Risc-V 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.

March Update: Tablet Bonanza!

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

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

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

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

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

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Video synopsis of this month’s update

TL;DR

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

Housekeeping

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

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Community Q&A live stream recording

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

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

Here’s a sneak peek at the upcoming community website

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

Newsflash

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

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

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

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

These are some really awesome looking cases

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

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

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

QT6 on the PinePhone

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

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

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

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

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

PineTab-V

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

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

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

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

PineTab2 (By Lukasz and CounterPillow)

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

DanctNix Arch PineTab2 build in action

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

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

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

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

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

We arrive at the following results:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PineNote

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

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

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

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

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This looks pretty awesome doesn’t it?

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

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

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

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

February update: things are taking shape

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

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

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

Let’s get to it.

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

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://youtu.be/N4gIxeddzNg

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

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

The PineSAM application looks incredibly cool

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

Quantumworks cluster

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

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

Replicated x2 RBD-NDB w/ osd using all cores

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

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

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

Mixed Random Read/Write IOPS: 3500/1175

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

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

Rugged Pinecil case by Piotr Strog

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

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

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

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

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

Instructions on flashing Linux on Ox64 by Platima Tinkers

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

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

PineTab2

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

Here’s a picture of the PineTab2 FOSDEM demo

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

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

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

Close up picture of PineTab2 ports - via Jozef Mlich

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Star64

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

Here’s ayufan setting up the demo live :)

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

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

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

Star64 running Debian with XFCE desktop at FOSDEM

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

PinePhone (Pro) [by Lukasz & Biktorgj]

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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!

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

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.

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

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.

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!

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!

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

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.

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

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!

RISC-V SBC Riddle

Tue, 09 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The riddle has been solved by DALTON. I’ll be contacting the winner in the coming days.

Thank you to everyone who played along!

The correct answer is: PINEONE

In the event you’re interested, you can learn more about this and previous riddles here.

It is time for a bit of community fun. Below you’ll find a riddle, or a cypher to be precise, pertaining to the name of our upcoming affordable RISC-V single board computer (SBC) announced in the February community update.

The previous riddles were solved in a matter of hours, so I put in a bit more effort into crafting this one.

Correctly deciphering the riddle will reveal the name of the SBC - please enter your answer in the comments section. Only answers submitted on this blog post will count, as they are time-stamped, which makes it easy to verify who was first. You get bonus points if you explain how you arrived at your answer.

The person to solve the riddle first will win the RISC-V single board computer*.

Latin slant

Under the scorching sun

An old Roman senator sat

Studying it all

And slowly came to realize that

He bears witness to the empire’s fall

And so began his intricate plan

For the imminent end

So savage and so cruel

Was this strive to mend

It lay waste to the Roman rule

_*****The winner will receive the first production version of the SBC. Prototype devices destined for developers will ship first. _

The Pine Store cannot ship to countries under international embargo (North Korea, Iran, etc.,).

February Update: Show and Tell

Mon, 15 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to this month’s community update. As many of you know, we have now entered the Chinese New Year (CNY) period, which means that all manufacturing and related business activities have ground to a halt. It is always a mad rush to complete ongoing work prior to CNY, but now that the festive period is upon us we get a chance to catch our breath and evaluate the progress made.

In this month’s update we’re going to take a close look at the Quartz64 model-A, showcase headway made on the PinePhone keyboard, discuss our first RISC-V single board computer and introduce plans for making LoRaWAN a staple of the PINE64 ecosystem.

You can watch the synopsis of this month’s community update on Youtube (embedded below) as well as on LBRY and Peertube. Stay up-to-date with PINE64 news and make sure to subscribe to this blog (subscription widget at the bottom of the webpage), follow PINE64 Telegram News channel as well as our Twitter and Mastodon.

I’d like to acknowledge JF, Marek (Gamiee), Alex (clover), PizzaLovingNerd, Konrad, Biktor and Dylan for their contributions to this community update. Thank you!

