PineNote Development/Apps

Development

Here are some resources you may find helpful in learning to develop on embedded Linux devices:

• Great YouTube series introducing you to the kernel and lower-level components of Linux: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiZ05pnHZqM
• https://embetronicx.com/
• https://bootlin.com/training/
• https://www.nand2tetris.org

Emulator recommendation for developing and testing PineNote apps: https://github.com/michaelshiel/picom-epaper

The PineNote is a specialized device, mainly due to the eink display having unique display and refresh characteristics. Finding and configuring apps that work well sometimes requires a lot of tweaking and a lot exploring, especially for applications containing fast screen updates and animations, as well as depend on a lot of colors.

Here is a video showing the performance of a few applications.

Desktop Environments

Sway

• WinkShell "Collected applications, configurations and scripts for using a wlroots-based compositor with an EPD (aka e-ink display). Currently supports Sway only."

• 0cc4m's config

Getting touch + pen working on sway

If you notice that touching the screen works, but when you use the pen the mouse coordinates are inverted, don't worry! We can fix it! Set rockchip_ebc.panel_reflection=0 on boot (see this page for more info). Add the following line to your sway config:

# This line rotates the mouse input by 180 degrees. See https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/1.11.3/absolute_axes.html
input "type:table_tool" calibration_matrix -1 0 1 0 -1 1

Gnome

Maximilian's Config

Note: You may need to compile a modified mutter as well.

GTK3

High contrast style for eink-devices can be found here.

GTK4

High contrast style for eink-devices can be found here.

Application support on the PineNote

Notetaking

Xournal++

Works well, writing is pretty quick. The development version supports PDF highlighting, links, and offers repainting-related optimisations (https://github.com/xournalpp/xournalpp/commit/c0a91f02afbfb67a60f7088b4c579a796693e05d and https://github.com/xournalpp/xournalpp/commit/ce1c66cb6d78f3332714ca21d279cf20548d7c06). To improve the performance even further apply https://github.com/xournalpp/xournalpp/pull/4158 and https://github.com/xournalpp/xournalpp/pull/4611 while on master.

Xournal++ uses anti-aliasing and interpolation, which do not work well for the A1 waveform. Mitigations include using either dithering or black-white mode in the ebc driver, or compiling Xournal++ with https://gitlab.com/hrdl/pinenote-shared/-/blob/main/patches/xournalpp/0001-Disable-anti-aliasing-and-use-NEAREST-interpolation-.patch.

Obsidian

Works well, EInk-Theme can be found here.

Web Browsing

Firefox

Pretty good experience! Enabling GPU acceleration is helpful.

GPU Acceleration in Firefox

See 0ccam's notes here.

"Cloud"

syncthing

High contrast theme can be found here.