Pine Tab 2
I bought a PineTab2 after a suggestion from Doug. You see that conversation we had about my thinking about building a tablet with a Raspberry Pi and a touch screen and a power bank, I was frustrated that I have a perfectly good working order Samsung tablet that's a little over ten years old and it can't update anymore so all you can do with it is open pictures and play videos from an SD card. I am sure this tablet used to cost close to a thousand dollars and now it's almost useless. I have a few things I would like it to do. But all of those things require it to be able to update somehow. And because of this, Doug said that with all the logistics of building a tablet from scratch, you'll be in quite a bit of money if you decide to build a tablet from scratch, and I said it wasn't about the money. Besides, the advantage of buying it in parts is that I can buy it piecemeal which is far more doable than buying one thing for a ton of money. And then I added, the reason I am thinking about doing this is that I am frustrated with companies selling an expensive product and then just deciding remotely that it is useless so I have to buy another one. On principal, I want to be the one who makes decisions like these. Then he suggested a PineTab2, which is only about $200, runs Linux, and has tons of peripherals that tablets typically don't have, which I sited as another motivator for building a tablet out of a Pi. I was thinking about turning it into a Flipper Zero, well, to have the functionality but to also do all other tablet things. And you need peripherals for this because a Flipper has GPIO pins, a USB port, bluetooth, RF, RFID, iButton, and others. It just lacks Wifi. But the Pi would have Wifi by default.
We looked at the PineTab2 and actually it looked very compelling. It used an ARM processor but all phones and tablets do, it had 8GB of RAM and internal graphics, a USB 3.0 port and a 2.0 port for charging and debugging, another just for the detachable keyboard, a micro SD card slot, and a micro HDMI port. This was sounding too good to be true for only 200. What was the deal?
Well, I was thinking about just buying this instead, with the warning from Doug that it'll run Arch Linux, which is way harder to set up than a regular Linux machine. You have to set it up so that it has a GUI at all, it doesn't just come with it like many Linux OS's do. You have to set it up so it connects to WiFi and Bluetooth and so on. I thought, well, if I don't like it surely I can install another Linux OS, right? Yeah. Okay, so this isn't a problem as far as I see it. I am willing to give Arch Linux a shot in the name of ultimate control. Plus one of the reasons for doing this is to challenge myself so that I can become more competent. Doug thought that was a good cause. But he did question why do this at all when I have a perfectly good laptop, that's really powerful, fits in my pocket, is smaller than the PineTab2 which is 10 inches and my GPD Pocket 3 is only 8 inches wide, it can be used as a tablet, it's specs are far superior, has an i7 processor, why would I do this? Well, it isn't actually a tablet, I don't want to use it that way, and it is actually just a bit small for what I want a tablet for.
I am an artist, I trace the outlines initially because it drives me nuts that I will work so hard to get everything right, all the proportions, the lines seem right, but everything seems a bit off and I can't figure out why, but I am doing my best, and then I shade it and I am satisfied with how good the hand I drew looks, and I did the folds of the persons jeans really well, I would never want to delete this. And then I find out a crucial line is absolutely in the wrong spot, or it's the wrong proportion or it's shaped wrong. And I have to fix it because it affects everything else. So I trace. I figure I'll do this until I get better. But in the meantime, I need a tablet I can trace off of because I don't want to print everything I want to draw and I don't want to have the printer dictate for me how big the picture will be. So far this is a thing my Samsung tablet can still do with one huge problem. I can't actually trace because pencil lead is conductive and confuses the screen. So I thought, man if this was my GPD Pocket, I would just write a script that temporarily disabled the touchscreen so I could trace without problems. But it's not. It's my Samsung tablet and I cannot modify anything because that isn't a thing Android allows anyway, even if it did work.
Well, I think I will probably be able to solve this with a Linux-based tablet even more easily than a still perfectly working brand new Android or Apple tablet.
I bought it on the 4th of July. I didn't think it would take so long for them to put the order together, they didn't even send an email saying that they were putting it together, for all I knew it was shipping and I couldn't track it to make sure I was on the doorstep to receive it before a porch pirate takes it.
Before buying it I looked up why it was so cheap for such a fancy seeming tablet, basically it came down to no marketing, only word of mouth, it uses parts from other tablets that other companies built, it uses affordable parts, it uses Linux which is free, ...got it.
Turned it on and it already had a username and password, found it in the manual.
Connecting to WiFi was a problem, I was thinking the whole time that because its Arch Linux, this will be a real challenge but I was going to plow into it and figure out how to connect it to WiFi which was a far harder operation by appearance than any other attempt I had ever made with literally anything ever before. it wanted to know what security the router was using, the BSSID as well as the SSID, it wouldn't list any SSID's that it saw, in fact I couldn't even get it to recognize that there was a WiFi transmitter/receiver built into it and I started to wonder if this is one of this tablets quarks.
