I tried the PP as a daily driver for a few months so far, and had fair success. Here's what I found:
As a phone, it's mostly OK.
As a camera, it's inadequate.
As a computer, it stinks without a monitor, keyboard and mouse (using Mobian Bookworm).

I use the phone as a phone, for work. Work pays for me to be accessible, and I need to be able to get calls at any time. For years I used a Blackberry Passport. It was a rock-solid phone, and had a good camera that was worth taking into the field where there was no phone service. The HMI was decent, and worked well on the touchscreen. The only app I used was a bible reader. Everything else was either done through the Blackberry Hub or the web browser. When the carrier stopped supporting the BB Passport, it was time to switch, and I tried the Pinephone.

The Pinephone works as a phone, although sometimes the audio is way too quiet. I didn't miss any calls when the phone was working. The browser works moderately well, and I can mostly do on it what I was accustomed to doing on the BB. Browser problems boil down to scaling/HMI/touchscreen issues. The bible readers available are not adequate! They are great on the desktop, but don't work well with the touchscreen interface, and aren't adapted to the small screen. The developers of Bibletime and Xiphos have told me they are not interested in adapting them to phones.

The camera does take pictures, but doesn't focus well, doesn't do closeups well.  With the BB I was accustomed to taking detailed, in-focus macro pictures of equipment nameplates, wire terminations, fine details of broken equipment and so on. This camera isn't adequate for any of that. It's not worth carrying this for the camera. The megapixils software does seem to be doing its job, but the cheap camera can't do what I need.

SMS works well, no issues there. MMS doesn't work yet, but I can live with that.

Unfortunately, this is a computer, not a phone. It's a linux computer that requires quite a bit of typing to administer, and without docking bar, keyboard, mouse and monitor, it's terribly tedious to handle necessary tasks. Because it's a computer not a phone, the touchscreen HMI is not very smooth and easy compared to the BB Passport. Because it's a computer not a phone, none of the bits that work together seamlessly on a phone play well together. For example, I was able to get my contacts imported to the contacts app, and am able to dial a contact from the phone app, but the phone app won't tell me the name of a caller when that number is a contact.

Because it's a computer not a phone, it's running Mobian Testing, software that needs updates, and the updates occasionally break stuff. That's become a huge problem for me. I need the phone to just work ALWAYS, and being down for a few hours while I try to troubleshoot issues is a huge problem.  If I'm going to keep on using this, I'll have to get a second phone so I can have one to use and one to risk an update on.

Because it's a computer not a phone, the thing is just BUSY. With the BB, I never really had to think about administration or updates, everything just worked. Linux isn't like that.

Because it's a computer not a phone, and because the software is still beta, the battery life stinks! For a while I was able to go 6 hours or so without charging, as long as the phone was suspended and in my pocket. Recently it's been emptying the battery in two or three hours in my pocket. It gets quite warm, which is nice on these cold winter days.

The plastic case back is breaking, but is still usable. The phone hardware is working fine so far.The switches to turn off stuff are OK. I don't use bluetooth, so I was able to turn it off and save a little power.

In summary, Linux is great for a computer, but isn't great for a phone. The touchscreen interface is a lousy way to administer a linux computer. The software has a long way to go, but it is already usable as a phone.

I look forward to the day when Mobian Stable is 100% functional and there is no reason to worry about the very rare updates breaking anything. That's probably a couple of years in the future.

Hello, my quick setup:
-a rooted phone
-pop os linux
-windows 10 64
-a micro sd
-and this pinephone

-time to lost

I bought a PINEPHONE – with Convergence one week ago.

I first simply tryed to configure it on manjaro default system but there is a persistent manjaro graphic bug. I am blocked on landscape side (i am not sure of this translation) and i just have a half screen, i couldn't finish the setup. I forced reboot a lot, shaked it, but nothing happened.

I've then flashed OS on sdcard with my rooted phone and this app and etcher (and after rufus). The flash succed each time with arch(pinephone) and jumpdrive(pinephone) but whent I put the sd THE PHONE ALWAYS BOOT ON MANJARO.
So, I'm looking for a solution.

I have all read the pine wiki and the noob one but I found nothing about.

I am sorry, I just want do disserve my personal interest, sorry for my english and please be nasty I am a big noob.

Thanks for your reading.

Hi, 

recently the screen on my Pinebook pro was broken and it's taking a while for the parts to come back in stock. So I am willing to buy a broken pinebook pro for the LCD display. 

If anyone has a good LCD(no scratch or anything) make sure to respond.

