Pine64 March update: making waves

https://pine64.org/2024/03/17/march-update-making-waves/

by LorenDB • 2 years ago

119 52 2 years ago

pierat• 2 years ago

Ah, more badly supported gongkai cramware, using the cheapest and hardest to obtain drivers for anything. Everything is out-of-kernel, and you're making custom kernels IF YOU CAN TRANSLATE CHINESE... And hope its made for your kernel version.

And when you say something, you'll be screamed at "these are hackers tools bla bla bla". But they don't even work with reference software. They string hardware together, and slap a PINE logo on it. You're up shit's creek, and you have to MAKE the paddle.

Or you get shit like hardware failures like "hardware destroying USB-C on the phone if the keyboard is pluged in on the Pinephone pro". Like, seriously, save your money.

After dumping $600 into this "ecosystem" I'll hard pass. And I'll speak up for the pain and suffering you're getting into if you do go this route.

cassepipe• 2 years ago

I had read this article some time ago... It sounds like it is relevant : https://tuxphones.com/pine-formula/

blihp• 2 years ago

Interesting article... I've been wondering why things seemed to go in a strange direction at Pine64. That article provided some clarity.

LanternLight832• 2 years ago

I get some of this (have an unused Pinephone), but I'm still thankful they tried (built up a stir) and, FWIW, the PineTime is OK and the Pinecil is the best soldering iron I've seen anyone use

DaSHacka• 2 years ago

I get some of this (have an unused Pinephone), but I'm still thankful they tried (built up a stir) and, FWIW, the PineTime is OK and the Pinecil is the best soldering iron I've seen anyone use

Surprised to see someone else echo my thoughts exactly, this is exactly what I've been saying for some years now whenever someone asks about buying Pine products.

The PineTime is pretty decent (though the strap included OOTB is atrocious) and the pinecil is honestly awesome.

The PinePhone is of course a disappointment, though that's par for the course for most of Pine64's stuff.

atoav2• 2 years ago

Have you seen anyone use a JBC soldering station before?

dvdkon• 2 years ago

I think some people have misplaced expectation of Pine64 hardware, because some of their products (e.g. Pinecil) have been very polished. Most of it is a better documented and more open alternative to random gadgets from AliExpress. If you want a lot more than that, it's not for you.

Maybe they should make a different brand for their products that end up being usable and polished. I think this mixed offering approach is hurting their image, which is a shame, as I see value in "cheap no-name HW, but hackable".

colinng• 2 years ago

Yes, the Pinecil (both versions) are awesome, and if you buy several and split the shipping with friends, affordable.

But a majority of the work was done by the RalimOS project (firmware for several soldering irons). In the end, the input is DC or USB PD, a thermistor, accelerometer, volt meter, two buttons, and the output is a heating coil and a status screen.

For the soldering iron to work is several orders of magnitude lower complexity than a phone.

I’m sure they’d love for someone like Ralim to come along and write the entire OS for them. The problem is, as other posters have mentioned, there just aren’t enough millionaire programmers with nothing better to do than write a phone OS for you for free.

vrinsd3• 2 years ago

Sadly (as much of a cynic as this makes me seem) I kinda figured this is exactly what would happen when the Pine people decided to partner/use MediaTek or name any other vendor who doesn't truly embrace or care about open-source. I'd spotlight Chinese SoC vendors here but that's biased, Qualcomm's track record isn't awesome here either, but it's my understanding people inside ARE trying to change that culture.

My high-level observation is the Pine people are basically selling what's effectively a "reference design" built around some questionable hardware under the guise of making an open-source hardware/phone/etc. Whether or not the device actually works as a phone, has good battery life, works reliably is kind of a secondary goal and ends up mostly resting on the shoulders of a community of unpaid software developers.

People here might be too young to remember, but there was a prior attempt at an open-phone called "OpenMoko". Despite using silicon that was more open-source friendy, it didn't really work out. It's REALLY challenging to build custom hardware, get the details right and build it on open-source software unless you're super well funded and very coordinated.

