[quote pid='89016' dateline='1612558952']
These systems keep popping up everywhere, and they have a ton of potential, but the education-focused companies don't really take advantage of the full possibilities of the system.  They flood everything with gimmicky sensors for throwaways projects, but they're missing a lot of what makes the whole thing special.

I think there should be a new line of compatible systems, designed for building truly commercial quality products in a modular way.

Right now, modular systems just aren't that great for anything but educational use.  I never see anyone actually building anything with them, even on a DIY level.

But there's only a few changes needed to make them totally usable, none of which should add more than a few dollars to the price.   The whole thing might even be able to replace or supplement other ideas like the PineCom, by just letting people build their own device for everything that the PineTab and phone aren't suited for.

Lego Mindstorms already proved the concept.  Modular Electronics, even at the consumer level, is totally possible and practical, but only when it's actually modular and doesn't depend on adding in a ton of ugly non modular hacks.


Here's what I've noticed has room for improvement in the existing modular space:

* Modular power.  Define a new connector for unregulated 3-20v, which has a Vin bus and a main battery bus.  Any module can supply power or take power from either one with a diode.

In this way, things like robots that need 12v for motors can be totally modular.   

For maximum compatibility, the connector could be a 5-pin JST-PH, having ground, unregulated 0-24Vin, 0-24Vbat, and regulated 5v, and 12v, all busses that any module can take from or supply to.   

Almost every project has that one part that needs one of those voltages, with no way to supply it.

Power input modules should also provide power to the VBat bus, but batteries should not provide to Vin, to avoid charging a large battery from another battery.

And everything should be reasonably protected against input transients as might occur from cable inductance.

* Lower Power/better batteries

Although they're terribly hard to find in America, LTO batteries are cheap and last 20k cycles, and can be charged like capacitors, with a nice voltage curve that makes it easy to check the level.  To really let people make high quality devices, we should be using batteries that don't explode and don't wear out.

So many of the worlds "Throw an Arduino at it" projects use almost no power.  A huge number could in fact only be a mA or two.  

A mainboard should be able to run from USB or the 5V bus, but also should be able to at least run in very low power trickle charge mode from the unregulated VBat bus. 

There's so many projects you just can't do without building a ton of stuff from scratch, because nothing is really designed for this kind of thing.  Everything just has WAY too much idle power draw.




* Fewer Modules

At most, I think there should probably be an ESP32-S2 and an RFM69 or LoRa based module, a USB-C power input module, maybe a 12v battery, and maybe a motor/LED driver.

Most of the cheap modules are easy and trivial to make yourself, or else they're already covered by STEMMA or the like.  Just use the STEMMA standard connectors, give us a top notch base, and the rest will be pretty trivial with a basic breakout board for the connector.

Adding 800 different kinds of main processor chip is just fragmentation.

* Higher Quality modules

Things should be designed with all proper protections.  A motor driver with current limiting and I2C diagnostics for short/open can handle a whole crapload of use cases.  A giant relay is cheap, but needs support component and can't do certain things.

If there's an ADC module, it needs all appropriate ESD shielding you would want in an industrial grade part.

* Case Friendly mechanical design

We should be able to 3D print a case for this stuff, in a way that exposes the USB port, and maybe even a power switch and a button or two for things like easy pairing and setup.   The usual modular boards have tiny buttons that are not at all friendly to enclosures.

Perhaps a standard back panel layout could even be designed, that would be common to all mainboards, with a USB, power switch, and a button and LED or two.

Any additional addons should also be designed with consideration for enclosures.


* Standard connectors

Grove is cool and all, but Adafruit's STEMMA uses standard JST-PH connectors that are cloned basically everywhere.  Might as well use something like that.


* Sold as fully complete kits?

One way to avoid just making a bunch of random useless junk would be to start by focusing on complete kits that resulted in something usable for everyday use.

Imagine a PinePlug modular smarthome plug that you could customize with your own firmware, or add a motion sensor to the externally-exposed connector, etc.

Or a PineBot robot, or even a PineLight flashlight.   Maybe a PineStation weather station,  or a PineCalc graphing calc/universal remote/etc type device that could take over a lot of the PineCom's use cases.

Door and gate sensors that run forever on tiny solar panels would be amazing.  Tiny E-Ink displays would be cool.


It's easy to see how a half-dozen modules or so could be used to make most of these things, with so many consumer gadgets only having at most one custom bit of tech. A modular system like this would make it very easy to add new products without the risk of making e waste trash.

And a lot of potential product suggestions would, IMHO, be a lot better as modules than full products.

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Since I am interested in the RISC-V architecture and the everyday use of open technologies, it would be nice to use a more open technology in my desktop (at the moment my desktop is RockPro64, about two years, if I'm not mistaken), so I want to know there are no plans to release boards with riscv64 processor?
So far there is one board for a good price and performance (at least according to the description).