Turned out that it just needed an update, and it took a while, there were a lot of updates to clear. But when this was done, all of the sudden, everything was very smooth sailing. I was able to simply click on the wifi icon and selected an SSID, plugged in my password and it connected.
I tried installing a number of things and as I was using the Pine Tab 2, it started to become apparent that it is a slow tablet even though it has great specs. I was so sure before I bought it that there had to be a catch to justify how cheap it was, and I did what research I could and watched videos and googled things I was curious about and so on, and I learned that they saved money using a plethora of methods like being open source and reusing designs for other products which also means using their parts. They were cheap where they could be and good quality where they had to be. And I was kind of satisfied that perhaps it is just the case that this is a good and really cheap product. But I have used it in trying to set it up and while I haven't ever hit a point where it freezes or anything, its response latency seems kind of high. Like it always takes it a quarter or half second to respond every time you do something.
Wednesday 2024-10-09
I was talking about this with my instructor who agreed and suggested we try installing a different OS. But I was kind of convinced to give Arch Linux a shot and now we are abandoning it. And I liked that this tablet had a really nice desktop environment very similar to both Mac OS and Windows 11. IT just so happened that I didn't write down my usernames or passwords for this device for some reason, which I never just don't do but I didn't do it this time for some reason so I has a hard time trying to remember what the login password might have been and finally I remembered it by chance and got in, and in trying to resolve this issue, I was doing research on alternative ways to get into the tablet so I can redo y usernames and passwords or even install a different OS and happened to google what type of OS the Pine Tab 2 has and I learned that there's this desktop environment thing I had seen the name of on the tablet while using it, so I recognized it when it said KDE Plasma. I looked it up and learned that desktop environments are a thing, and this is why Arch Linux on my tablet looks like a cross between Windows 11 and Mac OS.
I suspected that this was the reason why Arch Linux was running so slow but then also asked if Arch or KDE Plasma were slow. But my research basically told me they are both very lightweight and the KDE Plasma desktop environment is only a few hundred MB or something like that. So I asked google "arch linux kde plasma vs ubuntu desktop os which is lighter" and the impression I got from the results was that Ubuntu is lighter. Doug, my instructor, suggested that I try Raspberry Pi OS and I said yeah but I want it to be very customizable and he said well it was developed for PI's, so it's very customizable and he said something like that it may be even more customizable than other Linux OS's. This was flabbergasting to me because my impression is that Linux all around is extremely customizable but things just work and look differently depending on which flavor and distro you install. And then he suggested that I should install a minimized Ubuntu Server OS, and then install KDE Plasma since I liked what I saw. It should run pretty well. I asked why Ubuntu server, will I still be able to install anything that I want like regular Ubuntu and he said yes except that Ubuntu server would have even more options because its designed to run server stuff and it's all designed to run well, so there's not much beta software.
I decided to give Ubuntu Server Minimized and install KDE Plasma to see if that would do the trick. So we began the process of trying to boot this from a USB but all the methods I found were invalid. One result said yes, you just hold the up volume button and then press and hold the power button as well until you see the UBOOT menu. I did this many times and it would just keep booting regular, another thing said there is no boot menu. And finally on the Pine Tab 2 Wikipedia page, under Installation Instructions and Preparing the MicroSD card, there was a thing that said:
Note regarding the boot order: The SPI and the internal memory (eMMC) have a higher boot priority than the microSD card. The pre-installed bootloader on the internal memory (eMMC) tries to boot from the microSD card first. In some cases it can be required to bypass the bootloader, for example if the bootloader is corrupted or was overwritten by a bootloader with varying settings.
To force the device to boot from the microSD card, the eMMC and the SPI can be disabled by using the debug UART adapter shipped with the device in the box also containing the charging cable. Set the SD BOOT MASKROM switch on the adapter to the position ON and plug it into the USB/PD charging port. Then power on the tablet and unplug the debug board or set the switch to the position OFF again when the factory image is started, otherwise the factory image won't find the eMMC.
Power on the device with the microSD card inserted (and optionally with the USB UART adapter inserted and the bypass switch set to ON depending on the software situation, see the info box above). It should now boot the new operating system from the microSD card.
Something is not working? Please join the PineTab channel in the community chat, the community is always happy to help. In the section #Connecting the UART adapter you can find information about how to connect the USB UART adapter and how to retrieve the boot logs if the device is not booting properly even after the above procedure.
