Expectations

[spyro]

Hi folks.

I'm afraid to say that I've been finding owning a PPP a... cr*ppy experience.

I had expected to receive a device that, whilst the software was incomplete, at least had the basics covered - reliable booting, diagnostic ports, etc.

Well, I got lucky, and when I bought it (I think it was about a year ago) I managed to get it to work eventually after muddling my way through the assorted guides out there. I'd boot mobian, and then basically nothing was finished (fair enough, its a dev phone).

I didnt have time to play with it then (I planned to have a look at camera stuff), and it crashed on suspend so it got thrown in the "expensive paperweight" bucket.

Move on 12 months... I got some time to play, and I'd clearly forgotten / suppressed the trauma (at least my wallet had)...

After about 8 or nine attempts at getting it to power up, I managed, and... it still booted.

I thought to myself "I'll just update this debian device, and maybe it will install all that lovely fixed software and nice new toys" - I am used to Debian being reliable in this regard.

Irrationally, then, I executed

apt update
apt upgrade

And it worked!

Although a little red flag there - it now produced a deb12, not mobian boot splash...

whatever - how bad can it be?

apt dist-upgrade

oh dear... now it doesn't boot anymore...

No worry, I thought - its an open device, with OSS on it, and of course with everything being open, the instructions to fix it will be concise and easy to follow.

Nope.

I mean, this is tragic.

There is *not one* place I can find that *really* details how a PPP boots. I did find a couple of pages, but nothing on them was any use.

I mean, what, literally, is supposed to happen? theres a $£%£$^ huge LCD on the thing, but no, it just sits there blankly, or if I'm lucky, the one LED on it might change colour or it might buzz a bit.

but WHERE is any of this documented? what does the 4 buzzes mean when it occasionally does that? why does the LED go blue in some modes?

seriously - android and fastboot is better documented.

I build small devices for a living, and have worked on getting ARM devices booted for years, but this takes the cake into a whole new dimension. I'd have been utterly embarrased both personally and professionally to have released such a pile of junk.

-10 out of 10. Pathetic.

This is almost as insanely dumb as my RockPro64, which comes FROM THE FACTORY with the serial port running at 1.5Mbaud. Who the h*** wants that, ever? utterly useless, unexpected, and I had to spend AGES hunting through my serial adapters until I found one that would tolerate such a stupid speed.

WHY?

This is OPEN HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE. There is literally no excuse for this.

Any hardware on sale should come with:
1) A list of instructions on how to FULLY RESTORE IT TO FACTORY SETTINGS
2) All specs, for all versions
3) A guide that INCLUDES METHODS TO IDENTIFY  *ALL VARIANTS* of the phone - "purchased before XYth of XXX" is not good enough. I have no idea when mine was purchased at this point.
4) A bootloader that either speaks serial 8n115200 and/or (preferably) also can display status on screen / interact enough with the user to perform a self test or indiate why it's sulking.


So. Now what?

I have a useless Pine Phone Pro, that I was once enthusiatic about getting to use, that does nothing but bootloop and try to kill its battery now.

There are no instructions on restoring the phone to any sort of factory settings.

I've tried following this guide on installing tow boot, https://tow-boot.org/devices/pine64-pinephonePro.html

it doesn't actually give a link to the file it refers to, but I'm guessing its the spi-installer.img located in here:

https://github.com/Tow-Boot/Tow-Boot/rel...006.tar.xz

I've tried following this on the pine64 site:
https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_P...emporarily

it SEEMS like I have the version where pressing vol_down makes it do er... something? but all it does is turn the LED blue.

this isnt documented AFAICT. Is it meant to go blue? I read that the *screen* is supposed to go blue, but that isn't happening either.

This is over a year later now - what is the excuse? EVERY SINGLE issue above should have been solved at release, and *certainly* should have been by now.

Does anybody ACTUALLY know how to make my expensive brick into a phone again?

[fxc]

Hi folks.

I'm afraid to say that I've been finding owning a PPP a... cr*ppy experience.

I had expected to receive a device that, whilst the software was incomplete, at least had the basics covered - reliable booting, diagnostic ports, etc.

Well, I got lucky, and when I bought it (I think it was about a year ago) I managed to get it to work eventually after muddling my way through the assorted guides out there. I'd boot mobian, and then basically nothing was finished (fair enough, its a dev phone).

I didnt have time to play with it then (I planned to have a look at camera stuff), and it crashed on suspend so it got thrown in the "expensive paperweight" bucket.

Move on 12 months... I got some time to play, and I'd clearly forgotten / suppressed the trauma (at least my wallet had)...

After about 8 or nine attempts at getting it to power up, I managed, and... it still booted.

I thought to myself "I'll just update this debian device, and maybe it will install all that lovely fixed software and nice new toys" - I am used to Debian being reliable in this regard.

