making announcements regarding upcoming hardware at FOSDEM. We’ve got some really cool and exciting gear in the pipeline and I cannot wait to share it with you. You can expect a post regarding the announcements on January 31st. You can scroll down to the bottom of this page and sign up to this blog to get a notification once the announcement goes live.

Last on the housekeeping list is the PINE64 cluster, which will host all our community services. The cluster has arrived at BBXNET’s datacenter and is now undergoing assembly. We’ll gradually be migrating all services to the cluster; I’ll make sure to keep you up-to-date on how things are coming along with it. I expect that the first things to be moved are the chats - I must admit that I am looking forward to a self-hosted Matrix instance.

Some assembly required ;)

Pinebook Pro

The majority of ISO and ANSI Pinebook Pros pre-ordered in the past months have either been delivered or are en route to their new owners. Many more are to be shipped, so if you haven’t gotten your tracking number yet please do not worry. Pinebook Pros that will not make this shipping window - mostly units ordered in December - will be shipped out in February, after PinePhones go out to end-users. Shipping at this time of the year is difficult due to the upcoming Chinese New Year. There are various abnormal logistics issues that need to be overcome, including a shortage of staff. We’re doing our best to ship everything in a timely manner and hope for your understanding. You’ll have your Pinebook Pro soon one way or another.

With that out of the way - we’re blown away by the sheer amount of positive feedback we’re getting regarding the ISO and ANSI versions. Thank you - it’s equally important to hear words of encouragement as it is to get constructive criticism. I too have recently received an ANSI Pinebook Pro for testing from the last production run and I admit that the keyboard (despite ANSI not being my thing) turned out rather nicely. I also find that the fit-and-finish has been perfected at this point, and the unit feels very polished. The one thing that end-users will need to do however, is update their keyboard and trackpad firmware - the factory failed to apply the necessary fixes in this production run. Moreover, ANSI users will have to change the keyboard layout to ANSI in the default OS (en_US) as the default OS layout is ISO (en_UK). We’ll see to it that this is the last time end-users need to do the firmware update on their end.

As promised, upgrade kits that convert the original Pinebook into a Pro-esque version are in the works, but we won’t be able to have them ready this month. We know that many OG Pinebook owners are waiting for this upgrade to drop and we’ll make sure that it is ready for production when factories resume operation after Chinese New Year. We apologize for the delay in delivering the pro upgrade kit, but there are still some aspects of this that need to be ironed out and we didn’t want to rush it. Onto the subject of upcoming software.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqmFDCZcxM0&t=1s

DorianDotSlash takes a look at 3 different OSs on the Pinebook Pro (40min)

With so many Pinebook Pros now in the wild and in the hands of developers, software development has really picked up pace and we’ve seen images posted of numerous builds on forums, social media or elsewhere. Here is a list of OSs - that I am aware of - which are either already out or will be available for the Pinebook Pro in the next weeks and months:

Arch Linux
Ubuntu 20.04 w KDE
Ubuntu MATE
Gentoo
Alpine Linux
NetBSD
OpenBSD
Armbian
RISC OS
NixOS
Debian Mainline
Debian w MATE
Recalbox
Ubuntu 18.04 w MATE
Manjaro XFCE
Manjaro KDE
Q4OS
Fedora 31
Void Linux
LAKKA

A kind request to developers - we’d appreciate if you could post your builds on the PINE64 forum in the form of an announcements as well as add your builds to our wiki so it’s easy for end-users to find them. You can alternatively ping me or one of the moderators and we’ll do the above on your behalf. Thanks!

NetBSD via Jared McNeil @jmcwhatever Twitter

Nix OS via @fadenb (Twitter)

Gentoo via Jannik2099 (Chats)

RISC OS via @RISCOSbits (Twitter)

Previous Next

I don’t have the time to cover every and each upcoming OS in detail, nor do I find it necessary—a simple internet search will tell you all you need to know about most of the Linux distributions—so instead I’ll focus on BSD. From the very start we said that the Pinebook Pro a Linux and BSD laptop, but until now I haven’t had much of a chance to talk about the latter. In the July 2019 update I acknowledged that a segment of our community is made up of dedicated *BSD users and I’ll let you all know when I hear of *BSD developments; so I expect that this will come as a welcome surprise that development is now coming along. Indeed, this month we’ve had our first glimpse at NetBSD booting and running on the Pinebook Pro. It is my understanding that NetBSD is coming along nicely, and while it’s early days for the OS on the Pinebook Pro, this platform is known to the developers; the ROCKPro64 is already well supported by NetBSD. I’ve even seen screenshots of 1080p youtube content being watched in NetBSD on the Pinebook Pro and the WiFi adapter working (the latter being something *BSD lacks drivers for).

NetBSD Youtube playback on the Pinebook Pro via Matthew Green (@mrgtwentythree)

Yet another popular *BSD is OpenBSD. Whilst I have not yet seen the OS running on the laptop, I am happy to report that development has already started on an OpenBSD port. I have written to the developers, asking for a progress-report and an ETA, and hope to get a response shortly. When I do, I’ll surely edit it into this post or include it in the next community update. I too would really like to see OpenBSD on the Pinebook Pro this year as it’s certainly one of the more recognizable (due to its long-running heritage) *BSDs out there.

As you can surely tell, we’ll soon have quite a selection of FOSS OSs to choose from: multiple Linux distros, *BSDs as well as Chromium OS and Android. The current growth of the PINE64 community, combined with a very positive reception of the Pinebook Pro, is also an assurance that solid and prolonged support of the device is inbound. I suspect that partner-project developers feel the same way - for instance, the number of Manjaro ARM 19.12 Pinebook Pro download link clicks is twice that of the next popular device. The download rates for all community builds for the Pinebook Pro are through the roof.

Lastly, I am genuinely happy to see that people are having fun with their Pinebook Pro - and by fun, I specifically mean playing FOSS and retro games. Being an old school gamer myself, I am particularly excited to see Recalbox on the Pinebook Pro; I have tested the alpha build together with a handful of community members and it’s coming together really well. Just as any other OS for the Pinebook Pro, Recalbox can be easily booted from an SD card, so that it can be easily dual-booted with your full-desktop OS on the eMMC. A release is currently scheduled for mid-February, so be on the lookout for that if you enjoy retrogames. If a dedicated gaming distro isn’t your thing, then Astr0baby is putting together a detailed list of games that you can run on your Pinebook Pro complete with build instructions. As a side-note, and related to games, he also has an awesome guide on virtualisation on the Pinebook Pro, which I suggest you read if you’re interested in this subject matter. Getting back to the topic of games, we have set up our own Open Arena server, you’re welcome to follow instructions I posted to join for some casual fragging this weekend :)

PinePhone

As I’ve mentioned in my Casual late December community update, Braveheart shipments have been pushed back a couple of days so that Pinebook Pro ANSI units could clear from the Hong Kong warehouse. Not that it matters, but in the name of transparency, I believe that the shipping team decided to dispatch Pinebook Pros first simply because they take up more space in the warehouse than the phone pallets. The reason I am including this information in the first place is to put at rest question regarding production status (more on this later). As things stand, we’re now ready and I am happy to confirm that PinePhones will begin shipping in two days time - on January 17th 2020. The dispatch process will take a couple of days, however, so your unit may ship anytime between the 17th and 25th. At any rate, you’ll have your PinePhone soon.

So many PinePhones!

Let’s talk shipping. As I already mentioned in the past, the PinePhone will ship using Asendia. They offer a balance of solid shipping times (approx. 10-14 days to Northern Hemisphere + Australia and New Zealand), security and shipping cost. Unlike other carriers they also do not file import tax on your behalf, so it will be up to your customs to determine whether the PinePhone needs taxed or not. Without dwelling too much on this subject matter, I can confidently write that there are greater chances you won’t be asked to pay anything extra than with other carriers capable of transporting goods with Lithium Ion batteries.

One key downside of shipping using Asendia is parcel tracking. Simply put - from my experience and that of developers (sample of ~100) - the tracking isn’t particularly good. Having left Hong Kong, my parcel’s position wasn’t updated until it reached the destination airport and was logged for pickup by the local courier company. From this point, however, I was able to track the parcel in my local delivery service’s system and 17Track. This has, by and large, also been the experience of other people. So what does that mean? It means a few things: for starters, don’t worry if you won’t receive shipping updates for a prolonged period of time - this is to be expected. Therefore it also means that you shouldn’t email support, sales or info - it won’t make the shipping any faster and will just make the response times - to people to people we can actually assist - considerably longer.

Speaking of support, PinePhones ship out just days before the Chinese New Year starts. This means that there will be very few, if any, staff to answer your questions during this holiday. Therefore, more than ever, we will rely on our community members and partner project developers for support during this period. So if you experience problems with your Braveheart PinePhone, regardless of if it’s a software or hardware query, then before you decide to email support please make sure to join the chats or post your question on PINE64 forums and see if there is someone who can offer help. Unless your unit is DOA or damaged, you stand a much better chance of getting answers to your questions from community members in the coming weeks.

Community forums and chat options available from the drop-down menu on this site

With all the formalities out of the way, let me talk a bit about the PinePhone Braveheart itself. Inside the box you’ll find the PinePhone, a high quality USB-C charging cable and an introductory leaflet in letter form (written by yours truly with the help of the community). We assume that most, if not all, of you already have a 5V 15W PD charger, and we have no intention of adding more rubbish to the landfill than necessary. The PinePhone will charge just fine at a lower wattage but the charging process will obviously take much longer. If you don’t have a 15W rated PD charger yet, then use whatever charger you have in the meantime, and I suggest you wait for end-user reports regarding what chargers work best for the PinePhone. Lastly, the packaging which the PinePhone arrives in (as is the case for all our products) is made entirely out of recycled materials. We strongly encourage you to recycle the packaging according to your local standards if you do not intend to keep the box.

PinePhone Packaging Box

The PinePhone itself arrives with a polymer (a nice way of saying plastic) screen protector applied at the factory. I’d suggest you keep it on your phone, but I understand that there are some who distinctly dislike plastic screen protectors - if you’re one of those people, then you can peel it off without worrying, the PinePhone features hardened glass. In the future we may partner with some company to deliver a glass screen protector for the PinePhone - stay tuned for more information in the coming months.

There are a great many aspects of the phone that have been changed, improved upon and polished since the dev phones, which you’ve probably seen have shipped. This includes engineering things, such as tweaks to the antenna layout or PCB improvements and known errata corrections. To most people, however, it’s the aesthetical changes that will stand out the most. There are a few things which you may immediately identify as different when compared to a dev phone - especially some of the earlier dev units. The LCD and digitizer are sealed, so there is virtually no gap between the glass and the screen. The LCD used is also pitch black when the device is turned off as opposed to grey-ish or silver. The Lithium battery has now been branded and the back of it facing the PCB contains all necessary warnings and regulatory messages.

Braveheart PinePhone with back cover taken off (modem blurred)

Perhaps most importantly, however, the back of the phone has been significantly improved upon. Both the plastic molding and the applied coating have been considerably refined. I haven’t held a Braveheart phone in hand myself, so I cannot provide a first-hand account of how the coating turned out; that said, those on the team who held one of these PinePhones seem very pleased with the end-result. Lastly, similarly to how we chose to only brand a single key on the Pinebook Pro, we chose to sneak in a small PINE64 logo between the camera and the flash LED. The logo is placed behind glass, so won’t be scratched or eroded from regular wear and tear, and is pretty small in size. This was my idea, and I hope that it is unintrusive enough to satisfy those who hate branding yet prominent enough to make this an unmistakable PINE64 product. It also opens the entire back of the case to partner-project branding; something I expect we’ll see in the future as we ship OS-specific PinePhone production-runs ( information on this topic here). Let me know what you think about the little PINE64 logo in the comments.

Placement of the PINE64 logo

As for software, the phone arrives preloaded with a factory test image rather than an end-user operating system. This preloaded factory test suite is running on Linux - postmarketOS to be precise - which allows you to test various features of the phone and run an automated test. The automated test runs through all key sensors, inputs, outputs and the modem (if you have a SIM card inserted - otherwise it will return a modem failure error). The manual tests include the touch panel, modem, speakers, vibrating motor, LED notification light and more. It also includes an option that allows the factory to write the image to eMMC (which has already been done, since the image is running from eMMC).

Factory OS - postmarketOS with custom factory UI

At this point I assume that everyone getting a Braveheart PinePhone understand that it’s up to them to find the operating system build they are interested in, flash it and take part in the community discussion and ongoing development. Most builds are available on the PinePhone Wiki - which you can and should contribute to (use your PINE64 forum credentials to log in). Some OS builds have to be sought out however; for example, this is the case for Manjaro and Nemo mobile. These builds will, in time, be added to the wiki too, but for the time being the Wiki knowledge base is just getting built up. You will likely want to run the OS you’re interested in from the SD card for now. New builds show up every couple of days - I am currently waiting for Maemo Leste and Nemo mobile for demo purposes - which requires you to reflash the storage medium. It just isn’t very convenient to test new builds from eMMC.

Finally I wish to briefly discuss future PinePhone production-runs. We will actively monitor and evaluate software development progress over the Chinese New Year period. This period is quite vital to furthering progress as partner-project developers will shortly have an entire dedicated audience of contributors and testers to work with. Admittedly we expect a lot of progress to be made in the coming two months thanks to community contributions. We have previously stated that larger scale production of PinePhones is scheduled for March 2020, and this is still what we’re aiming for. If production commences in March then I’d expect the next production-run on PinePhones to reach their new owners in late April. But if no Linux phone OS reaches sufficient maturity by that point in time we may decide to hold back a month or two before starting the manufacturing process. After all, we want it to be the best Linux on mobile experience possible, so as not to discourage people from the idea of Linux as a viable alternative to Android and iOS. Production this year may start with entering into a cooperation with a partner-project that will be able to deliver a daily-driver OS. I have previously described the nature of such a relationship in a dedicated blog post, which I encourage you to read. Presently there are a number of candidate OS for this undertaking, and we’ll be talking to them in the coming weeks to determine how much progress can be achieved. I’ll make sure to update you on this topic as development progresses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11eObhH8MKA&t=1s

A quick look at 4 different PinePhone OS

PineTab

With the Pinebook Pros and PinePhones now manufactured and shipping, our attention has turned to the PineTab. Early adopter PineTabs have entered production earlier this month and will likely be delivered to us prior to the Chinese New Year. This does not, however, mean that we feel ready to open pre-orders just yet. We need to test and review the units before making them available for order and need to determine the right OS to pair it with for shipping. As things stand, there are only two viable OS for the PineTab at this point in time - Arch Linux and postmarketOS (XFCE / Plasma mobile). There are other OSs too, but those are PinePhone ports and more of an afterthought rather than a dedicated build. All OS options have their strengths and drawbacks, but I feel like there isn’t a single one that stands out as particularly complete.

PineTab dev unit running Arch Linux via @RealDanct12

This may very well be a chicken-and-egg situation. The lack of PineTabs in enthusiasts’ hands, in conjunction with developers’ focus on the PinePhone and shelving the project until phones and laptops ship, may be the root cause for no viable software. I am happy to entertain this possibility and in fact find this quite likely. So then, my question to you is: would you rather have us ship the PineTabs to enthusiasts with a clear notice that basically no usable software exists for the platform or wait and see if we manage to build up some support?

There is nothing else I have to to report regarding the PineTab at this point in time which I haven’t reported before in my December community update post, so if you haven’t read it yet, I suggest you do. We really hope to hear from you regarding what route you think we should pursue with the PineTab. At this point your arguments may be the key deciding factor whether we decide to proceed with the PineTab in the next 2 months or if we decide to hold off, explore our software options with developers further, and release it with a more feature-complete OS build later this year. I am looking forward to hearing from you.

PineTime

The PineTime has quickly built up a dedicated development community. from the project’s inception, I’ve expressed how impressed I am by the work done on the device. Each month new FOSS OSs and front-ends become available for the PineTime, and I am now looking forward to showing them off at our FOSDEM stall. Last month I dedicated a portion of the community update to explaining how we interact with the PineTime development community and featured some of the early work. A lot of the software and the development process seen insofar can be vaguely classified as either experimentation and proof-of-theory development (as well as pure fun). It’s great to see that developers enjoy working with this device, but at the end of the day the majority of end-users are keen to see UIs that resemble and function as smart timepieces. After all this device is what we all hope to be wearing on our wrists at one point in the future.

To this end, this month I want to highlight two front-ends that are really starting to take shape as actual timepieces. From what I’ve gathered, both of the two OSs offer similar functionality, synchronizing and keeping time as well as displaying connectivity status. But presently more advanced smartwatch-type functionality, such as pushing phone notifications, is yet to be implemented. My knowledge about PineTime back-ends is, to say the least, highly limited - so I reached out to the developers of the two OSs directly for details. Below are their explanations of what code their PineTimes run and what the front-end can do in the current state.

PineTime Running Koen’s Front-End (via Koen in chats)

The first of the two UIs has been developed by Koen Zandberg:

“The application as of now can be used to make the PineTime into a simple timepiece. Bluetooth LE with a GATT current time service client is used for time synchronization with a[n Android] Phone companion app. Energy is conserved by only turning the screen on when the button is pressed, it automatically turns off after a few seconds. The display shows the current time and date, the bluetooth connection status and the battery status.

The system is based on RIOT as embedded operating system, providing the threading infrastructure, drivers and power management. Nimble is used to provide an open source Bluetooth LE stack. Finally LittlevGL provides the high level graphics on the display supporting partial updates for fast and efficient updates.” ~ Koen Zandberg (@bergzand)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZrsH783ZLI&feature=youtu.be

PineTime syncing with Android phone originally posted by JF

The second front-end is developed by JF (whose work I already featured in previous updates):

“The firmware provides drivers for the display, battery measurement and touch panel. It also supports BLE connection and implements a CTS client that retrieves the current date and time from the device it is connected to.

The application built on this firmware provides some simple functionalities : it displays the date and time, the battery level and the status of the BLE connection. The display can be switched on and off using the button and the touch screen. As a demo of the touch panel, a colorful square is drawn when it detects a touch event.

The project is written in C and C++ and is mostly built around the NRF52 SDK and FreeRTOS.” ~ @codingfield / jf002

My thanks go out to both JF and Koen for taking the time to answer my questions. I am excited to see the PineTime software progress over the course of this year and beyond. I appreciate that much work still needs to be done to make this a viable smartwatch - especially since at one point it will have to pair to the PinePhone. This means that PineTime developers will eventually have to cooperate with and receive help from mobile OS developers in getting the PineTime syncing with their Linux systems. I hope that once Braveheart PinePhones ship someone from our community, or partner-project communities, will take it upon themselves to start developing a companion app for the PineTime. Regardless of what the future holds, the PineTime is already a success-story in my book.