(Sorry if this is in the wrong spot; I don't see a section of the forum specifically for SOQuartz)

I eagerly bought the SOQuartz to replace the RPi CM4 in a project where I need to drive an LVDS display (hoping to drop the part of the circuit that converts DSI to LVDS), but yesterday I learned that the RK3566 can only support LVDS on its first MIPI-DSI transmitter, and on the SOQuartz only two lanes of the first DSI channel are broken out to the board-to-board connectors (MIPI_DSI_TX0_D[01][pn], page 15 of the schematics.)

I wish the two DSI channels had been swapped so that all four lanes of the LVDS-capable transmitter were broken out. The other DSI transmitter could have only 2 lanes broken out with less loss of functionality.

This is probably unlikely to be changed in a minor board revision, but maybe if there's a SOQuartz 2 or something?

One of the main things i use my phone for is watching videos so when i recently got a pinephone i set out to get this working nicely on it.

I installed mobian with phosh on a microsd and that's been really stable for me. This has a videos program built in but it wouldn't play a video i'd downloaded to the phone so i installed mpv since i'm familiar with it on desktop and it's small and simple. This worked great when i went into settings and made it the default for video and music files. The only problem is the default interface and other ones i found were not made for a phone and so it made pausing and changing time difficult with only a touch interface.

Thankfully mpv has a fully scriptable interface so i managed to make a really simple interface by editing the the default file from the mpv github.

It just gives you a time seekbar and a central play/pause button but that's all that's usually needed.

To use this script you need to make a 'mpv.conf' file in the '/home/{username}/.config/mpv/' folder with the line 'osc=no'
This stops the builtin interface from appearing. There must be no spaces in the file and {username} is 'mobian' on mobian.

Then you need to make a folder named 'scripts' in the same folder so that you can put a new file in '/home/{username}/.config/mpv/scripts'

To use my edit of the interface you need to make a file with a .lua extension. I named it 'osc.lua'.
Then copy and paste this code in which is mostly just the same as the original: https://pastebin.com/aTq7Uncb

With this done, anytime you open a video on the pinephone, you'll have a simple interface that will be fully usable with only touch.
To fullscreen the video just double tap somewhere above or to the sides of the play button and seekbar. double tap again to exit fullscreen.


Hopefully this is an easy way to make pinephone a little more normal for daily use. Any improvements are welcome as this is just a simple edit of the osc and I don't very well understand the mpv API. Also i did most of this on desktop and then moved the files to where they needed to be.

Hello,

I'm currently working on a GPIO expander HAT that fits the ROCKPro64 and Quartz64. Here's a 3D render of the current prototype board:



It uses the I²C pins to provide an additional 16 GPIOs, and can be stacked up to 8 times for a total of 128 GPIOs. Each board has an interrupt pin for bank A and B (8 pins each), which can be configured to fire when the input on a pin changes.

The terminal block is a screwless terminal, and can be accessed even when multiple boards are stacked on top of each other.

The boards are based on the MCP23017 chip from Microchip, which can run at up to 1.7 MHz. Each I/O pin can provide 25 mA.

It'll be a while before I have some prototypes assembled as the IC is on backorder for the next few weeks, but I wanted to gauge whether there's any interest in doing an actual production run of these boards using surface mount components and improvements discovered while using the prototype run.

So if you're interested, let me know in the thread, and name what price you'd be willing to pay per board. I'm currently aiming for maybe $15/board as a target.

what are these pins above modem chip? six pins.

i marked them from 1 to 6.

A while ago, I decided I wanted to use Retroarch on Arch Linux Arm Plasma Mobile on my Pinephone UBPorts CE, with or without a physical controller. It was not easy and I could not find a consolidated set of instructions for my desired use case, so I thought I would post a little tutorial here for anyone else interested in doing something similar. By following these steps, you should have Retroarch and the necessary emulator cores to emulate Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Genesis, Super Nintendo, Playstation, and Nintendo 64.

My goal is to save people time and headache, and to hopefully find people who can push the envelope further. I have personally tested Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Genesis, Super Nintendo, Playstation, and Nintendo 64 with this configuration. I have not gotten Dreamcast to run yet, and Playstation and Nintendo 64 run very poorly. I am hoping others can advise how to improve the performance of those emulators. I do not have extensive knowledge of all of the configuration options for emulator cores, so maybe tweaking the configuration could make them playable. I am holding out hope for Super Mario 64 because I saw a video months ago on YouTube showcasing N64 emulation on the Pinephone. I don't know if it was taken down, but I can't find it anymore. The video showed Super Mario 64 being emulated on a Pinephone and it looked like a playable frame rate. I managed to get it to run, but it is not playable yet.

I welcome feedback to make this information more complete, useful, clear, etc.

