Dormant Projects and Hardware

[S265]

It is a shame to see the Pine64, Rock64 and PinePro64 no longer being pursued by developers and enthusiasts. Posts to these lists are few and far between. But I understand that passion needs an object of desire and these no longer deliver. Other projects present an appealing challenge.
It would be nice to do more with these great tools. How to reach a wider audience with their potential? We need people who can think outside of the PC world with ideas from left of field, that have been ignored or abandoned by others. The Rasberry Pi has many of these fans. I wish some would come here and take the hardware to new places in science and engineering. My own bias is to see Fedora, and OpenSuse and other mainline distros available to try and reach the wider audience, perhaps with mainline kernel support. But this may not be necessary for some technical projects. What about a competition to find the best new projects for this under-used hardware?
My 2c.

Proud owner of Pine64, Rock64, Pinebook Pro.

[poVoq]

I guess there is just too much (often better) competition on the regular SBC market.

I think where Pine64 shines is uncommon stuff that otherwise isn't available or only at much higher prices.

That said: I wish the Sopine modul platform and clusterboard would be developed/expanded further as it is in theory great for home based server clusters.

[thatsamtoress]

All things has there own purpose which their strength can be seen

[PakoSt]

A lot of the effort put into the Pinebook Pro directly affects the rockpro64 and rock64. Same with the PinePhone and Pine64-lts.

Maybe the PineH64 is an exception to the rule (though shouldn't Panfrost bring similar support for the Mali inside of that SBC?).

It will be great if more people were active with the devices, I agree. Better support for the ports would be great, luckily mainline kernel support os close for most of them. A few updated system images will go a long way

[S265]

A lot of the effort put into the Pinebook Pro directly affects the rockpro64 and rock64. Same with the PinePhone and Pine64-lts.

Maybe the PineH64 is an exception to the rule (though shouldn't Panfrost bring similar support for the Mali inside of that SBC?).

It will be great if more people were active with the devices, I agree. Better support for the ports would be great, luckily mainline kernel support os close for most of them. A few updated system images will go a long way

Yes agreed ... the mainline kernel has a lot to offer. My most recent adventure was using the latest Armbian on Pine64+ 2GB. It worked extremely well. I was able to install Docker and Portainer the Docker GUI. My plan is to take a look at Seafile on Docker. Still going.

[GreyLinux]

I would disagree , over the years I've had a few raspberry pi's and a couple of odroids, but currently I'm working on a media server with the rockpro64 NAS setup. I wanted to get away from the other companies slightly and support pine64 . I currently have a pinetab and a rockpro , but eventually I'll hopefully have a pinetime , pinephone pinecil and a few other SBC's like the hardrock64 when it comes out.
I intend to write a tutorial on here when I'm finished setting up my media server, unfortunately I've only been able to tinker the last few weeks , a couple of days at a time.

But to let you guys know what I'm working on its a rockpro 64 running armbian buster with openmediavault as a native install . Running in docker I have jellyfin, Home assistant, Radicale caldav server and nginx as a reverse proxy.
Eventually I intend to run more but this is the current projection . All of it is now working as expected, I'm just working on fail2ban and psad to provide a bit of security .

[Paulie420]

I must be missing something; can't you load up Armbian on a Pine/Rock SBC and do GPIO projects just like on the Raspberry Pi?

Is there no library or support or... what?

I was going to order a couple Pine/Rock boards and use them on projects that I have planned... whats the holdup?

[Avamander]

I think it might just be that the RPi is just so massive it's hard to hear about other SBCs. It's still used and people like it, it's just not mainstream.