Pine64 was a Useless Project

[joe]

I don't think i buy it only $19 PineA64 will make me suffer over for 3 years. Is this pain beyond reality?
your life only this money ?
In fact, the development of allwinner should be much harder than ROCKCHIP.

[ab1jx]

Slower generally means lower power, which is a good thing for running on batteries.  I have 3 Raspberry Pi Zeroes and a Pocket Beagle.  Curious about the Pinebook.

If they could get displays to build them, an interesting approach might be to have a place to plug in the SBC of your choice.  Sell it without one or optionally with one.  It's the display, keyboard, touchpad, battery environment I'm looking for.

[blkadder]

I was one of the first to pledge on KS, and my board was DOA after about a month of messing with it. At least you guys got a board that worked for you. I am not complaining, I understand that it was $20 and that it was a valiant first attempt by the company. I am considering ordering up one of the new generation of the boards just to give it a go. I am no developer or even very knowledgeable about SBCs in general but I do tinker with some of the other companies offerings.

The reason for my post is to just say that it is good of the company to allow people to voice their opinions about the product. If nothing else, it lets the company know what people are thinking about their products. Yes, the product was oversold, but what company in their initial offering doesn't do that? All in all, it was/is a $20 board, less than half the price of a Pi, and I hope that the company will continue to refine their products.

[SimonMasters]

I'm reading this thread with much interest because I've been looking for a SBC that is more powerful than a RPi for a mesh parallel computing project.

Pine64's low energy specification and price make it a candidate. Another contender is the UP board, and of course RPi3+ If I say it is "crypto mining" I hope I don't alienate too many community members! For protoyping I need 10 or 20 devices. I am planning to take this to Kickstarter: either as a share-equity issue, or a very modest reward-based proposal with an ambitious stretch target.

Given the overwhelming success of Pine's original KickStarter campaign and the "we are not software developers" response to the many issues on this forum, I have the following questions:

(a) Would any (disatisfied) non-user OWNERS of existing Pine64 hardware like to donate their kit to such a project?
(b) Is there any appetite for collaboration or sponsorship from the owners? Who are they? Who do I need to speak to?
© What interest or experience of Mesh, CUDA and computationally intensive parallel processing exists in the Pine community?
(d) Does anyone have any appetite for a collaborative project that will involve a lot of "configuration fixes"?

Or is it a shambles and best left alone? I'd really appreciate some feedback on this.

[dkryder]

@SimonMasters you are about 3 weeks too late because after having 2 pine64 listed for sale for ~ 1 year someone bought them. otherwise if you paid shipping you could have them. the owner is tllim he is a mod of sorts. mesh and cuda on this board are a big question mark. i can't remember any discussion. mesh = maybe and cuda = i doubt it since the processing power needed just is not there. shambles, in my opinion, is a good descriptor. but hey, there are thousands of pine64s living productive lives in certain use cases. good luck.

[zer0sig]

I'm reading this thread with much interest because I've been looking for a SBC that is more powerful than a RPi for a mesh parallel computing project. 

Pine64's low energy specification and price make it a candidate.  Another contender is the UP board, and of course RPi3+  If I say it is "crypto mining" I hope I don't alienate too many community members!  For protoyping I need 10 or 20 devices.  I am planning to take this to Kickstarter: either as a share-equity issue, or a very modest reward-based proposal with an ambitious stretch target.

Given the overwhelming success of Pine's original KickStarter campaign and the "we are not software developers" response to the many issues on this forum, I have the following questions:

(a) Would any (disatisfied) non-user OWNERS of existing Pine64 hardware like to donate their kit to such a project?
(b) Is there any appetite for collaboration or sponsorship from the owners?  Who are they?  Who do I need to speak to?
© What interest or experience of Mesh, CUDA and computationally intensive parallel processing exists in the Pine community? 
(d) Does anyone have any appetite for a collaborative project that will involve a lot of "configuration fixes"?

Or is it a shambles and best left alone?  I'd really appreciate some feedback on this.

Did you ever make any headway on this? I'm not sure how useful a cluster of PINE64 devices would be for crypto mining (as opposed to a more power hungry processor/GPU type setup), but I'd love to hear how this turned out.

[S265]

I purchased 2 Pine64 boards thru crowdfunding hoping it will be a great board and good alternative to Raspberry, but still i am struggling to get a fully functional OS for these boards and mostly other people also stopped developing and supporting these boards. from past 3 years these boards are lying and eating dust. I tried stable release of Android, Ubuntu etc. but non of them are useful neither for work nor at entertainment.

Pine64 has not fulfilled what it promised while launch.

The Pine64 still has untapped potential using mainline kernels, and mainline distros like Fedora, OpenSuse and even Redhat. Early adopters have moved on - that is ok. And credit to those who did invaluable work getting the board up and running for users. But a new challenge awaits - the mainstream is out their. That is why Pine64 Inc should be in the user/software space ensuring ongoing support for their users who invested in these. My 2c.

[ltorsini]

I'm a huge fan of the old-school Pine64 and have been using both my 64 nonstop since the original weatherproof case builds in 2016: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=2023  I'm not sure what happened to the photos, if an admin would be inclined to help I'd be happy to upload them again.

One is running OpenHAB2 (wish someone smarter than me would port OpenHAB3!) to control the vast number of IoT devices in my lab/home. It hasn't skipped a beat and has reliably run the place for a couple of years. The second is running a recently crashed version of Android and is the reason I am kicking around the OG 64 forum to see if there are any stellar Android images here that might use the zigbee/zwave module and manage the GPIO pinouts... doubtful but worth the look.

Anyway, FWIW this project has far exceeded my expectations and I'll be using these OG 64s until they release their magic smoke.

[tllim]

I'm a huge fan of the old-school Pine64 and have been using both my 64 nonstop since the original weatherproof case builds in 2016: https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=2023  I'm not sure what happened to the photos, if an admin would be inclined to help I'd be happy to upload them again.

One is running OpenHAB2 (wish someone smarter than me would port OpenHAB3!) to control the vast number of IoT devices in my lab/home. It hasn't skipped a beat and has reliably run the place for a couple of years. The second is running a recently crashed version of Android and is the reason I am kicking around the OG 64 forum to see if there are any stellar Android images here that might use the zigbee/zwave module and manage the GPIO pinouts... doubtful but worth the look.

Anyway, FWIW this project has far exceeded my expectations and I'll be using these OG 64s until they release their magic smoke.

Thanks, glad to know the old horse still keep running :-)