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https://hackaday.com/2018/09/1...

Mod parent up!

Tons of very useful links from the hackaday link, in no particular order:

http://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Pa... http://www.lindeni.org/lindeni... https://www.elecrow.com/ https://gist.github.com/probon... https://www.amazon.com/gp/prod... https://www.reddit.com/r/elect... https://github.com/petit-miner... https://www.pine64.org/?produc... https://www.pine64.org/?produc... https://www.pine64.org/?produc... https://www.board-db.org/ https://github.com/NextThingCo... https://detail.1688.com/offer/... https://detail.1688.com/offer/... https://www.aliexpress.com/ite... https://github.com/NextThingCo

Plus this ---> How to hand solder the Allwinner chip

Last, but not least, the following 3 youtube links for more soldering tips and tricks:

https://www.youtube.com/result...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/result...

https://hackaday.com/2018/09/1...

Mod parent up!

Tons of very useful links from the hackaday link, in no particular order:

  http://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Pa...
  http://www.lindeni.org/lindeni...
  https://www.elecrow.com/
  https://gist.github.com/probon...
  https://www.amazon.com/gp/prod...
  https://www.reddit.com/r/elect...
  https://github.com/petit-miner...
  https://www.pine64.org/?produc...
  https://www.pine64.org/?produc...
  https://www.pine64.org/?produc...
  https://www.board-db.org/
  https://github.com/NextThingCo...
  https://detail.1688.com/offer/...
  https://detail.1688.com/offer/...
  https://www.aliexpress.com/ite...
  https://github.com/NextThingCo

Plus this ---> How to hand solder the Allwinner chip

https://hackaday.com/2018/09/1...

Mod parent up!

Tons of very useful links from the hackaday link, in no particular order:

http://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Pa...
http://www.lindeni.org/lindeni...
https://www.elecrow.com/
https://gist.github.com/probon...
https://www.amazon.com/gp/prod...
https://www.reddit.com/r/elect...
https://github.com/petit-miner...
https://www.pine64.org/?produc...
https://www.pine64.org/?produc...
https://www.pine64.org/?produc...
https://www.board-db.org/
https://github.com/NextThingCo...
https://detail.1688.com/offer/...
https://detail.1688.com/offer/...
https://www.aliexpress.com/ite...
https://github.com/NextThingCo

And fast.

• Young Doc: No wonder this circuit failed. It says "Made in Japan".
• Marty McFly: What do you mean, Doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan.
• Young Doc: Unbelievable.

I've been ordering from Aliexpress and Chinavasion for a long time. A lot was just knockoffs. Then there was some innovation now they're actually incrementally improving on their designs.

My current mobile computing device (without cell access) is a Vernee Active. IP68, USBC, 8-cores, dual sim, world (minus the US) capable. For cheap. It's a great phone. It looks like Vernee actually put time and effort into designing their website.

Chinese "brands" are popping up and they're doing pretty good. And their current customer service is better than Walmart. I've gotten a few bad boards, some with a design flaws, some stuff that broke and I've never had a problem getting a refund or a replacement. They're fighting each other for 5-star reviews and they'll do anything to get you to leave a 5 star review.

A good industry to have been watching is 3D printers. The product life cycle follows a fairly predictable design cycle.

1. Someone comes up with a design.
2. People rush to the design.
3. Other companies knock off the design.
4. Someone comes up with a new design.
5. GOTO 1

Most of the early growing pains with FOSS were because the chinese simply didn't understand how it worked. I have some soft bricked devices because of bad uBoot with no source. However that's been turning around. Allwinner/sunix has come a long way in the last decade. It's probably as good as Broadcom at this point but not quite Marvell.

Walmart and Amazon should be afraid because the Chinese have learned how to cut them out.

Most of the Allwinner boards will quite happily boot and run on 100% open source code these days,

Awesome! Can you provide any instructions or links to make my CubieBoard 4 with Allwiner A80 not useless?

sunxi linux still lists most things as not supported and not worked on: http://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_m...

Under GPL violations they list:

As is usual, there are the libnand and libisp violations. But with A80, Allwinner decided to step this up a notch, or two, or all the way to 11.