That’s all for this month’s update. Remember to sign up for the blog (scroll to the bottom of the page to submit your email address) to receive a notification once we publish our FOSDEM announcements.

Many thanks to Dalton (UBports) for proofreading this blog entry.

December Update: Thank You For 2019!

Thu, 05 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to the last community update of the year. I think that 2019 will be remembered as the year PINE64 transitioned from being a relatively niche FOSS hardware project to a mainstream one. This transition is an exciting prospect for all of us involved with PINE64, and we cannot wait to see how the project develops over the next 12 months.

Let me take this opportunity to thank those of you whom have been with us thus far: the partner-project developers, community contributors, mods and admins, shipping and assembly teams, and - above all else - the end-users who make this project possible. Thank you for actively shaping PINE64 and making it one of the most vibrant and welcoming communities in the FOSS space. The amount of progress we’ve made in just one year is incredible and the success is truly collectively ours. Thank you!

Here’s the TL;DR:

Next Community Update January 12th ; Give us some feedback
The PineTime is now in the PINE Store ; Great development
PineTab early adopter pre-orders likely in January ; New keyboard ; LTE/ SSD adapter
Brave Heart PinePhones worked on ; shipping early January ; PinePhone cases ; First phone call ; PinePhone keyboard
Continual good reception ; Keyboard / TP firmware update available ; A lot of OSs coming ; regional keyboards ; OG Pinebook upgrade kit likely in January 2020.
New announcements at FOSDEM 2020 ; teaser of what’s to come next year
Happy New Year!

Housekeeping

I’ll try to keep this section short. It’s unlikely that I’ll be able to publish the next Community Update on 05/01/2020 seeing as I’ll be traveling during the Holiday and New Year’s period. In other words, I won’t have an opportunity to sit down and write the blog until I am back home on January 7th. I feel like the earliest date I can commit to for an update blog entry is 12/01/2020. In the meantime, if some noteworthy or urgent information surface then I’ll post ad-hoc updates in the forum news section. Make sure to check it once in a while during the holiday period and in early January.

I’d also appreciate if you could fill in this short poll/ questionnaire concerning your satisfaction with various aspects of PINE64 as a project. Please feel free to share any thoughts you may have in this forum thread. It’s important for us to get feedback on which cogs of the project are turning well and which ones are grinding. Over the past year we completely redid key aspects of our community infrastructure - the website, forums, Wiki, the chats, etc., These changes are somewhat obvious, since many of you interact with them daily, but what you may not be aware of is that the ‘back-end’, so to speak, has received a lot of attention; namely, we have taken steps to improve PINE Store support, which includes timely responses to your order queries and up-to-date information on your order status.

Lastly, I would also like to mention that it’s now easy to sign up for the blog. If you scroll down to the bottom of the page you’ll find a small widget with an email sign-up field appropriately titled “Subscribe to the PINE64 Blog”. Enter your email address and go through the motions to confirm that you actually wish to follow the blog.

PineTime

I have the distinct pleasure of beginning this section by announcing that a limited production-run of the PineTime development kit is now available in the PINE Store. You can pick up a kit with a (really nice) set of silicone straps and a charging dock for $24.99. You also have a choice of two shipping methods to choose from. If it turns out that the PineTime kit proves to be a popular PINE Store item then we’ll make sure to build more units at the earliest possible date. I don’t want to promise anything at this point, but it is possible that the PineTime development kit will be available permanently available in the store alongside the watch in the future. We just feel like it’s in line with the community spirit of this project.

Indeed, the PineTime has insofar proven a fantastic side-project for us. I am literally in awe of the effort, creativity and experimentation in the PineTime development group, which I make sure to check into at least weekly to catch up on progress. I couldn’t write this community update and omit Lup Yuen Lee’s phenomenal article on the PineTime titled “Sneak Peek of PineTime Smart Watch… And why it’s perfect for teaching IoT” which discusses the PineTime, it’s potential real-world applications and strengths as an educational device. I highly recommend you read it even if you’re not interested in the PineTime - its that good.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, and on more than one occasion, we consider the PineTime a side-project that is solely dependent on community efforts. What I mean by this is; there are no dates to be met and no ETA to speak of. We literally sit on the sidelines and watch how the project evolve in an organic way. This also means that the development process is much more relaxed and it accommodates experimentation and out-of-the-box thinking. In light of this I feel that everyone should have the opportunity to take a shot at developing for this platform, because only good things can come out of more people having a kit to toy with.

TinyGo on the PineTime by @_CONEJO

Picture via @codingfield

PineTab

We’ve heard you, you want an early adopters edition of the PineTab. For those of you who do not follow this blog on a regular basis, let me explain; last month I asked if you want us to gear up for an early production run of the PineTab, and the answer was a resounding ‘yes!’. I’d like to thank all of you for the encouraging responses in the comments section, on the forum and chats, which ultimately convincing me (and more importantly TL) that an early adopters PineTab batch is viable. As things stand, we’re currently planning on making pre-orders for the PineTab available sometime in January of 2020. Mind you, this is a tentative time-frame however, as it is largely dependent on how PinePhone shipping progresses in the coming month. In short, we do not wish to find ourselves in a situation where we have to divide our attention between two important and highly anticipated projects. Tackling one thing at a time is usually the wisest thing to do.

Last time I wrote about the PineTab I mentioned that we’re doing research on a new and improved keyboard for it. We realise that whilst some of you will gravitate towards using touch-input based mobile OSs, there are also many users who will prefer to use a more traditional Linux desktop on the PineTab. To this end I am now happy to report that we have settled on the type of keyboard we will be selling for the PineTab. The core mechanics of the keyboard - that is to say the way it attaches magnetically to the PineTab and the way it folds - remains pretty much identical to the original concept, that we have been showcasing for nearly a year. That said, the material of the cover and the keyboard keycap styles have significantly changed for the better. The new cover material is made out of durable synthetic leather and the keyboard has a familiar chiclet layout. I am also happy to announce that the PineTab keyboard is backlit with 3-step brightness control.

Another accessory for the PineTab that you’ll also be able to order is a M.2 storage and LTE modem adapter. This adapter makes it possible to install any M.2 SATA SSD or LTE modem into the PineTab, further improving its core functionality. I am including a picture of the adapter below.

To learn more about the PineTab please read my Community Update from August this year.

PineTab M.2 LTE Modem/ SSD SATA adapter

The PineTab will use this type of keyboard (not identical)

PinePhone

There is currently a lot happening in the PinePhone development space. Both hardware and software is shaping up well and coming along very fast. Developers have been steadily getting their development units over the past two weeks and I myself got a PinePhone just a couple days ago. While there will be a handful of improvements and minor aesthetic changes made to Brave Heart PinePhones (aesthetically, most notably the texture on the back-cover of the phone) the current dev phones already feel very polished and sturdy. I must admit that every time I pick it up there is also something completely surreal about it and the fact that it’s a device dreamed up by a handful of guys over a beer rather than executives in a boardroom. I made a short video showcasing the PinePhone developer edition the other day - I am linking it below for you to check out. In the video I discuss the phone hardware itself, and I intend to follow it up with a video looking at the software next week. With so much happening with software development I want to give developers a week or two with their phones before making a video on their work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwkcr3CvyCM

A close look at the PinePhone Hardware

Speaking of developers, thanks to their dedication we have identified a few minor hardware issues with the current development phones. Most of the issues have already been addressed, but there is one outstanding problem - namely reception of the WiFi antenna. In short, the antenna needs to be retuned and this will take a week or two. As a result, Brave Heart PinePhones will first ship in early January rather than late December as we originally planned. We’re sorry for this delay, but we don’t want to cut corners on the Brave Heart batch and shove it out the door just to make the originally announced 2019 release schedule. After all, Brave Heart backers are some of our most enthusiastic end-users, and we want to deliver the best early adopter phone we possibly can. At the same time we also promise that there will be no further major delays, as all phones need to ship before Chinese New Year, no matter what.

About shipping; we’re currently experimenting with new shipping methods. While DHL Express is great, at least for the most part, it is also expensive and in some geographic areas more “problematic” (*wink wink*) than in others. We know that many of you have been asking for us to consider other shipping methods so we figured that now is as good of a time as ever. I can tell you my experience with the shipping method destined for the EU: tracking was poor, but the parcel was delivered relatively fast (14 days) and I was not asked to pay tax. This experience appears to also be the case for most other developers. Regarding the tracking, there were no updates from the moment the parcel left Hong Kong until it reached the destination country, but once it arrived I received up-to-date tracking from the local parcel delivery services. Overall, I feel this is a good compromise and - granted we get positive feedback from you guys and gals - we’re stick to it for mass production phones in 2020.

Let’s talk about upcoming accessories for the PinePhone. I can already tell you that there are third parties actively looking into making their own accessories - including some that utilize the I2C pogo pins - for the PinePhone, and we simply cannot wait to see what they come up with. We’re very happy to see people make use of the released case-back panel file to design their own peripherals! For now, however, all I can only write about accessories that we have in the pipeline. The first type of which are cases - this is something I previously mentioned in a post about our commitment to give back to the community and society.

PInePhone Soft Case Render

PInePhone Hard Case Render

The see-through case is made of soft silicone and we’ve gone to great lengths to make sure that it is nicely molded. You know that I never try to ‘sell you stuff’ - but it would be nice if you’d pick one of these up cases; all proceeds from the soft cases will be relayed to a fund, independently chaired, and aimed at doing our share to close the digital gap. The hard case is made out of resin and is black in colour. There is potential to have the cases in different colours in the future; leave a comment below telling me what colours you’d like to see. As for the case itself, it is very resilient and really well molded. Both of the cases will be available in March of 2020 for the official PinePhone launch or sooner.

We’re well aware that an accessory that many of you want for your PinePhone is a keyboard. We have a good understanding how important a keyboard can be to a Linux phone, effectively turning it from a smartphone into a Linux PDA. We are therefore not cutting any corners and, instead of reinventing the wheel, we’ll be making a keyboard heavily inspired by PSION Series 5 keyboards from the 1990’s. We hope to not only replicated the usability of the PSION Series 5 keyboard but also the tactile feel it is known for. The keyboard will use the I2C connection on the back of the phone, which will allow it to open and close identically to the Series 5 PDAs. Due to the compatibility with the existing original Pinebook and the development for the PineTab, as well as the ability of the PinePhone to dual boot from SD, I expect that you’ll eventually be able to run a fully fledged Linux OS with the keyboard attached. Many probably want to know the availability of the keyboard, which is understandable, but for now we’re talking to companies so we can get the molding process going. So, for now, I can only vaguely say that it will be available sometime in 2020.

Original PSION Series 5 keyboard - inspiration for the PinePhone keyboard

The last but certainly not the least important subject I wish to discuss is software status. The different OSs are making great progress and I am happy to report that, as of today, all key features of the phone work. That’s right, over the past week the two missing pieces - the driver for the front facing camera and much of the modem routing for voice call capability - have been sorted out. Below you can find a video showcasing the front camera FOSS driver in action (same camera on a different device) as well as a recording of a quick voice-call I had with Marius from UBPorts who called me from his PinePhone. On the subject of placing phone calls, work on VoLTE is proceeding well and we’re getting help directly from the modem manufacturer to have the functionality operation as soon a possible. Stay tuned for more information on VoLTE in next month’s update. Lastly, the ANX7688 driver which is responsible for power on the PinePhone is now working correctly and capable of performing a power delivery (PD) handshake with compatible chargers to deliver the optimal wattage (15W).

Before I wrap this section up I feel it necessary to underline that despite the truly excellent software progress in recent weeks, the PinePhone is not yet ready to be a daily driver. I am writing this in the hope of preventing people from developing a false impression that the Brave Heart phones can run feature-complete OSs at this point in time. This is still very much a work-in-progress project as of December 2019, and various aspects of the software needs time to be properly implemented into the respective OSs. The fact that all key functionality has been worked out doesn’t automatically mean that each and single OS will be able to implement these features on-the-fly into their systems in a matter of weeks. Such implementations takes time and effort. In other words, if you’re getting a Brave Heart edition phone – have the mindset of a tester and contributor rather than an end-user. This should already be apparent to you from previous blog-posts, but I just wanted to spell it out. In turn, by March 2020 you will be the first to have a fully functional mainline Linux phone that you’ll be happy to show off to others.

Happy family ;)

Pinebook Pro

The Pinebook Pro has continually been met with a positive reception from developers, end-users as well as the media. If you haven’t done so yet, I highly encourage you to read Pinebook Pro reviews by LINUX Unplugged and POCKETNOW, which offer fair and balanced overview of the device. Below, I’m also linking two video reviews which I suggest you check out. As things stand, the Pinebook Pro is currently on track to become the most popular PINE64 device of all time (bar the ROCK64 single board computer), and this is very good news for all of us. For end-users this effectively means that the Pinebook Pro is very likely to develop a solid and wide software support-range, whilst for developers it means that there is an eager Linux and *BSD audience to use the OS they work on. We are truly happy that we managed to deliver what people wanted and welcome new and enthusiastic members into our fold.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgNYQsdxlMw

DASGEEK’s Pinebook Pro Video Review

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoIfSnFCs84Roger Clark’s Pinebook Pro Video Review

Speaking of OSs available for the Pinebook Pro, their number is steadily growing and new options available for download. The recent month saw the release of Q4OS as well as multiple Manjaro Preview images which run on the mainline kernel. There are also builds of Fedora 31, Kali Linux, Arch and many other OS in the works, that we know you’ll be excited to see running on the Pinebook Pro. I will also mention that over the past month the default Debian with MATE build has seen a lot of improvements, including: boosted performance, new web browsers, increased Firefox performance, significantly enhanced suspend (power consumption in suspend is now 1/10 of original value) and many kernel fixes. You can follow the developments of the default OS build here. The Mainline Linux development is coming along very well and if you are dead set on running a mainline build with Panfrost (FOSS) GPU drivers then I suggest you follow this thread by tsys, which highlights the steady progress of 5.X kernel that is bound to be the basis for all future Linux OSs.

Arch Linux on the Pinebook Pro via Screenshot via @AndreVallestero https://github.com/AndreVallestero

The past month has also seen a very important development on the hardware front. Namely, problems with missing keypresses and an unwieldy trackpad have now been resolved and are a thing of the past. The firmware fix for both inputs has been delivered thanks to the hard work of a dedicated group of people: TL Lim, anarsoul, Xalius and ayufan. Everyone who has already gotten their Pinebook Pro should install the new trackpad and keyboard firmware. The firmware update can be performed from any Linux OS and process itself is very simple only requiring running two scripts between reboots. Please reference the forum thread that describes the process in detail for more information. Future Pinebook Pros, starting with units shipped in December of 2019, will arrive with the new firmware pre-flashed.

This brings me to the units currently on pre-order. The final pre-Chinese New Year Pinebook Pro production-run is now well underway. Let me reiterate what I wrote last month; if you want to get your hands on a Pinebook Pro prior to late March / early April 2020, then this is your last chance. Currently, the ISO-keyboard variants are scheduled to ship out in late December, closely followed by ANSI-keyboard variants in January. It is possible that due to the high volume of shipments from China in this period (Christmas in the West and upcoming Chinese New Year) the shipment process may be longer than usual.

Pinebook Pro ANSI layout

We have extensive plans for the Pinebok Pro in the future. Presently, we’re looking into ways to deliver various regional keyboard options to end-users - something we know many of you want. We still haven’t decided on if this is something we can realistically eventually offer, however, but rest assured that we will surely try. One of the concepts we’re currently exploring is offering regional keyboard caps sets, which end-users can install into an unpopulated ISO or ANSI keyboard on their own. These regional keysets would be accompanied by a corresponding keyboard firmware utility, which has now been open sourced (MIT License) and is executable from any Pinebook Pro Linux OS.

As I have written in the past, we are also planning on offering an upgrade kit for the original 11.6” and 14” Pinebooks. This kit would effectively convert an existing Pinebook into a Pinebook Pro-like device, and offer most of the functionality and compatibility of the flagship laptop. If all goes well, these kits will be available in the store sometime next month. I’ll have more information on these kits as they become available, so stay tuned and check the News section of the forum in early January.

Lastly, I want to give a shout-out to an awesome community Initiative that have sprung up around the Pinebook Pro. A group of people want to design protective ‘skins’ for the laptop. We have now provided users with the .dwg file with the exact Pinebook pro case specifications and are eagerly awaiting for the first designs to arrive. Needless to say, once a couple of designs have been completed, I am sure we’ll be able to help in promoting them or even including them in the store eventually. What a great and fun initiative guys!

Carbon ‘skin’ concept for the Pinebook Pro by tophneal

Happy New Year!

We always make product announcements at FOSDEM and this coming year we have some really awesome projects that we cannot wait to share with you. As a bit of a teaser I’ll write that next year you can expect announcements of new single board computers, compute and AI modules and at least one pro-grade device. We also hope that our other side-project - the CUBE FOSS IP camera announced this year - will finally enter production at some point in 2020. I think that it will be a great year for PINE64 and I am looking forward to seeing how our plans all pan out.

In the meantime, I wish you all a joyful holiday season and a Happy New Year! See you all in 2020.

November Update: Brave Heart, Pinebook Pro reception and more

Tue, 05 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Our core focus for the past month was on getting the manufacturing process and shipping of the Pinebook Pro, PinePhone and PineTime development kits back on track. I will not reiterate the events that led to the delays of those devices in this post, but if you’re interested then read the detailed account of what happened in last month’s community update.

With the Pinebook Pros and PineTime development kits now shipped, and with the PinePhone developer edition now shipping, I feel that we’ve done a good job in handling the situation.

The big news for this month is that we will start taking pre-orders for the PinePhone Brave Heart edition on November 15 and that the next Pinebook Pro production-run pre-orders, offering a choice of ANSI or ISO keyboard, starts today. Let’s get to it.

[update 19/11/2019] I have now posted a follow-up to this community update on the forum; mostly containing information about the PineTime dev kits and PineTab availability based on your feedback. It can be read here.

