Pinebook Pro 'xtreme'

[Luke]

@Arwen The RK3588 is one of three SOCs that we're looking at for a future PBP.

You know how we work: first a dev board, then a few months later evaluation of progress (seeing how Linux matures), and first then can we start a discussion if a particular SOC is viable. It doesn't matter how good a SOC is if there is no Linux or Linux-development for it.

Personally, I am currently more interested in the regular Pinebook (non-pro) at this time, since its up for an upgrade in the foreseeable future and there are a lot of fun things we could do with a less 'serious' device.

[tllim]

I do repeat *my* request : not more power or memory, but a "geek port" that allows to plug "hats" and do experimentation or command/control directly from the PBP. Maybe a USB-C extension would fit the job but it would be great to control electronic stuff. So I²C, SPI, UART, CAN, Modbus, ...

I second that motion!  

One of the ideas I raised with the original Pinebook was that since the USB, headphones socket and microSD socket were on a daughterboard on the left side of the Pinebook, that it could be swapped out for another module, which would expose a 5x2 female header (why? Because that conveniently perfectly fits in the hole in the side for the USB socket!) which would then allow access to a bunch of GPIOs...

But having said that, it's probably better (better in this case meaning easier, more flexible, safer) to have an Arduino Nano plugged into the USB... allowing reliable I²C, SPI, etc with a dedicated processor.

Actually someone can just expend the side daughter board to implement that GPIO expansion function. The side board schematic has been released, Pinebook and Pinebook Pro have same daughter board :-) If this interest is high, I can released the side daughter DSN and Gerber file.

[Arwen]

Looking at the daughter card's schematics, there are several un-used pins on the cable, 7, 8, 33, & 34. Just enough for another SPI device, (flash or otherwise). I've not yet checked the main board, but the RK3399 has 6 SPI interfaces. SPI 1 is already used for the bootable flash device. Some others have the pins re-purposed to something else. But their might be one of the 6 that is un-used at present.

Perhaps a hardware moder version of the daughter board can use this as an interface.

[Kochise]

Sure, GPIO expander

[brent.thierens]

@Luke can I be curious and ask what the other 2 SoC's are that you guys looking at for the future?

[Luke]

@Luke can I be curious and ask what the other 2 SoC's are that you guys looking at for the future?

Neither have been announced so under NDA

[as400]

@Luke can you give us some tech details ? Like which Cortex'es ? How many cores and RAM ?
Without any names of course.

[Luke]

@Luke can you give us some tech details ? Like which Cortex'es ? How many cores and RAM ?
Without any names of course.

I'd rather not.

What I will say is that one option will be very much akin to the RK3588 while the other will be something completely different.
Read between the lines, and ask no more

[brent.thierens]

Ok, that made it clear to me. You are speaking about the 16-core RISC-V CPU Alibaba once showcased

[fpex73]

I would rather have a more moddable PBP, with some more on board memory and support for SATA drives. Maybe a more powerful CPOU as well. Something an extra 50$ could easily achieve (if not less)