pineph.one

The recent kernel patch that fixes the rcu errors/crashes has been applied to U-Boot in Manjaro testing/unstable branches.  https://gitlab.manjaro.org/manjaro-arm/packages/core/uboot-pinephone/-/commit/ebdfd9a4124276fdb2d636aaecb861c205b71d69 I have tested this on the 4 phones that randomly hang during boot. All 4 have passed 100 consecutive reboot cycles without hanging. Hopefully this patch makes it into other distributions soon.

A recent kernel patch fixes the instability that was causing the rcu errors I was having in many of my PinePhone boards . I have tested this patch on all of my boards and the rcu errors have gone away. I can run them at 624MHz DRAM clock and not have any hangs or time jumps. The patch has made it into megous kernel , so any distribution that uses it will get the update.

I was playing with the microSD card extender from Pine64 . It seems to have damaged the socket . There is a card detect switch built into the socket and it no longer functions. This causes U-Boot to hang if there is a bootable SD card in the socket. It tries to boot from it and then fails the card detection, even though it is running from the card itself. In the serial debug output it shows: Trying to boot from MMC1 MMC: no card present spl: mmc init failed with error: -123 SPL: failed to boot from all boot devices ### ERROR ### Please RESET the board ### Another PinePhone user had the same issue https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=13775 To fix the problem I soldered the switch pin on the socket to ground. When a card is inserted it would normally short the pin to ground (T6 is connected to ground). It now thinks there is always a card inserted. It does not seem to cause any problems. I actually soldered the pin to the metal shield since it is connected to ground. If you think ...

I added a flexible passive GPS antenna to one of my PinePhones. These antennas are meant to be adhered directly to the inside of a plastic enclosure, far from any metal or ground planes. The datasheets I have read for similar antenna recommend at least 12mm distance to the ground plane. This particular antenna I got off of eBay from China, and has no datasheet. It does work quite well though. I taped the antenna to a piece of plastic from a SIM card to make it more rigid. It is paper thin, except for the area where the cable is soldered. Like on the Franken-Phone I removed the U.FL connector from the end of the cable and soldered it in place. This time I removed the spring contacts so that it would not make contact with the existing antenna in the mid-frame. I left the spring contact for the WiFi antenna intact. I shaved some of the plastic from the mid-frame so that the cable would fit between it and the metal shield of the modem. I also cut a slot in the back case with a Dremel cut...

I decided to take the worst performing PinePhone PCB and turn it into a hardware test bed. This is the 3GB 1.2b upgrade board that fails my compiler and memtester tests . It will time jump even with the RAM running at 492MHz. It is usable. With the serial adapter you can login to the serial console without an attached screen. Once WiFi/SSH is configured you can do everything remotely. I have also used wayvnc to remotely connect to the graphical desktop. I bought a large flat aluminum heatsink from Amazon to use as a base. I cut up a sheet of thermal pad material (sold for use with 3d printer glass hot beds). The pad is sticky and holds the PCB and battery to the heatsink. The battery is not the correct type/size for a PinePhone battery. It is an old battery I found in a drawer that has the same pinout, works fine. The micro USB breakout board has the VBUS and Ground soldered directly to the pogo pin pads. The loose orange wire at the bottom is soldered to a tiny pad next to the ke...

I have been using SIM cards from several different MVNOs. Tello, RedPocket, and IoTDataWorks. Tello is a T-Mobile MVNO. Previously they were with Sprint. They have a monthly plan with 500MB of LTE speed data and unlimited SMS for $5. After the 500MB it drops to 2G speeds. This plan has no voice minutes. It also has no taxes added. They do charge $10 for the SIM card. RedPocket is an MVNO for T-Mobile/Sprint, AT&T and Verizon. I have an AT&T SIM on the $60 a year 500MB/100minutes/100SMS per month for 12 months plan. I also have a T-Mobile SIM on the $30 a year 200MB/200minutes/1000SMS per month for 12 months plan. You can only find these plans on eBay. Once you use up your data for the month it is cut off until the next month cycle. The IoTDataWorks SIM is meant for IoT devices. It has no voice or SMS, only data. I have the 1 year unlimited 64kbps SIM, which is on T-Mobile. It was $40 on Amazon when I purchased it. The price has gone up to $45 last time I checked. All of these w...

My PostmarketOS Edition phone has been on and sitting idle for over 37 days. I would periodically login over ssh and do updates. It was fine and stable until today when the modem disappeared, a reboot and it is back to normal. While it was mostly idle it was running Monitorix and recording statistics. It was also sending a hourly/daily email with a summary of stats. Although this is a PostmarketOS Community Edition phone, it is running Arch Linux ARM, with the RAM speed set to 492MHz. The reason for running the RAM at a lower speed is explained here . Some graphs from Monitorix showing the last 30 days. Uptime Memory Usage. This is a 3GB model. Chrony Stats I added monitoring of some PinePhone specific stats using the gensens module. Temperature readings from the CPU/GPU. CPU frequency of the 4 cores. Battery charge level. Battery charge/discharge rate.