09-14-2016, 10:18 AM
(09-14-2016, 09:38 AM)MarkHaysHarris777 Wrote: Clearly the PineA64 SBC was unfairly over-hyped and was marketed by an over-zealous team who got lost in the board's clear potential but who also completely forgot about the reality of the board's clear inability to deliver on the 'reasonable' expectations that were unfairly set.
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I backed this board as a development board only with clear potential, and as a viable replacement ( and better replacement frankly ) for the Raspberry PI; it has been all of that and more!
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The second main piece causing much of the general complaint is that the shipping team did not really consider the infrustructure necessary to satisfy and 'real' shipping request from all of the backers
We could add to that the fact that many of the shipping delays were attributed in various different Kickstarter updates to 1) The ABS cases 2) the LCD screen 3) the Lithium battery 4) the Z-Wave modules 5) constant reminders that many backers had not yet completed their surveys (when in fact they were expected to make uninformed decisions about what Backerkit accessories they actually needed).
The ABS case requires modification to be useful, neither of 2 official Pine64 LCD screens have worked with my board (I tore the ribbon cable on the panel trying to get the first one to work and the tpi connector on my board trying to get the replacement to work) 3) Lithium batteries seem to be a contentious issue due to their present unavailability. The Z-Wave modules have to be deconstructed to work in the ABS case. The camera doesn't fit the case. (I would be interested in selling my unused LCD panel, unopened ABS playbox, and unused camera module if anyone is interested PM me). And parts that seem not to be 100% compatible were apparently arbitrarily arbitrarily interchanged making troubleshooting a seeming nightmare (ala the GBE) and parts were left off of the board that are supposed to be their (e.g. pullup resistors for GPIO).
So, I'd say it is a bit more complicated than unrealistic expectations and shipping logistics. Mr. Lim seems to be a very fair, decent, and honorable man, but this is not his first rodeo with consumer electronics, I still have a VEO webcam that has his handiwork in it (though it no longer has drivers available for Linux nor Windows), and his Popcorn product seemed to be quite successful. I would have expected that his experience would have headed off many of these issues.
I'm sure you aren't saying the Pine64 is at present a viable replacement for a RPi? We are constantly reminded by you and others that we cannot buy products from Spark,Adafruit, or Seeed for the RPi and expect them to work out of the box.
(and as an aside, can you advise as to whether the HDMI-VGA adapter sold at shop.pine64.org will in fact work with this board? It would be so much easier if I didn't have to whork up or family television set to have a local display, and I thought I recalled some weeks ago seeing a statement that they will not work reliably.)
As for moving forward, I wholeheartedly agree Pine64 (or another manufacturer since the hardware is open source needs to resolve the issues and bring a replacement board to market sooner than later. I do want to love this board and see it succeed, I really do, but it simply isn't off to a promising start.