This may just be the most news-packed update since July last year, so strap in for some PINE64-goodness and let’s get to it.

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

Video Synopsis by PizzaLovingNerd

TL;DR for this month’s update:

Housekeeping: Two PineTalk episodes are out!
Housekeeping: Pinecil back in stock late Feb/ early March
Housekeeping: Shipping status of PinePhone Mobian CE
Housekeeping: Manufacturing difficulties expected after CNY and for much of Q2/Q3 this year
Quartz64: Detailed specs listed and pictures of the SBC shown
Quartz64: Comparison to ROCKPro64 connectivity & performance
Quartz64: Generic benchmarks on par with most popular SBC on market
Quartz64: More than a stand-alone SBC - a dev platform for future devices
Pinebook Pro: Production resumes in March; pre-orders mid-March
PinePhone pt.1: End of CEs; PinePhone to ship with Plasma Mobile on Manjaro from now on.
PinePhone p.1: A close look at the PP keyboard; fitted with 6000mAh battery
PinePhone p.1: We decided on the keyboard layout with community - the keyboard will be programmable, for those who wish to alter keyboard functionality
PinePhone p.2: Opensourcing the modem - a status report by Biktor, Konrad and Dylan
PinePhone p.2: Modem - work done on kernel 5.11; running open userland on kernel 3.18; making phone calls from open firmware
PinePhone p.2: Expected modem improvements using FOSS firmware
PineTime: 3 versions of InfiniTime released in short succession in last 30 days
PineTime: Blob-less heart rate monitoring working on InfiniTime + improvements to OTA flashing
PineTime: Navigation on PineTime synced to Linux or Android Phone
RISC-V PINE64 SBC: We’re entering the RISC-V SBC game
RISC-V PINE64 SBC: Starting with an entry-level SoC combined with a RISC-V WiFi/BLE currently being opensourced (Nutcracker challenge)
RISC-V PINE64 SBC: Goal to make RISC-V accessible to all at a reasonable price; fun SBC with multiple potential applications; sub $15 SBC
RISC-V PINE64 SBC: Stay tuned for a name reveal via riddle
LoRa & LoRaWAN PINE64 integration: we are doubling down on LoRa integration - coming to all PINE64 devices
LoRa & LoRaWAN PINE64 integration: we will build our own base stations based on next gen technology with better range, lower power consumption & higher transfer-rates
LoRa & LoRaWAN PINE64 integration: Novel use of technology - text-based communication without a middleman

Housekeeping

I want to start by giving Peter and Ezra - our PineTalk Podcast hosts - a huge shutout. They’ve worked really hard on the first two episodes of the podcast and, judging by the number of episode downloads, so far their style has resonated well with the community. In the last episode they spoke to Dalton Durst from UBports, discussed the recent announcement of PinePhone Community Editions coming to a close and answered some questions from the community. PineTalk is now available on all major platforms, including Spotify and Apple’s Podcast app, and I highly encourage you to subscribe to the RSS feed.

Yes, of course, you can listen to PineTalk on your PinePhone too

Over this past month we received a significant amount of feedback concerning the new PINE64 website. This included suggestions on improving the site’s responsiveness, functionality as well as a variety of various minor bugs encountered by community members. As a result, responsiveness has been significantly improved and sections of the site have been reworked to offer a better experience on mobile devices. There is now also a dedicated blog button (honestly, I was surprised to hear people had issues finding the blog on the new site) and the blog itself received some much needed tweaks to improve navigation. A number of fixes were also made to make the page less taxing. Thank you to Gamiee for his continued work on the community site and to all of you who submitted feedback and suggestions.

As I mentioned in the opening bit of this blog entry, CNY is now upon us and there will be no manufacturing or shipping activity until late February. All Pine Store contractors in Malaysia, China and Hong Kong are now enjoying time off with their families and close ones (where permissible, of course, given COVID19 is still rampant). To those of you awaiting a response from the support or info teams, please be aware that you will not receive a reply until after CNY. If you have an urgent query concerning your shipping or order status, i.e., a query which cannot wait, then please reach out to me or one of the moderators in our chats.

