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. 

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.
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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!  

Project: Small self-powered speaker

Low power amp-in-a-box, showing off some more messy copper-tape construction.

Project: Tool demagnetiser

A simple little box that defeats the ferrous furries.

April Update: CE & FCC, Software Update and DIY Router?

I hope and trust this update finds everyone well. Production in China is picking up pace and we expect to start shipping the Pinebook Pro with Manjaro and PinePhone UBports Community edition next month. I am happy to report that, for the time being, everything is proceeding  smoothly and we’re on track to ship devices in accordance with our original plans. Still, I encourage you to sign up to this blog to stay up-to-date on shipping information since anything can happen in the next 30 days.