
New Hardware from PINE64 - lelf
https://blog.hackster.io/new-hardware-from-pine64-a7c95e26684d
======
edent
Just as a word of warning, I bought the old PineBook64 and it was dreadful. I
could accept the speed limitations of a $99 laptop - but the hardware was
inadequate. The trackpad couldn't tell the difference between scrolling and
zooming. The keyboard regularly skipped keypresses. Firmware updates were
promised, but never arrived.

There was also very little software support. The occasional community build of
of Ubuntu or Android. Neither of which received much in the way of bug fixes
or development.

I appreciate it was designed as a "tinkering" machine - but it's hard to
tinker when the basics don't work.

Devices like this live and die by their community. If you don't have lots of
committed people working on supporting a platform it quickly withers and dies.

I like the look of the "pro" model. But if it receives the same lack of
attention as their earlier hardware, it won't be worth buying.

~~~
baybal2
> The trackpad couldn't tell the difference between scrolling and zooming. The
> keyboard regularly skipped keypresses. Firmware updates were promised, but
> never arrived.

Only when people run into things like that, they get appreciation for people
making decent low-end hardware.

I say, it is twice as hard to design a decent $300 laptop that a decent $1000
laptop.

Supply chain for low-end parts is a total Wild West (or East if you want.) If
you want 100k top-tier panels from Samsung, you sign the contact and go away
having a good sleep. If you want 100k of ok quality and moderately priced
panels, you are up for a lot of sleepless nights picking them up from random
distributors, through all of manufacturing run.

For touchpads that don't go on standalone modules, calibration is also case by
case. Some times, it simply doesn't work - you plastic is too thick, it's
dielectric value is off. Ideally, you have a specialist company making a
custom made module for you, with Synaptics blessing, but for budget stuff, you
your only option is to calibrate it yourself using SDKs leaked to Chinese FTPs

And stuff like keyboards - there are no dedicated keyboard module makers these
days, your chassis maker is doing that nowadays. You are up for a lot of trial
and error on that, and if you want any custom switches, god save you.

Ideally, if you are a budget maker, you want to spin as many models on a
single "chassis" as possible to cover RnD expenses. This is the only way big
ODMs like Quanta and Clevo or brands like Asus can make cheap and moderately
good stuff.

Trying to be small and differentiated differentiated is the hardest thing to
do for a budget OEM.

Checkout a brand called Chuwi - it's a miracle how they can make five
different chassis a year, and do it profitably, while being an e-commerce-only
brand.

~~~
mntmoss
Indeed. Casio is one of my favorite brands in electronics because they have
been so reliable about doing cost reduction without compromising the core
device functions. For example, when they do a high end keyboard, which seems
to happen about twice a decade, the key features are soon brought back down to
their low end models, meaning that at any given moment their offering is most
likely biased towards the cheapest of the range, with a bit of price
differentiation on features.

Casio is a well-established brand and gets the benefits of scale, but that
only makes some parts of the job easier. They still have to carve out market
share one product at a time, like everyone else, and they don't do it through
the expensive flagship pieces.

------
pornel
Are there _fast_ desktop ARM machines? Can I spend $500, not $50, to get
something with 16-32GB of RAM and a ton of CPU cores?

I am with Linus on this "server ARM revolution won't happen". I've had to fix
an ARM incompatibility that QEMU didn't emulate (related to hardware timers).
Pine64 wasn't in stock. I got RPI, but compilation on that toy machine was
soooo slooow that I literally forgot about the whole project before it
finished compiling.

~~~
opencl
The ROCKPro64 is not super fast, but it is a pretty big step up from the Pi. 2
big cores and 4 little cores with 4GB RAM for $80. ~2800 geekbench multicore,
Pi 3 is ~1400.

[https://www.pine64.org/?product=rockpro64-4gb-single-
board-c...](https://www.pine64.org/?product=rockpro64-4gb-single-board-
computer)

About $1000 will get you a Snapdragon 845 devkit with 6GB RAM which is again
quite a bit faster. 4 big cores and 4 little cores. ~8500 geekbench.

[https://www.intrinsyc.com/snapdragon-embedded-development-
ki...](https://www.intrinsyc.com/snapdragon-embedded-development-
kits/open-q-845-development-kit/)

$6400 will get you a 96 core ARM server.

[https://system76.com/servers/starling](https://system76.com/servers/starling)

~~~
floatboth
$269 (+ $70-100 shipping) will get you a MACCHIATObin (+ a 4GB DIMM), a mini-
ITX board with four A72 cores, PCIe and FOSS firmware
([https://github.com/MarvellEmbeddedProcessors/edk2-open-
platf...](https://github.com/MarvellEmbeddedProcessors/edk2-open-
platform/commits/marvell-armada-wip) or even just mainline TianoCore) capable
of running a graphics card before the OS (thanks to qemu).