I haven't checked recently but Ubuntu and Debian were both at least 1-2 versions out of date.

And that's putting aside the reset issues if you put it under any sort of load for over a few minutes.

They're faster than comparable Raspberry Pi units since they don't put all their peripherals through a slow, shared USB 2.0 bus. There's also more variety in the different boards, some of which have working WiFi/BlueTooth and on-board flash memory. There are several tiny versions of the board, too, including a SODIMM one with peripheral board and very tiny versions with ethernet and I/O ports on it.

There are already two 64-bit boards that actually run in 64-bit, unlike the Raspberry Pi 3.

Unfortunately, unless you're using Android, the accelerated graphics chipset isn't available in some distributions. The web site http://linux-sunxi.org/ has more information.

The Armbian project at http://www.armbian.com/ is actively developing on these units.

by total contrast we're creating the beginning of a comprehensive eco-system of hardware re-use which *happens* (through direct correlation) to both save money for end-users and also reduce e-waste.

In defence of the Raspberry Pi foundation's work, the ecosystem (peripherals, software, community) is what sets it apart from the sea of samey Allwinner-based SBCs. I really hope that the ecosystem you're building is as successful!

yeah it was the price-point for the feature-set at the right time that really got people's attention, in the same way that the $9 CHIP has grabbed people's attention now... but less so *because* the pi already exists.

so that area is "sewn up" and over-saturated. that's not *the* reason why i have taken the approach that i've taken - it's a different story, tackling a much larger set of systemic and underlying problems in the way that we (world-wide) think of and "consume" our computing appliances. never liked that word "consume". like, "how's that PCB tasting, sir? need some ketchup? how about some steel-reinforced dentures?"... :)

the sunxi community then helped take that initiative over, they've been working non-stop now for years to pressurise allwinner

I hope they have more luck with that than with their software. With all due respect, the linux-sunxi tools are poo, and are (in my experience) a big part of the reason most Allwinner SBCs are found running Android.

yeah if you don't receive any funding and have to do stuff part-time... nobody's very happy with allwinner, but the price-point on their SoCs and the overwhelming marketing success in China is extremely compelling - GPL-violating or not. but, y'know what? they're getting there. oliver and the team have managed to get most of CEDARX reverse-engineered, which is deeply impressive. http://linux-sunxi.org/Cedrus must add that to the TODO list...

Has anyone actually used the pine?

They are just beginning to go out to backers now. Android is working, Linux is more or less working, and from what I can tell, the mainline kernel support for the Allwinner A64 is nearing completion. Note that this will explicitly not include video drivers in the kernel. You will still need a binary blob Mali driver just like now, until the Lima project gets something really working. A64 mainline kernel support was a major bullet point for PineA64, and it was supposed to be finished right around now. At least it's still being developed, and not abandoned.

Cubieboard 4 (CC-A80). There's some stuff at Sunxi Linux page. A10-OlunuXino-LIME as well.

My SheevaPlug is still easier to use than both of them.

The answer appears to be no on the rPi. The BCM2835's USB port is OTG-capable, so it isn't master only; but I can find no mention of gadget device configuration actually being available. The CHIP is maybe: apparently OTG support was added in kernel 4.3; don't know how well it works, or whether the CHIP's mini-b port even has its data lines connected.

Yay! An AllWinner CPU! Because I really want to buy products from a blatantly GPL-violating company. Go with something else like the boards from Hardkernel, which use Samsung and Amlogic CPUs. Even their cheap Odroid-C1 has a gigabit NIC.

Also some issues regarding Allwinner not releasing code have been resolved.

Ah, so they've cleared up all of these GPL violations? Otherwise, they aren't going to see a penny from me. I've been specifically avoiding SBCs based around Allwinner chips, and will continue to do so because I don't consider the company ethical.

Not sure why you're harboring a special grudge against Allwinner, when virtually all the SoC manufacturers in China are identical in that respect.

What it comes down to is a difference in cultures. Companies like Allwinner have no interest in complete solutions, but merely design and produce the ARM SoCs that are most likely to sell to ARM-based gadget manufacturers. A consequence of this is that software is just a burden to their hardware business and so they spend as little time on it as possible.

