June Update: postmarketOS CE PinePhone, Shipping & PINE64 Cluster

Hello everyone! It has been a really busy time for us here at PINE64 as we’re working hard to deliver outstanding PinePhone UBports Community Edition and Pinebook Pro shipments. The big news of this month is that we’re excited to announce that a postmarketOS Community Edition PinePhone will be available for pre-order early next month.

Borax is not a suitable coating under high vacuum | Project H #8

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=RCJUwJUnJGs

Another test made – it turns out that dumet wire with its borated protective layer is not suitable for use in a high vacuum. Maybe at room temperature.. The borax layer (or the borated compounds) evaporates under high vacuum at 500C. I will need to find another solution.

ROCKPro64 Cluster Move June 5-10

The process of moving our end-user services to the ROCKPro64 cluster will be taking place in the coming days (5-10 June). I am not going to pretend like this is the best time for the move to be taking place, since it is not.

Is Borax Suitable Coating for High Vacuum? | Project H #7

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=ylmuYxDzRvI

A borated dumet wire would be a perfect solution for the insulated electrical connection between stem and digits inside the tube H. Borax would work as the insulating layer while copper-clad NiFe core would do the electrical connection which is easy to spot-weld to both stem and digit. Moreover, we have plenty of dumet already, it is low-cost, we can cut it to whatever length we need in-house, etc.. But – how does the borax behave during bakeout process under high vacuum, will it be stable once there is plasma around?

Thinking How to Drive a Panel of 121 Nixie Tubes | Project H #6

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=MYzIJkWOEIQ

While working on the tube H itself, we have to keep in mind also the design of the electronics – without an absolutely reliable driver, the panel will simply not deliver the desired experience. Our first idea was to use a master module with just a string of shift registers – we do this normally in our clocks.. However, it turned out the data flow required in this case would be too large – we will need to split the logic.

Welcome New Community Members!

With thousands of Pinebook Pro laptops and PinePhone smartphones shipping in the next days and weeks, I felt that a short introductory blog post aimed at newcomers was in order.

SimpleTesla v1.23 App-date

Новая приложуха выходит не каждый день – так что небольшой обзорчик. :)
Обновление на самом деле планировалось о-очень простым – пересборка и фиксы багов несовместимости с 9-м Android…
Но так же не удержались добавить несколько фич и пофиксить известные баги.
Подробней об изменениях, а так же ссылка на APK'шку под катом.
Читать дальше

Successful Window-Envelope Seal | Project H #5

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=JYS8-C4yIaU

Finally some progress – I succeeded in sealing of the front window. I still need to do thorough testing, evacuating it etc.. but it seems the design I chose might work. The tooling setup is temporary – I will make it safer and more productive later.

Exploring Open FPGA Hardware

Last month, Kate Temkin began her blog series aimed at comparing FPGA families that have open source toolchains available. In the first post she reviews the pros, cons, and features of the Lattice iCE40 LP/HX, Lattice iCE40 UltraPlus, and Lattice ECP5 families.

Excerpt:

“The world of FPGAs has traditionally been full of closed-source mysteries: designs have long been crafted using expensive, multi-gigabyte vendor tools, and the inner working of vendors’ hardware and software have remained closely guarded secrets.

This changed when Claire Wolf created her IceStorm project, which reverse engineered Lattice’s low-cost iCE40 FPGAs, and led to an expansive ecosystem for creating FPGA...

May Update: PineTab pre-orders, PinePhone Qi charging & more!

With the PinePhone and Pinebook Pro production well under way and shipping in just a few days time, we’ll now be turning our attention to the other projects we have in the pipeline.