[https://www.solid-
run.com/product/SRM8040S00D04GE008S00CH/](https://www.solid-
run.com/product/SRM8040S00D04GE008S00CH/)

$300 for a tiny Kirin 970 board with 6GB RAM.

[https://www.96boards.org/product/hikey970/](https://www.96boards.org/product/hikey970/)

$1200 will get you a Developerbox, 24 A53 cores, also PCIe and FOSS firmware.

[https://www.96boards.org/product/developerbox/](https://www.96boards.org/product/developerbox/)

£2255 will get you a 32-core Ampere eMAG workstation

[https://store.avantek.co.uk/ampere-emag-64bit-arm-
workstatio...](https://store.avantek.co.uk/ampere-emag-64bit-arm-
workstation.html)

You can also order a system from Ampere directly, no public prices but they
might be offering 16-core systems for less.

[https://developer.amperecomputing.com/resources/](https://developer.amperecomputing.com/resources/)

------
detaro
Direct link to announcement this post seems to take most info from:
[https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=7093&pid=43850#p...](https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=7093&pid=43850#pid43850)

------
40four
I have a RockPro64 4GB version & I have been very pleased! Lots of OSs
available & easy to flash with their provided installer software. Used it
mainly as a home web server runnibg Ubuntu 18.04 so far, but I have some other
ideas to tinker with in the future.

Been really happy to have it around! Nice to see the company continue to
deliver new products. I might pick up one of those camera cubes. Bravo Pine64!

------
onli
Back then I was interested in the $90 Pinebook and finally opted against it,
mainly because the driver support seemed problematic. The new Pinebook Pro
according to the article will have a RK3399: Arm Cortex-A72 + quad-core
Cortex-A53 + Mali T860 MP4 GPU. Can someone here judge based on the specs how
driver support of that laptop will be like? Does the Mali gpu have a proper
free (kernel-included?) linux driver? I did not find the answers to that.

~~~
StreamBright
[https://wiki.debian.org/MaliGraphics](https://wiki.debian.org/MaliGraphics)

RM produce designs for a GPU called 'Mali'. This is incorporated in many SoCs
and thus devices. It is used in a number of devices that can run Debian.

There are three major revisions of Mali GPUs: Utgard, Midgard, and Bifrost.
See wikipedia page for reference.

Partial free drivers were developed for Utgard but were abandoned (lima). Work
on Utgard has continued by a new set of developers (lima). Free drivers for
Midgard and Bifrost are under active development but are not yet ready for
Debian users (panfrost).

Proprietary drivers are also available from the vendor for each Mali version.
Since 2016, the binary drivers put out by ARM have been redistributable and
thus can be packaged for non-free. GPLed kernel shim drivers are also released
by ARM, which is eligible for Debian contrib. As of March 2017, these have
been packaged in Debian for Midgard devices; see MaliMidgard. Upstream
proprietary drivers are available from The ARM developer site

~~~
onli
Thanks. But that's bad:

> _ARM dropped support for X in their releases after r16 (Jan 2017). This is a
> massive pain as that 's what we all still use. Only wayland, fbdev and
> android are supported after that._

If that's not misleading and there would be no proper X support the laptop is
a no-starter for me. On the other hand, panfrost is in mesa now and
[https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Panfrost...](https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Panfrost-
Performance-Fast) sounds promising. Maybe that free driver will be ready till
then.

------
dingdingdang
Think the Pine guys are doing what the Raspberry peeps should have done long
ago: releasing products with 3-4GB of RAM. This way consumer facing devices
are not constantly disk trashing for swap disk when browsing the web.

~~~
alias_neo
RAM is, relatively speaking, one of the most expensive components of an SBC.

Raspberry Pi _could_ have offered 4GB+ of it, and they could also have
quadrupled the price.

As much as I'd love a Pi with 4GB+ of RAM, is quite obvious why the $35
computer doesn't have it.

~~~
wolfgke
> Raspberry Pi _could_ have offered 4GB+ of it, and they could also have
> quadrupled the price.

Raspberry Pi's SoC does not support more RAM than the 1 GiB that it now has.
This is as far as I am aware considered a serious problem by the Raspberry Pi
Foundation.