Here’s the TL;DR:

Our monster clusters; core community services will migrate to our own hardware in 2020
Pinebook Pros shipped; Last pre-orders for ~3 months start today (ANSI +ISO)
We’re aware of NVMe adapter & Trackpad issues, expect fixes soon
OG Pinebook upgrade to Pro-esque setup in Q1 2020
PinePhones for developers (finally) ship November 5-18th
PinePhone Brave Heart Pre-Orders start November 15th; delivery December 2019 / January 2020
PineTab production conundrum; state of software
PineTime dev kits shipped; development proceeding exceptionally well

Housekeeping

Earlier this year we announced that we’ve built two monster ROCKPro64 clusters with the intention to host our website, Wiki, forums, CDN, Matrix instance, IRC, etc., as well as provide the community with an efficient OS images build server. We’ve have since been looking for a reliable host that would meet our criteria in terms of support, bandwidth, services and access that could house the server. Thanks to Gamiee - a community member, contributor and moderator - we were able to get in touch with BBXNET, who agreed the host the cluster for us at their datacenter and provide us with exactly the service we were looking for.

BBXNET are located in central Europe, Slovakia, and offer a wide range of services including Internet and Television to their customer base. I feel compelled to let you know that they are helping us out of their own accord for no financial gain, a rare type of generosity, and in exchange for their help we’ll host a banner with their company logo on the website. It is the least we can do.

As the setup process gets underway, Gamiee (who has a high degree of access to the server farm) will be taking pictures of the installation process. These pictures will be featured in future community updates. The transition of services to the cluster will be gradual, as we do not intend to compromise stability of our community services. I expect that Matrix and CDN will already be operating on the cluster in early 2020. If you live in Slovakia and in BBXNET’s service region, be sure to consider them when choosing your next ISP.

48x ROCKPro64 cluster

[edit 8/11/2019] It turns out that the smaller of the two clusters, featuring 24x ROCKPro64 will be installed at BBXNET. I apologize for the confusion. I am including a picture of the smaller cluster below. Gamiee has already tweeted a picture of the server case and will be rebuilding and installing it at the final destination this month. More information to follow.

24x ROCKPro64 cluster

Pinebook Pro

Thanks to the amazing efforts of the factory and shipping teams, the Pinebook Pros from both community production-runs and a large portion of the ‘public batch’ have now shipped. I expect that the majority of the ‘public batch’ will be at some stage of delivery processing from Hong Kong by the time this post goes live, or shortly thereafter. In short, if you haven’t gotten your Pinebook Pro yet, don’t worry, you should be receiving your shipping notification soon.

As things currently stand, we are approximately two weeks behind the original shipping schedule for the remainder of the public batch. This means we’ve got just enough time to launch one more round of pre-orders for another large production-run before the Chinese New Year. Unlike the first batches (which have already shipped), this production-run will feature the much-requested choice of ANSI (US) or ISO (UK) keyboards. So if you have been holding out on buying a Pinebook Pro because you wanted to get an ANSI keyboard version, now is you chance.

It is important to emphasize that this will be the last production-run until after the Chinese New Year (which comes to an end in February 2020). During the holiday, production ceases completely at Chinese factories, and there are often production challenges immediately after people return to work after CNY. Here is what you need to know: if you do not pre-order a Pinebook Pro from this next batch before CNY, you probably won’t get your hands on one until late March or early April 2020.

Let’s talk about user feedback, initial reactions and community engagement. Reported and known issues aside (I’ll get to that), the reception of the laptop has been very good and it appears that we have delivered on our promises in the eyes of end-users. I’ve now seen a number of Youtube videos and it appears that they echo the positive sentiments end-users share on the forum and elsewhere. DASGeek even ran a live unboxing of the Pinebook Pro stream the other night, which I feature below. We’ve felt good about the physical build quality and software maturity of the Pinebook Pro from the very start, but it is a relief to get an affirmation from the community. Speaking of the community, we’re also very glad to see a high degree of engagement from people who continually contribute to testing, identifying and debugging software issues. Your efforts are much appreciated!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-XikeQDKOw&t=1s

DASGeek live unboxing and Pinebook Pro showcase

For those of you looking to have more choice of operating systems, you’re in luck as many partner-project OS developers are now starting to receive their Pinebook Pros. It will obviously take them some time to bring support to the platform - this doesn’t just happen overnight - but I am happy to say that we expect to see Manjaro, Kali Linux, Q4OS (Debian), Fedora, KDE Neon as well as (hopefully) Ubuntu MATE OS images on the Pinebook Pro in the foreseeable future. The same is true for *BSD OS images, but I have a much less knowledge regarding the *BSD communities and their development cycles, so I cannot comment on a prospective roadmap. Regardless of how things pan out for the individual projects, I expect there to be considerably more OS choices available in January of 2020.

As a teaser I attach an image of Manjaro running mainline kernel and Panfrost FOSS GPU drivers on the Pinebook Pro - pretty cool huh?

Picture from Manjaro devs (thanks for sharing!)

Last but not least, we are aware of the problems with the NVMe adapter and trackpad issues - both of which I discussed in last month’s update.

Let me start with the trackpad: we’re working closely with the vendor to resolve this as soon as possible and we’ve already successfully compiled the keyboard firmware utility from source and applied the correct license (huge shout-out to Ayufan for offering help getting this code functional in record time). The underlying issue itself has now been identified and a firmware patch is incoming soon. As soon as the trackpad issue is resolved the updater will be compiled into a binary and bundled with the necessary firmware; all that will be needed to apply the fix is hitting a big ‘START’ button and restarting the Pinebook Pro.

As for the NVMe adapter it looks like we got it wrong twice (whoops, sorry! Let’s hope the third time’s the charm). We’ll make it right, so don’t worry; the engineering team needs to sit down and do a bit of thinking as to how this can be best addressed in the shortest time-span and in the most efficient way. I’ll make sure to get back to you when I hear something from people in the know. We really appreciate your patience.

There is one more thing I’d like to mention before heading on to the next section. When we first announced the Pinebook Pro we made a commitment to those of you with the original Pinebook (featuring the Allwinner A64) that it will be possible to upgrade existing Pinebooks to Pro-esque versions. We have since struggled with two engineering issues to make this a reality, the most important of which is heat-dissipation of the RK3399 in a plastic shell. It now looks like we’ve cracked this issue by using heat dissipating metal foil and a thermal pad. Provided that this solution holds up under testing, you can expect the upgrade kit in Q1 2020. We hope that by providing this kit we not only cater to our community but also do our part in reducing the number of OG Pinebooks ending up in landfills.

PinePhone

The road to deliver the PinePhone has been a bumpy one for us in the recent months. If you haven’t done so yet, I encourage you to read last month’s update, in which I explain some of the difficulties we encountered in the process of manufacturing developer units. I usually don’t like shifting blame onto others for delays - it just feels like a cheap excuse - but frankly, the current PinePhone delay is caused solely by third parties. More specifically, it is caused by part vendors that failed to deliver the necessary components to us on time. We usually plan for these situations, and we did in this instance too, but we were stood up by more than one vendor and on more than one occasion, resulting in the production stalling each time. I am not going to go into details here, mostly because I don’t want to waste time on it, but for what it’s worth - it all boils down to reliably sourcing quality digitizers. To date, we had to reschedule assembly thrice because of this. What can I say, you live - you learn - you get over it and move forward. The good news is that we’re now moving forward and full steam ahead with a reliable supply of components.

Here is the PinePhone road-map for the foreseeable future:

Pre-release PinePhones are currently shipping and we should have them all out by November 15th. Once shipped, delivery should be between 7 and 14 days.
Brave Heart edition PinePhone pre-orders start 8:00AM, November 15th (GMT+0).
Brave Heart edition will be delivered December 2019 / January 2020.
Mass production begins after Chinese New Year, likely in early March 2020.

Let me address each of the points above, because I feel there are a few subtleties the community needs to be made aware of. The developer PinePhones will start going out this week and we expect that shipments will be concluded by November 15th. Ironically, the delay in production of PinePhones for developers has brought about a number of key benefits to these units. For one, based on internal testing and feedback from partner-project developers with existing prototypes, we managed to address all known hardware issues as well as implement proper antenna arrays. Prior to the delay, we were planning on shipping PinePhones for developers with off-the-shelf u.FL antennas. Such antennas, while not ideal, would have served the development purposes just fine. The delay, however, granted us the additional time to properly implement the antennas into the phone’s body and tune them according to requirements for end-users. We were able to complete the tuning process of 3G, 4G, and GPS antennas . We’ve made progress tuning the 2G antenna but haven’t finalized it yet.

This effectively means that developers will be receiving a well-rounded, complete and (to our knowledge) problem-free platform to build their OS releases and applications. These units are much closer to those that end-users will be receiving this and next year. We were hoping to have developers give us one last bit of feedback on the hardware before it enters production and ends up in enthusiasts’ hands. But it is too late for that. The window for PinePhone Brave Heart production is closing very fast due to the upcoming Holidays in the West and, more importantly, the Chinese New Year in January 2020 which shuts down Chinese production lines for over a month. This effectively means that if we didn’t start Brave Heart edition production now, we would find ourselves in no position to deliver any PinePhones until March 2020. Suffice to say, we don’t want to do that. As a result, Brave Heart circuit board assembly is already underway, the molds are pumping out PinePhone chassis and the necessary components have been sourced and are en route to the designated factories.

[edit 06/11/19] Here is a picture of the infused antennas used in the Brave Heart batch

Prototype - photo by Martjin Braam

I don’t want to give you an impression that the Brave Heart PinePhone edition is a rushed or incomplete product - that is not the case. We have carried out extensive in-house testing of prototypes and sent prototype phones to a number of key developers from partner projects. Youtube videos show these prototypes in action - you can search for them online or check out last month’s community update, where I feature some of them. We have addressed all known issues with the hardware and tested software compatibility extensively, both in-house and with our partner-projects. Indeed, this is more testing than we usually do on any other hardware, including flagship devices such as the Pinebook Pro. The extensive testing carried out on the PinePhone is a result of both the complexity of the device as well as our understanding of its importance, which spans far beyond our community.

With that out of the way, I’m happy to announce that the Brave Heart production run of PinePhones will be available for pre-order in 10 days time from the day of publishing this blog entry, on November 15, 2019 at 8:00AM (GMT+0).

Timer on main page counting down to pre-orders opening

So, what can Brave Heart adopters look forward to and what should they be aware of? Let’s talk about the hardware first: the Brave Heart PinePhones will, by and large, be identical to PinePhones produced in 2020 and onwards. This applies to the case molding, PCB, LCD assembly, cooling, as well as various other components making up the phones, including aesthetic ones. These are effectively considered ‘final’. That said, as I already mentioned, we will likely be further tweaking 2G antennas to improve reception of the respective bands and we reserve the right to fix any issues that may be uncovered in the hardware. We do not, however, deem it likely that any major issues will transpire or affect end-users. Still, keep in mind that this batch is called Brave heart for a reason - we’re looking for those brave enough to be the first adopters of this hardware. If bravery is not in your nature, or this isn’t something you’re willing to take a risk on, then please sit this one out and wait until March 2020 to get your production unit.

As for the software, I have nothing but good news to relay. It is my understanding that, with the exception of the front-facing ‘selfie’ camera, all core features of the phone are now functional. Developers still have a lot of software optimisation to do, including voice calls (which are a work-in-progress) and camera functionality, as well as other kernel and userspace parts. To give you a vague sense of where software is at using traditional computer terminology, which most of us can intuitively understand; you can think of the main flagship OSs as first stable ‘beta OS images’. Not everything works, bugs are to be expected, but overall things are really shaping up nicely. In a similar vein to what I wrote regarding the PinePhone Brave Heart hardware - if trying out beta builds isn’t something you enjoy, then please wait until polished OS images become available in Q1 2020. I expect that this is something most users who want an early PinePhone already expect and understand, nonetheless I felt it necessary to underline this so that only those with the right mindset get one of those units.

Finishing off this already lengthy PinePhone section, I completely forgot to mention that Brave Heart schematics and other associated documents have now been made available. I am linking them below for you to view and comment on:

PineTab

[edit 8/11/2019] Vox Populi, Vox Dei. Looks like there is a lot of interest in an early-adopter production run of the PineTab. Subsequently we have decided to make it happen. We still need an suitable OS to emerge however; we hope that news of the production now being underway will help in making this happen.

We’ve made no secret of the fact that the PineTab is currently taking a backseat to the Pinebook Pro and the PinePhone production schedules. That said, we constantly get asked about the PineTab status on the forum, Twitter, Mastodon and elsewhere (even by podcast hosts). Hence, I felt it necessary to provide the community with some general sense of the hardware and software development stages, as well as share our thoughts on a suitable time for starting production. Spoiler alert, we aren’t quite sure as to the latter.

As I mentioned in last month’s community update, we are currently waiting for a suitable OS image to emerge so that we can ship the tablet with it. We also need to make a couple of minor improvements to the hardware itself - we’ve gotten feedback from partner-project developers that the keyboard pogo-pin connector needs to be strengthened and the speaker replaced with a better one. To date, no other major issues have been reported with the prototypes, and so - as I’ve already stated in the past - we can theoretically start production of the PineTab relatively soon. With the Holiday season and Chinese New Year now looming over our production schedules, we’re at the brink of making a decision on whether now is a viable time to start an early adopter production-run. The next couple of days will determine if we find this time feasible or not. I’ll make sure to update this entry when a decision on this subject is reached.

As things stand, we have already settled on the keyboard design that we’ll use for the tablet. It is a really nice chiclet keyboard - at least as far as small form-factor keyboards go - and features sturdy illuminated keys. Similarly to the keyboard you may have seen used with prototypes, it doubles up as complete tablet cover and features a really pu leather (fake leather) finish. We’re really pleased with how it turned out and I am confident in saying that most of you will like it too.

As far as the software is concerned, we’ve got a couple of options available to us. The PineTab has benefited greatly from the amount of development that has gone into the PinePhone. But there is more than mobile OS devs in the development pool. Indeed, there are a number of original Pinebook developers and projects that have taken on the task of developing for the PineTab too. There are a handful of very promising OS images from big and small projects alike, but to my knowledge none that could be defined as ready for prime-time. Some of the OS images feature a traditional desktop environment and are, to a greater or lesser degree, tweaked ports of OS images for the original Pinebook. One such example is Manjaro with KDE - probably the most popular distro on the original Pinebook. From the phone lineage of OSs, there are already builds of Aurora, SaifishOS, Ubuntu Touch and PostmarketOS for the PineTab. I have not tested all of the aforementioned builds and so I cannot speak to their ‘completeness’. Danct12 from PostmarketOS has great showcases of the PineTab development progress, as well as various novelty items related to the tablet, uploaded on his youtube channel. I link some of his videos below.

What do you think, should we run an early adopters batch before the Chinese New Year? I am really eager to hear what you think, so leave a comment under this post with your thoughts on this. Thanks!

Aurora on the PineTab - by Sergey Chupligin (neochapay)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahONNYFLjK4

OpenGL demo on the PineTab - by Danct12

PineTime

Despite development being in its infancy, the PineTime is already running FOSS software. Developers working on the watch deserve a huge shoutout for making so much progress in so little time - it hasn’t even been a month since they received the development kits. There are only so many things that I can keep track of when it comes to development, especially when there are so many things that have to be actively dealt with, so I am not going to pretend I have any real insight into how far devs have gotten. That said, the development process has taken on a striking resemblance to what I’ve seen with the PinePhone, where developers from different backgrounds and walks of life work together in getting the project off the ground. It’s probably corny to write this, but it’s genuinely quite heartwarming to see people bundle around what is effectively a proof-of-concept idea at this time.

Since this is a community driven side-project, we have started considering making the dev-kits available to everyone in the store. In contrast to the PinePhone, which requires expensive and sophisticated development kits, a PineTime development kit is effectively an open watch with a debugger. Therefore, producing more of such kits is relatively simple. At the time of writing, a decision has not been reached yet whether we’ll proceed with making more kits available or not. But there is no denying that there is a lot of interest in this project also from people who want to use the PineTime in novel, interesting and important ways. For instance, we’ve been contacted by researchers from a reputable institution who wish to use the PineTime in a health-related capacity rather than a smartwatch.

I’ll make sure to let you all know how the PineTime project evolves in the coming weeks and months. In the meantime, I leave you with a picture of the PineTime running its first FOSS watchface (and OS).

The PineTime’s first watchface running TinyGo - photo by Ayke van Laethem

This is all for this month, thanks for reading!

October Update: PineTime, Delays and Shipping News

Sat, 05 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This month’s update will be slightly shorter than usual - I have been dealing with some health issues recently, which significantly reduced my time to actively engage with the community. Hopefully I’ll make it up to you in November.

September has been a bitter-sweet month for us. On the one hand, we’ve seen a lot of great developments: the first Pinebook Pros have reached their owners, and the reception has so far been great; core developers have started receiving their PinePhone prototype handsets and dev pre-order coupons have started going out; and we’ve announced the PineTime smartwatch - a companion for the PinePhone and other Linux phones.

On the other hand, (and I have no intention of sugar-coating the situation) things haven’t gone exactly according to plan regarding shipments of developers’ PinePhones and Pinebook Pros for end-users. A series of miscommunications, factory errors as well as just good ‘ol bad luck resulted in dates slipping by a few weeks. To those of you who had to wait for your units and to those whom are still waiting - we apologize for the delay, we’re very sorry. Read on to find out what happened.

[EDIT 18/10/2019] Since writing this blog entry I provided an update on the situation (Pinebook Pro, PinePhone and PineTime dev kits shipping) on the forum. Click here.

Bullet Points:

Pinebook Pro first batch shipping delay causes explained ; we’re sorry
Future shipments 2 weeks delay ; we won’t put shipping staff at risk
Pinebook Pro early adopter feedback very positive ; issues noted and worked on
PinePhone Dev edition delay explained ; prototypes run great
The PineTime ; a side-project with a lot of potential ; community driven
Closing thoughts - are we being stretched thin?

Pinebook Pro shipping delay detailed explanation

Let me give you a run-down of the events that caused the delay in the shipment of Pinebook Pros to customers. The delay was caused by a series of intertwined events, so it’s just appropriate that I list them in chronological order. The first issue we encountered during production was that the Pinebook Pro doesn’t power on with the battery disconnected. This isn’t an issue that will affect the majority of users, but it had to be addressed nonetheless. Finding and implementing a solution (a bypass cable - please see the engineering notice) set us back a few days.

However, the majority of time was lost on the second issue. To understand the problem you first need a little technical background; the RK3399, which is the SOC used in the Pinebook Pro, has a hardwired boot sequence that prioritizes eMMC over SD. This means that, unless the bootloader on the eMMC is altered to seek out bootable SD or USB 2.0/3.0 flash (such as uboot on the Debian + MATE build), the OS residing on eMMC will always boot prior to bootable micro SD or USB 2.0/3.0 flash.