I’d like to quickly touch upon the Pinecil’s availability. I get bombarded with questions about when it will be back in stock, so I’m answering the query here: stock will be available again late this month or early the next. Don’t expect it to show up in the store before the end of CNY.

I must say, the Pinecil looks good in red - picture via Dan Lien on Twitter

Before proceeding to the main topic of this month’s housekeeping section, I want to write a few words about the Mobian Community Edition PinePhone shipping status. As some of you are aware, we ran into issues with DHL shipments in late January and early February. Long story short, we effectively had to reship an entire palette of KDE CE PinePhones twice due to a DHL error. This threw a wrench into our schedule; the shipping team worked hard to dispatch as many phones as possible prior to CNY, but unfortunately most Mobian CE units ended up waiting at the warehouse to be shipped to their rightful owners. Only phones destined for Europe were successfully shipped before work ceased. Please follow the dedicated forum thread to stay up to date on the shipment process.

I’d like to finish this housekeeping section by making you aware that difficult times are ahead of us manufacturing-wise. It was a year ago to the day when I first wrote about the impact the COVID19 pandemic would have on the supply chain and manufacturing process in China. I reported on the situation more than a month before any big brand even murmured a word about the severity of the electronics shortages, which we all witnessed mid-and-late last year. You see, big brands don’t really want customers to know that their devices will not be available or in short supply. So here I am, a year later, once again being a bearer of bad news (edit: since originally writing this passage, 10 days ago or so, some reporting of the issues already begun in the media). We expect severe component shortages and major component price hikes after CNY. I am writing this to prepare you for what is to come. Production-wise, we’re entering a difficult phase and compromises will be made - there is no doubt in our minds that the emerging market situation will have a significant negative impact on PINE64. However, the extent of the impact won’t be known for at least an entire month, so let’s not worry too much about the unavoidable and hope for the least disruptive outcome. Keep your fingers crossed! I will, of course, keep you up to date on how things pan out.

Quartz64

It is finally time for us to take a look at Quartz64 model-A, the first installment in our ‘Quartz-line’ of next generation single board computers (SBCs). The doc page for Quartz64 is now available for those of you who wish to study the schematics and datasheets. Keep in mind that photos of the Quartz64 depict a prototype device and some modifications to the hardware may prove necessary prior to the SBC’s release. Any changes made, however, will be very minor at this point and only implemented to remedy issues identified by developers, if such arise. In other words, although this is an engineering sample, production units will look indistinguishable from it. With the board’s layout now finalized, we’re happy to share all the details you’ve been waiting for with you.

Top view of Quartz64 model-A

Many of you will immediately notice the close resemblance, in terms of both the available I/O and general layout, that this board shares with the ROCKPro64. Both boards feature USB 3.0, alongside 2xUSB 2.0 ports and have an open-ended 4xPCIe slot, which can be populated by a variety of peripherals. The similarities don’t end here: the Quartz64 features un-populated IR and SDIO headers (current IR and WiFi/BT modules are compatible), has HDMI capable of 4K output at 60FPS as well as a DSI and CSI output and MiPi interface. There is also 128Mb of onboard SPI flash, just as on the ROCKPro64. The eMMC and mSD card slots too can be found in the exact same position on both boards. There are also FAN, VBAT and 12V power headers, situated in the same model-A layout locations. A RTC connector is also located on the PCB. The 12V header is capable of powering up-to two 2.5" SSDs or HDDs when using our 12v 5A power supply, just as on the ROCKPRo64.

While the SBCs share many similarities, there are some significant differences between the two. For one, as you have likely already spotted, the Quartz64 has a native SATA 6.0 port located right behind the USB ports. The Quartz64 has one USB 3.0 port, while the ROCKPRo64 has one USB 3.0 and one USB-C port. The Quartz64 PCB also features an integrated battery charging circuitry. This means that, similarly to the PINEA64-LTS, the board can be completely battery operated. A unique feature of the Quartz64 is its native e-ink port; as I already mentioned in last month’s update, we hope to have a 10" e-ink panel available in the Pine Store when the SBC releases to the public. Perhaps most importantly of all, Quartz64 is capable of supporting up-to 8GB of LPDDR4 RAM.

