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Pine64 Unveils Quartz64 SBC

cnx-software.com

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Re: Pine64 Unveils Quartz64 SBC

#31

Post by captainmuon »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #7
Funes- wrote: post #6

Coupled with that 10-inch e-ink panel that they mention will be available when it launches, this could make for a great machine for working (reading, writing, coding...). I hope the price is not very steep.

I worry more about the price of a 10 inch e-ink panel.

Don't worry about the price - when the e-ink patent overlords learn that they are not being used for blessed purposes (digital signage or ebook readers) but as general purpose display sold to end users (gasp!) they'll probably become mysteriously unavailable.

(Source: our company tried to buy e-ink displays to integrate into a product. All I can say is, it is difficult...)

Re: Pine64 Unveils Quartz64 SBC

#32

Post by monadic3 »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #7
Funes- wrote: post #6

Coupled with that 10-inch e-ink panel that they mention will be available when it launches, this could make for a great machine for working (reading, writing, coding...). I hope the price is not very steep.

I worry more about the price of a 10 inch e-ink panel.

What's the concern?

Re: Pine64 Unveils Quartz64 SBC

#33

Post by tpmx »

CameronNemo wrote: post #24
stambros wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lost 2 SD cards that way. It's a relic that should be phased out in favor of NVME or SATA.

What SD cards did you use? I have seen high endurance ones available.

These have never failed me:

https://www.digikey.com/en/product-highlight/a/atp/advancedm...

I even set up a testing rig to do randomized power shut down thousands of times; they didn't fail:

https://forums.balena.io/t/raspberry-pi-atp-amlc-microsd-car...

Found these via this 2018 HN comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16777238

Re: Pine64 Unveils Quartz64 SBC

#34

Post by MayeulC »

ed25519FUUU wrote: post #4

How does the onboard battery charging IC work? Can I hook up a 3s li-ion battery and charge it via the 12v power input? Does the battery kick on if the main PSU is interrupted?

I imagine you would need to communicate the battery topology (voltages, currents) to the power management IC (PMIC). Probably via a devicetree, or possibly a devicetree overlay?

Devicetrees are used to list hardware peripherals, and instruct the kernel load the appropriate drivers with the appropriate parameters (I²C addresses, etc), so it would be the reasonable place to put that info, though it's probably configurable at run-time instead. There might also be some defaults, but I'd expect it to be "power PMIC off" if that chip is only used for the battery circuit (which I doubt).

Edit: According to the scematic on the wiki page[1], it's a feature of the main PMIC, RK817-15. I's also indicated "1Cell Li-ion"

Interesting features for that chip[2]:

    Input range: 3.8V –5.5V for USB input
    2.7V -5.5V for BAT input
    Switch mode Li-ion battery charger providing charging current up to 3.5A.
    Power path controller with 4A current path with optional extended external mos.
    Accurate battery fuel gauge with two separate battery voltage and current ADC
    Real time clock (RTC)
    Low standby current of 16uA (at 32.768KHz clock frequency)
Devicetree support has already been submitted, probably merged a while back[3].

[1] https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Quartz64

[2] https://rockchip.fr/RK817%20datasheet%20V1.01.pdf

[3] https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-arm-kernel/patch/...

Re: Pine64 Unveils Quartz64 SBC

#35

Post by rcoder »

CameronNemo wrote: post #26
ilikeorangutans wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What boards would you consider "better" and for what reasons (gpu and crypto extensions, or are there other factors)? I run a few raspberry pis and always looking for new/better toys.

I like rk3399 boards, unless you need deep suspend or video out through the USB type c port.

RK3399s make great bang-for-the-buck boards, but the idle power consumption is pretty high. I’ve been kicking around one of the Khadas VIM3s which has a newer Amlogic SoC on it and like what I’ve seen so far. It’s a significantly more expensive board, though

There are plenty of things that an RK3399 (or the new Rockchip being used in the OP) can handle just fine.

I was definitely interested to see that this new chip supports up to 8GB of RAM. I think there are a lot of interesting applications for RAM-rich, Gig-E bearing nodes that can run off a battery. (Examples: Redis at the edge, “Field” PostgreSQL replicated to the cloud when possible, nested VMs protecting trusted “firmware” from remotely-loaded containers and machine images, etc.)