Irrationally, then, I executed

apt update
apt upgrade

And it worked!

Although a little red flag there - it now produced a deb12, not mobian boot splash...

whatever - how bad can it be?

apt dist-upgrade

oh dear... now it doesn't boot anymore...

No worry, I thought - its an open device, with OSS on it, and of course with everything being open, the instructions to fix it will be concise and easy to follow.

Nope.

I mean, this is tragic.

There is *not one* place I can find that *really* details how a PPP boots. I did find a couple of pages, but nothing on them was any use.

I mean, what, literally, is supposed to happen? theres a $£%£$^ huge LCD on the thing, but no, it just sits there blankly, or if I'm lucky, the one LED on it might change colour or it might buzz a bit.

but WHERE is any of this documented? what does the 4 buzzes mean when it occasionally does that? why does the LED go blue in some modes?

seriously - android and fastboot is better documented.

I build small devices for a living, and have worked on getting ARM devices booted for years, but this takes the cake into a whole new dimension. I'd have been utterly embarrased both personally and professionally to have released such a pile of junk.

-10 out of 10. Pathetic.

This is almost as insanely dumb as my RockPro64, which comes FROM THE FACTORY with the serial port running at 1.5Mbaud. Who the h*** wants that, ever? utterly useless, unexpected, and I had to spend AGES hunting through my serial adapters until I found one that would tolerate such a stupid speed.

WHY?

This is OPEN HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE. There is literally no excuse for this.

Any hardware on sale should come with:
1) A list of instructions on how to FULLY RESTORE IT TO FACTORY SETTINGS
2) All specs, for all versions
3) A guide that INCLUDES METHODS TO IDENTIFY  *ALL VARIANTS* of the phone - "purchased before XYth of XXX" is not good enough. I have no idea when mine was purchased at this point.
4) A bootloader that either speaks serial 8n115200 and/or (preferably) also can display status on screen / interact enough with the user to perform a self test or indiate why it's sulking.


So. Now what?

I have a useless Pine Phone Pro, that I was once enthusiatic about getting to use, that does nothing but bootloop and try to kill its battery now.

There are no instructions on restoring the phone to any sort of factory settings.

I've tried following this guide on installing tow boot, https://tow-boot.org/devices/pine64-pinephonePro.html

it doesn't actually give a link to the file it refers to, but I'm guessing its the spi-installer.img located in here:

https://github.com/Tow-Boot/Tow-Boot/rel...006.tar.xz

I've tried following this on the pine64 site:
https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_P...emporarily

it SEEMS like I have the version where pressing vol_down makes it do er... something? but all it does is turn the LED blue.

this isnt documented AFAICT. Is it meant to go blue? I read that the *screen* is supposed to go blue, but that isn't happening either.

This is over a year later now - what is the excuse? EVERY SINGLE issue above should have been solved at release, and *certainly* should have been by now.

Does anybody ACTUALLY know how to make my expensive brick into a phone again?

From your description you already have Tow-Boot on it, so flashing Tow-Boot again makes no sense. Boot with VOLUME UP:

"The phone can be started in USB Mass Storage mode by holding the volume up button at startup before and during the second vibration. The LED will turn blue if done successfully. In this mode, the phone will work like a USB drive when connected to a host computer."

From there, flash a new OS. Download https://images.mobian.org/pinephonepro/m...2.0.img.gz, connect your phone via USB to the computer and flash the eMMC directly using Balena Etcher.

The Explorer Edition is solely sold to low-level developers with mobile development experience (kernel, drivers). Don't tell us the software is early, things are not documented etc., that's an ass thing to do. Be better. Please ask the in the community chat about any unclear steps.

[alaraajavamma]

it SEEMS like I have the version where pressing vol_down makes it do er... something? but all it does is turn the LED blue.

this isnt documented AFAICT. Is it meant to go blue? I read that the *screen* is supposed to go blue, but that isn't happening either.

Hi and welcome to the forum.

To be honest I did not read your whole post .

What you need to do is this:
Download chosen Pinephone Pro image to your computer. I suggest that start with postmarketOS Phosh.
You can find it here:
https://images.postmarketos.org/bpo/edge...0208-0145/

Then connect your Pinephone Pro to your computer using usb cable. Boot now your Pinephone Pro and press volume up all the time so long that the blue led will be on constantly.
Then use some image writing software (for example gnome disks) and flash that downloaded image to Pinephone Pro (which should be visible after these steps in gnome disks or similar).
Notice that some usb cables does not work correctly so if you don't see the device change cable.

You can find information here:
https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/PinePhone_Pro
And you can also join to Pinephone channel  using matrix, irc, discord or telegram.
People are happy to help but notice that most things are all ready documented (for example that blue light thing is written in tow-boot home page)

And please also notice that Pinephone Pro software developement is pure community effort so people are doing it when they want to and when they have time to do something for free.