Has anyone tried the Pine 64?

[MarkS]

https://www.pine64.com/

I backed the Kickstarter and received my board a couple of days ago. I haven't had the time to play with it, but I'm generally unimpressed with the design. The board is nearly twice the size of the Raspberry Pi and too thin, causing it to warp. It looks like it could have been laid out better. I'm not sure what longer term effects the warping will have on the operation as the warping is minor, about 2 mm from the center to the edge of the board.

Did anyone here back the project? If so, have you received it and what are your thoughts? How do you think it will stack up against the Pi 3?

[m12lrpv]

Mine supposed to arrive in the second wave so I haven't got it yet.

I'm not sure how useful it will be. I'm hoping it will make a better media player than the pi B.

[stejep]

I am also waiting on mine, and yes I think it will make a great media center.

[miguelvp]

Still waiting for mine as well.

As for the Pi 3, it came after this one.

I did get the 1 Gb network one and it doesn't hang from the USB so that will make the Pine64 better for some applications (like video streaming at 4K) I also think it has faster memory but I don't recall.

What I do recall is that spec wise the Pine64 was a better choice (for me, that is).

[ArdRhi]

My partner and I both backed this, fairly substantially.  We also backed the CHIP $9 computer, and it's actually a nice little board. I haven't gotten mine yet, since I had the later-delivering Pocket CHIP version, and she got the earlybird edition. I'll ask her tomorrow for a link to a presentation she did on it at a recent Scala symposium -- she got Scala to run on it, and did a nice little presentation on the subject. I suspect she'll do the same with the Pine, and we just got our Pi 3's, so we'll see how those compare. I splurged and got WD Pi Drives for them, too.

[keethrax]

Just got mine, SD card still en route. Looking forward to playing around with it.

[m12lrpv]

Mine is supposed to be in the post however the tracking info has it as return to sender so I have no idea what's happening.

[Robreeves]

I got mine up and running.  Android operating system has network connection issues with the 2 gig model, so it's pretty useless at the moment.

Got Ubuntu running yesterday.  Midori is the only browser that works.  I have hopes of using it as a remote desktop client, but so far have not succeeded at connecting to my office VPN (Cisco).  I have a good idea of what I'm doing wrong, so I have hopes of better results this evening.

[miguelvp]

I got mine up and running.  Android operating system has network connection issues with the 2 gig model, so it's pretty useless at the moment.

Got Ubuntu running yesterday.  Midori is the only browser that works.  I have hopes of using it as a remote desktop client, but so far have not succeeded at connecting to my office VPN (Cisco).  I have a good idea of what I'm doing wrong, so I have hopes of better results this evening.

On Android if the ethernet doesn't work you could try with a wifi usb dongle until they sort things out, i'm still waiting for mine, should be here soon I hope, but I never did receive a tracking number so it's just a wait and see.

[miguelvp]

Got mine just now, hopefully I have time this weekend to try it out.
I'm going for Android and going to use it for the SeekThermal Android SDK.

[miguelvp]

I got mine up and running.  Android operating system has network connection issues with the 2 gig model, so it's pretty useless at the moment.

Got Ubuntu running yesterday.  Midori is the only browser that works.  I have hopes of using it as a remote desktop client, but so far have not succeeded at connecting to my office VPN (Cisco).  I have a good idea of what I'm doing wrong, so I have hopes of better results this evening.

Looking at their wiki it seems the network connection issue was fixed a while back.

From:
http://wiki.pine64.org/index.php/Pine_A64_Software_Release#Android_Image_Release

Android Image Release 20160216
...
Improvements
Solved Gigabit Ethernet Hang issues
Please take note that this release is for Pine A64 1GB and 2GB Ram version only.

The previous image version 20160112 has the following known problem:
GbE still unable to connect and currently fixing it. 100Mbps Ethernet link should be no problem.
But that doesn't affect the 512K model since that only supports 100Mbps Ethernet anyways.

So you want to install version 20160216 for your 2GB Pine, mine is a 1GB one so I'll get the same.

[miguelvp]

I did try that image and it works, some caveats though:

Bought a cheap 64GB microSD class 10 from microcenter, seems it's a fake, don't know for sure I'm formatting it again, but it failed writing the image. Had a sandisk one (also 64GB) and that worked just fine.

The image provided seems to want the IR keyboard, that gets overwritten if you put a physical keyboard on the USB but I couldn't get the software keyboard to come up. Maybe I have to do some research for that. Maybe if I put a display and touchscreen and that might work.

but it works, tried HULU and plays fine, as for my purpose I couldn't install the playstore seek thermal app, but I hope the SDK version will run, or if I sideload the app it might work. Not enough time right now to test it all.

[m12lrpv]

I got mine and loaded remix os onto an 8g sandisk and the android image onto a 16g sandisk. No problems there.

Only had a chance to run the remix os in a quick 10min test. Initial issue was the overscan(?) when connected to the TV; The desktop went off the edge of the screen.

Hoping to try the android image next.