RockPro64 and Pine H64 Discussion Thread

[stuartiannaylor]

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That of been the vendor its just videostrong board as far as I am aware and its a dev board https://www.cnx-software.com/2017/09/25/...399-board/
https://www.cnx-software.com/2017/09/27/...enchmarks/

But I was posting as there are quite a few already popping up on the RK3399 https://www.96rocks.com/ which is videostrong again.
There are a few others also and this is really good as hopefully there should be a really big dev pool behind these with hopefully little difference.
Even Orange or was it banana have an rk3399 on the way.

I frequent CNX regularly for years.
I hope that you are not serious about what you wrote.
So for a Mecool board you have to get downloads from Videostrong. Who predominantly sell TV Boxes etc, and have no developer resources at their own website. A company which I crossed off the list even before Mecool.
Videostrong equals : No response to emails. No response to AliBaba messages. The Community link at their website leads to a forum/board in the Chinese language only (Go ahead and join). Image/Rom downloads (without their Android or Linux source code) at Mega, which means download limits and throttling. And why would a company associate with Mega ? Very unprofessional.

Image downloads without source code is a violation of the Open Source license. If a company or individual distributes binaries (compiled from open source code), they must also make available the source code of the binaries that they are distributing. If they don't , their target group/audience are not developers. If they can upload binaries to Mega, they can also create repos for the source code at GitHub, Gitlab, Bitbucket, etc. But if they don't want you, it won't happen.

I'm going to leave it at this, because I/we have gone off-topic. Just be careful where you shop and what you buy.
I stick to Pine and 96boards/Linaro. And maybe Firefly.

EDIT:
P.S. Go to the Linux mainline repo : https://github.com/torvalds/linux and search for your favourite board vendor or board model. You won't find Mecool and Videostrong. But you will find Pine64, Linaro, 96boards, HiKey, Firefly, etc in the source code.
In other words, you have no access at all to the source code  from Mecool + Videostrong. Not from them, and not through the Linux mainline source code. Because they don't commit their additions and changes to the Linux mainline repo. Maybe because they are not committed to developers.

Well if you have been a regular visitor of CNX then you will be well aware that it really doesn't matter where you buy from as maybe apart from the exception of Raspberry, developer and support resources are far too thinly spread on platforms of relatively short lifespan.
I made no indication of purchase but was purely saying the plethora of vendors irrespective of content is a good thing.
There seems to be a lot of activity with the RK3399 platform from a wide range of vendors and this is all good in terms of dev and support that has requirements far in excess of many of the individual vendors resources.
It could have the potential to surpass many other platforms in economy of scale which will have benefits for all is all I said and just gave a few examples.

There is a 96Boards version https://www.cnx-software.com/2017/09/29/...k3399-soc/
OrangePi https://www.cnx-software.com/2018/01/29/...d-for-109/
Aaaeon https://www.cnx-software.com/2018/01/26/...processor/
Sappphire https://www.cnx-software.com/2017/08/05/...ent-board/
Odroid https://www.cnx-software.com/2018/02/06/...-and-more/

All good for the platform ecosphere but like I say I make no mention if a single vendor has any merit or benefit over another.