Pine64 March update: making waves
pine64.org
pine64.org
Now with LLM proliferation a self hosted voice assistant that actually works will become pretty possible.
I really want something like the homepod mini.
After 10 years, the Pandora still is one of the best emulation handhelds out there.
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
Better do H.265 because H.264 already is obsolete.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.
Yeah, RK356x has mainline support for VP8/H.264/MPEG2 decoding.
https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/latest/source/drivers/media...
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!
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.
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.
The Pinecil is great at making things hot, even with challenging ground planes, it's very quick to reach the target temperature, and I can carry it with me in a pocket and power it from USB.
There really isn't any soldering iron even an order of magnitude close to its combination of price, power, and versatility.
In the end, when it comes down to it the one thing that nobody should compromise on are the tips. There are open hardware soldering stations that use original hakko tips that work really well. Not sure if a similar thing exists for JBC. 10 years ago when I bought it that wasn't an option tho.
Modern tips are expensive, but the difference to older tips is that they have the temperature-sensing element in the tip (as opposed to: in the handle), that means as soon as you touch something with the iron, short temperature dips are avoided and that makes soldering easier, more pleasant and quicker.
That means the actual soldering station mainly needs to read that sensor and regulate the temperature by switching a Mosfet. That is not rocket science. Add a interface to control the temperature and maybe something that senses if the handle is put down (hall sensor in a holder?) and you are basically there in terms of functionality.
Whether it will work as reliable I can't say, but it will be at least a 75% cheaper.
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".
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.
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.
I found SailfishOS UI to be pretty bizarre and for using compiled software (Qt) the UI was oddly laggy. Basic things like attaching photos when sending an MMS were bizarre, you had to do it one at a time from the gallery app, etc.
Ubuntu Touch has a pretty reasonable UI (aside from having a start-bar like thing that you swipe in and out) but they do NOT support VoLTE at the moment which means you can't use it as a phone! Performance on Ubuntu Touch was also pretty bad even on decent hardware and while it's improved on Pixel-era devices you'd think all UI interactions would be instaneous.
Both projects seem to have made some strane prioritizations. Sailfish seems to have pointless re-invented their own UI paradigms, their own browser, etc and Ubuntu Touch doesn't seem to care the devices can't be used as phones given lack of VoLTE but they have Snaps and their own web browser...
VoLTE is hard but JMP.chat can act as a workaround.
Based on this Stackover flow post I guess it CAN be compiled but that depends on the version, open-source, commercial, etc:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9448296/is-qml-translate...
JMP.chat exists but honestly that's kind of a crutch or work around if your primary cell phone can't make or receive calls on its own without ANOTHER broker or provider.
One thing I did like about Sailfish OS and to a lesser extent Ubuntu is that it's mostly "standard" Linux under the hood so you can do things like run dnsmasq or something like that and tweak it as needed.
But in this day and age I think the bare minimum for a cell phone is calling, texting (SMS), possibly MMS and GPS/maps that don't need a network or Internet connection. I'm hoping PostmarketOS, Sailfish, Ubuntu Touch, open-source-smart-phone will get there but I'm not holding my breath.
Unfortunately I managed to drop it and now the screen has a dead spot in the bottom left. As that is the spot where the important icons are it means I have a device that works perfectly aside from being entirely useless (a device which resembles its owner perfectly).
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).
You're looking for Purism: https://puri.sm/posts/how-to-be-upstream-first/
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.
There were also several HW revisions based on community feedback. Far from a scam.