Now here is the problem - the factory we work with is accustomed to carrying out hardware and QC test using a custom Android build. They always flash this build to eMMC modules before completely assembling the devices. This Android build doesn’t have the necessary uboot alterations to prioritize SD or USB bootable storage; as a result, we found ourselves in a position where all the fully assembled Pinebook Pros were running factory Android and there was literally no way to reflash them with Linux without disassembling all the laptops and reflashing them manually. Moreover, the factory uses a proprietary Rockchip utility to install the Android image and is completely unaccustomed to flashing ‘normal’ DD images. Needless to say, solving all problems related to this situation took a very, very long time - over a week in total.

For those interested, I am including our solution to the problem that will be used in future batches. Our offices in China will deliver pre-flashed Debian MATE eMMC modules (since the build features uboot that prioritises SD and USB storage over eMMC) to the factory, and the factory will carry out its tests on the custom Android running from SD. This effectively means that we’ve taken on a part of the production process, which is a burden to our staff but the simplest way to resolve this issue.

The third, and last, technical issue was first found after all units were assembled and moved out of the factory. Someone from the shipping team realised that the laptop emits an annoyingly high pitched noise when charging. This did not affect the operation of the Pinebook Pro, but we were certain that users would be displeased with this imperfection. So, the laptops were brought back to the factory over the weekend and the tiny component making the noise was removed and replaced. The reason for this issue being caught this late is quite simple - the high pitched noise isn’t loud enough to be heard on a factory floor with all sorts of machinery operating. It’s only noticeable at ambient noise levels; e.g. at home with the TV off.

At this point in time we missed our shipping date by weeks, but it was now September 27 and geopolitical events - which I will not discuss or debate here - caused further setbacks. The Pinebook Pros are produced in Shenzhen, mainland China, but ship out from Hong Kong via DHL. This means that our shipping staff needs to make the trip to the Hong Kong storage bay where the Pinebook Pros get picked up for delivery. If you follow global news, then in all likelihood you’re aware that the situation in the region is volatile at the moment. As a result of the situation in China and Hong Kong, only half of the original first production run shipped out. The remaining portion of the first batch will be shipped in the next couple of days, after the week-long national holiday comes to an end, and (hopefully) things calm down slightly.

Before I wrap this section up let me assure you that we will not expose our shipping staff to situations where their life or wellbeing could be jeopardised. I hope this decision is self-evident, and that we can all agree this it is the only sensible course of action. This also means that if the situation in the region will remain unstable, then future shipping dates may slip too.

Future Pinebook Pro shipments, early reception and feedback

The current delay in delivering early Pinebook Pros has pushed our dispatch dates for the second (community) and third (public) batch slightly forward. Granted that production and shipping processes are not impacted by the unrest in the region, we will be shipping these two batches collectively at the end of October or in early November. With most issues ironed out during the production of the first batch, I trust it should be relatively smooth sailing from this point on. Famous last words, I know. Based on feedback from early adapters, it seems that there are no glaring or core experience hampering issues we need to address at this point in time, and the minor things users have found should all be fixed swiftly. As always, I’ll keep you posted on how things progress on the forums and chats, as well as on Twitter and Mastodon.

Right now we are aiming to open up the next round of pre-orders on the day that the second and third batch ship out to end-users. I can currently only offer a guess as to when this will be - likely sometime between October 25 and November 4.

Before wrapping this section up, let me discuss end-user reception and feedback. I am happy to say that Pinebook Pro reception has been overwhelmingly positive. There is an entire thread dedicated to people’s early impressions of the Pinebook Pro, which I encourage all of you to read - especially if you’re on the fence if you want one for yourself. Let me add that I am impressed with the quality of the feedback thus far - it has been on-point and constructive. I am actively monitoring the information flooding in on the forums and chats, and from what I’ve gathered the grand majority of users are impressed with the hardware and happy with the default software. This is obviously a huge relief to us. A number of people have already posted pictures and youtube videos of their Pinebook Pro running and showcasing its various features, so I am posting them below for all of you to check out.

User submitted pictures (by Mrfixit2001 & kunger)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sm4DEGP-qIE

Quick unboxing video

That said, there appear to be some minor problems with additional hardware and the keyboard firmware. Let’s start with hardware: reports indicated that the optional PCIe-NVMe adapter can push the trackpad up-and-out of the chassis if a NVMe SSD is too thick or the adapter is installed incorrectly. It will take us some time to replicate this and figure out what can be done; I don’t have a solution for this from the top of my head. My guess is that it is caused by the thickness of particular NVMe drives, in which case we’ll have to compile a list of drives that fit inside the Pinebook Pro chassis. We’ll try things out on our end and let you know. Onto trackpad/keyboard firmware: we’re aware that under particular circumstances the trackpad/keyboard firmware can misbehave causing delayed input. From my testing, it seems to be a relatively rare occurrence, but when it happens it is indeed quite annoying. Thankfully, we have the source code for the utility used to alter and patch the keyboard firmware - it was open sourced to us by the keyboard vendor. We’re in the process of building and testing this utility on ARM. Rest assured that this is an issue that we’ll solve in the future, and it should be a relatively painless process for end-users to get the firmware patched. The utility has a simple GUI, all you need to do is press ‘START’ and wait for the software to run its course installing the keyboard/ trackpad firmware binary.

PinePhone prototypes and developer pre-orders

Last month we opened PinePhone pre-orders for developers intention to have them shipped by now. However, right before assembling complete prototypes we received word from partner-project developers who already had core PinePhone components, that the digitizer has issues with registering swipe-motions. Based on this information we were forced to hold off on starting production and turned to another vendor for a suitable digitizer replacement for the PinePhone. Sadly, the time it took to deliver and test the new part was long enough that we were unable to complete prototype production before the current Chinese National week-long holiday, which is ending on Monday October 8th. This is another case of bad luck we ran into last month. Despite the unfortunate delay in assembling the phones, we are happy that this flaw was found prior to the devices being shipped out.

But it is hardly all doom and gloom. We’ve tested the hardware last week and are now positive that the new digitizers work well. This means that the PinePhones for developers can be built once the aforementioned holiday finishes next week. The pre-order coupons for approved developers have now started going out and will keep on being dispatched until the end of next week, and possibly even further into the future. I’ve seen numerous reports that people have gotten their coupons already. Some of you who follow us on social media may have also already seen that a handful of key developers, whom we’ve been working with since the very start of the project, have gotten their prototypes ahead of the holidays. In fact, Martijn from PostmarketOS even built his unit on camera for all of you to enjoy. Check out the video below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyeD1sfQNoM&t=1s

Building a PinePhone Prototype and running PostmarketOS

The initial feedback from those who got their hands on the PinePhone prototypes has been great. Marius from UBPorts shared a video showing that the prototype with the new digitizer not only looks great but also runs Ubuntu Touch very well. It’s noteworthy that both PostmarketOS shown in Martijn’s video, and Ubuntu Touch in Marius’ video run the open-source Lima driver. This means that UI performance will only improve with time as the Lima driver gets polished and improved upon. From the videos circulating online you can also see that most of the core features now work flawlessly on many available OSs. Even browsing the web and watching youtube already works very well on most systems; I recently tested a recent build of LuneOS, and I was completely blown away by how much of the core functionality is already in a mature state. The prototype isn’t completely problem-free however, and the remaining bits and bobs will need to be addressed before production of the Brave Heart editions starts in late October. I’ll keep you posted.

Note: This image preview protects your privacy. Click to load the video from the Google servers.

Ubuntu Touch running smooth on the PinePhone

Ubuntu Touch on the PinePhone

The PineTime

Finally some truly good news - the PineTime. I’ll immodestly take the credit for the start of this project, since I pushed for us to explore the potential for creating a FOSS smartwatch for some time now. After initial talks, we quickly agreed that the PineTime should be a side-project (like the CUBE FOSS camera), completely community driven and positioned as a complementary device to the PinePhone. Therefore, rather than looking into creating a complex device (which would be cool too! - it’s something we may look into in the future), we opted to make a simple and inexpensive smartwatch based on a FOSS friendly SOC. To this end, we quickly determined that the core functionality of the watch should be similar to that of the Pebble, but with some modern functionality, such as a colour LCD touch screen and a heart rate monitor.

Early on in the planning process we also decided on using a square watch chassis for the PineTime. We had a choice of a few form factors, including a round-one, but decided to proceed with an unassuming and simple design. The main reason for the choice of square chassis, however, is not the looks but rather ease of development. Simply put, it’s easier to develop an OS using a square display. It was a safer choice from a development standpoint, especially when taking into account that entire OSs need to be built, or ported to, the PineTime watch. Apart from the display and SOC choices, we also had a few other criteria in mind: the watch had to have multi-day battery (a week at minimum), feature a touch panel, be waterproof and lightweight. We have started writing up the Wiki for the PineTime, so if you want to learn more technical details of the watch you know where to find them. I’m including some prototype pictures below.

Prototype on wrist

Development kit

Charging dock

Internals exposed

The core idea behind the PineTime is to have a simple and open-source watch that connects to your Linux smartphone. It will push notifications from your phone to your wrist, inform you of incoming calls, help you keep track of your activity, but it won’t attempt to replace your smartphone. Not to mention that it will not need to be recharged every day - we currently aim at a 10 day battery life. I trust that many of you feel that this is the correct approach to creating a wearable device, and I hope that developers will offer an interesting range of systems and front-ends to run on it. We have now assigned all dev kits to developers who contacted us and will start production of the kits this month. We cannot wait to see what people and the community will be able to do with the little device.

There is one last bit worth touching upon in relation to the PineTime. A smartwatch of this type requires a companion app on the smartphone. This effectively means that PineTime developers will have to work together with - or at the very least get help from - Linux-on-Phone developers to bring apps to the different OS platforms. Then there is the question of creating a companion app for Android phones, since I am sure many users relying on open variants of Android will be interested in the PineTime too. As I’ve already mentioned, this is a project which we’ll leave with the community - it will be ready when it’s ready, be it in 3 or 6 months, or even a year. On our end, we’re ready to start production of the watch as early as January 2020.

As for pricing, we are presently aiming for a price point of approx. $20. The price includes the watch and a charging dock. We decided on selling the 20mm watch-straps separately, since most people have their own preferences of style, and hope to carry a wide selection at launch. These straps will vary in price, starting at approx $3 for regular silicone sports straps. You can obviously pick up any standard 20mm watch straps on your own, they will most likely fit the PineTime.

Closing thoughts

We’ve heard community members as well as podcast hosts express a concern that ‘we’re stretching ourselves thin’ with respect to all the projects that we have in the pipeline. This is not completely accurate, please let me explain. We’re not stretched thin from a production, manufacturing or financial standpoint. The Pinebook Pro, the PinePhone and the PineTime are all produced by different factories and the work on these devices is carried out by separate engineering teams. Hence, it is not true that a delay in the shipping of one device will necessitate the delay of another device; to use the events of last month as an example, the delay in Pinebook Pro production and shipment last month had nothing to do with the delay in shipping out PinePhones to developers. As I have outlined in earlier sections of this community update, these situations were purely an unfortunate coincidence.

That said, we - the people end-users and factory representatives have contact with on a daily basis, as well as the people behind logistics - are indeed stretched thin due to the workload brought about by manufacturing delays. I think I have some 30 emails still sitting unanswered in my mailbox, not because I didn’t want to answer them but rather because I’ve been busy doing other things that are more urgent. When everything runs smoothly, productiontion and shipments are timely, the number of devices produced doesn’t impact our workload. Its first when things go South that we get overwhelmed. With Murphy’s law in full effect last month, we did ‘get stretched thin’ because we had to deal with multiple issues at the same time.

We’ve now placed some of the secondary projects on temporary hold - at least until we ship the PinePhone Brave Heart and October Pinebook Pro batches. This clears out a little bit of space for us to deal with any unforeseen events related to these projects. At the same time, don’t worry, we’ve got a lot of cool stuff coming in early 2020 - including the PineTab.

That wraps it up for this month. Thanks to all of you guys who are there cheering us on, it really makes a difference.

September Update: The PinePhone is real & shipping soon

Thu, 05 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Picture of a PinePhone prototype running Plasma Mobile

Let’s start with a quick recap of last month’s events: the Pinebook Pro went into production, software development on the PineTab started, we announced the SOEdge AI module and introduced our initiative for giving back to PinePhone Linux developers during the community meetup in London. This, however, is hardly everything. Let me segue into the core topic of this month’s update, namely the PinePhone. Behind the scenes prototype PinePhone PCBs and chassis have been produced and undergone extensive testing. With the testing now completed, we made the decision to manufacture a small batch of PinePhones for developers. We have also scheduled two larger production-runs, which will be open to early adopters later this year.

So, without further ado, I am hereby happy to announce that the first PinePhones have now entered production and will start shipping to developers this month. As you probably already gathered from this brief introduction there is a lot to cover, so let’s get started.

Bullet Points

Donating to PinePhone devs ; contributing to solving digital divide
Pinebook Pro shipping schedule ; engineering notice ; privacy switches & ‘PINE64’ logo key
PinePhone prototypes ship to developers this month ; 8 months since announcement, years in planning
PinePhone shipping timeline for 2019 & beyond ; “Brave Heart” editions ; 2020 large-scale production
PinePhone hardware overview ; PinePhone vs dev kit; new LCD+ TP ; aluminium alloy infusion ; quick charge
PinePhone software status & progress report

Housekeeping

We recently announced that we’ll be donating $10 from each PinePhone sold to Linux-on-Phone projects working with us. If you haven’t done so yet, I strongly suggest you read the original announcement. In short, we intend to have OS-specific campaigns - complete production-runs with a particular OS pre-installed as well as stylised phones - but also a permanent system allowing users to select directly which project we should donate to. We wish for the donation process to be both transparent and, in the spirit of our community, also completely open. This means having the donations software hosted on GitHub/ GitLab for anyone to view, review and contribute to. If you’re interested in helping out in making this happen then please reach out to fire219 on the forum or in the chats.

During the meetup we also announced that we’ll do our share to contribute to closing the digital divide. Let me give you a short run-down of how it will work: money from the sales of soft cases for the PinePhone will be funneled into production of original 11.6” Pinebooks for those in need of a computer. I’ll be speaking to people in the community as well as notable persons in the broader Linux universe in the coming months to set up a panel that will put forth proposals, discuss them and subsequently vote on where the Pinebooks should be donated to. This initiative will start with the first public production-run of PinePhones; more information will follow once I have members of the panel lined up. I’d like to note this is a community initiative and therefore also completely open for all to participate in by sending in proposals, interacting with the panel as well as having insight into the panel’s workings.

Community meetup - sunny day in London 18 August, 2019

Pinebook Pro: Shipping dates, ‘PINE64’ logo key and software updates

Before proceeding to discuss the PinePhone there are some Pinebook Pro news, which I think ought to be covered first. Let’s start with the shipping dates; the first community pre-orders will start shipping mid-September, followed by the public pre-orders in October. Please note that these dates are subject to change - if something changes you’ll be notified ASAP. A wide range of things can affect production at this early stage - as an example, we recently discovered that the Pinebook Pro does not power on from mains with the battery disconnected from the mainboard. Whilst this will not affect the great majority of users, a suitable workaround still had to be determined and implemented to mitigate the issue. Working out such things takes time and results in shipping dates slipping - thankfully, in the case described above, everything got sorted in a matter of a couple of days. A bypass cable, disconnected by default, has been added to the mainboard. In the event the laptop is required to run on mains power with the battery disconnected the cable needs to be joined; please read the engineering notice.

Onto the ‘PINE64’ logo key and its functionality. Before the community pre-orders began in July we announced that the Pinebook Pro will include privacy switches. In the same post I discussed the feedback we received regarding our decision not to brand the laptop, which prompted us to include a subtle touch in the form of a ‘PINE64’ logo key on the keyboard. Since then there was a lot of back-and-forth discussion regarding the functionality of the key. Eventually we put 2 and 2 together and reached a logical decision - the ‘PINE64’ logo key now functions as a regular Super key unless pressed down with F10, F11 and F12 key for 3 seconds. Pressing the combinations above will disable/ re-enable the laptop’s microphones, the WiFi/BT module and the webcam. We feel that this is a natural fit for the ‘PINE64’ logo key and its function, and we hope you feel the same way. Since we’re already talking about changes to hardware, and I have nowhere else to fit this piece of information, I am happy to let you know that the Pinebook Pro’s webcam has been updated to a 1080p cam; I’m sure that some of you will appreciate this.

Lastly, I want to discuss software related things. In the recent weeks ayufan has pushed a number of OS images for the RockPro64, the Rock64 and also the Pinebook Pro, which includes a very long list of improvements that result in great functionality and performance. A choice of Ubuntu with MATE desktop or LXDE as well as a great-performing build of Chromium OS will be available for you to try on day one. The default Debian with MATE desktop, which ships with the Pinebook Pro has also received a lot of development hours since the OS image was shipped to the factory. The list of improvements is quite lengthy so if you’re interested make sure to read the update-log here. The one truly vital improvement made is a patched U-Boot (pending feedback from early adopters), which alters the Pinebook Pro’s default boot sequence. This means that now the Pinebook Pro will boot OS images on the SD card and USB 2.0 / USB 3.0 ports prior to the onboard eMMC. It’s a simple way to try out other OS’, such as those offered by ayufan, without committing to wiping your current installation. To get this and the numerous other features please make sure to update your system using the included utility on first boot (please reference the update-log).

The ‘PINE64’ logo key and privacy F-row keys

The PinePhone now exists

It has only been 8 months since we announced the PinePhone at FOSDEM 2019, but the idea of creating a FOSS Linux phone has been with us for years. Indeed the phone topic was first discussed in 2017 over a pint of beer at a pub in Brussels during FOSDEM of that year. I remember TL brought with him a tablet chassis and talked about how we could have an A64-based device ecosystem: a SBC, a SODIMM module, a laptop, a tablet and a phone, all of which would run mainline Linux on a common platform. Soon after, however, the creation of a phone was deemed too complex and expensive. Looking back I think we felt it would be an undertaking that would deplete all of our energy and resources, which at the time were being pumped into Rock64 and RockPro64 development. The phone discussion resumed last year once all SBCs that were in the pipeline hit the market. Having done some research on mobile Linux operating systems, on October 2018 I joined UBPorts and started talks with the project developers. It wasn’t long after that I wrote to TL: “These guys seems really friendly and (…) I think they are up for it”. We have since established contact and welcomed into the fold all major Linux-on-phone projects, whom are now collectively working towards making the PinePhone the best device it can be. Only 11 months after committing to creating a mobile phone, the first PinePhones are now being assembled at the factory. I dare say, this is no small feat for a reasonably small and community driven project.

