As of the latest firmware update for the keyboard and touchpad that is miles better for the keyboard, users have been reporting a sort of input lag with the touchpad. With the right libinput tweaks, it is a little annoying but usable.

I too did some experimenting, but did not get very far.

The keyboard is driven by the SH68F83, which presents two interfaces over USB - one for keyboard and one for touchpad. The touchpad is connected to the SH68F83 over an i2c bus. An eeprom is also connected to the SH68F83 i2c bus and is used only for persisting the kill switches states. When the touchpad is touched, interrupts are fired alerting the SH68F83 to read registers and proxy data back to the OS over USB.


@xalius has been attempting to reverse the the firmware that runs on the SH68F83, a USB/keyboard MCU with an 8051 core.

How I suspect the keyboard and touchpad firmware update process works:

1. A firmware fw_tp_update.hex is flashed to the SH68F83. This firmware appears to be named XW-TPUTOOL_TV3-US-H1-12-00.
   
2. The touchpad update firmware receives tpfw.bin over USB and then flashes it to the touchpad IC (likely over i2c at 400KHz, but could be some OOB bitbang over the i2c bus)
   
3. The fw_ansi.hex or fw_iso.hex are then flashed back to the SH68F83.
   

• Get a block of data from the USB transceiver. Using the TX* and RX* SFRs.
  
• Fill XPAGE, IB_OFFSET, and IB_DATA SFRs with the flash sector, offset into the sector, and data to write.
  
• Kick off a state "gate" by sequentially filling IB_CON1, IB_CON2, IB_CON3, IB_CON4, and IB_CON5 with a magic numbers.
  

• A proper dissassembly of the SH68F83's 8051 code from the firmware .hex files.
  
• A dump of sniffed i2c traffic during a firmware update of the touchpad.
  
• A dump of sniffed i2c traffic while using the touchpad, with correlation to what was happening on the touch pad (tapping, two fingers, scroll, pressing the buttons, etc.)
  
• What the heck is the HLK H2168? Datasheets or any info anyone can find about this chip are greatly appreciated.
  

After some help on the chat channels, here's the first Alpine Linux/postmarketOS image for the Pinebook Pro, only tested on an ansi model.

Images can be downloaded here:

http://images.postmarketos.org/pinebookpro/

The current image has no UI installed since the postmarketOS UIs have touchscreen optimisations in them, meaning random things will be unnecessarily big. You can use the normal Alpine instructions for installing your favorite desktop environment.

default account is demo/demo

I have a Pinebook Pro. I did the following:

• I flashed the Manjaro image on the eMMC from Debian running on from the SD card. That rendered it unbootable, it only lit up both LEDs if I tried to power it on.
  
• I concluded that it must have a corrupt bootloader or u-boot on the eMMC, so I removed it. It then booted fine from the SD card.
  
• I did the trick where I reinstalled the eMMC and then switched on the eMMC switch just after the machine started booting. It booted from the SD card and recognized the eMMC.
  
• I then zeroed out the first few MBs of the eMMC in order to nuke the defunct bootloader or u-boot. After a few seconds the machine hung, I though it was because it filled its RAM with IO cache, no big deal.
  
• Since it must have gone past the bootloader already, I reset the machine - and after that it never showed the eMMC drive again. It doesn't show up in /dev, it isn't shown in gparted. Dmesg only shows one line containing mmc1, it's about clock speed being set. I misplaced my USB eMMC reader, so I can't test it using that. I tried using rkflashtool, it shows this:
  

Hi,

I'm relatively new to the PBP, having received it only a few days ago, and I have a problem:

Whenever I playback any video or audio on Firefox or Chromium and listen via my headphones I can hear a strange hissing noise that stops whenever I stop the playback. Also, in Firefox, the audio only plays back if the local volume setting (that is within e.g. the video player) is at its maximum. Am I doing something wrong?

I'd like to thank for your help in advance!

It seems that after modifying my fstab on manjaro to mount a swap partition, the pinebook pro is unable to boot.

The problem is, the mmc has boot priority over the sd-card, so the only way to boot from sd is to disable the mmc, which leaves me unable to access the fstab in question. Enabling the mmc after boot doesn't make it visible either.


However, now I think about it, when I was installing manjaro, it did boot from the sd-card without having to disable the mmc.
Can it be something else that's wrong? A corrupted u-boot install maybe?

Unfortunately, I don't have a working UART cable (I ordered the official one that runs on 5V), nor do I have a usb to mmc adapter.

Does anyone have any ideas to fix this?

Hi all. My brand new Pinebook Pro has been working fine since Monday but I've been having issues with it today. Around 30 seconds after the login screen displays the system freezes up for around ten seconds and then reboots. I'm running the default image and haven't changed any settings on the machine.

If I tail /var/log/syslog this is the last message I get before it locks up:

Hello all,

Just received my PBP yesterday. I typically use Ubuntu, so the desktop will take a little getting used to. However, I created a new sudo user acct, which does not have sound playback at all. The default "rock" user does have sound playback.

I searched the forums and found a post about the alsamixer / selecting the correct sound device, but this did not work. How do I get sound playback for accounts other than the default "rock" user?

Thanks!

Today I installed this drive with @danielt hack (thanks ).
PBP was at 14% of battery at the time I booted it and the boot was successful. Then I copied almost entire filesystem from eMMC to SSD and it went fine.

So I think one might say it works OK. If anything bad happens I will update this thread.

I ordered it on amazon and it came quite quick delivered straight from amazon warehouse by DHL.


edit1: I have put it into hardware accessory compatibility list on wiki.


edit2: Some performance comparison between eMMC and NVME:


[root@pbp ~]# hdparm -Tt --direct /dev/nvme0n1


/dev/nvme0n1:
 Timing O_DIRECT cached reads:   1934 MB in  2.00 seconds = 966.69 MB/sec
 HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(identify) failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device
 Timing O_DIRECT disk reads: 2646 MB in  3.00 seconds = 881.86 MB/sec




[root@pbp ~]# hdparm -Tt --direct /dev/mmcblk2

/dev/mmcblk2:
 Timing O_DIRECT cached reads:   300 MB in  2.01 seconds = 149.55 MB/sec
 HDIO_DRIVE_CMD(identify) failed: Invalid argument
 Timing O_DIRECT disk reads: 440 MB in  3.01 seconds = 146.42 MB/sec

I taught coding at a private school for several years (first LegoWedo, then Scratch). I taught children from 5 to 12 years old. Children want to develop further in the direction of coding, so I want (after the winter break) to open a class with programming in Python and EduBlocks.
That's why I'm looking for single board computers for my class.

What do you recommend to me? My first choice was Raspberry Pi, but I'm a big fan of Pine64 (I use Pinebook Pro on a daily basis, and Pinephone (Brave Heart) will be coming soon ).

I want to be able to install a simple linux OS (debian, manjaro, ubuntu) with Python and a browser (EduBlocks).
I would also like to be able to connect additional sensors to the boards in the future (temperatures, distances, etc.). Ideally, the board should be compatible with the Grove system.

What do you recommend from the Pine64 family?

I'm having issues using my nVME drive with my pinebook pro.  Any time I do any sort of major read or write the entire system freezes.  I have attempted the power reduction settings listed in the wiki, however, the state is not saveable and does not fix the issue.  I'm using a Samsung 970 500gb.  Any help would be appreciated; I'm at a loss.