Hey folks,

A little background:  this is my first pine64 device.  I've flashed a few androids over the years, and long-time linux engineer.

My PBP arrived a couple weeks ago with Manjaro KDE and I've invested a bit of time getting it set up the way I like.  Currently all I'm doing is tarring everything to a file on USB drive.  But I really want to do an image backup.  Idea being I could flash a new OS, and then restore my image of customized Manjaro if I don't like it.  Or say I bork it bad and just want to revert to a known good state. 

It's always best to backup a quiesced filesystem (preferably unmounted).  I've done a little research here and on wiki and stuff and think I at least have a strategy.  Please let me know what you think:

First, I need to choose a linux distro which I can boot from SDcard.  Then insert a 64GB USB thumbdrive.  Boot the SDcard image.  finally dd the emmc to the USB.  poweroff, eject media and boot back to normal.    To restore, I do the above but dd the other way from USB to EMMC.

Is this a sound strategy or does it take me down a more aggravating path than one I'm not aware of, yet?
Is it better to boot from USB and dd to SD? (instead of the reverse as I described above)?
And where exactly does etcher come into play?  Burning the OS to the SDcard?

Many thanks,

Hi,

I power up my clusterboard with the pine64 power supply (15A).

The clusterboard leds of socket #0 and #1 lights up, but sockets #3 to #6 does not turn on.

I was able to access sopine boards connected in any socket with a USB-Ethernet dongle through SSH.

I use the sopine armbian-focal img and sopine armbian-bionic images, with a modified dtb file to include 'allwinner,tx-delay-ps = <500>;' following: https://forum.armbian.com/topic/9402-eth...ne-module/.

With this modification I was able to see eth0 device with ifconfig next to my usb-dongle, but only if I connect the Sopine Board on socket #0 or #1. In the rest of the sockets the SOPINE led is on, but not the corresponding clusterboad led and the eth0 device is not listed (only my usb-dongle).

I think my clusterboard is malfunctioning.

I will try with an ATX power supply in the following days.

Any clue what could be wrong?

Also even if I have eth0 interfaces up with a correct ip in socket #0 and #1, they can not ping each other through the internal switch.

I've been playing with my new Pro for a while couple of weeks now. I absolutely love it. I do have one minor problem though.

The up arrow on the keyboard doesn't work properly. I need to press very firmly or even wiggle my finger to get it to work. It's not something I would consider sending the unit back for, but if there's a known fix I'd be interested to know it.

Thanks PC

This morning, for the first time I can remember, the power light began flickering with noise. The noise sounds like a fluttering relay with some light beeping. I'm currently using Balena Etcher to flash an SD card. Disconnecting the AC power supply had no effect.

When Etcher finished, the noise stopped the flickering continues.....

Not aware of anything being mentiond about this particular event. Does anyone have an idea?

Many Thanks, Rick :-)

The Morph browser is giving me a really annoying issue on websites. It keeps giving me a connection untrusted pop-up. It's never for the actual site it's always for the ads like sometimes it's the Google ad domain giving me errors and other times it's other ad domains. 1. Has anyone else run into this I looked an never found anything about it 2. Is there a way to install another browser?

Solved: my pfblockerNG system was making it throw the errors. Although this should not be an issue since I don't intercept or break normal htttps encrypted ads and I never receive this message on other devices.
I fixed this by bypassing my DNS servers on the phone and the dns resolver on my pfsense box

https://forums.ubports.com/topic/3857/set-dns-in-ut/9

Hey there

when opening the backcover you find in the upper left (seen from behind) a hole with a button in it with the description "reset".

What is this button for? What does it? I mean having the cover openend it is easier to pull the battery then finding some pencil to hit this button.

Does it have any further meaning than cuttung the main curcuit?

Thanks

I hope it is the right place to place the topic.
I guess it worth to mention I read CRUST thread which is closely related to the topic. But it puts the device to sleep mode.
What I'm interested in is optimizing power drain for the device running under light to moderate load. For instance chatting or listening music.
My findings are:

• brightness scales from 0 to 8 with range 0 - 300 mA;
  
• cpu freq scales from 480 to 1152 KHz with range 300 - 600 mA;
  
• good findings end here
  
• software disable modem/Wifi gives nothing (hw kill switch gives ~120 mA for both);
  
• cpu cores online/offline gives nothing or even negative under load.
  

hello,
can you share how to get started with pinetime, building project and flashing. Here am not able to create the project in segger for pinetime and how bootloader and mynewt works? is there any video to know the process of building and flashing it to pinetime?
thankyou

Kindly share the link for Pine time mechanical source files.

Hello everyone and good morning from Spain.

 I recently bought the Rock64 board and I would like to install the most recent and updated version of Android (Stock or TV) BUT it includes "root". That once installed, it is already with the "root" applied.

I want to install some applications BUT it is essential that the Android version is "root".

What is the LAST or most RECENT version of Android (Tv or Stock) that includes "root" and that is available for eMMC 16Gb?

Thank you very much and much encouragement, strength and courage