You're more than welcome to be sarcastic and to express your criticism. I would even encourage that, as long as we stay civil, so we can have healthy discussions. In the end, this is a free forum, as far as I know.
Your concerns are perfectly valid, simply because you do not know me. However, I am not a scammer, and I am not a poor dude asking to get $5 or $10 as a hand-out and disappear. Also, I do not expect anyone to simply throw in their money without asking for the specifics of the proposed hardware fix, but do I expect people to simply ask whatever they want to know.
Please, keep in mind that I also value my own time, because I am a knowledgeable person with a ton of experience. Also, for the time being I do not want to spend a few more weeks on fleshing out a few possible variants of the hardware fix in detail, without even knowing if it would be possible to get a free PinePhone for the purpose of performing the actual experiments.
Absolutely nothing about the hardware fixes would be proprietary. All attempts toward the final hardware fix would be documented, and the final fix would be documented in great detail, with very detailed, as simple as possible instructions for anyone wanting to apply the actual hardware fix to their own PinePhone. In a few words, my goal is to contribute to the community.
Why am I asking for a hardware donation? First, I've already invested a ton of my time into analyzing the internals of PinePhone, all that for free, which I'm fine with. Next, I should put my own PinePhone on the line, and possibly have it produce a puff of magic smoke. Ok, bad things happen. However, it is now perfectly valid to ask what would I be getting out of all that? A lot of work done for free (which I'm fine with), taking some risk, and a clear monetary loss in the end.
By asking for a hardware donation, I'm asking the community to take the risk together with me. I will put a lot of work into it for free, and produce publicly available results for the community, and possibly for Pine64 to incorporate in the next PCBA revision, but I do not like very much the idea of taking all the risk myself. Let's share the risk and reap the benefits together, which is the whole idea behind having a community of any kind.
Please keep in mind that changes in the screen backlight circuit have been introduced in different PCBA revisions. I would love to have all available revisions of the PinePhone PCBA for experimentation, and I would love to be able to produce clear fixes for all of them, but you're already bashing me for asking for a single PCBA revision. I cannot even imagine what you'd say if I were asking for all PCBA revisions instead.
If anyone already wanted to try out the hardware fixes on their own unused PCBAs that are just collecting dust, why is nobody doing that already? I would be perfectly fine with somebody else doing the actual work, so I am able to just replace a single capacitor (or something similar) in my PinePhone and have the backlight flicker fixed. However, AFAIK nobody has done that yet, so I am proposing to actually do that myself, and have the community assist me in the process. What's wrong with that?
I apologize if my comment in your thread has offended you in any way. You could have asked me to delete my post instead. Furthermore, why haven't you posted any updates on the actual hardware fixes you've announced? Have you actually tried out those fixes, and if so what were the results? If I remember correctly, you've provided no updates in about a month.
Lastly, I'm perfectly fine if this actually yields no donations in hardware. Failure is always an option, and I might even decide to take all the risk and put my own PinePhone one the line. I would make the results publicly available in that case, too.
Your concerns are perfectly valid, simply because you do not know me. However, I am not a scammer, and I am not a poor dude asking to get $5 or $10 as a hand-out and disappear. Also, I do not expect anyone to simply throw in their money without asking for the specifics of the proposed hardware fix, but do I expect people to simply ask whatever they want to know.
Please, keep in mind that I also value my own time, because I am a knowledgeable person with a ton of experience. Also, for the time being I do not want to spend a few more weeks on fleshing out a few possible variants of the hardware fix in detail, without even knowing if it would be possible to get a free PinePhone for the purpose of performing the actual experiments.
Absolutely nothing about the hardware fixes would be proprietary. All attempts toward the final hardware fix would be documented, and the final fix would be documented in great detail, with very detailed, as simple as possible instructions for anyone wanting to apply the actual hardware fix to their own PinePhone. In a few words, my goal is to contribute to the community.
Why am I asking for a hardware donation? First, I've already invested a ton of my time into analyzing the internals of PinePhone, all that for free, which I'm fine with. Next, I should put my own PinePhone on the line, and possibly have it produce a puff of magic smoke. Ok, bad things happen. However, it is now perfectly valid to ask what would I be getting out of all that? A lot of work done for free (which I'm fine with), taking some risk, and a clear monetary loss in the end.
By asking for a hardware donation, I'm asking the community to take the risk together with me. I will put a lot of work into it for free, and produce publicly available results for the community, and possibly for Pine64 to incorporate in the next PCBA revision, but I do not like very much the idea of taking all the risk myself. Let's share the risk and reap the benefits together, which is the whole idea behind having a community of any kind.
Please keep in mind that changes in the screen backlight circuit have been introduced in different PCBA revisions. I would love to have all available revisions of the PinePhone PCBA for experimentation, and I would love to be able to produce clear fixes for all of them, but you're already bashing me for asking for a single PCBA revision. I cannot even imagine what you'd say if I were asking for all PCBA revisions instead.
If anyone already wanted to try out the hardware fixes on their own unused PCBAs that are just collecting dust, why is nobody doing that already? I would be perfectly fine with somebody else doing the actual work, so I am able to just replace a single capacitor (or something similar) in my PinePhone and have the backlight flicker fixed. However, AFAIK nobody has done that yet, so I am proposing to actually do that myself, and have the community assist me in the process. What's wrong with that?
I apologize if my comment in your thread has offended you in any way. You could have asked me to delete my post instead. Furthermore, why haven't you posted any updates on the actual hardware fixes you've announced? Have you actually tried out those fixes, and if so what were the results? If I remember correctly, you've provided no updates in about a month.
Lastly, I'm perfectly fine if this actually yields no donations in hardware. Failure is always an option, and I might even decide to take all the risk and put my own PinePhone one the line. I would make the results publicly available in that case, too.