It's however not hard to sell "kits" that give you the idea they'll do something but end up tricking the end-user who doesn't find out until after the money is spent.

mattl• 2 years ago

Really tried to use the OpenMoko and almost every other open source phone that came along for so long and never had any success.

jauntywundrkind2• 2 years ago

MediaTek has gotten much better. Yeah, my mt7621u wifi craps out a couple times a day and has to be usbreset. But in general, I think MediaTek and Qualcomm are both at B- and moving in the right direction.

This is one market, not a total picture, but looking at what OpenWRT supports is some kind of indicator. MediaTek really showed up in force for Wifi 6. Very very few 802.11ax systems were hackable, try as we might. But a bunch of very affordable pretty well performing MediaTek access points showed up early, & only more and more have been made available since.

I wish I had a real source of real information on what's forcing the bad old dirty shitty don't give a fuck world to reform into people who actually want their chips to be usable, who appreciate that having your shit upstreamed into mainline is the only way your crap isn't immediately rotting on the vine from day 0. Google's Chromebooks seemed to have had some influence, created a uniquely strong pressure to do the right thing; MediaTek seems like they've kind of had to pass the gauntlet on this, & become something more than they might have otherwise been. One of the best act's Google's ever done, having a Chromebook team that has driven hard for getting the heck out of vendor hell. Meanwhile, the Android team has the Google Kernel Image, excuse me, Generic Kernel Image (Generic Google Kernel Image at best!) to specifically enable everyone to never have to upstream their support ever again, from what it looks like (because Google will maintain a userland driver layer hitting Google APIs so folks can just ignore actual kernel support forever).

megous5• 2 years ago

So what's the famed MediaTek based Pine64 device? And who are these Pine people, exactly?

Dalewyn• 2 years ago

you're making custom kernels IF YOU CAN TRANSLATE CHINESE

I feel this will be a useful skill to have in the mid- to long-term future if computing keeps going the way it has been going and goes where the vocal minority wants it to go.

Lest we forget, the chief force behind RISC-V advancement has been China and China is slowly but surely also coming to parity with our latest silicon. Pax Americana and English as the lingua franca aren't guarantees anymore.

azinman2• 2 years ago

Except Chinese is too hard for the world to learn, particularly in a technical context where it’s about the written form. Any logographic will have the same fate. This means it’ll end up staying within China and they’ll have a hard time globally.

zozbot234• 2 years ago

Every piece of hardware starts out as "out of kernel", the meaningful comparison is whether support has any chance of being upstreamed to Linux/Uboot and other such projects. And Pine64 will still fare a lot better on that score than the random fly-by-night Aliexpress vendors you're comparing them to, if only because of their FLOSS-friendly community orientation.

megous5• 2 years ago

So why did you buy any Pine64 stuff in the first place?

eternityforest• 2 years ago

The pinetime looks nice. Everything else I really want to see succeed... But it's fairly hacker-y. I like open source, but I'm not really a big fan of hackers-only stuff that doesn't just work.

wkat42422• 2 years ago

That PineVox hardware looks great. There's a great lack of smart speakers that aren't bound to some service like Apple, Amazon or Google.

Now with LLM proliferation a self hosted voice assistant that actually works will become pretty possible.

dugite-code2• 2 years ago

And it's well timed with HomeAssistant's new voice interaction developments. That and the news of how unprofitable Amazon and google home's offerings are.

Cacti• 2 years ago

aren’t they supposed to lose money? i though they were subsidized by the business specifically to collect data that can be used elsewhere.

WhatIsDukkha• 2 years ago

Why don't people just use bluetooth conference mics and most any hardware?

NewJazz2• 2 years ago

Cost maybe.

wkat42422• 2 years ago

Because it's messy, expensive and ugly.

I really want something like the homepod mini.

jauntywundrkind2• 2 years ago

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

It'd be cool if something materialized here. I kind of knew not to expect much for hackability with the OpenPineBuds and bit anyways, but wow, uh, was surprised just how little was available to play around and see.

Ideally someone would make some hackable Bluetooth hardware run Zephyr and Sound Open Firmware. Different class of devices, but good enough for Intel, AMD, and MediaTek to be using it as the basis for their sound firmware. It'd be great to open some access here!

