05-09-2016, 05:21 AM
(05-09-2016, 05:07 AM)pine.tree Wrote: You can easily get a USB serial adapter and use that to give a status on your Pine booting up.
Are you kidding? This is your advice to solve the 'My Pine64 is DOA' problem? Seriously? Oordering a serial adapter somewhere, waiting at least 3 weeks for shipment or paying the same price as the board, learning about baud rates and the like just to realize what's wrong?
- This board needs DOCUMENTATION. A quickstart guide that tells the problems users are running into. And not these weird unstructured walls of text the Pine64 folks think would by enough being copy&paste from forum to Wiki (but maybe they simply don't care and love to get DOA returns over and over again)
- Replace crappy Micro USB with a sane barrel plug since Micro USB to power anything that needs more than 100mA is always wrong or just insane. At least add a barrel plug and mark it '5V ONLY' in big letters on the PCB
- Put a programmable LED on the board and not just a connector. This way the board/bootloader can provide user feedback
- Use SPI flash to store a basic bootloader: https://linux-sunxi.org/Pine64#SPI_NOR_Flash
- Again DOCUMENTATION/COMMUNICATION. Communicate clearly the state of software development. Until a few days ago 1080p has been the only working HDMI resolution. By refusing to tell users this limitation the Pine64 folks managed to get 8 out of 10 boards returned as DOA flawlessly working (just not with the display the backer in question tried it)