I don't know by what they thus plan to replace the SoC in the future.

~~~
alias_neo
This is what I was alluding to. There was an interview recently with Eben,
where he explained that the SoC needs an upgrade to give them more (faster)
peripherals and the ability to add more RAM. I can't find the source at the
moment.

As I understand it the SoC in the Pi was some older IP that was licensed to
them (RPF/Eben) for free (or close to) by Broadcom.

The RPF will have to sink so significant cost into a new SoC (and I choose to
believe that this is already happening, as we speak).

------
rubyfan
I recently bought an Orange Pi 3 which is roughly similar to Pine H64. Easy
enough to setup and runs Pi Hole and Kodi just fine, unfortunately no way to
run RetroPie at the moment.

These boards are kind of hamstrung by lack of Mali support from what I can
tell. If you want a cheap single use server board they are great but they
don’t compare to Raspberry Pi’s community and support ecosystem.

~~~
planteen
I bought an Orange Pi 1+ H6 for the high-end Mali GPU. The board was dead on
arrival, as in, it never pulled any current from the power supply. It was
plain as day to see this on my bench top power supply. The support I received
was horrible. They kept demanding the same "troubleshooting" steps over and
over and for me to upload YouTube videos showing me doing the steps. It
clearly was DOA. I threw it in the garbage and swore off Orange Pi forever.

I switched to a Rock 960 and had a much better experience.

------
teekert
I really really love the idea of this Pinebook Pro but find this Pine64
ecosystem a risk. I would love it if I could buy this with an RPi heart. At
least then I'd know I could easily run fullHD video on the GPU, I would for
certain get a nice modern Ubuntu Mate desktop that is reasonably nice speed-
wise. I'm pretty sure I could do most of the things I do on my 800 dollar
laptop on a Pi3. The Pine64 eco-system makes me very weary though and it is
again echoed here in the comments.

~~~
polartx
I do a fair amount with SBCs for my home automation, and various projects
(always flashed with Dietpi where possible). I've got Raspberry Pis, NanoPi
Neos, Odroids, and the one regretful purchase, a Rock64 by Pine.

The hardware support was abysmal from day one; the only recourse was a message
board where suggestions from the makers included using a magnifying glass to
look for bad surface mount welds on resistors.

Dietpi later came out with an image for the Rock64 (those folks really walk on
water in my eyes), which has saved my Rock from the bin (all the officially
supported linux builds were rife with crashes), and I'm currently using it as
a massively overpowered nginx server (because I don't trust the hardware for
anything else at this point).

tl;dr - I would not buy something from Pine64 again.

------
xienze
Re the new Rock64

>The new version will add Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) support

_Integrated_ PoE? I’ve been waiting a looong time for a reasonably-priced SBC
to offer this. Anyone know if that’s the case?

------
benj111
The phone looks interesting. Although the realist in me questions why it would
be successful over all the other Linux phone efforts.

I _hope_ it's successful though.

~~~
unwind
These look really cool, I had no idea the PINE project was so diverse in its
hardware projects.

Especially the $20 "naked" digital camera core ("The Cube") looks like it
might trigger loads of cool projects. I guess it runs Linux, since it's pretty
high-specced and has rich I/O. Power over Ethernet support suggests fixed
installations is a niche (like security cameras, smart homes, automation and
so on), but it might also be useful for visual effects. Cool stuff.

I think this:

 _Over the last year or two we’ve seen the Raspberry Pi form factor starting
to become a defacto standard for single-board computers, much like Adafruit’s
Feather has for micro-controllers_

was a bit surprising, Feather is cool but surely it's an attempt to establish
_another_ standard, since Arduino already _is_ the standard for
microcontrollers? It was a bit weird that Arduino wasn't mentioned, there.

Looking forward to seeing when these become possible to order.

------
myrandomcomment
I have the original Pine64 in a case with all the addons, remote, etc. I
played with it for a bit thinking to use it as a Kodi box. It’s been sitting
on my project tablet since then. It is going on the eBay item pile soon. It
was just not quite fast enough to keep up with how I wanted to use it. At this
price point however it was a cheap experiment. I will likely order a the newer
model and try it out. They current Kodi box for the man cave TV is an Intel
compute stick (i5) (windows 10 because I am to lazy to figure out how to get
Linux on it). It drives a 4K TV. It has steam installed for older games.
Speaking of which it was funny as I was playing the Mater of Orion remake on
the system. At larger sizes of galaxy it was painfully slow. I also have a
much older (~5 years) 6 core AMD FX. Tried it on that system and it was much
faster. Looking at activity monitor it seems it was one of the few games (from
a few years ago) that take advantage of multi core chips.