SMART_failure• 2 years ago

I want Pine64 to work, but I have a shelf of e-waste because I bought in, hoping. It seems they have selectively alienated some of the developers working with their hardware, rather than feeding the community they expect to produce the software ecosystem that sits around their hardware.

pjmlp• 2 years ago

The story of most of these projects, see Pandora as well, there were lots of drama on that one.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13985288

nolist_policy• 2 years ago

Yes, but the OpenPandora is actually useful for the task. Tons of apps in the repository and not just emulation but original homebrew too. And it just works like a polished product.

After 10 years, the Pandora still is one of the best emulation handhelds out there.

xrd2• 2 years ago

Anyone know if you can repurpose the Mycroft Mark II to use this home assistant bundle? Mine is just a brick right now.

synesthesiam• 2 years ago

Yes, it is possible by installing the Wyoming Satellite software on the Mark II. All the pieces are there, it's just missing some easy-to-install firmware. Source: I worked at Mycroft on the Mark II and am now the voice guy for Nabu Casa (Home Assistant).

xrd2• 2 years ago

I just checked out that project, thank you! But, I don't see any instructions at all for even getting started, even after searching the issues. Is there a good place to find information? When you say "missing some easy-to-install firmware" it sounds like there is a big piece missing, no?

shadowpho• 2 years ago

Why didn’t they just buy off the shelf rockhip? Those are affordable, have way better Linux support, similar cpu perf and an actual pcie lane so you can have a real nvme :/

gnarbarian• 2 years ago

the pine time is one of the greatest electronics purchases I've ever made. it cost me $20 the battery lasts forever and it is the perfect minimalist smartwatch.

I think these guys are on the right track aiming for simple hardware. I will be first on the list for their bone conducting headphones

qwerty456127• 2 years ago

H.264 video encoding/decoding driver isn’t in the kernel yet.

Better do H.265 because H.264 already is obsolete. It seems most of the videos made/streamed today already are either H.265 or AV1. Nevertheless supporting H.264 is also useful because the majority of old videos stored on people's drives probably is in this format.

megous5• 2 years ago

H.264 video decoding is mainline for RK3566. Pretty sure I compiled and tested ffmpeg v4l2-requests branch for my Pinetab 2 recently and it worked (with wayland).

Yeah, RK356x has mainline support for VP8/H.264/MPEG2 decoding.

https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/latest/source/drivers/media...

dingi• 2 years ago

Instead of releasing a bunch of half-baked hardware, Pine64 should focus on getting a decent level software support for those devices. OG PinePhone is 2 or 3 years old now, and still has crappy software support. At this point, it is reasonable to assume that Pine64 devices are a scam.

stavros2• 2 years ago

In what way are they a scam? Are they being unclear on the fact that the software is half-baked? This whole blog post is about how the software isn't ready.

megous5• 2 years ago

OG Pinephone is 4.5 years old. And it definitely has a very different level of SW support than when it was released.

There were also several HW revisions based on community feedback. Far from a scam.

threemux• 2 years ago

I'll echo others here - they need to focus on a core set of products and get better about upstream support. They have a few legitimately good devices like the Pinebook Pro and the Pinecil. Focus on those and maybe a handful of SBCs.

opan• 2 years ago

AFAIK, they do next to nothing in terms of software support. It tends to come down to the community and the manufacturer of the SoC they use to make this stuff work. They're just getting cheap hardware in the hands of developers and hackers and trying to get people on-board. The RK3399 in the Pinebook Pro is very well-supported by now, though a bit old and low on RAM. I would trust that most RockChip stuff will eventually (maybe 3-5+ years after availability) get good support. The QuartzPro64 should be coming along slowly now, and I imagine once it's better-supported we'll see a Pinebook Pro 2 with the same RK3588. Similar to how we had the RockPro64 before the Pinebook Pro. The PineTab 2 and PineNote base off existing RockChip stuff (RK3566) they're already using in some SBCs (Quartz64), so we should see a lot of their devices improve at the same time. For the same reason I expect the Orange Pi 3B and 5 Plus to mature with the current latest Pine offerings. As long as you stick to stuff with these popular chips, there's a decent chance the devices will become usable eventually. I would avoid anything too new or obscure when getting ARM devices.

megous5• 2 years ago

All of these devices are already usable quite well for some purposes. Pretty much the level of support follows how long they were available. But neither is particularly unusable.

Pine64 March update: making waves

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