PinePhone Pro on PINE64

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.

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.

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), 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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!

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.

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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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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

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!

PinePhone Pro on PINE64

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

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

February update: things are taking shape

TL;DR

Housekeeping

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

PineTab2

Star64

PinePhone (Pro) [by Lukasz & Biktorgj]

Pinetime [by JF]

December Update: Merry Christmas and Happy New PineTab

Housekeeping

NewsFlash [by Lukasz and Pillow]

A look back at 2022

2023 sneak peek

PineTab2

PinePhone (Pro) [By Thanos]

October update: An Ox, no bull

Housekeeping

Star64

0x64

PinePhone (Pro)

QuartzPro64

August update: RISC and reward

Housekeeping

PinePhone (Pro)

Star64

PineBuds Pro

Pinecil [by Gamiee]

PineTime [by JF]

June Update: Who likes RISC-V?

Housekeeping

Who likes RISC-V?

PinePhone (Pro)

PineNote

May Update: Worth The Wait

Housekeeping

Quartz64 & SOQuartz

Pinebook Pro

PinePhone (Pro) [by Lukasz, Dylan and Brian]

PinePhone (Pro) Keyboard [by dsimic]

PineSound

PineTime

April update: no more unicorns

TL;DR

Housekeeping

QuartzPro64

PineSound

PinePhone (Pro) [by Lukasz, Peter & Brian]

PineTime [by JF]

PineDio [by JF]

PinePower

March Update: Introducing the QuartzPro64

Housekeeping

QuartzPro64

PinePhone (Pro)

Quartz64

PineTime [JF]

January Update: More News

Housekeeping

PinePhone Pro

PinePhone

RK3588

PineNote

InfiniTime [by JF]

PineDio [by JF]

PinePhone Pro Explorer Edition pre-orders open January 11

Happy New Year, the keyboard and cases are here!

About the keyboard case

About the add-on back cases

PinePhone community poll

December update: a year in review

Housekeeping

A look back at 2021

A sneak peek at 2022

PinePhone Pro

PinePhone (Pro) hardware

PinePhone (Pro) Software [by 33YN2]

Quartz64 [by** CounterPillow**]

Quartz64 [by CounterPillow****]

PinePhone / PinePhone Pro Keyboard