Developer pre-orders are now live and it won’t be long before core enthusiasts get their hands on the PinePhone too. This is just the start of our journey with the PinePhone, but with both software and hardware progressing at Warp 10 speed I am confident that in early 2020 everyone interested in a Linux phone will be able to purchase one.

PinePhone with battery inserted

PinePhone without battery + back cover off

Developer pre-orders September 2019

These PinePhones are prototypes and are aimed solely at developers. More specifically, we intend for these early units to find their way into the hands of developers with extensive Linux experience and an interest in Linux-on-phone. Sorry app developers, tinkerers and end-users, you will have to wait a little longer. Due to the very limited number of these prototype phones available at this time, the pre-orders will be made on a bespoke basis. In this way we can ensure that each and single unit goes out to someone who can contribute to the project at its current stage and help us deliver the software for the first public production-runs.

Regarding the actual hardware; the phones are nearly identical to units that will ship later this year and in early 2020. I write ‘nearly identical since the antenna calibration hasn’t been completed as of yet and there may be additional tweaks to the PCB design based on the feedback we’ll receive in the coming weeks. As for the software, this edition of the PinePhone will ship with a custom OS built for debugging hardware on the PinePhone. It is meant as a reference point which can be used during development. All relevant information pertaining to the build will, of course, also be available for those interested. The greatest resource of all, the developers themselves, are readily available in the chats and we expect to see the owners of these early PinePhones joining them in the near future.

Main page dev pre-order widget at the time of writing

“Brave Heart” editions in October 2019 and beyond

We are planning on having two early adopter production-runs this year. We chose to call these two batches the “Brave Heart” editions, since no complete OS images will be available at the time of shipping. So, in other words, these production-runs are only for those of you whom are brave enough to buy a device without a fully functional OS. Rest assured that we will make sure information about the state of software is front-and-center at the time of shipping. These two production runs will be geared towards the bleeding edge enthusiasts who also wish to contribute to development by debugging, testing builds and offering feedback. These phones will ship without an OS preinstalled - we expect that people who will pick up a Brave Heart edition will want to hold off from flashing any OS to the eMMC in favor of trying out weekly or daily builds on SD cards. A pre-flashed OS would be significantly outdated by the time it would end up in users hands anyways. The turn-over time for builds is presently quite fast and I expect this pace will keep up for quite some time, especially with detailed bug reports from early adopters pouring in.

We are planning on starting the production line on mid-October, just over a month from now. Pre-orders for the Brave Heart edition will start around the same time and will be open to all. This batch of PinePhones is scheduled to be delivered in November. The second batch will be built the following month, on 15 November, and will be delivered to end-users some time before Christmas. Please keep in mind that these dates are tentative and we may instead opt to pool together the two production-runs into a larger batch in early-to-mid October. This schedule depends on the feedback we receive from developers and their experience with pre-production units. A commercial-scale production of PinePhones has currently been scheduled for March 2020. By this point in time we expect to have - at the very least - one end-user ready OS image with all core functionality.

PinePhone Hardware

I’ll divide this section into a discussion on the PCB and the body of the phone. I’ll also touch on the notable differences between the development kits and the PinePhone. Let me get the differences between the phone and the dev kit out of the way first. The things that I’ll list may seem obvious to many of you, but I will go over them anyways, since I’ve recently been made aware they aren’t immediately apparent to everyone interested in the project. As I already mentioned, the form factor of the kit and phone PCBs is different as the design had to be shrunk down to something that would fit inside a phone chassis. The dev kit is also modular, with the individual parts being detachable from the mainboard, while the phone has most of the key components permanently soldered onto the PCB. While a modular phone is conceptually very cool, it is rather impractical and significantly increases the manufacturing complexity, and thus also the cost of the device. Lastly there is the question of physical space that components take up; phone chassis are rather cramped, so having a modular design effectively means having a thick phone. For the same reason, the full-sized Ethernet and HDMI ports found on the dev kits didn’t find their way into the actual handset either. I’d like to note, however, that both video-out and Ethernet functionality is achievable via the USB-C port on the phone. The last and most important difference is the touchscreen used on the actual phone. The LCD display is slightly larger at 6” and the touch panel includes a drastically better high-precision driver.

Left PinePhone // Right development kit (v1.2)

We have also made some significant improvements to the phone’s chassis since the original design was publicly unveiled. The inner section of the plastic body has since been infused with an aluminum alloy and tooled to be compatible with an existing 3000mAh big-brand battery. Having the body infused with an aluminum alloy serves two purposes: it significantly strengthens the core structure of the phone and improves component heat dissipation. With metal now being an integral part of the assembly, the PinePhone also feels considerably more sturdy in the hand. The entire inner construction of the phone, and most of the components, are held in place using standard Phillips-head screws. Very little adhesive is used on components that are not soldered onto the main PCB such as the cameras, so removing these parts is also pretty straightforward. The detachable back panel - which covers the privacy switches, pogo pins and the removable battery - is made of a durable soft-touch plastic. Subjectively speaking, it’s nice to the touch and attract fewer greasy fingerprints than glass or metal. Taking the phone apart is achievable by anyone and should take no longer than 5 minutes from start to finish. This time estimate excludes the LCD+touch panel, which I suggest end-users do not attempt to disassemble; it is possible, but requires some finesse.

Case with aluminum alloy infusion (prototype)

PinePhone mainboard + daughterboard (prototype)

Onto the last point on my list, namely the PCBs used in the phone. The mainboard is an 8-layer Blind Via PCB, and it is the most complex PINE64 design to date. There is also a smaller daughterboard, which is connected to the mainboard using a ribbon cable, that houses the microphone and USB-C port. The USB-C port on the PinePhone does not only support alternate mode video out and data, but also 3A 5V quick charge (follows USB PD spec) when using a compatible charger. The Allwinner A64 SOC, powering the PinePhone, and Quectel EG25-G modem are placed on opposite sides of the mainboard, with the A64 facing inwards. The A64 makes contact with metal on the LCD back-plate via a thermal pad. This solution provides ample heat dissipation, even under load. All components on the mainboard are covered by a removable metal shroud (not in picture above), which is similar to those found on the Pinebook and Pinebook Pro. The mainboard is covered and held in place using the internal structure of the phone’s body, but leaves the following components and ports exposed: I2C pogo pins, privacy switches, SIM card as well as micro SD card sockets. Access to all the above is fast and easy, and only requires you to pull off the back cover of the PinePhone, which pops easily using a fingernail or the edge of a credit card.

Compared to modern big-brand smartphones the PinePhone is remarkably simple, and we trust this is a good thing. Repairing and maintaining the phone is straightforward and achievable by anyone with a screwdriver and patience. Batteries for the phone can be had for under $10 online throughout the world and we’ll be stocking replacement parts as soon as larger-scale production starts next year. Before we move onto software, let me say that this isn’t the end of updates to PinePhone hardware; as it has always been the case with PINE64, we’re continually looking to improve currently listed specs. More surprises are in the store for this device so make sure to check the PinePhone spec-sheet closer to public-release date.

PinePhone Software

I am happy to report that a tremendous amount of progress has been made on the PinePhone software in the past month. Most notably perhaps we’ve got our first glimpse at the Ubuntu Touch build on the PinePhone, which I know many of you have been looking forward to seeing. As I’ve mentioned in the past - and on more than one occasion - I am not the most competent person to assess software. That said, even I can tell when something is running well; and yes, the Ubuntu Touch build that I’ve gotten to experiment with runs really quite smoothly. The animations are fluid, applications now launch and the overall experience is massively improved over my past experiences. Moreover, mobile and wireless connectivity are now also functional. Below is a clip from Marius (UBPorts) showing the UI running snappily as he toggles between the different GUI elements. That isn’t to say that the build is production ready, but it’s coming along very quickly and will likely be one of the launch OSs. I will wait for another month or so, and give Marius and Nikita a bit more time with the build before I showcase it on the PINE64 youtube channel. It will, however, be the first thing I load up on my pre-production PinePhone when I get it next month.

https://vimeo.com/357951065

Video by Marius Gripsgard from UBPorts

Similarly, the PostmarketOS Plasma Mobile build also works quite well. Animations are smooth, applications start as they should and even little things such as the brightness slider are functional. Sadly the build currently suffers from an issue allowing it to only run properly on the first boot - on subsequent reboots the UI errors out and only displays a black screen. I am told this is a problem which is not isolated to the PinePhone dev kit, but affect all supported devices. Apart from this error, there are also a few lesser issues, most of which are related to the Lima GPU driver. This build too has undergone very significant improvements over the course of last two months. Until very recently, many of the UI elements were incorrectly rendered as transparent and applications did not launch. If you are interested in seeing Plasma run on the PinePhone then please make sure to check out Martijn Braam’s youtube channel, where he demos WIP builds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8V711Iordo4

PostmarketOS running Plasma Mobile by Martijn Braam

I also had a chance to get my first hands-on experience with SailfishOS this month, and I was very positively surprised by how well it runs. My surprise stems from the fact that the UI has always appeared to me to be quite intricate and complex, which had me believe that it was more resource hungry than other OSs. It also uses experimental Lima drivers as opposed to the (currently faster) mali blob. Thankfully when swiping between tabs, opening applications and scrolling through the settings menu I was greeted by smooth OS functions. Adam and Dylan have posted videos showing the performance of the OS that I am including in this post for you to check out. It is my understanding that most of the functionality already available in other OS builds is also present in SailfishOS. I now have high hopes for SailfishOS on our platform, and I hope that the large and thriving community behind this OS will appreciate the unique feature set that the PinePhone brings to the table.

https://vimeo.com/357952216https://vimeo.com/357952026

Videos by Adam Pigg and Dylan Van Assche from SailfishOS

I did not try out LuneOS this month, in part because I’ve already done so recently and know that it runs very well on our hardware. I spoke to Tofe, the LuneOS developer behind the builds, and he told me that a lot of progress has been made recently. LuneOS currently expects to have an early release available within a month’s time. Functionality of this early release will have to be confirmed on the developer PinePhone, but LuneOS ran well on the dev kit hardware and so any negative performance changes are unlikely. I also reached out to Wizzup from Maemo Leste asking for a development progress report. Maemo Leste has been working on their phone and cellular support in recent months. Below is a screenshot showing off their cellular status applet (showing signal strength and access technology) and operator name applet (showing the operator name - KPN). Setting up a cellular data connection, which is automatically provisioned is now also possible. Sending and receiving SMSes also works using Empathy and Telepathy-ring - the attached screenshot shows the PinePhone-side of the affairs with Maemo Leste receiving SMS messages. Maemo Leste also have a (long) update post of the various software improvements I suggest you read here.

](/blog/images/es/MaemoLeste2.png)

Screenshots by Merlijn (Wizzup) Wajer. Left UI with visible networking // Right SMS on PinePhone development kit

I get the sense that everything is coming together in a rather fast and orderly fashion. Modem functionality is also coming along very well. Developers are planning on debugging remaining modem-related issues - some of which prevent phone calls from working properly - this month and they are positive that everything will be working soon. Phone calls aside, both GPS and LTE data already work, and SMS messages have already been sent and received from the development kit on most OSs. I have tested WiFi myself on more than one build and it functions properly, as do a number of sensors on the development kit, including the gyro and ambient light sensor. For those keen to learn of all the details, you can check the PMOS bug tracker that details what has already been implemented and confirmed as working. I am not certain if this bug tracker is representative of the majority of PinePhone OS images, it may very well not be, but it certainly gives you an idea about overall progress and state of software. In a nutshell, software is getting close but it still has some way to go.

That’s all for now, stay tuned to this blog as well as Twitter + Mastodon for more news in the coming weeks!

Its time to start giving back

Mon, 19 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

PINE64’s commitment to giving back to the community, partner projects and the society has been outlined by TL Lim during our community meetup in Hyde Park, London on 18 August, 2018.

No one has ever become poor by giving ~ Anne Frank

Free as in a bird, not as a beer. Libre and not gratis. We all understand this concept while simultaneously appreciating that open source software is, for the most part, also free of charge to regular end-users. By relying on donations and sponsorships to make revenue and keep the light on, most projects maintain a low barrier to entry for new and prospectus users. Anyone with a computer and an internet connection can readily use just about any Linux or *BSD operating system, as well as any open software these OS’ run. Not to mention that anyone is welcome to study, contribute to and alter the said software. I know that I am preaching to the choir but FOSS is amazing. That said, these are hardly the only reasons for using open source software. For a sizable number of people, the payment-free model also means access to good and viable alternatives to proprietary software, which may be financially out of reach. I myself, as an undergrad student in the early 2000’s, resorted to using OpenOffice - not for ideological reasons, but rather because I couldn’t afford the MS Office Suite.

That said, projects need money to sustain the development process and, ultimately, the software they deliver free of charge to end-users. Much has already been written on the subject of sustainability of FOSS projects by people more knowledgeable than myself, so if you’re interested in the subject matter then search for FOSS financial sustainability. In a nutshell, keeping a FOSS project financially sustainable is very difficult; In the words of Andre Staltz, data shows “(…) that open source creators and maintainers are receiving low income” and “[t]his is not the first time [in history] hard-working honest people are giving their all, for unfair compensation”. The statistics vary vastly, but it is estimated that only a marginal fraction (approx 0.0001%) of people who ever, at any point in their life, used open source software have donated any amount of money to a project. It comes as no surprise then that even very large projects, such as Linux Mint, receive monthly donations that average $13K ($24k max / 7k min) from their user-base.

The question then arises, how can we do our share for the projects we work with? (by ‘we’ I mean both Pine Microsystems and PINE64 community). All of PINE64 hardware relies on community software and third-party projects, but the one piece of hardware that is solely supported by third-party projects is the PinePhone. Since the PinePhone is an experimental project in its own right, we decided to also make it a testing ground for an idea we’ve had for some time now. From the very start of the PinePhone project we were clear that we wish to work with existing and well established Linux-on-phone projects. This decision stemmed from a firm belief in these projects competences and our ability to deliver a true FOSS phone. To this end, we have now made the decision to relay all revenue from PinePhone sales to the development community and third-party Linux-on-phone projects. In doing so we hope that, on the one hand, this will help Linux-on-phone projects grow and prosper, and on the other, entice developers to commit their time to PinePhone development.

Before proceeding let me just state the following: if this model works, and all parties involved are happy with it, then it is likely to be implemented for other similar devices in the future.

How it’ll work

Unlike many of PINE64 products that bring in no revenue (for instance, the Pinebook and Pinebook Pro) the PinePhone has an ‘in-built’ profit of ~$10 per unit. I provide the USD value as an approximation due to fluctuations of component prices and other market variables which there is no control over. It is exactly the $10 sum, per unit sold, that we wish to donate to the partner projects working on the PinePhone. Just to make it clear, the $149 will always be the final price for end-users and no-one will be asked donate money. As it were, we’re making the donation on your behalf.

We seek to make financial contributions in two ways. Please note, that only PinePhones sold in the PINE Store will be subject to the points below:

1) Via OS promotion campaigns (large).

2) Allowing users to indicate directly which project they wish the money to go to (small).

Lets start with the first of the two options. Once a partner project decides that an OS build for the PinePhone has been completed, and we too are satisfied with the OS image, then an entire PinePhone production run will be flashed with the OS build in question. We may also end up customizing the PinePhone for each campaign with project-specific phone’s covers, as well as include the project’s stickers, etc., so as to make each campaign truly feels OS-specific. Lets say, to make the math simple, we produce a batch of 1000 PinePhones for one of the projects. So, with 1000 units sold, the donation made to the project will amount to USD $10,000. Depending on the project size, its existing install-base of users, as well as general level of interest in the PinePhone, these batches may be significantly larger or smaller. Let me also assure you that we will ensure that the entire process, from start to finish, is both clear and transparent to the end-users making the purchase during the campaign period.

The second way in which we wish to contribute to partner projects is by giving you - the end-users - the option to indicate which Linux-on-phone project should receive the $10 from your PinePhone purchase in the PINE Store. Each partner project will be assigned a code that you’ll be asked to key in (if you so choose) when completing your PinePhone purchase. To make the process completely transparent, and so that there are no speculations about how the system works, we will likely list the help of community developers to build it. The source for the system will, subsequently, also be uploaded to github or gitlab for anyone to view, study and alter (if need be). But what happens with the $10 if no project is indicated at check-out? - the answer is that the money will go to a PINE64 community fund. This will allow us to help send community members to conferences, support community initiatives and activities, and much, much more.

There is more: contributing to closing the digital gap

But wait! there is more. We are also making our contribution to closing the digital gap - a term used to describe the inequality of access to a computer, internet and technology of underprivileged individuals or groups. It may be inconceivable to many of you, but access to a computer, to secure and sophisticated software, as well as the Internet remains a privilege of less than half of humanity. And the number of children with regular access to a computer worldwide is just a measly 19%. While not as important as access to fresh water, food, shelter or electricity, access to a computer has a substantially positive effect on individuals and thus also the communities they inhabit. A recent UN report has outlined that providing school-age children with a computer correlated directly with improved literacy rates, access to further education, financial independence (particularly important in the case of girls and young women) and perhaps most importantly safety (in many less economically developed countries, children access the internet and do homework at internet cafes. Travel to-and-from the internet cafes, as well as the cafes themselves, frequently exposes children to potential danger).

Enter the Pinebook - an ideal laptop for distribution as an aid in closing the digital divide. It is inexpensive, sturdy and durable as well as simple in design, which effectively means that it can be repaired by anyone with limited resources. All that is needed to access the Pinebook’s internals is a Philips screwdriver, and in the event of a component failure spare parts can be had for a very small fee. Moreover, despite its low cost, the Pinebook has all the basic networking and connectivity one would require for basic tasks, allows for a wide array of software to run on it, has a very long battery-life as well as reaps all the benefits of running open source software.

How will this be achieved?

Our commitment to closing the digital gap will start with the PinePhone launch. There will be two types of covers available for the PinePhone in the PINE Store - a soft rubber cover (likely transparent) and a hard plastic one. The following refers to the soft covers sold in the PINE Store only. The final pricing for the cover isn’t set in stone yet, but I expect that it should be in the $10 range. All revenue from this soft cover will go to a only sole purpose: funding Pinebooks used in our initiative to help close the digital gap. The math is simple, but let me outline it anyways; 10 soft PinePhone covers sold in the PINE Store ‘buys’ one Pinebook for someone in need. You get your PinPhone cover and someone in need gets a Pinebook, what’s not to like?