Re: Pine64 Unveils Quartz64 SBC

#36

Post by fl0under »

Funes- wrote: post #8
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The target market for the Raspberry Pi foundation is education. They get cheap boards into the hands of people everywhere and provide plenty of documentation to get them started. Raspberry Pi has the biggest community, and therefore it’s the best choice for anyone looking to get started. If you’re the type of person who needs very specific features like AES acceleration, then you don’t want to invest in a board aimed…

In my opinion, Raspberry Pi's main problem has to do with using SD cards, which are prone to errors and corruption. It's a kind of media storage that works best if it operates more statically--for instance, you read some photos on your camera, remove a few, take some new ones... and that's it for the day. They are not intended to undergo a large number of read/write cycles on a regular basis, and that's what the Rasp…

You can use log2ram [0] to reduce the number of writes to the SD card. That's what I'm doing at the moment and haven't had any problems with my SD card, though it has been in use for less than 6 months so far. I agree though that a SD card is not the best storage option for the OS and would like to move mine over to an nvme drive.

[0] https://github.com/azlux/log2ram

Re: Pine64 Unveils Quartz64 SBC

#37

Post by PragmaticPulp »

tpmx wrote: post #10
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The target market for the Raspberry Pi foundation is education. They get cheap boards into the hands of people everywhere and provide plenty of documentation to get them started. Raspberry Pi has the biggest community, and therefore it’s the best choice for anyone looking to get started. If you’re the type of person who needs very specific features like AES acceleration, then you don’t want to invest in a board aimed…

> The target market for the Raspberry Pi foundation is education. I'd bet 80% of the sales are to hobbyists/companies. It's a weird setup. Have a look at this page: https://www.raspberrypi.org/about/meet-the-team/ There are two groups of people: * Raspberry Pi Foundation (100+) * Raspberry Pi Trading (27) My understanding: The people in "Raspberry Pi Trading" do the hardware/software/documentation/product management/…

> I'd bet 80% of the sales are to hobbyists/companies.

Hobbyists are part of the educational target. Raspberry Pi has introduced more people to embedded Linux than any other project.

We didn’t always live in an era of cheap SBCs. Before Raspberry Pi, the barriers to entry were much higher and much more expensive.

As much as people like to criticize the Pi for not having every possible feature or not being completely open source at every level, it doesn’t actually matter for 99% of projects. It gets the job done cheaply, quickly, and with a huge support community behind it.

The Raspberry Pi CM4 is now available for anyone who needs more granular access to IO or extra features like eMMC.

Re: Pine64 Unveils Quartz64 SBC

#38

Post by StillBored »

api wrote: post #2

There's quite a few third party boards that are far better than the Raspberry Pi 4. I found the Rpi4 quite disappointing, especially the half-supported GPU and the lack of AES/crypto extensions in the ARM64 chip. Only ARM64 chip I've ever seen that lacks those.

While this board has a nice selection of features, its likely the pi4 is faster in any number of workloads due to the use of the A72s. A55's are still in the small/energy efficient category (the article notes they are slower than the existing rk3399). Which is fine if your doing traditional micro-controller functions. But the problem with these boards is they end up being application specific rather than general purpose boards. For example they have hardware video decoders/etc but as soon as the user tries to decode something that doesn't have hardware support it falls back to the CPU, and turns into a slideshow.

Now if this were the rx3588 with the A76s it would be a different story.

Re: Pine64 Unveils Quartz64 SBC

#39

Post by tpmx »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #37
tpmx wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The target market for the Raspberry Pi foundation is education. I'd bet 80% of the sales are to hobbyists/companies. It's a weird setup. Have a look at this page: https://www.raspberrypi.org/about/meet-the-team/ There are two groups of people: * Raspberry Pi Foundation (100+) * Raspberry Pi Trading (27) My understanding: The people in "Raspberry Pi Trading" do the hardware/software/documentation/product management/…

> I'd bet 80% of the sales are to hobbyists/companies. Hobbyists are part of the educational target. Raspberry Pi has introduced more people to embedded Linux than any other project. We didn’t always live in an era of cheap SBCs. Before Raspberry Pi, the barriers to entry were much higher and much more expensive. As much as people like to criticize the Pi for not having every possible feature or not being completely…

It seems like you didn't reply to I wrote, but rather to what you imagined I could have written. Or you're just pontificating in general.

Re: Pine64 Unveils Quartz64 SBC

#40

Post by JustSomeNobody »

amelius wrote: post #21
qchris wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that this could be an underlooked, but absolutely killer feature for this board. Built-in support for high-capacity li-ion batteries that automatically kick-in for a battery backup would be awesome for homemade NAS set-ups, not to mention a whole host of robotics-y or home automation projects.

Yeah, but you'll have to power your modem too.

These work really well for that task. Can power a cable modem and a small edgerouter-x using a y-cable.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Belkin-Residential-Gateway-Battery-...

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