Probably DOA board

[tkaiser]

I'm sorry, but it was a really stupid design decision to both not include a power adapter AND make sure that 99% of all power adapters aren't going to work.  If the video works in just one mode, then that also doesn't meet the HDMI design spec.  These are things that I haven't had to deal with using competitor's boards.

Regarding power supply: Yeah, but Micro USB to power anything that needs more than a few mA is simply asking for trouble especially if you don't INFORM your backers/customers what's wrong with it. Look through the forums, you're definitely not alone. The problem is well known since 4 years when Raspberry Foundation started with this insane idea to use Micro USB.

Regarding HDMI: You should keep in mind that Pine64 does exactly NOTHING here. There is Allwinner providing crappy kernel sources and Android support (holding back necessary parts like DRAM initialisation that we need as source licensed under GPLv2 or similar), there is the RemixOS team trying to cope with this and there are a few brave souls over at linux-sunxi that do the real work (in their spare time, without being paid, just for fun). 

There's one single person who has the balls to deal with this crappy Allwinner BSP kernel to provide something that is used now by all of the OS images that are provided. He managed to get HDMI working at 1080p60. The whole libhdmi stuff is a blob (not open source) so that any of the available Linux images do show some display output AT ALL is his merit alone. And since he doesn't need more (having a 1080p display) that's it. 1080p60 is all you get now until someone starts to get in touch with BSP kernel sources and starts to improve this. This is pretty well documented in the release notes of all 2 available ORIGINAL OS images: Ubuntu Xenial and Arch Linux.

And what happened: This documented limitation has been removed on all 'featured' OS image announcements, the headless original OS images were sticked together with Desktop environments and unknown modifications have been done and now everyone out there thinks he deserves real Desktop Linux OS images. WTF? That's still developer stuff only. If you need 'more' choose Android or RemixOS. And with featuring/creating just another useless Linux OS image variant things get even more worse.

BTW: You said you bought a PNY card. That will be your next showstopper. Again due to lack of documentation. The Pine64 is surprisingly NOT a digital camera but some sort of computer instead. Digital cameras need certain sequential transfer speeds, computers need high random I/O. Guess what? The average PNY or Kingston or $insert-your-favourite-pay-twice-the-price-get-cheap-crap-brand-here will be horribly slow and your whole user experience when you try to use a desktop linux or Android/RemixOS will be shitty.

http://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?t...81#pid8081
http://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=191&page=5

[tomofdarkness]

I'm sorry, but it was a really stupid design decision to both not include a power adapter AND make sure that 99% of all power adapters aren't going to work.  If the video works in just one mode, then that also doesn't meet the HDMI design spec.  These are things that I haven't had to deal with using competitor's boards.

Regarding power supply: Yeah, but Micro USB to power anything that needs more than a few mA is simply asking for trouble especially if you don't INFORM your backers/customers what's wrong with it. Look through the forums, you're definitely not alone. The problem is well known since 4 years when Raspberry Foundation started with this insane idea to use Micro USB.

Regarding HDMI: You should keep in mind that Pine64 does exactly NOTHING here. There is Allwinner providing crappy kernel sources and Android support (holding back necessary parts like DRAM initialisation that we need as source licensed under GPLv2 or similar), there is the RemixOS team trying to cope with this and there are a few brave souls over at linux-sunxi that do the real work (in their spare time, without being paid, just for fun). 

There's one single person who has the balls to deal with this crappy Allwinner BSP kernel to provide something that is used now by all of the OS images that are provided. He managed to get HDMI working at 1080p60. The whole libhdmi stuff is a blob (not open source) so that any of the available Linux images do show some display output AT ALL is his merit alone. And since he doesn't need more (having a 1080p display) that's it. 1080p60 is all you get now until someone starts to get in touch with BSP kernel sources and starts to improve this. This is pretty well documented in the release notes of all 2 available ORIGINAL OS images: Ubuntu Xenial and Arch Linux.

And what happened: This documented limitation has been removed on all 'featured' OS image announcements, the headless original OS images were sticked together with Desktop environments and unknown modifications have been done and now everyone out there thinks he deserves real Desktop Linux OS images. WTF? That's still developer stuff only. If you need 'more' choose Android or RemixOS. And with featuring/creating just another useless Linux OS image variant things get even more worse.

BTW: You said you bought a PNY card. That will be your next showstopper. Again due to lack of documentation. The Pine64 is surprisingly NOT a digital camera but some sort of computer instead. Digital cameras need certain sequential transfer speeds, computers need high random I/O. Guess what? The average PNY or Kingston or $insert-your-favourite-pay-twice-the-price-get-cheap-crap-brand-here will be horribly slow and your whole user experience when you try to use a desktop linux or Android/RemixOS will be shitty.

http://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?t...81#pid8081
http://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=191&page=5

It's great that there are lone individuals working on things and releasing them so the rest of us could benefit.  That is not the impression that the kickstarter gave.  The kickstarter gave the impression that this was a ready for prime-time design with Android already up and available and ReMix and linux coming not too far behind.  Instead, the documentation is ridiculously bad and there's no easy troubleshooting.   I've found quite a few contradictions in the various getting started guides.  "you have to use Phoenix" "you can't use Phoenix" blah blah blah.  

I actually purchased this because I've wanted an inexpensive android widget display for quite a few years, and so I'm looking forward to using it as Android, so I don't actually care if linux works on it at all, but I would like to use an inexpensive display for it.  I can't tell how much of your response is sarcasm and how much of it is hostility directed at me or at others.  I'm also not terribly concerned if the storage isn't the fastest ever, it was a fairly inexpensive thing that I could easily re-purpose if I needed to get a different one.

[tkaiser]

That is not the impression that the kickstarter gave.

Exactly. And what I wrote above was just the description of 'the current state of software development and documentation regarding Pine64' causing that much troubles for most of the users since it's absolutely not in sync with the impressions/expectations that are still not adjusted down to reality. And most probably nothing will change.