How will you decide whom to send the Pinebooks to?

We intend to make this a community process. Details are still being worked out, but I envision having community members submit suggestions for people and places, charities and institutions, existing projects dealing with the digital divide, etc., that would either directly benefit from using Pinebooks or help with their distribution. In time there may be an advisory body consisting of PINE64 community members as well as notable people from the broader Linux community, whom will be tasked with weighing in on the proposals and put them to a vote. We’ll see how it goes. If you have any suggestions regarding this subject matter then please make sure to share your thoughts in the comments section.

Lastly, if you are a developer or represent an existing education-focused project, and would like to tailor an OS build for the Pinebook then make sure to get in touch with me.

August Update: London Meetup, PineTab News, SOEdge and More!

Mon, 05 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000

PineTab development prototype

July has been a busy month for all members of the PINE64 project. Between the updates to various systems, preparation of Pinebook Pro pre-orders and the subsequent launch, shipping of PineTab development kits as well as production of the PinePhone prototype, there has been little to no downtime. To this end I wish to publicly thank fireTwoOneNine for doing a hell of a job helping out, troubleshooting problems and setting up the systems necessary to keep the wheels turning. An awesome job and a huge thank you. Here is what is on this month’s update agenda:

We’re meeting up in London - join us!
Just the Wiki left to do - help wanted
PineTab is up and running! ; getting an illuminated keyboard
Pinebook Pro pre-orders sum-up ; public pre-orders 25 August
PinePhone prototype this month ; software coming along
SOEdge AI module

Meetup in London

We’re having a casual meetup in London on August 18, noon (12:00) at Serpentine Bar & Kitchen located in Hyde Park. We’ll have a few things with us (including a Pinebook Pro prototype) to show and toy around with. We will also share information about new and upcoming devices at the meetup - as always we’re very keen to hear your feedback regarding what we’re doing. If the weather is good then we can sit outside in the sun; it not, well, then we can sit inside and later head out to the closest pub. So if you live in London, or otherwise able to make the journey, then we’re looking forward to meeting you in person. Everyone is welcome.

Housekeeping

In June I wrote that the next things on our community to-do agenda are the chats and Wiki. Let’s start with the prior - we have now improved the way in which the various chat protocols are bridged and, after a few hiccups, everything seems to be running smoothly *knocks on wood*. There are now also Telegram groups for Pine64, Rock64, PinePhone and Pinebook (Pro) that have been linked to their Discord, IRC and Matrix counterparts. They’ve been added the the community tab on the website. In a nutshell, you now have more ways to communicate with each-other and it’s all interlinked in a neater way. If you haven’t joined in as of yet, then consider doing so as much information shared in the chat never reaches the forum.

Onto the subject of the Wiki. This is the last item on our community ‘fix-and-improve’ itinerary, and something that has been in the back of my mind for well over a year. Similarly to many other things in the PINE64 project, the idea behind the Wiki is that the community runs and maintains it. Whilst handing over control of much of the project to the community - the website, forum, chats, etc., - has been a great idea and success, this approach has not worked equally well for the Wiki. This isn’t to say that people have not contributed, because there have been numerous contributions, but it has become evident that a long-term and sustainable strategy needs to be put in place. A community member - zaius - has taken it upon himself to organise a group of a few people to accomplish just this. If you’re interested in helping out then make sure to reach out to him directly on the forum (and CC me in PMs please).

The PineTab is up and running!

Let’s talk about the PineTab, which I feel is the one device that hasn’t gotten the exposure it deserves thus far. In this update I will make an attempt to rectify this, especially since I thankfully have nothing but good news to convey. This month developers from partner projects received their PineTab kits and it didn’t take long before the first demo images became available for testing and showcasing functionality. As is always the case, we have already gotten a lot of valuable feedback from developers in regards to both electrical and mechanical issues with the dev-kits. We will collect and convey all the reported feedback to the factory so that everything is ironed out before the PineTab ships to end-users.

Speaking of shipping, apart from the handful of reported shortcomings, the hardware is coming together nicely and we’ve already locked in the key specs weeks ago. At this point production could start any moment granted a suitable OS image becomes available; I’m discussing software progress further down in this post. As we announced in June, a number of upgrades have been made to the PineTab since the February unveiling - this includes a larger 64GB eMMC capacity (voted on by the community) as well as an optional M.2 key adapter that can be used for LTE or storage. I expect that the potential to mount a LTE module is of particular interest to many users on-the-go. I am including pictures of the PineTab with a M.2 SATA drive and LTE module mounted in the case.

LTE

M.2 SATA

But this isn’t the end of improvements made to the device and peripherals. We’re pleased to announce that the keyboard (which you probably should get) - that also doubles up as a cover for the tab - will ship with a backlit ANSI-layout. We’re still figuring out the details, but it will likely be customised in accordance with the feedback we received for the Pinebook Pro. The quality of the fabric on the keyboard/ cover has been improved as has the key spacing, making it both more durable in transport and comfortable to type on. I trust that this is a welcome upgrade for those eagerly awaiting the PineTab since input quality is clearly at the very top of the priority-list of PINE64 user-base.

PineTab New Keyboard

Another yet unannounced PineTab upgrade that we’ve recently made is a spec bump of the battery. The PineTab page currently lists a 4500mAh battery but we’ll be shipping the PineTab with a 6000mAh battery. This is the maximum size of a single slab (cell) produced, and using more than one slab is out of the question as we need to keep some space inside the case free for those who will be mounting M.2 storage or LTE inside. As you can see from the pictures above, there isn’t much space left inside the case with LTE or storage mounted. While the PineTab may not reach the 10 hour battery life of the original Pinebook, with its lower screen resolution and smaller display size I still expect that the battery-life to be in excess of 6 hours of continuous run-time. The battery can be charged in two different ways: via the standard barrel connector or the micro USB port. While charging via micro USB is not ideal under normal circumstances, since it is relatively slow, it is a major bonus because it makes it possible to charge the device from a powerbank. These features combined with the small size and versatility of the device will make it a good travel companion - something you may wish to take with you on long flights or treks in the wild.

On to the software; there are quite a few images already available and, thanks to all the development that has gone into the Pinebook and the PinePhone, they are already very functional. There are already postmarketOS, AOSC, Manjaro, Ubuntu Touch, KDE Neon and numerous other OS images being worked on - many of which are being developed alongside Pinebook or PinePhone OS images. As a result, I expect that software support for this device will be solid on launch day, and it will benefit from both the Pinebook (desktop-oriented) and Pinephone (touchscreen oriented) OS and front-ends. The ultimate goal is to have many options for the PineTab, so that those who primarily wish to use it as an ultra-portable laptop and those who actually want a ‘tablet-first’ device have a range of options. That said, we’re currently still waiting for one feature-complete OS image that the PineTab can ship with.

Different OS images and front-ends

I was really excited to see Martijn Braam from postmarketOS demo the PineTab running a build with the Sway window manager. Watching the video gives you a sense of the sort of interesting experiments that such a laptop-tablet hybrid device opens up. You can see Martijn use the trackpad and keyboard for the usual window manager and terminal stuff, and then switch to the touchscreen to interact with web pages in the browser. Obviously the Sway WM may not be a natural nor a perfect fit for the device, but the option is there for those who only occasionally need the touchscreen functionality and love tiling managers. Moreover, looks like Sway will be getting touch navigation buttons on the top bar, gesture navigation and a virtual keyboard in the foreseeable future - making is a real option. Let’s face it, if tiling WM experience can be enriched by the touchscreen then every other scenario I can think of - perhaps with the exception of running a raw Bash shell - is almost certainly viable. Martijn also has a video showcasing Phosh shell running on postmarketOS. It is very cool to see a work-in-progress front-end crossover from another great FOSS project. I have also seen KDE Plasma and plasma mobile running on the device; I am linking the relevant media below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZG0eBRzSBc&t=1shttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFgKjJYHfas

Pinebook Pro pre-order launch

I spent all of last month’s update on the Pinebook Pro so I’ll keep this section short. Although the pre-order launch was not exactly problem-free, I feel that it went pretty well overall. Initially a bug in the database prevented people who either signed up to the forum or changed their password since late May 2019 from being accepted for a pre-order. This issue was quickly traced down and rectified (it took 40 minutes from the first report of issues to system being fixed) and, to the best of my knowledge, everyone who wanted to receive a pre-order confirmation eventually received an acceptance email. I’ve also received reports that some users, who already received their purchase-coupons, ran into issues with completing their order after selecting additional accessories such as the NVMe adapter - this has now been resolved.

I understand that the various little problems have proven frustrating to some of you, and I appreciate that it made the process less than perfect. What I will say, however, is that one of the reasons we chose to open pre-orders to the community first is so that our system could be properly tested on a smaller scale first. We’ve now learned from the launch and have ideas to further improve, streamline and simplify the pre-order system in the future. Since a similar system will likely be used for future products too, this pre-order launch effectively made for a test-run of long-term system viability. To this end, I thank those of you who signed up for pre-orders - knowingly or not, you’ve helped improve the experience for others in the future.

I sincerely hope those of you who receive the Pinebook Pro next month will take the time to actively offer feedback and help us address any potential shortcomings. Meanwhile, we’ll be opening pre-orders to everyone outside of the forum on August 25th. We expect that there is a fair amount of interest in the Pinebook Pro outside our core community and cannot wait to welcome new members into our ranks. To those community members still on the fence, deciding on whether you want a unit with 128GB eMMC: please be aware that the community member pre-orders close on August 24th. This means that from this point on only 64GB eMMC Pinebook Pro models will be built.

(Note: For those wondering about when their coupons will be emailed-out and units will be shipped, keep up to date with this thread.)

PinePhone - here is what’s happening

I expect there to be a lot of news about the PinePhone in coming weeks. If all goes well then in the next news update we’ll be taking a look at the PinePhone prototype and, granted its functional *knocks on wood*, we’ll be seeing it boot for the first time. But since my crystal ball has been malfunctioning as of late, instead of talking about the future, let’s instead focus on the things that are happening now. For starters, some developers have now received revision (2.0) of the PinePhone development kit. It fixes all of the issues that were present in previous iterations of the kit and aligns the functionality with the actual phone. We expect this to be the final revision of the board, but we will likely be replacing the touch panel on the kits and the actual phone, since the current one is giving developers grief. To consolidate things, and make development easier, we will use the same touch panel driver as the one implemented on the PineTab; we haven’t heard any complaints about the driver from developers and it clearly is superior to the one currently used on the PinePhone dev kit.

To the layman, the most important feature of the dev kit 2.0 is its capability to output video via USB-C, but there are many other tweaks that improved the operational stability of the setup. For all intents and purposes, this is just an evolution and not a revolution, and developers can happily keep on using the older development iterations until the actual phone ships. I’ve already mentioned that the prototype is being built and this is progressing well without any major setbacks. We were initially hoping to get a chance to show it off during the London meetup and get some live feedback from attendees, but due to a relatively minor delay (we’re some ~2 weeks behind schedule) it’s unlikely that we’ll have it with us. Regardless, the production of the prototype is a crucial milestone and you can take a closer look at how all the bits-and-pieces will be jigsawed together in the pictures below.

PinePhone Jigsaw

Once the Prototype is done it will have to undergo proper testing, which will take some time. Once all the testing has concluded we’ll have a better idea of when the first batches - aimed at developers and enthusiasts - will start shipping. We’re confident that it will be in early-to-mid Q4 this year. We’re currently evaluating and thinking about how to best launch the device so it only gets into the hands of those who are completely aware that they will need to deal with numerous OS teething pains until the software matures. Before someone points it out, I understand that this means we’re going back on what we initially said, namely that “(…) the PinePhone will first ship when software is ready (…)”. The reality of the situation, however, is that advanced users want to get their hands the PinePhone, and we don’t want it sitting in a warehouse until end-user level performance is achieved. I am still hoping that we can have at least one solid OS on day-one, and seeing how fast progress is made in recent weeks, I think that there is a possibility for at least an image or two achieve core functionality by production time.

As I have said in the past, I am not the best person to evaluate or report on software progress, but even with my limited understanding of the development complexities, I can tell that much is happening and progress is made. For those who do not follow the chats on a regular basis here is a quick run-down of what has been happening with the PinePhone for the past few weeks: There is now a relatively error-free postmarketOS plasma mobile build for the PinePhone. In the past, applications would not run and many of the UI elements that ought to be opaque were transparent. There are still performance issues with the build - the UI, despite being accelerated, is slow to respond (potentially something to do with shaders) and the touch screen is somewhat laggy. But as you can see below in the linked video, this is starting to look pretty good. We’ve also had our first look at Sailfish OS running on the PinePhone. The short demo shows the UI being quite responsive when entering and exiting the settings app, and scrolling though the different options seems very smooth as well. From what I can tell a lot has been done in the graphics driver driver, in this case Lima, to make this possible on mainline. I can only report on these information snippets due to time constraints and my insight. You can follow development live in the chats.

One last thing - as promised, we will have all the documentation about the PinePhone available just before the launch. Since we announced that we’ll be exposing I2C via pogo pins on the PCB (refer back to the blow-up diagram) many have expressed interest in 3D printing and otherwise making back-covers to use the interface. To this end, we’re releasing the back cover .stp file for you start planning or creating your add-ons for the PinePhone.

Plasma Mobile (pmOS)

Ubuntu Touch

Phosh (pmOS)

SOEdge AI Module

This is more of a teaser than a full blown announcement. As I have hinted in the June community news update, we have been toying with the idea of an AI module for some time. In fact, we initially intended for an AI variant of the RockPro64 but decided against it due to delays of the RK3399Pro SOC. Since we initially set out to create a RockPro64 AI a more feasible alternative arose, namely the option of creating a stand-alone AI module that can work independently or in conjunction with an existing SBC via fast I/O. The SOEdge neural module is based on the RK1808 and comes in a standard SODIMM form factor that it shares with the SOPine. It features 2GB of DDR4 SDRAM, 128Mb of SPI-NOR Flash as well support for eMMC.

We have taken great care to ensure a high degree of compatibility between the SOEdge and SOPine peripheral/ baseboard compatibility. In result, the new module can be used with the SOPine baseboard (N.B. the SOEdge doesn’t have digital video out functionality, so the digital video out port on the baseboard will not function) as well as the Clusterboard. We also intend to create a SOEdge-specific baseboard as well as PCIe and USB 3.0 adapters for it, so that it can be paired with the ROCK64 via USB 3.0 or the ROCKkPro64 using PCIe. We have spoken and worked closely with Rockchip and they’ll be open-sourcing all the relevant source code and documentation related to the SOEdge. I will be returning to look at the SOEdge, as well as other things we’ve been working on behind the scenes, at a later date when the software is up and running and there is something to showcase.

SOEdge in SOPine Baseboard

SOEdge AI module

There is a lot more news coming and I cannot wait to share it all with you next month. That’s all for now - you know where to find me if you want to have a chat.

July Update: All about the Pinebook Pro

Fri, 05 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

As I’ve mentioned in last month’s update post, the PinePhone prototypes are currently being manufactured (due in August) and the PineTab dev kits are rolling off the factory line to be shipped out to developers. With both the PinePhone and PineTab currently in-transition to their respective next development stages, I’ll devote this month’s update solely to the Pinebook Pro pre-order announcement, the last unannounced feature of the laptop as well as a hardware and software status update.

There is plenty to get to so let’s run though the points.

Bullet points:

Pinebook Pro pre-orders start July 25
Pinebook Pro gets privacy switches
Pinebook Pro OS builds
Battery life & ‘magical’ kernel
PINE64 key cap

Pinebook Pro pre-orders start July 25

[edit] 26/07/2019

Those asking about the pre-order system, coupons and shipping timeline please read the following forum threads:

https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=7725

https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=7752

Thank you!

This is the announcement many of you have been waiting for. The Pinebook Pro production has been green-lit and pilot batches have been scheduled for production. With the remaining hardware issues identified and resolved (side-note, huge thanks to the the key devs - ayufan and MrFixit - as well as the community for all the help sorting things out!), we’re now feeling confident that we can to proceed full steam ahead. A countdown for Pinebook Pro is now live and ticking away, so no one PM or email me saying they didn’t know or hear about it - this is plenty of heads-up time. If you follow us on Twitter, Mastodon, are a member of the forum, check the web-page or read the Linux press regularly, then you’re unlikely to miss the moment the pre-order system become accessible.

As we’ve promised from the very start, community members who registered on the forum prior to July 1, 2019 are eligible for a 128GB eMMC upgrade as well as pre-order priority. The eMMC capacity upgrade is a limited-time offer, available only for the first batch of Pinebook Pro laptops.

I’d also like to include a quick word of caution; pilot batches are aimed at enthusiasts. We do diligent testing of the hardware and create numerous prototype iterations to make sure that we deliver the best possible product on launch day. However, we cannot emulate thousands of people using the device, it is simply not possible, and as a result minor issues (usually fixable with some tinkering) may be present in the pilot batch. If you’re not the sort of person who likes to actively engage in development or issue-solving, or simply is not willing to take the risk, then it may be a good idea to wait for the second or third batch. I am not saying that issues are expected, but it’s the nature of pilot batches that they are effectively a chance for us to get feedback on the hardware from a large sample of users. I thought I’d get this out there are there is a lot of interest in this device.

Lastly, I realize that making a purchase decision is often dependent on what reviewers and notable individuals from the Linux world say about the product. Since reviewers will be getting their Pinebook Pros at the same time as end-users or even later, I figured I’ll reach out to the relevant people in my neck of the woods and give them hands-on time with the prototype. Now, I obviously cannot make anyone cover the Pinebook Pro, nor do I want to make it sound like it is an expectation on my end, so I am leaving the names of the people and their shows out of this post if they choose not to talk about it. But keep an eye out (and an ear out - is that even an expression?), since some of them may decide to discuss their experience with the prototype online.

Pinebook Pro Privacy Switches

Privacy switches on the Pinebook Pro are the last unannounced feature I was dying to talk about for some time now. I had to hold back my excitement and keep my mouth shut because we first had to make sure that our implementation of the switches would work reliably and as intended. The reason we kept this information back wasn’t to be secretive, but rather not to disappoint you if the implementation wouldn’t pan out and the Pinebook Pro would ship without this feature. With that out of the way; we’re very pleased that the implementation worked out because we’re very well aware that a part of the draw of the Pinebook Pro is its core FOSS nature, which means respect for both users’ choice as well as privacy.

