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 ins absolutely packed this month, we’re revealing PineTab2’s pricing and SKU variants (both of which I’m sure you’ll be pleased with), announcing that Star64 will be available in the next 6 weeks (or so) and report on all the work that has gone into PinePhone (Pros) development in the recent two months … and much more

Let’s get to it.  

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

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

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

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 of 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.

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). 

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 2×1 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.  

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 Wiki. 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. 

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