Front view of Quartz64 model-A

Back view of Quartz64 model-A

Performance-wise, early testing indicates that the Quartz64, with its 4 cortex A55 cores clocked at 1.8Ghz, is only 15-25% slower in computational tasks than the ROCKPro64. Do keep in mind, however, that the Quartz64 isn’t a Pro-grade PINE64 single board computer. The intended purpose for it is to eventually supersede the PINE A64 and ROCK64, rather than the higher-end ROCKPro64. If anything, the fact that I am comparing a non-Pro next generation SBC to a Pro-grade current generation board should be rather exciting. Lastly, since I know that many of you are curious, the Quartz64 delivers computational performance that is very similar to the most popular single board computer on the market (based on generic benchmarks). Do keep in mind, however, that such benchmarks do not always translate well to real-life tasks, so one board may be superior to another depending on the nature of the scenario. I also ought to mention that from our initial testing, the RK3566 runs really cool - under load, without a heatsink, it rarely spiked above 60*C.

Don’t read too much into these generic benchmarks

Designing the Quartz64, we envisioned that it will serve an additional purpose in the future. Aside from being a stand-alone SBC, it will also be used as a development platform for future non-Pro devices. We have been thinking about democratizing development for some time now, and we intend to start the process with the Quartz64. Creating dedicated development platforms, such as the Don’t Be Evil PinePhone kit, is expensive and time consuming. Such kits also limit the number of people who can participate in the bring-up process, as usually a very limited number of such devices are manufactured. The Quartz64, however, features all the necessary circuitry to start work on a next generation phone, tablet or laptop. Plug a display into the DSI port, a modem into the USB port and add a battery - voila, you’ve got yourself a next-gen phone dev kit. So to those who aren’t usually interested in SBCs in general - it may be worthwhile picking one up and helping the Linux bringing-up process on the RK3566.

Speaking of the bringing-up process, a small number of Quartz64 boards have now been shipped to low-level developers. I am looking forward to seeing how Linux takes shape on this RK3566 platform in the coming months. A major encouraging factor in the bringing-up process is that the Panfrost open source GPU driver ought to ‘just work’ once Linux is brought-up and functional to a point where video output is possible. GPU drivers are always tricky and usually take a long time to open source, so the fact we already have a FOSS GPU for this SoC is a major boon.

Under high load it manages to stay cool, even without a heatsink

It is too early to talk about general availability at this point. A lot will depend on how quickly rudimentary Linux support can be brought to the Quartz64. That said, I place a lot of trust in the developer’s abilities. You can expect an update on Quartz64 in the next community update.

Pinebook Pro

I am happy to let you know that we will be resuming production of the Pinebook Pro shortly after CNY. We were fortunate enough to secure A-grade LCD panels and the necessary RAM (currently in short supply) for the production to begin, and we already have an allocated slot at the factory for the assembly process. I presently do not have a pre-order date for you - that will be announced at a later time. But if you’re interested in picking up a unit then I strongly suggest you follow our Telegram news channel and/or social media for pre-order news (links in the opening paragraph of this post). I know, however, that many of you would appreciate a ballpark idea of when stock will be available, so to this end: based on our current schedule, pre-orders are set to open sometime mid-March 2021.

The Pinebook Pro is now a mature platform with a lot of fun development - image by Clover

PinePhone Part 1

Earlier this month we announced the end of the Community Editions. The Community Edition program was a vital step not only in bringing support to the PinePhone, but also in bringing attention to mobile Linux outside of our immediate bubble. Countless people worldwide were made aware of alternatives to the duopoly of Android and iOS, and I’m sure that we can all agree this is a good thing. This exposure is obviously good for PINE64, but I’d argue that it is equally good for the entire Linux community. Promotion of the Community Edition PinePhones propelled mobile Linux development like nothing else in recent years and gave birth to multiple new projects. With tens of thousands of PinePhones in people’s hands, it is no longer an unlikely possibility that a mainline Linux smartphone will take hold, but rather an inevitable certainty. Before moving on, let me once again thank all the projects and their developers who participated in the Community Edition scheme. You all did a great job.

