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The state of the QuartzPro64 in February 2023
Monday, February 27, 2023
In the previous article , I detailed all the steps I took to get started with the QuartzPro64, and I ended up with a Linux system running on kernel 6.1 (this commit from neggles' linux-quartz64 branch ). In this article, I would like to go into more details on the current status of the software in (nearly) mainline Linux. Note that things related to the RK3588 and the QuartzPro64 are moving fast and that the content of this post will probably become obsolete quite soon!…
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Getting started with the QuartzPro64
Saturday, February 25, 2023
The QuartzPro64 is an ARM SBC from Pine64 built around the new Rockchip RK3588 CPU. Before going any further, let me remind you that this board is not available to the general public. This is a development board that is only for developers who want to contribute to software development : mainline support in the Linux kernel, Linux distributions, projects,… Pine64 will probably design a board similar to their other SBCs (like the ROCKPro64 ) when the software support will be good enough for general uses.…
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Getting started with the BL618 and the BL618 development board
Saturday, January 14, 2023
Bouffalo has recently released their new chips : the BL616 and BL618 RISC-V MCU. Equipped with a WiFi6 + Bluetooth5 + Zigbee radio, this 32bit RISC-V single core chip runs at up to 320Mhz and is supported by 532KB of SRAM memory. Different variants of the chips exist with integrated flash and pSRAM memory. It also supports external flash and pSRAM memory. I was lucky enough to receive one of the first BL61X_MB development board.…
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How to debug the Bouffalo BL60x MCU using JTAG, OpenOCD and GDB
Tuesday, August 23, 2022
BL602/604 is a RISC-V MCU by Bouffalolab. It’s integrated in the PineCone devboard by Pine64 , as well as in the PineDio STACK . This is a relatively new chip : developer tools are not mature yet and the documentation is often a bit lacking. This makes the developer experience not as comfortable is it should be. In this article, I’ll detail how to wire the PineCone to a JTAG adapter (the Pine64 USB JTAG adapter ), and how to setup OpenOCD and GDB to debug the code running on it.…
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My DIY low-power 6 SSD NAS based on the Quartz64 ARM board
Sunday, May 29, 2022
Introduction ARM SBCs have been around for a few years now. They were made popular and accessible mostly by the RaspberryPi released in 2012 . I’ve been enjoying building countless projects around these boards : web servers, home-automation, camera recording, IM bots,… A new trend has recently appeared in the SBC world : the PCIe slot! The RaspberryPi 4 Compute Module exposes it via the IO board , and the Pine64 RockPro64 is equipped with a PCIe 4x open-ended slot directly on the board.…
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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.…
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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.…
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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.…
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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 :…
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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 .…