So when I opened the box the tablet came in, there was an odd device called USB UART that I had no idea what it was for. Apparently, you need this if you are going to boot to something else.
Thursday 2024-10-16
Got to work on project day today by trying to use the UART device to install an alternate OS on the Pine Tab2. Took me a whole day to find where I put the UART device but I found it. It's a small circuit board with a couple of lights on it, an on/off switch for booting of the SD card in the Paine Tab2, and three USB C ports. I found instructions online that said to connect the UART device to the tablets console or serial port, which in this case to my understanding is the second USB C debugging port, and the other end to your computer. I got excited when my instructor, Doug, told me that controlling this device is very similar to plugging into a switch or router through the RS232 port to configure it. That is a project I have been wanting to do for a long time but there was always something higher priority to do.
Install puTTy, and turn the device on through the console. It gave instructions to set the port to whichever USB port you plugged the computer into the UART with and set the baud rate to 115200, data bits to 8, stop bits to 1, parity bits to none, and flow control to none.
I discovered that once you connect the UART while turned on into the tablet, it freezes. It will not boot, if it is already booting, it will stop and even start writing lines of error to the screen and if the n turned back off or unplugged, it may still hang there or continue on to boot. However, while it was off, once the tablet was turned on through the traditional power switch, lines of garbled text and what looks to me like blocks of static, undefined characters--would fill the screen in paragraphs and then once the screen reached the login screen these would eventually give way to legible lines of text where you essentially control the tablet as though through the CLI, or console. You type what user, it prompts you for a password and it will show on the screen of the tablet that you logged in.
But this was not what we were trying to accomplish. We had flashed the SD card with Ubuntu Server with the intention to put KDE Plasma on it like the tablet came with on Arch Linux. But we were unable to find the screen on the console screen that said we could press any key to interrupt the boot process. And neither of us figured out yet how to turn the device on through the console port.
In troubleshooting, I tried different baud rates since this is how text is interpreted for the console from the tablet. And there were many features that controlled this. I did not try to press space, escape or enter when seeing the garbled text, so I need to try that since I just saw that instruction in my research but missed it. Sometimes the boot process doesn't display a visible prompt but will still accept key input "Ctrl + C" immediately after you power the device. My research indicated that I needed to recheck my settings in puTTy, but all of the settings were correct, no prompt shows up that can be interrupted, just a bunch of illegible lines that cannot be discerned, and then it starts showing all of the lines for bootup for Linux, at which point I assume it may be too late. My understanding at this time was that the illegible lines I was seeing in in the PuTTY console suggested that the output might not be properly configured to display correctly in the terminal, and that this is often caused by a mismatch in the encoding or baud rate, or it might be that some output is garbled before switching to readable text during boot. So I tried 9600 baud rate, 57600 and 38400 and then I think I tried one other before cycling back through to double check that I did it correctly. Then I tried enabling and disabling ESC[n~ in Terminal>keyboard settings, and IMPLICIT CR IN EVERY LF and IMPLCIT LF IN EVERY CR, and also XTERM, VT100, or LINUX. None of that worked either.
Instead of using puTTy, I could have tried using TERE TERM since I'm using Windows, but I did not try this yet.
After more digging I found the possibility that the reason this wasn't working was because I was using a .ISO instead of a .IMG since this is an ARM device. SO I looked for an IMG of Ubuntu Server, couldn't find one, went to the Pine Tab website and found a bunch of IMG's for Arch Linux and Ubuntu touch, kept looking, then looked for a way to convert ISO to IMG and found sites that would do it but one in particular for example would only do it for files that were a few hundred MB's, and Ubuntu Server is a few GB's. Then I found a video on YouTube explaining how to convert it in Windows. But all this guy did was have you make file extensions visible so you could change the extension in the file name from .ISO to .IMG. So despite my reservations, I did it when the guy in the video said that .IMG and .ISO are virtually the same. So I changed it, and then further research said that Rufus might not be the best solution for Arch Linux devices, so I should try Balena Etcher. So I did, it flashed to the card successfully', I inserted it into the tablet, tried booting again same thing.
I was stumped.
Friday 2024-10-17
I had the idea to simply just try installing the .IMG Ubuntu Touch OS from the Pine Tab website because perhaps we are going about this all wrong and none of the things I am trying are actually intended to work, and that this may be why they provide images of Arch and Ubuntu Touch on the Pine Tab website. So one of my next things to try is to flash Ubuntu Touch onto it to see if the parts I'm working with work properly and if they do then Ubuntu Touch should install just fine. If not I may need to get it fixed or replaced or just put up with how slow the tablet is with the current OS, despite how lite it is.
This has been Truncat3d 00000000111100010100110______________end of line
No comments:
Post a Comment