Invitation to Play Along

Image from: Дмитрий Куртуков - Keyboard for PinePhone

We are currently in talks with a number of hardware vendors regarding a Nokia N900-style, slide-out-design keyboard for the PinePhone. They’ll have to produce mock-ups or prototypes for us to consider in the next few weeks. The requirements specify that the new device needs to:

All about the PineTab (Update)

This is a supplementary post to this month’s Community Update - if you haven’t read this month’s news, then I suggest you go back and have a read since we’ve had a handful of interesting announcements. Regarding the PineTab, I am happy to let you know that production is well under way and we are mostly on schedule with the manufacturing and shipping processes. To be precise, we are just a week behind the original schedule; the cause of the delay is our decision to change the LCD panel driver (or perhaps more accurately, we were convinced to exchange the...

Pinebook Pro pre-orders open with shipping in August 2020.

Hello everyone,

I’m sure many of you will be happy to hear that the next round of Pinebook Pro pre-orders have now opened. This production-run is expected to ship in late August, 2020. Both ISO and ANSI keyboards are available. If the Pinebook Pro is something you’ve been waiting for,  then click the button below.

July Update: biggest update in months!

I cannot remember the last time I had this much to report. With so many announcements and highlights, I ran out of time and didn’t cover a handful of topics that happened this month. If I find the time, I’ll make a complimentary post later this month to cover the outstanding topics. Before we get into it, I’d also like to thank JF for his contribution to the text.

Michael "mickeyl" Lauer: Feeling like Don Quixote

For some years now, I have been feeling like Don Quixote fighting against windmills. This is a multidimensional feeling that has its roots in both personal and professional circumstances. With regards to personal issues, I won't go into details as I want to keep this blog free from politics, society, and economics. With regards to professional circumstances, something that bugs me a lot is that I seem to engage in fighting wars that can't be won. Free software lost a lot of wars, most notably though in the mobile sector. As I have complained more than once before, over the...

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. 

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. Many users are relying on our infrastructure for information and community support, particular now that people are receiving their devices and many more are waiting for their units to ship. But things are what they are, and we have a strict deadline we need to adhere to.

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. To this end, the primary purpose of this entry is to give you an overview of all the resources at your disposal. 

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. There is a fair bit of material to cover this month - the main piece of news, however, is that we’ll be taking pre-orders for the PineTab at the end of this month!