04-19-2018, 05:08 PM
(04-17-2018, 06:20 AM)Rocklobster Wrote: There's no doubt hardware wise, the Rock64 is king of the SBC world. While that can't be argued its only as strong as the software that can run on it and the peripherals that can be attached to it.
Being a total newcomer to the Pine world I ordered a Pine 1gb board a while back. I tried it out with Xenial and it was just ordinary and the form factor was a put off when compared to the Raspberry Pi. I ordered the Rock64 4g recently and just got it up and running on Saturday. Everything powered up fine using Xenial but the first hurdle I hit was none of my wifi dongles were supported by Xenial. I'm still trying to resolve that issue as I type.
My first reaction to the above problem was why didn't the makers integrate wifi onto the Rock64 board. I'm sure someone will tell me why. My next observation was the Pine community is quite small and there's a big reliance on one or two individuals to come up with solutions to problems. I do appreciate the Rock64 is quite new and it will take time to work out solutions but I'd expect a manufacturer to have some blueprint in place to have a solid working hardware/software solution and not being reliant on one or two individuals to supply this solution in their spare time.
Here's hoping the Rock64 community grows and becomes, if not as big, maybe as popular as the Raspberry Pi community.
We don't integrate the Wifi module into PINE64 product due to most countries, such as Japan, Taiwan, Israel and etc, required their own country wireless certification's before able to import. This may not be problem for individual but can become a big issue when companies using PINE64 board for their commercial or industrial project that no need Wifi. Even on certain projects that Wifi is needed, they may need to have special requirement like outdoor antenna.