As it mentions above this was a bit of an adventure. Just a bit of background. I bought my first Rock64 4g a couple of years ago to run as a home automation server. It was pre RPI4 so was way ahead in it's league at the time.I installed Armbian and with the relevant OS updates it's been running 24/7 ever since without any problems.

Fast forward to today. I noticed over the last year interest was waning in this board. Community posts are down to a trickle. I managed to pick up five of these boards for a fraction of what I paid for my original purchase. Now that I needed an Android TV box I decided to give it a go and install Android 8.1 TV on an SD card as per the recommended install image https://files.pine64.org/os/ROCK64/andro...oot.img.xz . The following is how I went about it and the results that followed

I downloaded the image mentioned above.Instead of the recommended install procedure I extracted the downloaded image with Win7zip https://www.7-zip.org/download.html . It's a very stable file extraction utility and the extraction process went fine. I then used Win32 Disk Image https://win32diskimager.download/ to write the extracted image to the SD card. Once that was complete I popped the SD card into the Rock64 and powered it up and to my surprise after 10 minutes the Rock64 splash screen appeared followed shortly after by it the Android splash and finally the Actual Android GUI.

After configuring the usual locales and connecting to wired LAN via the ethernet port and attaching a mouse/keyboard I was ready to go. I started to notice that wired LAN was dropping packets and disconnecting and reconnectiing.After a quick search here with suggestions of changing to shorter ethernet cables, two pair cable instead of four to resolve Gigabit Ethernet resolution issues nothing worked. Of course I was lucky enough to have four other boards to swap in. Well I've discovered that two of the five boards have faulty ethernet connectors and one of them also faulty USB2 connectors. Also it looks like USB2 to external DAC is out owing to cracks and pops during playback.This behaviour is similar to that on the RPI3+ owing to conflict between ethernet and USB2 bus. Obviously I can't confirm this for sure on the Rock64 but I know I am experiencing this.

I finally settled on one board that boots with no issues.Full Gigabit ethernet, USB2 ports working fine. My next problem was low sound. I tried every possible option for sound out including USB to external DAC. You could barely hear a thing. Finally I stumbled on the ADB option to control sound output. I enabled the Developer option on the Rock64. I installed ADB for Linux on a Linux machine and from the Linux machine issued the adb connect command to connect both machines together. I finally found the command to increase the Rock64 built in audio output to maximum adb shell media volume --show --stream 3 --set 15 .I now had perfect audio via HDMI to an amp via coxial or in my case coaxial from TV to external DAC and analogue to the amplifier. Sound is now perfect.

This install did take a little longer than expected. What I have learnt is that it appears quite a lot of those Rock64 boards may have been faulty from day one and only I had spare boards to experiment with I'd never got Android working on my Rock64. I just did a basic outline here.If anyone planning on doing an Android install on the Rock64 has any questions ask away.

Hi guys,

I'm running Manjaro on my PBP. Loving the device so far. They keyboard is amazing (backlight would have been nice, but I'm not gonna niggle about a $200 laptop) and the screen is pretty WOW.

I'm able to play 1080p30 video in youtube, but 1080p60 video turns into 1080p12 (or thereabouts — tons of dropped frames) in youtube, mpv, and vlc.

I'm running the latest Manjaro.

Has anyone managed to figure out 60fps 1080 video? I believe none of the players I've tried support hardware decoding. Is there any trick to this, or is it just a limitation of the FLOSS video drivers?

Thanks!

Hello!

I received my Pinecil in the mail yesterday.

When turning it on for the first time the screen flashed a message No USB-PD IC detected.



When powered from DC5525 the Pinecil works, but it emits strange crackling noises from the rear end where the power connectors are located.

Has anyone here experienced anything similar?

Thank you in advance,
JS

I can't seem to get the dock to consistently send a signal to my dell monitor.  Sometimes I turn it on and it works, others it doesn't.  I have come back to the machine a couple times when it was working to be greeted with the flashing red/green led. 

I flashed PCM's spi flash to boot off of a NVME drive.  It's a Mushkin 250 Drive.  

My system is Linux pinebookpro 5.13.4-1-MANJARO-ARM #1 SMP Tue Jul 20 18:40:45 UTC 2021 aarch64 GNU/Linux

I am using the official Pine64 dock.  I am using a powered HDMI to DisplayPort Adapter.  Plugged into the dock i have power, ethernet, mouse, keyboard, and HDMI.  I have tried using a VGA cable instead with similar results. 

I am aware of using the "linux-pinebookpro" package available from Manjaro, but I really want this to work using an up to date Kernel.  I could be wrong, butI believe the up to date kernel is more optimized. It feels that way.  

Any suggestions would be appreciated!

I cannot boot from the SD, and apparently I need to do that to flash the eMMC. Pinephone Beta, convergence model, came with Manjaro.

The first time I tried to insert an SD card, it wouldn't go in right. I looked into the slot, and two of the contacts did not look like the others.  My son took it apart and was able see they were bent up.  He was able to bend them down, and I managed to insert an SD with Mobian and boot from it. Now I want to flash Mobian to the eMMC, so I put Jumpdrive on another SD, but now no matter how I insert either SD, it won't boot from it. 

Oddly enough the phone does recognize the SD card after booting from the eMMC! lsblk shows mmcblk0 size 59.9G when the card is inserted, but it won't boot from the SD card it can see after boot!

Two questions:

The SD slot is damaged. Is this repairable?  

The phone does see the SD card after booting, is there a way to make it boot?

Hi folks,

Community Edition: I ran Mobian off of an SD Card.  Mainly used to tinker and play with different distros, never used as a daily driver. It works fine with AT&T mobile carrier in US.

$170 (includes flat rate postal shipping in US).

Our development main board consists of  Rockchip RK3399 Processor and Debian9/10 OS and we are using  fn-link 6222D UUC WiFi + Bluetooth 5.0 combo module in our IoT Application.

             But Bluetooth is not working in our custom Debian Linux. Please guide us further to solve this issue and send us the appropriate driver for Debian Linux.


PAF..,

I just updated Mobian today on my PinePhone, and now suddenly the keyboard quit working on the disk encryption screen.  I'm unable to enter my password.  Is there anything I can do?

I can see the keyboard, but I can't tap on any of the buttons.

Hi, just wanted to let you know that after flashing Tow-Boot to SPI I've got working suspend. Steps are described in updog's response here on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/PINE64official/..._pinebook/

The instructions worked for the first release. I haven't checked out the new one yet since it requires a SD card

One of the things that people seem to like about the Librem 5 is the kill switches.

However, it seems like the Librem 5 will not be delivered until 2022 at the earliest.

If the next version of the PinePhone came out with kill switches for the modem and WiFi I suspect that it would generate a lot of sales for the PinePhone.

Of course, a faster processor and more RAM would be interesting as well, but the Kill Switches might be the Killer feature!