Back to the subject at hand. There are three privacy switches mapped to the F1, F2 and F3 keys on the Pinebook Pro keyboard. They deactivate the following: 1) the BT/WiFi module; 2) the webcam; and 3) the microphones. I’ll give you a broad overview of how the switches work and answer the inevitable questions about their security. The keyboard has a special firmware that lives on, and operates separately of, the operating system. In a nutshell, it detects if F1, F2 and F3 keys are pressed for 10s. Once one of the keys get pressed for the set duration, the keyboard firmware cuts power to the chosen aforementioned peripheral. The implementation is no different to cutting a peripheral power mechanically via a physical switch, and the power state settings for each is stored across reboots.

This is privacy switch implementation is highly secure since the firmware that dictates if peripherals get powered is not a part of the Pinebook Pro’s operating system. The power state value for each peripheral also cannot be overridden from the operating system. In fact, the keyboard firmware itself cannot be accessed from the operating system. I have been told by a hardware engineer that, under particular circumstances, this particular privacy switch implementation may be safer than mechanical switches. If you’re really tech-savvy, and want to know how the firmware works, then I am afraid you’ll have to ask someone smarter than me (which means pretty much everyone in our IRC / Discord); I may get someone technical to write up a short piece about the privacy switch implementation if many of you request it specifically.

So there you have it, the Pinebook Pro is a FOSS laptop with privacy switches built from premium components that now also features privacy switches for peripherals relevant to security and privacy. Freedom of choice and openness has always been a core tenet of our projects, and now with the Pinebook Pro and PinePhone we’re starting to tackle the other vital component that the community cares about - the privacy and security hardware features.

Pinebook Pro OS choices on launch day

I expect that there will be three OS types available for device on day one: 1) different flavours / distros of Linux (discussed in past month’s update); 2) Chromium OS; and lastly 3) Android 9. Two quick notes before we proceed, firstly I’ll skip discussing Android in this update as I expect few people care about or/and want Android on a Laptop. I just wanted to let people know that there is a build for it and it works. Secondly, you probably already spotted the notable absence of *BSD on this list. This is largely our fault, stemming from the philosophy we adopted for building up early software support for the Pinebook Pro. That said, we cannot wait to see *BSDs on the Pro once it gets into developers hands.

Linux

Let’s talk a bit about the state of Linux for the Pinebook Pro. As far as Linux on ARM development goes, I can say with confidence that we’re in what I like to call the luxury territory. What I mean by this is that everything works - some things better than others, but it’s all there - and there are no deal-breaking issues in any of the builds. Developers have effectively moved from ‘making things work’ to ‘making things work better’ in the past two months. Improvements are literally done daily, if not hourly, and everything from desktop acceleration to trackpad settings and battery-life is being continually tweaked. Regarding the custom Debian build that will ship with the Pinebook Pro - at the time of writing we still have about two weeks to continue tweaking things so they work their best. You will, of course, likely want to hit the update icon when you get your laptop, which will update the kernel and numerous other things, as well as run your regular apt updates and upgrades.

Let me reiterate very quickly on the state of the Debian build that will ship with the Pinebook Pro. It features an accelerated Mate desktop, allows for 3D applications and you can play back videos locally up-to 4K at 30fps. Youtube as well as Netflix and Amazon playback work well at 1080p resolutions in the Chromium browser. Video out via USB-C works flawlessly too, so you’ll be able to use the Pinebook Pro for presentations, media, etc., For the record, the very same functionality is available in ayufan’s Ubuntu with Mate image, which also runs on the RockPro64, and can be downloaded directly from his github. At the risk of repeating myself, by the time you receive your Pinebook Pro there may already be other alternatives from partner projects; if not at launch then soon thereafter you’ll surely see the Pinebook Pro supported by the usual suspects (and newcomers to PINE64 hardware realm we’ve been talking to as well!). The one piece of functionality that we’re still working on is charging via USB-C - it works, but requires a very specific mode of charging at this time. We hope to improve this by the time the first units ship to end-users. I’ll make sure to update everyone on the state of this matter in due time.

Let’s talk battery-life. Developers are currently working at getting the optimal values for the battery into the device tree. In result we will need to wait a little bit longer to have a full picture of how well the battery performs during daily usage. That said, cool things have been done to improve battery life on the kernel level. MrFixit2001 has managed to make the governor monitor activity, so that not only does it set the frequency of the cores but also automatically turns the cores on and off on a need-be basis. We expect that this will see a significant improvement to battery life as well as thermals whilst having a relatively small impact on performance. From my testing, relative to all cores being active and the default interactive governor settings being applied, running webGL demos and playing simple games the observable performance difference is really negligible (for reference, 5 FPS difference running Aquarium WebGL demo). This is a very cool trick and one will be further improved upon and find its way into the majority, if not all, OS’ for the Pinebook Pro. Lastly, I think its worth noting that you can also turn individual cores on and off manually from the userspace for cores cpu0-5 (exchange value for X), which comes in handy if all you’re doing is terminal work or taking notes in class: echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/online. This applies to all current Linux builds.

Chromium OS

Some of you will probably write Chromium OS off as a daily-driver option, whilst others will be excited about it. Regardless of your personal views on the subject matter, there is no denying that having the choice to run it on the Pinebook Pro is a great option to have. Speaking of running Chromium OS, I cannot stress enough that the OS runs absolutely great on the Pinebook Pro. Even this early release is exceptionally smooth. There is no denying that ayufan has done a heck of a job, in a short amount of time, getting this build shipshape. For those of you who have a RockPro64 - you can already download and try it out. For the most part everything in Chromium OS seems to ‘just work’ on the Pinebook Pro; movies (online and local) play perfectly smoothly, 3D applications are perfectly responsive and the few web-apps I tested ran as they are supposed to. The build also comes with at Linux VM, which can be enabled under the settings menu. This allows you to install and run regular Linux applications on Chromium OS pretty much as if they were native Linux applications. So if you don’t want to use Google Docs, you can always install LibreOffice as you’d do on any Linux laptop. Apart from occasional and very minor glitches the build is highly usable and exceptionally polished.

If you have kids in school in Europe (or US/Australia), or other places were a lot of schools use Chromebooks as default teaching devices, then the Pinebook Pro may just be something to consider. For starters, it’s sturdy enough to be tossed carelessly into a school backpack and even slammed down on a desk now and then … not that I recommend it. Secondly, once your child outgrows Chromium OS and will want to explore a bit more, you can just load up a Linux distro for them. Not to mention that you’d be supporting a small FOSS company rather than one of the many large Chromebook manufacturers. I trust this comes across as a genuine idea to consider and not a sales pitch, for it is not.

A quick note on *BSDs

So I said I won’t be talking about the BSDs, but I feel like I should at the very least give you a general overview of the RK3399 *BSD functionality. I’ll make it quick. I’ve spoken to *BSD devs whom worked on the RockPro64 and from what I’ve gathered (despite the different *BSDs having varying degree of support for the RK3399 SOC) many of the core features are already supported, which bodes well for *BSD on the Pro. That said, some of the things you’d require on a functional laptop - such as the LCD (using eDP) for instance - will not work on the Pinebook Pro using *BSD as of today. So clearly a degree of work is yet needed for a BSD to run on the device. However, keep in mind that *BSD developers will be receiving their units soon and by the time you receive yours some basic functionality may be available.

PINE64 logo on Pinebook Pro key cap

It never ceases to amaze me how passionate people can be about the stuff were doing. Before I get to the meat of this (admittedly very minor) story, let me give you some background. There are two factors that underpin it and explain its origin; the first of which is that I genuinely do not like the hamburger (three horizontal lines) menu icon on the regular Pinebook. Sure, it’s better than having a Windows key cap, but it just seems very impersonal to me. The second factor stems from feedback in a recent OMG! Ubuntu! Article relating to our choice to not brand the Pinebook pro, that I’ll quote here:

“Although this is a nice move [not to brand the Pinebook Pro] on Pine64’s part, it’s also a little sad. The company is busting their posteriors on all this tech, so it’d be nice to see their efforts rewarded with a bit of awareness.”

Now to the meat of the story. With the two aforementioned factors in mind, I threw out a question in the chat the other day asking people if they think that a PINE64 pine-cone logo would be a good substitute for the current menu icon. My thought behind this was to see if we could have this tiny piece of branding on the device and at the same time potentially improve the functionality of the key. I tossed the question out and went to make myself a cup of coffee. When I returned to my computer screen I was greeted with backlog of dozens of replies. As it turns out, people really do care about how their keys look and what they do.

The overwhelming majority of people welcomed the idea of the little PINE64 pine-cone logo on the key cap and, as is the case when you ask a thousand people about their opinions, offered up many different ideas as to what the key cap can do. As things stand, I am happy to say that the menu logo will be substituted by the PINE64 logo, but it will take us some time to figure out its final functionality. If you have ideas of your own, make sure to post them below or on the forum.

That wraps it up for this month’s update!

[edit July 16, 2019] Finally had some time to sit down and give a short, unstructured, overview of the build that will ship with the Pinebook Pro. I know that many of you have asked for another video detailing how the Pinebook Pro performs in a real-life scenario, and I feel this is a pretty fair representation of what you can expect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-Yh8uiA2TY&t=0s

Volumio Motivo: a FOSS Audiophile Experience

Mon, 10 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The higher end alternative to the PRIMO, the MOTIVO, will catch your eye and ear. It is powered by the FOSS audiophile Linux distribution - Volumio - that is aviable for many Single Board computers, including the PINE A64-LTS and the ROCK64.

From our point of view, the technology inside the MOTIVO is what makes it stand out, although, we can’t argue with its great looks. Powered by a SOPine module, the Volumio Motivo is a true fusion of form and fucntion, and a brainchild of a Joint Venture between world-class industrial design firm Design Narratives and R&D and audio design Company Yottamusic.

Yottamusic has been working for 10 years on their the core-technology which is now in the Motivo: METACLOCK.

This Technology has 3 core principles:

Do not use a generic SOC (which handles communication with the DAC)
Use an interface that, other than USB and I2S allows faster data transfer
Use a dedicated FPGA to handle communication with the DAC. Therefore emancipating the Audio Quality outcome from the OSCPU combination.

It works this way:

The audio stream is sent from the A64 SOC via a high-speed BUS (SDIO) to a dedicated FPGA
Here the stream is reclocked via a double buffer and stored on a high-speed memory
It’s then sent, at the right moment to the DAC

The results that it brings:

104dB THD+N
110dB SNR
Jitter: 200ps Maximum
Network data correction

This means that with Metaclock technology, Volumio Motivo is able to achieve outstanding sound quality performances without the need of esoteric (and expensive) designs, following Volumio’s core principle: the best possible sound quality with an unbeatable priceperformance ratio.

Integrating Metaclock technology is being probably the biggest challenge Volumio Team has faced so far: since this technology has never been done before, in this way, there is no standard to follow nor any HOWTO nor literature. Work is currently being done to implement the very complex software integration to take the most out of this technology, without compromising on usability.

Back of the Motivo showcasing the wide IO array

Motivo front featuring an 8" EPS Touch Panel and control knob

For those of you craving for technical specifications, here they are:

8” EPS touch panel allowing for great viewing angles without glare.
Mounted digital volume control knob that also dubs as on/off.
All Winner A64 chip optimized for audio with low noise carrier band.
Wide bandwidth SDIO bus ideal for media transfer.
On board FPGA for noise and jitter elimination.
On board ESS Sabre 9038Q2M DAC.
Bluetooth 4.2
PCM and DSP 1024 compatible.

Audio Outputs:

RCA
Balanced XLR
Optical
Coaxial
HDMI I2S
USB 2.0

Peripherals:

Gigabit ethernet
Dual USB 2.0 (input/output)
HDMI 1.4 video for user interface display
9V/3A barrel power jack

To learn more about Volumio Motivo make sure to subscribe to the Volumio Blog

Volumio Motivo was unveiled at High-End in Munich, Germany last month.

June 2019 News: PinePhone, Pinebook Pro and PineTab

Thu, 06 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Bullet Points:

Forum is done, next up: chats and Wiki
PinePhone prototype in August ; software coming along
ANSI keyboard for Pinebook Pro ; new features / upgrades ; pre-orders this summer
PineTab M.2 optional adapter ; 64GB eMMC ; pre-orders this summer
New boards in the pipeline ; AI SBC/SOM of interest to us

Housekeeping

As many of you have probably noticed the forum has gotten an update. We’re still tweaking things now that the new layout and features are live, and we’ll continue to monitor your feedback and update things on a need-be basis. With the webpage and forum done, the chats and Wiki are next on our agenda. Both of these undertakings present their own set of challenges, hence may take some time to complete. If any of you wish to volunteer your time, especially with regards to improving the Wiki, then please let me know in the comments section below or the forum. Thanks!

PinePhone

Last month I began with (and spent most time on) the Pinebook Pro, so it’s just fair that I open this month’s update with the PinePhone news section. A lot has happened in the short period of one month, so the best I can do is to try to summarize the most important aspects pertaining to hardware and software progress. I’ll pay more attention to hardware developments in this post, simply because I am not competent in providing an up-to-date report on every projects’ software status (you can reach all the devs in the chat and follow the progress live using the chat log if you wish to stay up-to-date). For what it’s worth, I am happy to give you a short resume of my experience with the few OS images I’ve tested at the end of this section.

Let’s start with the end-user PinePhone developments. With the case selected and approved, the phone’s PCB was commissioned a couple of weeks ago and submitted to the design house with detailed instructions on the required feature set. The first of the things we settled on was the battery capacity and physical dimensions; the battery will be the same capacity as the Samsung J7 SM-J700H/ BJ700BU (3000-3400 mAh), which can be had for under $10 from amazon and eBay. So in the event you need replacement or spare batteries, getting hold of them will be easy and affordable. We also settled on the number, and the implementation of, privacy switches on the phone - there will be 4 switches in total: for the i) BT/Wifi module, ii) the modem, iii) cameras (front/back) and iv) lastly for the microphone. They will be located on the PCB, under the back-cover, to prevent them from being toggled by accident, e.g. in your pocket or purse.

After a chat with developers, we also came up with a way to expose I2C using 6 pogo pins. These pogo pins will be located directly on the PCB. The idea behind this implementation is that entire back-covers with add-on components can be created (even 3D-printed) with additional functionality to enrich the phone’s functionality. The implementation only requires that the custom back-cover with additional hardware has the same dimensions and position of plastic latches as the original - and obviously that the component in question uses I2C (contact pads). I expect that a back-cover with a keyboard - perhaps one similar to that found on the Nokia N900 - will be something a considerable number of people may be interested in creating. To this end, we’ll make sure to have detailed documentation on this feature. I really hope that the hackers and tinkerers among you will embrace and make use of I2C for new cool implementations.

Mainboard Front

Mainboard PCB Back

Slaveboard PCB

Rounding off the hardware-side of things - I don’t want to jinx it, but as you can probably tell from what I’ve already written, the PinePhone project is coming together really nicely. As things stand today, we expect a fully functional prototype in August. Once we have the prototype, it will then have to undergo functionality and durability testing before production of a pilot batch can commence. More on this in future updates. I’ll also note that the final dev kit (2.0), which incorporates fixes for all the issues found in dev kits 1.0, 1.1 and 1.2 as well as alignes all functionality (e.g. HDMI out via USB-C) with the production PinePhone, will be produced at the same time as the prototype.

Things are also progressing well on the software-front. The core phone functionality - calling and sending messages - has now been enabled in a number of OS’. It took a little while to get the mobile networking working due to an error with SIM slot wiring on dev kits 1.1 and 1.2; that has now been fixed using an adapter, and the aforementioned dev kit 2.0 will no longer require the adapter. I’ve tried PostmarketOS (Plasma mobile / XFCE / Weston demos), Maemo Leste and LuneOS in recent weeks and they’ve all made significant progress in a very short amount of time. The functionality highlights for each OS differ - which makes for interesting testing of these early OS images. For instance, Maemo Leste has messaging etc., enabled, while PostmarketOS has managed to get the camera working (Martijn from PMOS even ran a ~2hrs stream live from the dev kit), and LuneOS offers an extremely smooth UI experience with many applications working, including browsing the web. Morover, all sensors and even the speakers now work too, so things are really comming together at a rapid pace. As I’ve already mentioned in the May news update, developers from all the different OS’ work together, and so all the newly enabled functionality quickly finds its way into all OS images. I am still waiting to try a number of the OS’, including Ubuntu Touch and Sailfish OS; once I get my hands on these builds I’ll make sure to record a compilation demo, showcasing functionality and performance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SyqbI24qu0https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlrIqAwHRXY

Pinebook Pro

We listen to your feedback and take it to heart. For those of you who have not read my edit to last month’s post: there will be both an ISO and ANSI keyboard available for the Pinebook Pro. I do not have more information about when the ANSI keyboard will be available at this time - but I am getting an evaluation unit with the ANSI keyboard soon - I’ll edit this update accordingly to let you all know how I find this candidate keyboard. Wrapping up the keyboard discussion, I’d just like to make it clear - the first Pinebook Pro batches will most likely only ship with the ISO keyboard. Let me also address all those of you who are asking about regionalised layouts - there is currently no plan to support any other layouts except for standard ISO and ANSI.

ANSI and ISO Keyboard Variants

The choice of keyboards isn’t the only update to the Pinebook Pro since its announcement. In fact, there are some really awesome features coming that we haven’t talked about yet - largely since they need to be properly tested first - which I expect to discuss in next month’s update. I think many of you will be thrilled. That said, there are another two small updates to the Pinebook Pro that deserve some spotlight too. The first of these is that Pinebook Pro has been upgraded with a BT/WiFi module that supports Bluetooth to 5.0 (vs announced BT 4.1) and secondly we’ve asked for improvements to the firmware of the trackpad. As with many things in life, the devil is in the details, and on a laptop that means the input methods, which really makes or breaks the experience. The trackpad on the current prototypes is already very solid, but we are talking to the hardware vendor to further improve precision and reduce accidental inputs of the trackpad. Lastly, we decided not to have any branding on the Pinebook Pro, since it seems this is what users prefer. So you get to decorate it yourself using stickers or keep it smooth and black - up to you.