What's more, copyrights and licenses have very little relevance in the Chinese culture, it's regarded as "a western thing". And who are we to argue when it's completely normal in the West to ignore the copyrights and licenses on music and films in exactly the same way.

Also, the Chinese SoC manufacturers document very little, and even less in English. Well why should they? How many Western companies translate their documentation into Chinese? When you add that to the fact that they're not producing end-user solutions anyway, and that most of their SoCs are sold to local Chinese manufacturers just across the road, it's pretty clear why things are as they are. We still benefit from it though, because it's their lack of such preoccupations that gives us such cheap gear.

What's more, Allwinner can't fully document nor open source the MALI GPU drivers because ARM Holdings doesn't given them the right to do so. And ARM is a Western company, so perhaps you should blame someone closer to home.

Finally, if you want support for Allwinner chips but you don't speak Chinese then the place you should be looking is linux-sunxi.org .

Oh and good luck having hissifits about the Chinese view of copyright, a classic "first-world problem". They might even be acting more sensibly about this "imaginary property" stuff than we are, who knows. History will tell.

Here's a link about Allwinner's GPL violations.

Maybe do some fact checking first...
http://linux-sunxi.org/Main_Pa...

All of the Allwinner CPUs will boot from an appropriately formatted SD card and ignore the OS in flash. Don't know what wifi is in there but 75% of Allwinner A31 based tables out of China have Broadcom Wifi in them and the drivers are in the mainline kernel. I believe Kitkat is already available for the A31 and given how standardized these tablets are I don't foresee major problems upgrading.

Allwinner devices are far more hackable than Nvidia based ones. Most features of the Allwinner CPUs are documented except for the usual suspects -- graphics. A31 uses an Imagination PowerVR GPU. And it is not Allwinner that is keeping that GPU secret, it is Imagination.

$85 (with Slickdeals coupon) with free ship is an excellent price for this set of features. Anyway it is already sold out until they can get more from their OEM.

BTW - I do think there is a CPU security feature that can encrypt the boot, but I've never seen an Allwinner device that has turned it on.

Forgot to say, the pcDuino is US$59 + shipping, the Cubieboard is US$65+shipping (and that included cables and case). Both came in about a week to New Zealand.

This website is the center of the world for the Allwinner A10 SoC that these boards and quite a few other systems are based on, and individual boards have their own board specific forums too (e.g. http://www.pcduino.com/) . As the A10 SoC is used in a lot of low-end Android tablets I am pretty sure that it will have shipped more units than Raspberry Pi, (although not as many in hardware hacker firendly boards like this).

I made a "Ask Slashdot" about the topic a month or so ago hoping to raise some discussion about it, but apparently Slashdot editors didn't like the idea, possibly because I lambasted the Allwinner A10 quite clearly. To keep this comment short I'll just drop a few select quotes from the wiki pages:

Integrate G2D support for 2D acceleration, right now Mali drivers sometimes are slower than FBDEV in 2D tasks ( http://linux-sunxi.org/Mali400 )

,

* No output modules support apart from cedarfb which uses raw framebuffer access (not compatible with xf86-video-mali and any other driver/device that wants to write raw at the same moment). * No support for GUI of the VLC, only command line VLC is supported * 1080p and such movies with high bitrate sometimes buffer too slow and frames are dropping. * No support for OSD because of lack of YUV420 ( http://linux-sunxi.org/VLC )

, http://linux-sunxi.org/XBMC#Optimize_XBMC_for_the_Allwinner_A10_SoC_used_in_most_media_players_and_tablets ,

Disadvantages Allwinner's CedarX technology and libraries:

        Allwinner's own CedarX proprietary libraries have no clear usage license, so even if the source code for some versions is available the terms-of-use is unknown in open source software.
        The Android glue code is implemented as a "media player" (parallel to Android's Stagefright multimedia framework) instead of as standard OpenMAX (OMX) components and API's.
        This "media player" has limitations when it comes to playing back content pointed to by Android URIs and some web-based content.
        There is no glue code for any other multimedia frameworks on GNU/Linux systems. The use of OpenMAX (OMX) instead would have rendered this a non-issue, with existing projects like GstOpenMAX (GStreamer OpenMAX). ( http://linux-sunxi.org/CedarX )

