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Comment by the_duke | Hacker News Reader

I love the Pine lineup of devices.

They are really helping the Linux phone by providing a dev platform, partnering with different OS implementations and mainlining as much as possible.

I do wish they had a Pinebook Pro and Pinephone with a bit more oomph.

And for them to focus heavily on RISC-V in the future once that becomes viable, which sadly seems a few years off.

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I agree .. I've been hacking away on the PineWatch as a platform for the last few months, mostly to teach myself baremetal Rust, and it is an extraordinarily satisfying circumstance to be able to tell time on a watch running my own code. The hardware is decent for the price (very cheap), and it is so very, very refreshingly open.

I will pick up a PinePhone as soon as possible, based on this experience, and I'm probably going to be a Pine stalwart for the next few years, at least, as a general platform. These guys are finally delivering devices that we developers can be happy to get involved in.

I say that as a dev with years of iOS experience, where I am currently fatigued with having to keep up with yet more proprietary bollocks from Apple: the future of these devices is open.

The dev kit buy page has a scary warning that the cover doesn't pop on. How much of a problem is that in practice? I really want to get one to play with.

There was a recent post about that on r/pine64official (or maybe on Mastodon? I've been watching both) that said that the cover is held on with silicone glue. So it sounds to me like there's no mechanical detent, but you can use glue to hold on the cover. The main issues I could see with that would be waterproofness and possible glue mess if it isn't applied just so.

This isn't the post, but it is mentioned. [1] [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/PINE64official/comments/jaow6f/pine...

Its easy to seal the watch in a way that produces water-tightness .. but I still wouldn't want bother wearing it in the shower. Maybe okay in rain, though.

Also sweat from your arm. A watch needs to be at least somewhat waterproof.

I have two kits - one which I hack on with Rust, and has wires hanging out, and the other which has the pinewatch python project on it, and I have sealed it shut.

When I get my personal little watch application built and ready, I'll get another, install it, and seal it in.

No worries.

Do you need to have the watch open to reprogram it? I don't know why it wouldn't be able to do that wirelessly.

In the early days, yes. Now, not so much:

https://github.com/JF002/Pinetime/blob/develop/bootloader/RE...

.. there are so many interesting projects to run on the PineWatch, I just bought a couple extra so that I could evaluate them all at once. Its not an expensive investment - I've certainly spent more on the rPi lab-bench over the years:

https://github.com/daniel-thompson/wasp-os

(MicroPython based environment)

https://github.com/seclorum/pinetime-rust-mynewt

(Rust-based environment)

https://github.com/JF002/Pinetime

(C/C++ based environment)

Their upcoming Pinecil soldering iron runs on RISC-V, so there is that. :)

Really looking forward to it, it has been schedule-slipping for as long as I've been tracking now (this fall, basically).

Not sure what you consider 'viable', but here is a RISC-V mobile development platform: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor.

100 MHz FPGA softcore, keyboard, simple b/w screen.

It's an interesting kit, but not relevant in the context of iterating on a modern phone OS.

Well, I think the project is called "Precursor" for a reason - one can assume it can come closer to a smartphone form factor in a couple more generations - if successful.

That's really meant for development of hardware.

> I do wish they had a Pinebook Pro and Pinephone with a bit more oomph.

The new SOC they say they have planned for their 2021 lineup seems to be just that.

I wonder if I will be able to buy a simple mainboard upgrade to my existing PinePhone once they have something shipping.

I certainly wouldn't mind more "oomph" in my PinePhone and it would be nice not having to buy a new device entirely.

I doubt we are going to see the RK3566 in PinePhones in 2021. That sounds more like a 2022 thing to me – unless getting proper mainline Linux support is going to land extraordinarily fast for that new SoC.

Knowing Pine64 I think they might provide upgrade boards unless it turns out that revising other aspects of the PinePhone hardware (e.g. screen, camera, battery) can be revised and improved cheaply so that this would not make sense economically.

The announcement says the new SOC is for "non-pro" devices. They seem to have something more powerful in the pipeline for those.

I think the chip for pro devices is likely to be the rk3588.

I don't want them to focus on RISC-V. Only time will tell how appropriate RISC-V can be technologically in a smartphone application, and why would you want the company that focuses on open source to invest themselves into it? Are you aware that Riscv being an open ISA has absolutely nothing to do with open source (either software or hardware)?

If every compiler cost $1000 for every time you wanted to compile something, there would be dramatically less OSS.

Having an open, free ISA _allows_ for open hardware.

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