While the Community Edition program is now closed, we’re working on a plan to actively support mobile Linux projects moving forward. Talks are held with all major projects and we already have some ideas on how to provide developers with ongoing support. Aside from projects which received a Community Edition, we are now also talking to Maemo Leste, LuneOS, openSUSE, DanctNIX and Fedora developers. While we haven’t settled on a means to achieve this type of support just yet, I hope that a part of the strategy will be an introduction of branded back-covers to the Pine Store. In short, the idea is to sell back-covers with projects logos at approx. a $15 price-point, out of which $10 would go towards the donation. I think that this is a good and fun way of supporting development, which provides end-users with a tangible benefit for submitting their donation. It will take a couple of weeks for us to figure this out, or maybe even longer, but once we do arrive at a suitable arrangement I’ll write a dedicated blog entry about it.

At this stage I know many of you are wondering what the future of the PinePhone holds. A question that I frequently receive concerns the default operating system and user interface that will ship on the PinePhone. Today we are very pleased to announce that the PinePhone will ship with Plasma Mobile on a Manjaro ARM base from this point on. We have a long-standing relationship with Manjaro and KDE Community, and both projects have supported us and our efforts since the dawn of PINE64. I’m not sure if I wrote about this publicly in the past, but the promise that Plasma Mobile held in its early stages was the deciding factor for us to proceed with creating a Linux smartphone in the first place. Needless to say, we have been excited to see the UI environment mature and flourish on our platform over the past 12 months. Manjaro is our core partner, offering support for all our flagship Linux devices, including the ROCKPro64 and the Pinebook Pro. Their work on the PinePhone has been indispensable, and their current OS images are among the best and most fully-featured for the platform. Working with both projects on the PinePhone has been a pleasure and I am convinced that together we will reach new heights in the months to come.

Manjaro and Plasma Mobile is just a great combination (picture of widget on main page)

Earlier this month we also received the PinePhone keyboard, perhaps the most anticipated accessory of them all. It literally arrived a week ago from the factory. Looking at the pictures below, those eagle-eyed of you will probably notice the missing key caps. The key caps and the keyboard’s PCB are the two outstanding parts we’re still waiting for - we expect both to be delivered shortly after CNY. The molding is completed however, and has now been submitted to us for review. I’m happy to let you know that our initial impressions are very positive and we’re convinced that you’ll be pleased with it too. Please keep in mind that the pictures are of an early preview unit, and everything you see is a subject to change before they keyboard becomes available in the Pine Store.

PinePhone in the keyboard chassis from the front and side

PinePhone in the keyboard chassis from the side

PinePhone in the keyboard chassis closed top

PinePhone in the keyboard chassis closed bottom

From the very inception of the keyboard design we wanted to include a large battery in the base of the chassis. Aside from the obvious benefit of significantly extending the PinePhones operating time, a large battery also serves as a counter balance to the PinePhone placed in the top section of the keyboard’s body. We wanted to cram as much battery power as possible into the keyboard, and we were lucky to find a 22Wh 6000mAh battery which fits the bill perfectly. From my estimates, the PinePhone fitted with the keyboard will be able to remain in standby mode for nearly a week with the modem active. With the modem disabled, however, it will last you more than two weeks on a single charge when placed in deep-sleep. Due to the battery’s size taking up the bulk of the space inside the keyboard’s bottom section, the charging circuitry had to be shrunk down to a tiny PCB. But don’t be deceived by it’s tiny size, this charging circuit can simultaneously charge the keyboard and the PinePhone via the keyboard’s USB-C port. Since I know someone will ask: the USB-C port on the keyboard can only be used charging, it doesn’t support data or any alternate modes.