All these things quite well show the lack of commitment and complete blindness towards all the possibilities these kinds of SoCs could enable if only the software and the licenses were up to snuff. This brings me to the question: why choose the A10 when there are SoCs that atleast support the standard way of accelerating video through OpenMAX and/or GStreamer? Who does everyone seem to use Mali-400 when it's apparently very poorly supported? Is there any manufacturer who is even PLANNING to some day do a SoC with properly maintained and supported software package -- or better yet, release the programming documents to the wild so people can implement F/OSS software packages?

I made a "Ask Slashdot" about the topic a month or so ago hoping to raise some discussion about it, but apparently Slashdot editors didn't like the idea, possibly because I lambasted the Allwinner A10 quite clearly. To keep this comment short I'll just drop a few select quotes from the wiki pages:

Integrate G2D support for 2D acceleration, right now Mali drivers sometimes are slower than FBDEV in 2D tasks ( http://linux-sunxi.org/Mali400 )

,

* No output modules support apart from cedarfb which uses raw framebuffer access (not compatible with xf86-video-mali and any other driver/device that wants to write raw at the same moment). * No support for GUI of the VLC, only command line VLC is supported * 1080p and such movies with high bitrate sometimes buffer too slow and frames are dropping. * No support for OSD because of lack of YUV420 ( http://linux-sunxi.org/VLC )

, http://linux-sunxi.org/XBMC#Optimize_XBMC_for_the_Allwinner_A10_SoC_used_in_most_media_players_and_tablets ,

Disadvantages Allwinner's CedarX technology and libraries:

        Allwinner's own CedarX proprietary libraries have no clear usage license, so even if the source code for some versions is available the terms-of-use is unknown in open source software.
        The Android glue code is implemented as a "media player" (parallel to Android's Stagefright multimedia framework) instead of as standard OpenMAX (OMX) components and API's.
        This "media player" has limitations when it comes to playing back content pointed to by Android URIs and some web-based content.
        There is no glue code for any other multimedia frameworks on GNU/Linux systems. The use of OpenMAX (OMX) instead would have rendered this a non-issue, with existing projects like GstOpenMAX (GStreamer OpenMAX). ( http://linux-sunxi.org/CedarX )

All these things quite well show the lack of commitment and complete blindness towards all the possibilities these kinds of SoCs could enable if only the software and the licenses were up to snuff. This brings me to the question: why choose the A10 when there are SoCs that atleast support the standard way of accelerating video through OpenMAX and/or GStreamer? Who does everyone seem to use Mali-400 when it's apparently very poorly supported? Is there any manufacturer who is even PLANNING to some day do a SoC with properly maintained and supported software package -- or better yet, release the programming documents to the wild so people can implement F/OSS software packages?

I made a "Ask Slashdot" about the topic a month or so ago hoping to raise some discussion about it, but apparently Slashdot editors didn't like the idea, possibly because I lambasted the Allwinner A10 quite clearly. To keep this comment short I'll just drop a few select quotes from the wiki pages:

Integrate G2D support for 2D acceleration, right now Mali drivers sometimes are slower than FBDEV in 2D tasks ( http://linux-sunxi.org/Mali400 )

,

* No output modules support apart from cedarfb which uses raw framebuffer access (not compatible with xf86-video-mali and any other driver/device that wants to write raw at the same moment). * No support for GUI of the VLC, only command line VLC is supported * 1080p and such movies with high bitrate sometimes buffer too slow and frames are dropping. * No support for OSD because of lack of YUV420 ( http://linux-sunxi.org/VLC )

, http://linux-sunxi.org/XBMC#Optimize_XBMC_for_the_Allwinner_A10_SoC_used_in_most_media_players_and_tablets ,

Disadvantages Allwinner's CedarX technology and libraries:

        Allwinner's own CedarX proprietary libraries have no clear usage license, so even if the source code for some versions is available the terms-of-use is unknown in open source software.
        The Android glue code is implemented as a "media player" (parallel to Android's Stagefright multimedia framework) instead of as standard OpenMAX (OMX) components and API's.
        This "media player" has limitations when it comes to playing back content pointed to by Android URIs and some web-based content.
        There is no glue code for any other multimedia frameworks on GNU/Linux systems. The use of OpenMAX (OMX) instead would have rendered this a non-issue, with existing projects like GstOpenMAX (GStreamer OpenMAX). ( http://linux-sunxi.org/CedarX )

All these things quite well show the lack of commitment and complete blindness towards all the possibilities these kinds of SoCs could enable if only the software and the licenses were up to snuff. This brings me to the question: why choose the A10 when there are SoCs that atleast support the standard way of accelerating video through OpenMAX and/or GStreamer? Who does everyone seem to use Mali-400 when it's apparently very poorly supported? Is there any manufacturer who is even PLANNING to some day do a SoC with properly maintained and supported software package -- or better yet, release the programming documents to the wild so people can implement F/OSS software packages?

I made a "Ask Slashdot" about the topic a month or so ago hoping to raise some discussion about it, but apparently Slashdot editors didn't like the idea, possibly because I lambasted the Allwinner A10 quite clearly. To keep this comment short I'll just drop a few select quotes from the wiki pages:

Integrate G2D support for 2D acceleration, right now Mali drivers sometimes are slower than FBDEV in 2D tasks ( http://linux-sunxi.org/Mali400 )

,

* No output modules support apart from cedarfb which uses raw framebuffer access (not compatible with xf86-video-mali and any other driver/device that wants to write raw at the same moment). * No support for GUI of the VLC, only command line VLC is supported * 1080p and such movies with high bitrate sometimes buffer too slow and frames are dropping. * No support for OSD because of lack of YUV420 ( http://linux-sunxi.org/VLC )

, http://linux-sunxi.org/XBMC#Optimize_XBMC_for_the_Allwinner_A10_SoC_used_in_most_media_players_and_tablets ,

Disadvantages Allwinner's CedarX technology and libraries:

        Allwinner's own CedarX proprietary libraries have no clear usage license, so even if the source code for some versions is available the terms-of-use is unknown in open source software.
        The Android glue code is implemented as a "media player" (parallel to Android's Stagefright multimedia framework) instead of as standard OpenMAX (OMX) components and API's.
        This "media player" has limitations when it comes to playing back content pointed to by Android URIs and some web-based content.
        There is no glue code for any other multimedia frameworks on GNU/Linux systems. The use of OpenMAX (OMX) instead would have rendered this a non-issue, with existing projects like GstOpenMAX (GStreamer OpenMAX). ( http://linux-sunxi.org/CedarX )

All these things quite well show the lack of commitment and complete blindness towards all the possibilities these kinds of SoCs could enable if only the software and the licenses were up to snuff. This brings me to the question: why choose the A10 when there are SoCs that atleast support the standard way of accelerating video through OpenMAX and/or GStreamer? Who does everyone seem to use Mali-400 when it's apparently very poorly supported? Is there any manufacturer who is even PLANNING to some day do a SoC with properly maintained and supported software package -- or better yet, release the programming documents to the wild so people can implement F/OSS software packages?

CedarX doesn't support any of the standard Android video deocoding APIs, so any media players that use it have to be compiled against an undocumented, closed-source library. It seems that Rockchip is hostile toward open source. The kernel that's developed by the arm-netbook community is NOT supported by Rockchip, and kernel source has actually been coming from vendors and the community. http://linux-sunxi.org/CedarX

Yeah, one group did throw a fit and quit their efforts but most of the best work is centered here http://linux-sunxi.org/ here http://en.irc2go.com/webchat/?net=freenode&room=arm-netbook&app=1 and here https://github.com/linux-sunxi

There is XBMC support with hardware decoding for Allwinner, its been around for a month or so. Check the tail end of this forum http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=126995. This is the github with the source https://github.com/empatzero/xbmca10. Here are some build instructions http://linux-sunxi.org/XBMC. And there is this project that plans to put everything like this into a distribution for Allwinner devices http://www.indiegogo.com/pengpod.