------
thomas536
Anybody know of any SBCs* with good low power modes enough to run for a few
days on a 4000 mAh battery?

Phones have been able to do this for years, but I can't find any modern Linux
SBCs with real lower power CPU modes to last for days.

* ideally 1+GHz with 4GB RAM and on-board lipo charging circuit

~~~
ac29
The recently released Linux 5.0 kernel supports energy-aware scheduling, which
should help out with this:
[https://lwn.net/Articles/749900/](https://lwn.net/Articles/749900/)

~~~
voltagex_
Finding a recent board that can run mainline kernels may be a challenge.

~~~
bluegreyred
Indeed, that's what makes the raspberry pi so hard to beat, even though I'm
just a hobbyist using it as a tinker toy.

If something major breaks software-wise you can be pretty sure that the rPi
community is large enough to produce a fix within hours.

OTOH if you'd like a new kernel for that fancy $65 big.LITTLE 4GB dualchannel
ECC Gigabit PCIe SBC then you're at the mercy of your vendor who considers 4.4
LTS ought to be good enough and already reassigned the entire dev team to work
on a future hardware release. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

------
FerretFred
Y'know, I'd _really_ like someone to produce a proper Linux tablet 7/8 inch
that was affordable and wasn't 1/2inch thick. I can dream I guess...

------
0xfaded
Biggest deal in my opinion is 2 dedicated USB2 _hosts_, in addition to a USB3
host. The raspberry pi multiplexes (i.e. uses a 4 way USB hub) it's ports. If
I remember correctly the Ethernet is also multiplexed on the same bus. This
makes connecting multie cameras and streaming over Ethernet a problem.

------
Y_Y
Had to wait a long time to get a Build-to-order email for the old pinebook
after I sign up. Maybe I sign up today I'll get a pinebook pro before it stops
being cool.

------
StreamBright
I think I might just found the replacement for my 2015 MBP.

~~~
saagarjha
I'm curious what you're doing where a $200 laptop replaces your (presumably)
$1300+ MacBook Pro.

~~~
LeonM
I'm considering ordering the pinebook as a replacement for my rMBP too.

For me, CPU power and RAM are not that important, I don't need MacOS (any unix
system will do for me) and I don't play games (or at least none that would
require a powerful GPU).

The pinebook offers 4k60 over USB-C (my MPB only does 4k30 over hdmi, and the
mDP ports on the early rMBP have a design flaw that makes them unusable for 4k
monitors). The 10Ah battery in combination with the low-power hardware should
give very good battery life.

What I'm looking for in a laptop is a metal case, decent keyboard and
upgradability. The pinebook seems to offer just that. At a low enough
pricepoint not to be disappointed if it has some flaws. (Any flaw on a 3000
euro macbook would make me mad, and it has many).

~~~
mugsie
> mDP ports on the early rMBP have a design flaw that makes them unusable for
> 4k monitors

what is the context on this? I have a 2015 MBPr hooked up to two 4k monitors
on my desk right now, and I am not having any issues...

I would also worry about the GFX ability to actually output 4k/60 for anything
other than a terminal (The ARM Mali-T860MP4 GPU doesn't look like it is going
to be able to deal with 4k video for example)

~~~
LeonM
The early (first?) retina macbook pro's (sold from mid 2012 till 2013) have a
design flaw on the motherboard, this causes external 4k displays to show
noise, weird colors, lose sync or not turn on at all. Apple 'solved' this by
not listing the 2012 macbook pro on the supported device list for 4k monitors
[0] (this list appeared in 2015)

It seems like a signal timing issue on the early motherboards. The macbook
negotiates 60Hz with the monitor, but as soon as the monitor switches to 60Hz
it loses sync. If you install linux you can work around this issue by forcing
the output to 30Hz.

The issue was solved in the following motherboard revision, somewhere in 2013.
So that's why your MBP plays nice with your monitors.

[0] [https://support.apple.com/nl-nl/HT206587](https://support.apple.com/nl-
nl/HT206587)

(btw, I was not complaining that my almost-7-year-old 2012 device does not
work with modern 4k displays. I was just trying to explain why a 200USD
pinebook would be an upgrade over my 2012 macbook.)

------
akhilcacharya
Very tempted to buy the Pinebook Pro - if the battery life delivers, could be
a great machine to tinker with that can still run my daily workflow.

------
pininja
It’s great that we have access cheap and open hardware projects like these!
This new product line up is exciting.

------
gigatexal
I’m really interested in the Pinebook64 Pro. What retailers are selling them
or when can I pre-order?