I also have good news for all developers hoping to get their hands on the Pinebook Pro. If the aforementioned Pinebook Pro unit I’ll be receiving soon addresses all, or at least most, of my initial feedback I submitted to TL to be forwarded to the factory, then the manufacturing process for a developers batch will start shortly. This means that by the time end-users get their hands on the Pinebook Pro there will be a number of Linux, and possibly even *BSD, options to choose from.

Speaking of software, I am also happy to say that the state of software tailored for the Pinebook Pro is already superb. The last major outstanding issue with the Linux test builds (PCIe locking up in desktop use) has been resolved as of May 27th and all other features required for laptop functionality now work. Just for the sake of diligence, let me list some of the key components for desktop use that ayufan and mrfixit2001 got working in their builds over the past few months: BT/WiFi; PCIe (M.2) ; LCD panel including brightness ; suspend/ resume from suspend ; sound (speakers+headphone jack) ; USB-C (data, charging + video out) ; accelerated desktop (xorg glamor or armsoc) ; 4K video acceleration of local media ; 3D and video acceleration in browser (including: webgl 2.0 & widevine) ; support for a number of peripherals. More info on the respective builds can be found here and here.

Many of you have been asking about Pinebook Pro availability and when pre-orders will start. The answer is “this summer”, as we still need to evaluate the pre-production units for fit-and-finish and functionality. I trust you can appreciate that this is an important step and cannot be rushed. If it turns out that everything is OK with these units, then right after the pilot batch for developers regular production will start. Regarding when and how you find out about the Pinebook Pro pre-orders - chat and forum members will be alerted slightly ahead of time since we want our core users to get a small heads-up. Then we’ll send out notifications via social media (Twitter and Mastodon) and make an announcement on the website. This will likely be picked up by relevant media outlets too. In the future, there will be a newsletter sign-up that will alert you to new Pinebook Pro batches being available.

Here is a peek under the hood of the pre-production (post-prototype) Pinebook Pro

PineTab

I know that the PineTab news are well overdue, but once you’re done reading this section I hope you’ll agree that the wait well worth it. Long story short, the delay in PineTab production was due to us being unsatisfied with the digitizer panel; this has now been sorted and evaluation units of the tablet are now being built.

This delay was, however, not a waste of time. The extra time gave us space to think and consider what else can be improved on, and added to, the current design. We ran a poll some time back asking about the desired storage capacity for the PineTab, and the majority of users showed a strong preference for increasing the eMMC storage capacity to 64GB. After some considerations, we decided to honour the community vote and we’ll be including this larger eMMC with the PineTab.

We have also decided to include an option for a M.2 adapter on the PineTab. This will allow a number of expansion options that users and developers can explore - the most obvious applications being LTE and storage, but I am sure that you can think of other ones too. We hope that you’ll agree that the time it took us to bring the PineTab to fruition, since its announcement earlier this year at FOSDEM 19, has not been wasted despite the delay in selecting a suitable digitizer panel.

Granted we’ll be happy with pre-production units delivered to us and developers, then you can expect the PineTab to be available late this summer. More information on the PineTab and its new pricing will follow soon.

Future Single Board Computers

As I’ve already written in the May update, SBCs are and will remain PINE64’s bread-and-butter. They will always be the basis for any new devices - such as laptops or phones - that PINE64 will develop. It’s a part of us striving for software compatibility between the different types of hardware, reducing the workload of developers porting their OS’ to a new devices. To this end, I’d like to assure everyone that new (and exciting) boards will be coming in the future. It is too soon to talk about these boards however, since some of them are in concept or layout stages whilst others are still in our heads. What I will say, however, is that one field we wish to explore is AI, and we hope to bring both AI-focused boards and modules to the Pine Store in the future.

That’s it for this month’s update, chat away below or on the forum / in the chats.

Forum Update

Wed, 22 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The forum update is scheduled to go live at the end of May (likely over the weekend May 25-26th). You can expect the forum to be down for a couple of hours as work is being carried out. We hope that the process will be relatively painless, but if unexpected issues arise then this will extend the downtime. The forum upgrade is a part of our ongoing process of improving PINE64 services, which you can expect to carry over to the month of June with future updates to the Wiki and the chats.

Updating the forum is something that has been on our bucket list for a long time, but there have always been multiple other more pressing things that have taken priority. Frankly speaking, not much though has been given to the state of the forum, its structure and usability until earlier this year. The server move this month has given us the opportunity to update, change and most importantly improve all the PINE64 community services; the webpage was the first to receive an update and now its the forum’s turn for a make-over.

The current forum is in need of more than quality-of-life improvements - more specifically, we need to make the forum complient with regulation (GDPR). On your first login you will be presented with the privacy policy, which you need to accept before proceeding to using the forum services as per usual. Scroll to the bottom of the policy and click accept. Accepting the privacy policy (identical to the one on this website) is required for both new and existing members and applies to everyone, including moderators and developers.

New Look and Feel

The general layout of the forum has been simplified and designed to expose the bits and pieces that regular and new users access frequently. The side tab has quick access to the PINE64 chats - the Discord and IRC Webchat for the time being- while the top bar features links to the Wiki, this News blog, Forum Portal as well as other relevant information. At the bottom of the forum page you’ll find a footer with all the social links as well as some helpful information.

New Features

Apart from overhauling the look of the forum we’ve also added new features that will hopefully improve the forum experience. The most notable omission on the current forum is probably the ‘Alerts’ function, that notifies you if someone responds in your thread, quotes you in a post, rates your response or writes in a thread you’re subscribed to. This feature has now been added to the forum and can be accessed by clicking the bell icon next to your User CP icon. You can tweak the Alerts settings from the User CP if you aren’t happy with the defaults.

If you wish to mention someone, and have them be alerted of this, you can use the @ symbol in conjunction with their username. Mentions have an autocomplete feature (pictured below) so all you need to do is start typing and select the user in question from the drop-down menu. Mentions trigger alerts, so they are useful if you want to get someones’ attention.

The other improvement, which I truly hope users will embrace, is the ‘Mark as solved!’ button. I think this one doesn’t really need any explanation - if your forum query was resolved, clicking it will mark it as solved. This really simplifies looking for answers on the forum, and is likely to limit the number of reoccurring threads concerning the same subject matter.

That’s all for now. Huge thanks to ItsDave and FireTwoOneNine for putting in the time and effort to update and set the new forum up. As always, your feedback is welcome!

Taking RetroEmulation to the next level with RockPro64 and Roshambo

Mon, 13 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Retro Emulation is all the rage these days. What’s old is now new again. Game Emulation has been around for awhile, but the recent resurgance into making mini consoles spearheaded by the release of the NES Classic has opened up new possibilities for making our own NES or SNES classic’s.

Now Roshambo has released their own Gaming Case to compliment a few Single Board Computers, including the powerful RockPro64!

There are two separate models, one with compatibility for the rock64 and raspberry pi, and a Pro version specifically designed for the RockPro64.

In this review, I used the model for the RockPro64.

The RoshamboPro Retro Gaming Case

First off, the case is quite well built. It feels solid sturdy, and everything fits in as it should. If you get the case designed for the RockPro64, you will be getting a heatsink and fan included that can be controlled via software.

There is a recalbox image specifically for the RockPro64 that also enables the unique capabilities of this case. To start, let’s go over those features:

It has a reset option, as well as a power-on/power-off mode.
It has two usb ports in the front where the controllers go, as well as a separate usb port in the back of the case, and an extra usb type-c adapter.
The most unique feature of all, the SATA adapter at the top where you can install a ssd that will allow you to load up all the games you’d like. You can get these special SSD’s in 120gb, 256gb, and 512gb which look like little SNES carts. You can purchase them here.

A picture of the SSD.

The RockPro64

The RockPro64 is the star of the show.

It’s more powerful than a Rock64, and far more powerful than a Raspberry Pi 3B+.

You can buy one here at pine64.com

The RockPro64 comes in two flavors, a 2gb and 4gb version. The RoshamboPro Gaming kit for $99 will include the 2gb version, which should be all that’s required.

Gaming performance wise, the RockPro64 just decimates the Raspberry Pi in raw-power. Games that were not playable on the Raspberry Pi will play on the RockPro64.

For example, the RockPro64 will play arcade games like Primal Rage (which is a fun fighting game with dinosaurs and huge gorillas) which the Pi3b will struggle with. The RockPro64 will even play PSP games! The RockPro64 should have no issues with Playstation or N64 games either, something that the Raspberry Pi will struggle with (especially with N64 emulation.)

You will need the included Fan though, as the RockPro64 can and will run pretty hot, especially in that case.

The RockPro64 includes a USB-Type C adapter, as well as a USB 3.0 port, and two USB 2.0 ports. You can use a MicroSD Card or a optional EMMC card for booting as well.

Gaming on the RockPro64

The RockPro64 (and Rock64) both currently support the following distro’s dedicated to gaming.

Recalbox

Batocera Linux

Lakka

In this review, I used Recalbox, which combines Retroarch along with Emulationstation in a very easy to use Distro where you can do practically everything you need straight from the GUI.

Batocera is also very similar to Recalbox with some minor changes in UI.

While Lakka is different in that while it uses Retroarch, but does not use Emulationstation as a frontend.

When using the RockPro64, you will need to add in a Wifi Adapter. You can get a Wifi/Bluetooth module, or use a usb wifi adapter. I myself used my old trusty Linksys Wireless G usb adapter. You can load roms by mounting the SMB Share via Windows.

Click Start > This PC > Right click “This PC” and click on “Map Network Drive” > Type in the IP address of the rockpro64 like \\192.168.x.x or \\RECALBOX

You should be able to then find the ROMS share and just drag and drop the roms.

After you’re done, open up the Recalbox menu and select Ui Settings > update games list.

And your games should show up on Recalbox.

If you want to add in pictures and data about the games, you can use the built in scraping tool or you can use a tool on your PC called Skraper.

If you want to learn more about RetroGaming on a RockPro64, Rock64, or even other Single Board Computers, please join us at the /r/sbcgaming subreddit and discord.

Useful Links and Resources

Subreddit: /r/sbcgaming

/r/sbcgaming Discord

(Use these to talk about RetroGaming on the RockPro64, the Rock64, or any other Single Board Computer! We’ll be glad to have you there! And please stop in and say hi!)

Pine64 Discord

(Talk about the Rock64, Pine64, or RockPro64 here!)

May 2019 News

Mon, 06 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The new website is finally online and it is now easier to deliver news to people within and outside the community. Unlike the forum, information in this blog won’t easily get lost among the countless other day-to-day threads concerning troubleshooting, new builds and similar topics. In the long run, I trust this will make it easier to find, reference and share information.

And so, with no further ado …

News for May 2019 Run-Down:

Forum updates incoming
BTO is going away (for all devices)
PinePhone Status Report
Pinebook Pro Roadmap

Forum Updates Incoming

One of the reasons for moving the community services to a new infrastructure was to make it easier to update and improve stuff on the fly and when it suits us. One of the issues we were facing with the previous server setup was the inability to keep the forum up-to-date (as to why that was the case … it is a long story and not interesting). This is now an thing of the past, and so this week we will clone the forum database, update myBB to a recent version, add services we think / feel the forum deserves and migrate over. We do not expect any major or lengthy blackout because of this but be prepared for some potential forum disturbances this and the next week as we’re working on it.

BTO is Going Away (for all devices)

BTO is going away and is being replaced with a pre-order system. This change has already been reflected on the Pinebook store page. All those of you currently waiting in the BTO queue will be serviced, so don’t worry - you are not waiting in vain. Initially, when the BTO system was implemented, it was intended to determine interest levels in the Pinebook. In practice however, it failed to work as a reliable indicator of how many people actually want a unit and hence, how many Pinebooks need to be built. It also proved to be very demanding on the shipping team and those who dealt with the system put in place to reissue BTOs when customers decided against purchasing their unit. We also realised that you guys aren’t exactly huge fans of the system - BTO tickets lost in spam folders, people forgetting their BTOs, high volume of ‘when will it ship?’ emails … are all an indication that a different system had to substitute BTO. So, for the Pinebook, Pinebook Pro and PinePhone (and potentially other similar devices in the future) a pre-order system will be used instead. There will be a set quota of available units in each batch and the system will work on a first-come first-served basis. You will be notified about the availability of the device via an email; there will also be notifications on social media, such as Twitter and Mastodon. Forum and chat members will always get a short heads-up that the sales are going live. Consider it a nod to those actively taking part in the community. The pre-order page will list the expected shipping date and any other relevant information, which we trust will lessen the degree of confusion of when and what ships. There isn’t much else to be said - the functioning of the system will be pretty straight forward.

PinePhone Status Report

Development for the PinePhone is progressing nicely. Before I jump into some of the details, let me say that it is a real treat to see developers from all major Linux on-phone projects working together to achieve support for the PinePhone. The developers also collectively contribute to one repo, which means that they can benefit from each others work and do not have to re-do something that has already been solved or implemented. As things stand, new features and functionality are literally added daily. I hope to have some builds later this month so I can showcase them on youtube and make a post about the progress.That said, I fully understand and appreciate that developers want to take their time so as to have their early work reflect the effort they’ve put in, so this showcasing timeline may slip a little. Stay tuned. On the hardware front, the design of the PinePhone case is now complete (I’ll make a video showing the mockup at the same time as I’ll be recording the videos of early dev builds) and work on dev kits 2.0 with numerous fixes as well as the actual phone PCB will begin concurrently and very shortly. We expect to have a working prototype, as well as dev kits v2.0 (expected to be final) which will be fully aligned with hardware in the prototype(s), sometime mid-to-late summer. I dare say, unless something really unexpected happens - we will likely have the PinePhone ready before the end of this year. As we’ve said numerous times, this does not mean that we will start selling PinePhones the day we get them from factory; we will wait for at least one fully functioning OS build prior to sales commencing. More PinePhone news will follow late this month or early in June.

Front of the PinePhone Mockup

Back of the PinePhone Mockup

Pinebook Pro Roadmap

The Pinebook Pro software and hardware is coming together both quickly and well. In terms of software, community developers have all key functionality already working in their respective builds, and partner projects will be getting their hands on dev units sometime this Summer. As of today, there are two builds that have full functionality from the two developers whom have worked to get their kernels ship-shape for partner projects; these two builds are, Ubuntu (with Mate/ LXDE) from ayufan and Debian Stretch from mrfixit2001. In terms of hardware, the Pinebook Pro demoed in a recent (and poorly recorded - sorry about that!) video is probably nearly identical to what you’ll be getting when you order your unit. There are still a few outstanding PCB hardware issues in the unit I showed off in the video, which have now been identified and successfully resolved. The new PCBs should be back from the factory shortly, and granted that the PCB has no issues and test well, a pilot production of Pinebook Pros’ will commence shortly after. I am assuming that since you are reading this blog, then you must at the very least have an idea about what hardware is in the Pinebook, and what sort of materials it uses (if not, click here). In light of this, here I will focus on the two things that are rarely discussed but probably of vital importance to most users: the keyboard and trackpad. You will be happy to hear that the new ISO keyboard has a nice feel to it, has a soild click-y tactile plunge, the keys have a relatively long key-travel, and in my testing the keyboard has not exhibited any issues - indeed, I am writing this blog entry on the Pinebook Pro as a part of my testing. The trackpad is also a major improvement over the one found on the original Pinebook. For one, it is an actual point-to-point trackpad (and not an emulated mouse) and the coating / material that it is made out of is smooth and feels almost metallic to the touch. Now, if you’re coming from a high-end laptop, such as the Macbook or Dell XPS, then the trackpad will probably not going to blow you away; that said, I have compared the trackpad on my prototype up against similarly priced laptops as well as laptops twice the price, and frankly speaking it is on par with just about everything that is out there. More information about the Pinebook Pro will follow next month.

The ISO keyboard layout that will be used on Pinebook Pro production models.

EDIT: Here is a video where I showcase the software functionality on the current prototype. In this video I also discuss some of the design choices made - such as the ISO keyboard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mj3_jMBlbxA

[Edit 13/05/2019] Future ANSI Keyboard Option

Right, ok, we get it - many of you want an ANSI keyboard layout as an option. Understood. We will eventually offer a EU/US keyboard layout option at store check-out.

This may take some time as we need to find a suitable keyboard first, put it though its paces to make sure that its good quality, and also make sure that no extensive retooling needs to be done on the Pinebook Pro case. This means that you can expect the first end-user batch (or two) to ship with the pictured ISO keyboard only, as its unlikely we will find a candidate ANSI keyboard, test it and implement in into the production schedule on-the-fly. I trust everyone understands that these things need to be properly tested and evaluated before going into production.

More Pinebook Pro updates are coming soon - I’ll keep you posted.

New Community Ran Website!

Tue, 30 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to the new PINE64 website. In time, this blog will be filled with updates and news as well as posts from developers and contributors. The website will be maintained and ran by the community; everything, with the exception of the store, will be accessible to be shaped and molded to suit the PINE64 community of developers and end-users. More information will follow shortly.

For now, have fun exploring the new site. If you have any suggestions for improvements, or want to help maintain this website, or contribute something for the blog - let us know.

Community blog on PINE64

Quick update: May 2026

Table of contents

Whats been going on recently?

PineVoice

PineTime/PineTime Pro

LoRa? (Left-handed operational Radio authority, obviously)

Important recent community updates:

Do you have something to share?

Contact

Community

PineStore

Shocking disclosure, 20 volts to be exact

Introduction to the PineTime Pro

Table of contents

Introducing the PineTime Pro

Why “Pro” and not “PineTime 2”

What makes it “Pro”

A long road to get here

Recent progress

What about software?

What happens next?

Do you have something to share?

Contact

Community

PineStore

FOSDEM 2026 Update

Table of contents

Housekeeping

What happened at FOSDEM 2026

Demos

PineNote

PineTab 2

DRAM shortage impact

PineTime Pro

Future of community editions

Why can’t community editions exist for already released devices?

Challenges

Where is the PinePhone 2?

To conclude

Do you have something to share?

Contact

Community

PineStore

Project Showcase: Movuan

Table of contents

The Movuan project

Installing Movuan

What is Devuan?

Future goals and contributing

Do you have something to share?

Contact

Community

PineStore

August Update: Note-able Tablet Updates

Table of contents

Housekeeping

PinePhone Pro discontinuation

New community manager

About me

My goals as community manager

PineNote

Current status

Operating Systems

Arch

PostmarketOS

Nix

WiFi Compatibility

The issue

Workaround #1

Workaround #2

Some words of warning with this workaround

PineTab2

Kernel

OS (DanctNIX’s Arch Linux ARM port)

Mesa (GPU)

PinePhone Pro

Mainlining project

FreeBSD port

Contributors welcome!