PinePhone keyboard charging PCB

Look at the size of that battery!

This effectively completely frees up the USB-C port on the PinePhone. You can plug a convergence dock into it or use it for any other common USB-C devices, e.g. thumbdrives. A quick web-search revealed to me that there are now a number of USB-C wireless mice available on the market (something I wasn’t aware of!). So you can pick one up and plug it into the PinePhone, thereby transforming it into a pocketable Pinebook. Many GUI environments available for the PinePhone - including Phosh, Plasma Mobile and Lomiri - already work well in a desktop mode, but I am sure that the keyboard accessory will entice people to bring MATE, XFCE, GNOME and full-fledged Plasma to the device. And why not - after all the keyboard converts the PinePhone into a PDA capable of running full-blown Linux.

Before moving onto discussing software, I quickly wish to touch upon the keyboard’s layout. We spent a weekend in January ping-ponging ideas about the layout with the community. After some push and pull we finally arrived at a compromise that most end-users should be happy with, given the space and design constraints. The illustration attached below depicts the layout we arrived at and submitted to the vendor. I know that not everyone will agree with every design decision made; to those of you who would prefer a different layout, or really need a CAPS key (for whatever reason), rest assured that eventually you’ll be able to flash your own firmwares to the keyboard via the i2c pins, and thereby change the keys functions. This will, however, require input from the development community - an effort similar to that made on the Pinebook Pro will be needed. The time it took to get the community’s approval of the design led to a delay in delivering the keycaps prior to CNY. But even without its keys, doesn’t it just look awesome?

Here is they keyboard layout we agreed on with the community

PinePhone Part 2 [by Konrad, Biktor and Dylan]

We are currently working on three different fronts modem-wise: 1) porting the mainline (kernel.org) kernel; 2) open-sourcing the userspace and; 3) improving the way incoming calls and texts are handled while the phone is suspended.

The modem can now boot version 5.11 of the Linux kernel with minimal functionality (serial, USB and NAND). Konrad has been working hard on all the low level drivers that are needed (PMIC, clocks etc) so the rest of the devices inside the SoC can start. There’s still a lot of work to do, since the SoC has never seen an official release from Qualcomm ever since kernel 3.18.x, so even if some pieces can be adapted from other mainlined Qualcomm models, there’s a lot of code that needs to be written from scratch. Work is being done by Konrad to send his existing patches upstream, so that they can get merged and so that he can further continue the work.

VoLTE blobless audio calls will be possible in the future. Original Twitter post By Biktor

On the present factory firmware, there are about 150 closed source binaries and libraries that make the modem work. Biktor is working on replacing all of them with 3 open source alternatives that will hopefully get 90% of the required functionality. At this point we can initialize the modem, establish data connections and make both CS (normal) and VoLTE calls without any binaries, although sometimes audio fails, and call reception doesn’t work yet. Stay tuned for more information about the open sourced userspace in near future.

Dylan has been tackling one of the biggest complaints concerning the modem, namely the slow recovery from suspend and its USB resets, making the PinePhone lose incoming calls and texts when using ModemManager (since it cannot reconnect to the modem fast enough after suspend). These patches, currently in a testing stage, should make the PinePhone wake up and start ringing on the first dial tone when there’s an incoming call or text, as well as fix intermittent USB resets that show up when resuming from suspend.

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

We currently have: i) An open-source bootloader, allowing us to flash and boot custom software; ii) A temporary, open 3.18.140 kernel with minimal patches, that gives the same functionality as stock with less vulnerabilities and the chance of debugging drivers while moving to 5.x. iii) Open userspace options, with or without blobs, giving varying degrees of functionality, based on Yocto 3.2, or postmarketOS. iv) Modem SDK which serves as a playground for anyone who wants to build his or her own firmware based on Yocto. v) Initial support from the postmarketOS team that allows to create flashable pmOS images for the modem.

