First look at the 2nd prototype version of the PineDio STACK

Tuesday, December 28, 2021

PineDio is a new product range at Pine64 based on LoRa. Those products include a LoRa gateway, a USB-LoRa adapter, a LoRa backplate for the PinePhone and an embedded development kit based on the RISC-V BL604 MCU. You’ll find more info about PineDio on the wiki . Those products are not yet available for sale, as we are still working on bringing them up and running by writing software and drivers for them.…

How to replace the keyboard of your PineBookPro

Sunday, December 12, 2021

Recently, the keyboard of my PineBookPro started to type keys by itself. It was very annoying up to the point it was impossible to type the password to unlock my session. I decided it was time to replace the keyboard. Fortunately, the wiki provides a very detailed replacement procedure . I followed it to the letter and everything went well. I took a few pictures during the operation and have already added them to the wiki page as well.…

A driver for the LoRa backplate for the PinePhone

Thursday, November 25, 2021

In previous articles, I introduced the LoRa blackplate for the Pinephone and I flashed the onboard MCU with an SPI<->I²C bridge firmware . In this post, I’ll write a driver that allows the Pinephone to send ant receive LoRa messages via this LoRa backplate! How to communicate with the SX1262 ? The SX1262 (LoRa radio) is an SPI chip. As the pogo pins only expose and I²C bus, the Pinephone cannot communicate directly with the radio.…

Flashing the LoRa backplate for the PinePhone

Wednesday, November 24, 2021

In the previous article about the LoRa backplate for the PinePhone , I introduced the devices and tried to understand how it was supposed to work (I received the devices with no instructions at all). I made a few assumptions regarding the pinout of the pogo pads and of the wires that were soldered on one of the board by looking at the PCB, at the schematics and at the source code of the bridge (I²C <-> SPI) firmware that is linked on the wiki :…

First look at the LoRa backplate for the Pinephone

Sunday, November 14, 2021

The LoRa backplate for the Pinephone A few months ago, Pine64 sent me a few prototypes of their new devices from the PineDio range. PineDio is the name of LoRa based devices : The PineDio STACK : a development board based on the BL604 RISC-V MCU, equipped with the SX1262 LoRa module The PineDio Gateway : a LoRa gateway based on the Pine A64 SBC and the RAK2287 LoRa concentrator The PineDio USB adapter : a USB adapter to the Sx1262 LoRa module The PineDio LoRa backplate for the Pinephone I’ve already shared some information about the gateway on this blog and about the USB adapter on the Pine64 wiki .…

Let's plug an additional NIC on the Quartz64 !

Saturday, October 30, 2021

The Quartz64 and its PCIe port The Quartz64 is the latest SBC from Pine64 . It’s based on the RK3566 CPU running @2Ghz with up to 8GB of RAM (mine has 8GB) and provides a PCIe 4x port! This PCIe port is actually what I find amazing about this board. I know that the RockPro64 also provides this port but I haven’t had the opportunity to get my hands on this one board.…

Running a selfhosted Github runner on a PinePhone

Tuesday, October 19, 2021

The PinePhone The PinePhone from Pine64 is a Linux mobile phone running mainstream kernel and open source software. It’s supported by many Linux distributions like Manjaro, UbuntuTouch, SailfishOS, PostmarketOS, Mobian many many more . It provides nice features like privacy switches and is extensible thanks to pogo pins on the back of the phone. But the PinePhone is not a simple mobile phone : it’s a full-blown AARCH64 computer running on Linux!…

Discovering the Pine64 LoRa gateway

Friday, May 14, 2021

Pine64 has been mentionning LoRa on their monthly community update (in February, for example) for a few months now and it is now becoming a reality : TL, founder of Pine64 sent an engineering sample of the future Pine64 LoRa gateway to a few people from the community (myself included), and I received mine in the beginning of April. Since then, the whole “Lora” project has been named PineDIO (Pine + Radio), and Pine64 and RAK officially announced their collaboration for developping opensource LoRa hardware and software!…

ULP (ESP32) : a simple example

Tuesday, January 15, 2019

The ULP is a low-power coprocessor (Ultra Low Power) integrated into the ESP32 MCU. It's a very small processor that can run independently from the main cores and that has access to the GPIOs, some peripheral and an I²C controller. The ULP is also able to run when the ESP32 is is deep-sleep mode. In this mode, nearly the whole MCU is powered-off, except the RTC domain, in which the ULP is built. It is also able to wake the ESP32 up. A possible application of the ULP is to acquire temperature while the ESP32 is in deep-sleep and to wake it up once it reaches a specified threshold. Programming the ULP seems very interesting, but even if the documentation from Espressif is very complete, I couldn't find a simple and easy example to learn how to use it. Here is then in details an ultra simple exemple : the traditional blink, which blinks 2 LEDs on the WROVER-KIT V3. …

ESP32, ESP-IDF, CMake & CLion

Sunday, January 13, 2019

I've been working with ESP8266 and ESP32 for some times now. Until now, I used the Arduino framework, mostly because it's easy : it provides a lot of services and libraries, allowing me to go straight to the point and concentrate on my own code. But I like to understand what lies underneath the top-layers, get closer to the metal, the transistors, the peripherals and the registers. For that, Espressif provides a well-documented SDK, and for which a lot of resources are available online. This framework, name ESP-IDF ("Ce framework, nommé ESP-IDF ("Espressif IoT Development Framework") provides toolchains and tools allowing the development of application for ESP32 MCU. In fact, the Arduino framework integrates this SDK to provide a higher-level API, and compatible with other platforms When I installed the IDF, I was surprised (in a very good way) to find CMake files! CMake is an open-source tool to manager the build process of a project, especially for C++ projects. And CMake is natively supported by my favorite IDE : CLion. So, shouldn't it be possible to create, edit, build and run an ESP-IDF project in CLion ? That's what we are going to see! (TL;DR : the answer is 'YES'!). …