DOA 2GB Pine

[bonterra]

it is interesting that no one from pine64 has responded.

I guess they're too busy trying to locate people's lost packages.

[dkryder]

it is interesting that no one from pine64 has responded.

I guess they're too busy trying to locate people's lost packages.

good point. but i would think that by now they could have increased staff in one area or the other.  they have made a considerable amount of money.

[daveculp]

good point. but i would think that by now they could have increased staff in one area or the other.  they have made a considerable amount of money.

Not really.

I know the Kickstarter brought in 1.7 million but very little of that was probably profit. Kickstarter takes a percentage of the total for themselves. In addition they are selling the base boards for $15 each. Once you take development and manufacturing costs into account that leaves very, very little as profit.

[Ghost]

good point. but i would think that by now they could have increased staff in one area or the other.  they have made a considerable amount of money.

Not really.

I know the Kickstarter brought in 1.7 million but very little if that was probably profit.  Kickstarter takes a percentage of the total for themselves.  In addition they are selling the base boards for $15 each.  Once you take development and manufacturing costs into account that leaves very, very little as profit.

Tangenting on to that, the money they have spent on shipping, re-shipping, and shipping accessories separately, there is probably very little profit now to be had. So I think, in retrospect, they would've made more if they had used a dedicated courier service rather than the regular postal service, which, clearly, was not equipped to deal with the demands placed upon them. 

But speaking with the benefit of hindsight is easy. You make what you believe to be the best decisions at the time that you make them.

[daveculp]

good point. but i would think that by now they could have increased staff in one area or the other.  they have made a considerable amount of money.

Not really.

I know the Kickstarter brought in 1.7 million but very little if that was probably profit.  Kickstarter takes a percentage of the total for themselves.  In addition they are selling the base boards for $15 each.  Once you take development and manufacturing costs into account that leaves very, very little as profit.

Tangenting on to that, the money they have spent on shipping, re-shipping, and shipping accessories separately, there is probably very little profit now to be had. So I think, in retrospect, they would've made more if they had used a dedicated courier service rather than the regular postal service, which, clearly, was not equipped to deal with the demands placed upon them. 

But speaking with the benefit of hindsight is easy. You make what you believe to be the best decisions at the time that you make them.

I have admit I was surprised when they decided to ship accessories separately. I would have been fine with waiting until everything was ready to ship at once. However, based on the impatient reactions from a lot of people they probably made the right decision. However, shipping from China is cheap. I am always amazed how cheap it is to ship things into the US. I just had a large 5V 72AMP power supply sent 3 day mail from China for something like $15.00 shipping. I wouldnt have been able to ship it out of the US at that speed for less than $50.00.

I almost did NOT back the Pine 64 because of the incredibly low price. I know a little of the costs involved and was worried about their ability to deliver. So far, so good. Hopefully they can continue and make the Pine 2.

[bonterra]

PV monitors the data transfer rate, no more no less. It does not alter the data transferred.

Why don't you try it yourself?

it is not possible to monitor the transfer rate without altering (or buffering) the dataflow... which indirectly affects the rate, which indirectly affects the SPI connection to the SD card. 

But you are failing to see my point... it 'changes' the parameters of the build... the obvious thing to do, if one is genuinely interested in making the board work, is to remove the pv from the equation and retry; how hard is that?

Simple; follow the instructions and see what happens. We had a similar argument with a gent last week who claimed that "he tried everything" and the board was "dead on arrival"....  no it wasn't. He had not followed instructions, and when he did, his board worked fine...

marcus

Ok, so I finally received my board and could try the installation first-hand. I downloaded the Longsleep Ubuntu image and did exactly as instructed in the readme-file, it worked like a charm on my first boot.

Code:

~$ xzcat xenial-pine64-bspkernel.xz|pv|sudo dd of=/dev/sdX bs=1M oflag=sync

https://www.stdin.xyz/downloads/people/l...README.txt

[DonFL]

Again and again, its the recurring theme: pretty decent product, with its success put at risk by continuous order fulfillment incompetence.

If anyone ever wanted an example of why you keep your core competencies in-house and outsource the rest, here it is.