The end goal has always been the same, to have the modem as open source as possible. We aren’t touching the modem’s ADSP firmware, because in addition to the inherent difficulties that come with it, modifying the ADSP firmware could lead to problems with RF regulations or certifications.

PineTime [by JF]

January was a prolific month for InfiniTime: we released no less than 3 versions of InfiniTime in this short period of time. The biggest release was InfiniTime 0.11, which came with 2 major features - the long awaited integration of the heart rate sensor and a brand new navigation application from Adam.

Why did it take so long to integrate the heart rate sensor in InfiniTime? Well, in fact, I implemented a working demo of the HR sensor more than 6 months ago but couldn’t release it because it was based on a non-free/proprietary library. This library implements the algorithm that converts raw data coming from the sensor into human readable values (beat per minute).

From the beginning of the InfiniTime project, I always wanted it to be fully open-source. That’s the reason why I chose the GPLv3 license for InfiniTime. One of the implications of this choice is that we cannot include non-free/closed source modules into the codebase. This heart rate processing library was then conflicting with the license of the project and one of its main values.

But still, many people were asking for the heart rate sensor in InfiniTime, and fortunately, Daniel from WaspOS implemented a brand new algorithm for WaspOS and released it under the LGPL license, which allowed me to port his code in C++ and integrate it into InfiniTime. Thanks again to Daniel for his amazing work!

Heart rate measuring in-app (left) and displayed on watchface (right)

I teased the Navigation app in the last community update. I’m happy to announce that it’s now released! This app, written by Adam works in conjunction with Amazfish and PureMaps, and InfiniTime displays the navigation instructions from PureMaps when it’s connected to Amazfish. Best of all, these apps run on many Linux devices, such as the Pinebook Pro and the Pinephone!

See the video here.

Navigation instructions displayed on the PineTime

Speaking of Amazfish, Adam has also improved the integration in non-SailfishOS Linux distributions like ManjaroARM and Ubuntu.

The BLE connectivity has been greatly improved in InfiniTime 0.12 by updating NimBLE, the open source BLE stack integrated in InfiniTime. With this upgrade, you should expect less failed OTA and less unexpected disconnections from the companion app.

This month, I would also like to highlight Nico’s blog. In his blog, Nicolas writes about SailfishOS, smartwatches and… the PineTime! The first article is an overview of PineTime with SailfishOS. In a second article, Nico explains how to upgrade InfiniTime using Amazfish on SailfishOS. Finally, he reviewed InfiniTime 0.11 and 0.12 in this 3rd article. I really appreciate these blog posts, they are short, easy to read and give honest and accurate opinions about the progress of the project.

RISC-V PINE64 Single Board Computer(s)

It will probably come as no surprise to anyone following our project that we’ve been watching the RISC-V space very closely in the past 18 months. Many of you correctly concluded that the Pinecil, our recently released and very popular RISC-V soldering iron, was our first foray into the world of RISC-V SoCs. Indeed, the choice of the RISC-V SoC for the Pinecil was not mere coincidence. That said, Pincil’s SoC is rather rudimentary and incapable of running an advanced operating system such as Linux. We’re now at a point where we’re willing, and indeed keen, to dip our toes in the RISC-V pond and build our first single board computer capable of running full-blown Linux (and possibly also other FOSS operating systems). I’m not sure about you, but we’re rather excited about the prospect of this decision and its importance moving forward.

While we’re not quite ready to talk about the specifics of the SBC at this point in time, in part because many PCB-design decisions haven’t been set in stone yet, I do nonetheless want to give you a general sense of the sort of hardware that we’ll be delivering. Our first SBC will feature two RISC-V CPUs, the main one being a C906 64-bit SoC coupled with an auxiliary 32bit BL602 SoC for WiFi and BLE. The C906 is already capable of running Linux and, from what I understand, is completely open while the BL602 is in the process of being open sourced (including firmware) in our Nutcracker community challenge. The SoC has solid I/O, including USB 2.0 and Gigabit Ethernet, and I see it as a great entry-level Linux-capable RISC-V platform.

