Hello all,

So I’m wanting to venture down the rock64 path after having it suggested by multiple people. 

Currently I am trying to run libreelec with OpenVPN and transmission from a Pi 3/3B+ and it’s been a real pain. Between the insane bottlenecks with transfers over 8MB/s via transmission to hangs when streaming from USB it’s just been an insanely frustration. 

I am hoping to retire my DNS-320L which current contains 2 drives, a 2TB and 3TB WD NAS drive, so I was planning on purchasing the board, the NAS enclosure, the SATA cable and the 12V power brick because better safe than sorry. 

I presume the fan in the store would be a wise purchase?

Is there anything else I might need? I don’t care about booting from eMMC as I don’t see a benefit over a good 128gb SDHC card I currently am repurposing from my switch, had to upgrade. 

Also, my other concern was the shipping time and method to Canada. I see that most shipments come via DHL but I’ve had issues in the past getting hit with duties and taxes for large shipments. Looking arbitrary the total I fear I may push over $25, but looking st the Canadian store, the Rockpro64 is $140CDN(!!!) so even if I was hit, the savings would be massive. 

Lastly, what’s the deal on shipping speed/times? I see more stock is expected on the 12th, should I assume a 30ish day turnaround considering its coming from China?

I’m a bit wary as it’s a good amount of money and unlike buying from amazon I don’t expect to have flexible returns, so I need to know for sure this will work. 

My expectation would be to copy my Pi 3 setup here, loading Libreelec and running OpenVPN with transmission, but I do not know if the plugins will work seamlessly on the hardware. 

Thanks in advance!

Running Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS (GNU/Linux 4.4.132-1075-rockchip-ayufan-ga83beded8524 aarch64) and did a run of the https://bench.sh. 
With only the eMMC (no sd) I get really slow I/O speeds:


I/O speed(1st run)   : 93.5 MB/s
I/O speed(2nd run)   : 94.6 MB/s
I/O speed(3rd run)   : 91.8 MB/s
Average I/O speed    : 93.3 MB/s


Is this normal?

Does anyone have any information regarding where I can find a good, understandable tutorial on how to use the "dd" command for transferring a file to an SD card? To eMMC bulk storage, if that's possible?

There are plenty of good "type this in" code examples** in these forums; what I'd like to see somewhere--anywhere--is a "dd For Dummies" kind of tutorial (I know how to check the 'dd' man page--absolutely NOT what I'm asking for).

Thanks, in advance, to anyone who knows of a good, understandable-by-anyone source (again: anywhere) of "dd"-use information.


**There are also several examples of users' failures, because they didn't / don't have access to the type of tutorial I'm asking about. Again: many thanks.

Are the (4) groups of GPIOs A, B, C, D in the same 32-bit register?
Example:
GPIO1
3
1 0
[----D----][----C----][----B----][----A----]
7 4 1
I can toggle GPIO1A1, 4, 7 on/off but not GPIO1Bs.

TIA,
/Faradn

...Any way to set a fixed width font in this BBS?

So this is what happened.

I got my new Rock64 yesterday. Been waiting for a month to get this.

I flashed DieptPi and tried to configure it over LAN for first time and it was smooth except at one point there was no display. I tried to reflash the memory card with Dietpi. It started to get the updates for first time and then no display. 

I tried to flash OMV on that. When i connect without network it shows no network, which is ok. When i try to connect LAN cable i dont see the rock64 in network.

How can i get this resolved?

Hi every one,
  I just read that the pine64 team just shown up the their 24 and 48 rockpro64 cluster. I am very interested in making such a monster. @Luke, can you give some details on how you build the cluster and where you found the case ?

LMM.

Just bought my first rock64, and planning on buying more to replace some if not all of my raspberry pi's.

I bought a 1gb model for testing purposes and basically because it was so cheap, and it looks like the best and fastest option for running the os is an emmc card.  So here is my question, if that is the case and emmc is the best option, what's the deal with the color code systwm for emmc's?  This board will replace my raspberry pi 3B that I'm running nextcloud and plex media server on,  and I should be able to use a 16gb emmc module.  I have no idea which one I should buy though, a blue dot, a white dot, a red dot, what does all that mean and which one do I need?  Thanks in advance for the help, looking forward to getting this board up and running.

[1] A stable Debian 9 (Stretch) or Ubuntu 18.04 (Bionic) w/Mate DE distro 
installed. With all manpages...there are some missing manpages in @MrFixIt &
@Lucasz's Debian 9/Mate distro. No manpage for ``mmap''.

[2] <Important for me> Access to a/the Pi 2/3B 40-pin GPIO header. (How??)
...currently developing a ``RK3399'' GPIO library followuing the design of the
Pi2/3B BCM2835 GPIO library. I'm no dev, just a tinkerer...

Any other requests for comments folks?

/Faradn

We have below requirements and questions, please help with pointers for our research.

1. We need 4 UARTs
2. 2 ethernet(s) [100 Mbps is fine], one natively available, what is the best option to add second one?
3. WIFI/BLE

Though we look for Industrial Temperature, considering RockPro64 LTS' 0-70 temp is good for factories that we aim for.

How many hardware UARTs RockPro64 supports, somehow we could not find the straight answers. 
Is it possible to enable some GPIO pins to be UART? We want to connect 4 RS 485 channels on 4 UARTS, can RockPro64 could supply power for same along with 2 Ethernets while in use?

After the latest details on the project, here are some requests / tips / questions:
- 1 The lower border is too large (if it has no buttons).
- 2 The display manager should be i3 or lxde (kde or gnome would be f00l(no offence ubports)) and the OS arch or debian. All the always-running apps should be gtk2.
- 3 I hope that the pinephone 2 will use a mediatek or qualcomm soc. Not a surprise a battery of 3000 mAh.
- 4 USB host mode ? USB guest mode ?
- 5 A second USB ? mini hdmi ? But all those holes in the box could be a problem for water resistantce...
- 6 Some feature could be battery killer, like sensors are always on ? And the rgb led is fun (less bright /efficent ?) but I hope it doesnt use 3 pwm! it would kiII the battery. Also there could be minor useless module features that are on by default, must verify that.
- 7 Is the modem chip on the main board ? Then why not to use directly the qualcomm 9x07 modem rather than the quectel based on it ?
- 8 After the first launch you will need a period of testing to verify that the module doesnt spy. The threat can come from queltel qualc0m or andr0id small tools
- 9 Multi boot
- 10 Recovery from brick(boot from sdcard?)

Anyway, I love it ! I want one as soon as possible !