The instructions to install Retroarch on Arch Linux that you will see below are derived from the following video. It may help if you get stuck or want more information:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nI_MzwCjFuQ

The pastebin link shown below was found in the description of this video on Pine64's YouTube Channel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yILXtmc7Wrc

[Install Retroarch along with your desired emulator cores]
sudo pacman -S libretro
When prompted to select packages from the group, enter:
32 33 35 15 27 30
Which corresponds to 32) retroarch 33) retroarch-assets-glui 35) retroarch-assets-xmb 27) libretro-sameboy 15) libretro-genesis-plus-gx 30) libretro-snes9x

[Setup retroarch.cfg]
Replace the contents of ~/.config/retroarch/retroarch.cfg with this (found in the description of a video by Pine64 on Retro Gaming on the Pinephone):
https://pastebin.com/zNutfvxp
I don't know what all of the changes in this config file do compared to the default except for the menu interface. This configuration tells Retroarch to use the RGUI menu interface as opposed to the default Ozone menu interface. I can only assume this decision was made to improve performance as the RGUI menu interface looks simpler.

[On-Screen Controller Setup]
At this point, I recommend setting up the on-screen virtual controller button overlays as a backup in case you find yourself without a controller.
NOTE: When plugging usb c peripherals such as a controller into the Pinephone, the screen may dim. If your Pinephone's brightness is below a certain threshold, this may turn off the display entirely. Before plugging in your controller, or other peripherals, increase your brightness to around 50%.
Plug in your controller, usb c hub with keyboard, or connect via bluetooth with a virtual keyboard android app (Bluetooth Keyboard & Mouse), anything that will work to navigate the Retroarch interface.
Run Retroarch
Online Updater > Update Overlays
Settings > On-Screen Display > On-Screen Overlay > Overlay Preset > gamepads > psx > psx.cfg (or your gamepad overlay of choice)
From the On-Screen Overlay menu, ensure that Display Overlay is on, Hide Overlay in Menu is off, and Hide Overlay When Controller is Connected is on (or whatever you prefer)
NOTE: To actually use the on-screen overlay to navigate Retroarch and control your games, Plasma Mobile's Display Scale must be set to 100% instead of the default 200%. Open the Settings app in the plasma app drawer, go to Display, and change the scale to 100%

[Get N64 Emulator (mupen64plus-next)]
This one was tricky. I could not find any n64 cores in the libretro group in pacman. I ended up compiling it from source on the Pinephone. If you know of a better way, please let me know. You may need to install some packages if you have never compiled anything before. You will need make, git, and g++ at least.
NOTE: Compiling on the Pinephone will take time and can be paused or interrupted if the Pinephone goes into sleep mode. Keep it awake while compiling.
I think this should cover everything you need:
sudo pacman -S base-devel git
Once you have the necessary packages:
git clone https://github.com/libretro/mupen64plus-libretro-nx.git
cd mupen64plus-libretro-nx
git switch master (When I cloned the repo, it was on the develop branch which failed to compile. The master branch compiles at time of writing)
Using your preferred text editor (vim), change '0' to '1' for FORCE_GLES on line 2 of Makefile.
make all
sudo cp ./mupen64plus_next_libretro.so /usr/lib/libretro/

[Get Playstation Emulator (pcsx_rearmed)]
There are playstation cores in the libretro group in pacman, but for one reason or another they didn't work for me, so I compiled it from source on the Pinephone as well. If you know how to get the other cores working, please let me know. I may try troubleshooting them again later. You may need to install some packages if you have never compiled anything before. You will need make, git, and g++ at least.
NOTE: Compiling on the Pinephone will take time and can be paused or interrupted if the Pinephone goes into sleep mode. Keep it awake while compiling.
I think this should cover everything you need:
sudo pacman -S base-devel git
Once you have the necessary packages:
git clone https://git.libretro.com/libretro/pcsx_rearmed.git
cd pcsx_rearmed
make -f Makefile.libretro
sudo cp ./pcsx_rearmed_libretro.so /usr/lib/libretro/

[Miscellaneous]
It is usually helpful if not necessary to do the following on a fresh install:
Run Retroarch
Online Updater > Update Assets
Online Updater > Update Databases
Online Updater > Update GLSL Shaders

[Adding Roms]
Be sure you have updated your databases before this step. See [Miscellaneous].
Run Retroarch
Playlists > Import Content > Scan Directory
Navigate to the directory where you keep your roms. Retroarch will add them all to Playlists for you to easily select them to play later so you do not have to navigate to your roms directory each time.

[Play]
Run Retroarch
Playlists > Playlist of Choice > Game of Choice > Run > Core of Choice
Play!

Here's how we transmit and receive data over SPI on Apache NuttX OS... Featuring the latest prototype of PineDio Stack BL604!

SPI on Apache NuttX OS

Hello,

i did not think it’s that hard, but I can’t find an mobile app which reminds me of tasks on a specific time on a specific date. Does anyone possibly know one. Yes, there are some, but none is mobilefriendly…

Thanks a lot!