The C906 feature list for those very tech savvy of you

I am making the specifications known well ahead of time to manage your expectations. The overarching idea behind this board is to make an inexpensive board, accessible to all who wish to explore the RISC-V architecture, and to get it into the hands of as many people as possible. We’re aiming at a sub-$15 price point. We also want it to become a gateway to more powerful RISC-V SoCs in the future. While it’s our first entry into the world of this particular architecture, it most surely isn’t our last. The board will allow you to create fun IoT, learning and DIY projects, but I won’t be surprised to see someone make Doom, Sonic the Hedgehog or MarioKart run on it in a matter of weeks. In a month or two, I’ll share more details concerning the board-design and the exposed IO. Lastly, as you noticed already I haven’t mentioned the name of the SBC - you can expect a riddle in the coming weeks.

LoRa and LoRaWAN PINE64 Ecosystem Integration

In the past 6 months I’ve mentioned LoRa and LoRaWAN on many occasions and in multiple posts. If it wasn’t clear until now, we have been quite interested in the technology and its potential for novel applications. After extensive internal considerations, we now feel ready to double-down and make LoRa an integral part of the PINE64 ecosystem. I’ll explain a bit more about the core premises of our vision further down in this section, but let me start by writing about the actual equipment we’re planning to deliver. For one, we will offer next generation modules for all our devices - this includes, but is not limited to, the PinePhone, the PineTab and Pinebook Pro. We will be using next generation LoRa chipsets in our expansion modules, which deliver better performance while consuming less power. We will simultaneously introduce LoRa modules for North America, Asia and Europe, that conform to the respective regional regulations.

We will also build our own LoRaWAN base station, which too will utilize next generation LoRa technology. This chipset does not only allow for higher efficiency and lower power consumption, but also for an improved data-transfer rate when compared to presently available technology. We intend to introduce two versions of our base station, the first of which is intended for deployment indoors, while the second arrives enclosed inside an aluminum waterproof container for use outdoors. The theoretical range of the base station is measured in tens of km’s, at least in unobstructed line of sight. That said, a range of 5-6km is much more realistic in most scenarios due to terrain and other obstructions found in urban areas. As you have come to expect from us, the brains of the base-station will be running FOSS software atop of mainline Linux.

We aren’t the first ones to think of using LoRa for communication - source

So, then, why are we doubling-down on this? While LoRaWAN is usually used for a variety of IoT type deployments, we wish to use it for text-based communications. In its implementation we expect the functionality to be more akin to HAM radio rather than SMS or instant messaging. Most importantly of all, however, we see LoRaWAN as a means for communication without a middleman. To allow communication over vast distances, each base station can be connected to the internet. We hope that, in time, urban areas will see some degree of coverage and that people will be willing to join in on the fun. And yes, in the initial phase of this experiment, the purpose of LoRaWAN stations is to have a bit of fun, whilst simultaneously exploring the limits of the technology’s application for communication. Needless to say, getting developers onboard to support this novel implementation of the technology will prove crucial. Over the next months I’ll do my best to convince relevant parties that it makes sense to explore this LoRaWAN application and that it may be a first step in rethinking secure communication mediums.

That is all for now, I’ll catch you all in a month!

Risc-V on PINE64

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

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

March Update: Tablet Bonanza!

TL;DR

Housekeeping

PineTab-V

PineTab2 (By Lukasz and CounterPillow)

PineNote

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]

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

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**]

PineTime [by JF]

PineDio [by JF]

PineCube [by Gamiee]

RISC-V SBC Riddle

Latin slant

February Update: Show and Tell

Housekeeping

Quartz64

Pinebook Pro

PinePhone Part 1

PinePhone Part 2 [by Konrad, Biktor and Dylan]

PineTime [by JF]

RISC-V PINE64 Single Board Computer(s)

LoRa and LoRaWAN PINE64 Ecosystem Integration

Quartz64 [by CounterPillow****]