Hello folks, if you're struggling to find a secure and free(as in freedom) software IM and VOIP client for Pinephone, this is suited for you. With latest changes it is currently possible to build jami client for the pinephone and have it in _usable_ state with nearly all features working out of box! To get familiar with Jami more, visit:
https://jami.net/

The above applies for jami-qt client (not the gnome one!) and Phosh

What works:
- importing account / registering
- sending messages
- receiving messages
- calling and receiving audio calls
- calling and receiving video calls*
- adding new contacts
- sending / receiving attachments

What doesn't work:
- *pinephone camera (e.g if you're on video call, you see the other side, but they don't see you) - UPDATE see thread and https://git.jami.net/savoirfairelinux/ja...issues/287
- ui is generally not scaled well (but not unusable) without scale-to-fit, but with scale-to-fit it's usable for daily driver (see https://git.jami.net/savoirfairelinux/ja...issues/257)
- squeekboard must be popped up / minimized manually when chatting (see https://git.jami.net/savoirfairelinux/ja...issues/281)
- there are relatively many small UI quirks which are more annoying than showstoppers
- the UI gets nearly unusable when screen rotation is performed (it's better to have it fixed in portrait when using Jami)
- the led indication for e.g new message, incoming/missed calls is not triggered at all
- there are no packages in any of the pinephone OS distributions, you have to build/compile on your own

Tested the compilation on:
- arch linux arm (latest updates) with Phosh

Screenshots:
see https://git.jami.net/savoirfairelinux/ri...note_26254

Steps to build / compile:
- see: https://git.jami.net/savoirfairelinux/jami-client-qt but iin my case it was:

Hey There,

I can't get any of the sms apps to work and receive messages on my new pine phone. Does anyone have any insight of which one is best and how to get it working?

Thanks

first,  i added Chromium as a web browser and they key board doesnt show up so i have to plug in an external key board to type.  if there is a better browser please let me know. i would like to stay with a chromium browser but if i have to change im ok with that.
second,  im not sure what the sms client that is native to the phone help with that would be good to.
third can any program that loads on Manjaro load on the phone?

things that have worked very well,  the dongle works really well,  browsing with a keyboard works well and is plenty fast.

mine is not hooked to cellular network as i am waiting on a new sim card i am trying to work my deficiencies first i plan to use it daily.

i am pretty familar with linux in general and have plans for this device.

thank you in advanced for your help.

as update i got my sim adapter and sd card, it ate both i had to disassemble phone to get my sim card out after it ate it, i will no longer need help

Hi,

as there'd been a lot of reports of failed updates for ANX7688 firmware, i thought i'd share my experience here.
The wiki already points out that there's some trouble with Linux kernel 5.10 (timeout)
and i had some trouble with the image it refers to... here's a fail safe way!

Before (version 0x2312):

Some time ago, I wrote a small script to build an Alpine image for the Macchiatobin platform. I had some time a couple of weeks ago to see if I could also build something for the RockPro64, and it turned out to be way easier than I thought.

I don't have any images published, and the script itself is still pretty rough around the edges, but it does produce a 40-ish MB image that will properly boot Alpine, so I figured i would share it. Note that I'm building this specifically to use the RockPro64 as a router (using an Intel X550), so the kernel is pretty slimmed down and huge chunks of non-router functionality have been removed.

You can find everything in the hosted repository: https://git.sr.ht/~mutemule/alpine-router-aarch64

(Turns out that the only real tricky part was that you need the specify the serial console to use with `earlycon`, and once that was done, Alpine basically boots just fine. Everything else I've done is just to strip the kernel down to be what I want it to be.)

Hello,

I'm not sure if I'm at the right place to ask for help, please let me know if an other location is better suited.

I'm trying to port my XMPP client to FOSS mobiles on the Pinephone (currently Plasma Mobile and Mobian). It uses Kivy framework which supports Wayland and uses a SDL2 backend.

I can build and launch it, but I have only a black screen. I have the same result with official example, here is some logs I have with an example application:

In your January update you wrote that there will be another batch of the pencil in early February. Have I missed that already?

Hello fellow Pine-pals,

I have a PBP which I've installed Arch on and over all it works great. One annoyance has been that if I shut the lid it'll go to sleep but when I open the lid it doesn't wake up. I've tried pressing keys, tapping the power button, disconnecting and reconnecting the power...  nothing. I haven't tried accessing the serial console but that might be my next step.

Since it sleeps OK I'm thinking this isn't the magnet issue but something else.

Has anyone seen this issue before? I can't recall if it happened with Manjaro or not.

Thanks,

Duck of Death