Pinebook

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The Pinebook

The Pinebook is an 11.6″ or 11.6″ with 1080P IPS panel or 14″ notebook powered by the same quad-core ARM Cortex A53 64-Bit Processor used in our popular PINE A64 Single Board Computer. It is very lightweight, hackable and comes equipped with a full-sized keyboard and large multi-touch trackpad. It runs numerous mainline Linux distributions as well as *BSD and Android.

Software releases

Under Pinebook Software Releases you will find a complete list of currently supported Operating System images that work with the Pinebook as well as other related software.

Variants

The following variants exist of the Pinebook:

  • Pinebook 11.6″
  • Pinebook 11.6″ 1080p
  • Pinebook 14″

More information can be found on the sunxi wiki.

Pinebook Service Step-by-Step Guides

These are instruction guides for the disassembly:

Note: The installation process is the reverse order of removal guide

11.6″ Pinebook:

14″ Pinebook:

Pinebook Information

  • Dimensions: 299mm x 200mm x 12mm (WxDxH - 11″ Pinebook); 329mm x 220mm x 12mm (WxDxH - 14″ Pinebook)
  • Weight: 1.04Kg (11″ Pinebook); 1.26Kg (14″ Pinebook)#
  • Input Power: DC 5V @ 3A

SoC and Memory Specification

  • Based on Allwinner A64
Allwinner A64.jpg

CPU Architecture:

  • Quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 Processor@1152Mhz
  • A power-efficient ARM v8 architecture
  • 64 and 32bit execution states for scalable high performance
  • Support NEON Advanced SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) instruction for acceleration of media and signal processing function
  • Support Large Physical Address Extensions(LPAE)
  • VFPv4 Floating Point Unit
  • 32KB L1 Instruction cache and 32KB L1 Data cache
  • 512KB L2 cache

GPU Architecture:

System Memory:

  • System RAM Memory: 2GB
  • Storage Memory: 16GB eMMC module, can be upgrade to 32GB or 64GB eMMC module

Battery:

  • Lithium Polymer Battery (10,000mAH)

Video:

  • Mini Digital Video Port (Type A - mini)

Audio:

  • 3.5mm stereo earphone/microphone plug

Network:

  • WiFi 802.11 b/g/n with Bluetooth 4.0
  • 10/100Mbps USB Ethernet Dongle (Optional)

Storage:

  • microSD - bootable, support SDHC and SDXC, storage up to 256GB
  • USB - 2 USB2.0 Host port

Expansion Ports:

  • mini Digital Video port
  • microSD card port - support SD, SDHC, SDXC uo to 256GB
  • 2x USB 2.0 port
  • earphone plug with UART console mux circuit

Pinebook Schematics and Certifications

Mainboard schematics:

Daughter Board schematics:

Serial Console Earphone Jack pinout:

Certifications:

Datasheets for Components and Peripherals

Allwinner A64 SoC:

X-Powers AXP803 PMU (Power Management Unit):

LPDDR3:

eMMC:

SPI NOR Flash:

Wifi/BT module:

LCD Panel:

Touchpad:

Camera sensor:

Lithium Battery:

Other Resources

FAQ / Tips and tricks

Key left of Z ( \ | )

How to map the key next to Z to the symbols on \ and | (rather than <>) ?

Choose the alternative international US keyboard layout and variant. The name will depend on you desktop environment:

  • English (US, alt. intl.)
  • English (US, international AltGr Unicode combining, alternative)
  • English (US, alternative international)

Note: keyboard variants with similar names as the ones above change the upper left key for ` and ~. You have to press that key twice to get the desired char. This happens with the alt-intl variant. Choose the altgr-intl variant (or however it is called in your desktop environment) and it should work as expected.

To set the keyboard layout and variant in the terminal for X-Windows use: 

setxkbmap -layout us -variant altgr-intl

The Archlinux Wiki has some good help if you need to tweak your layout further [1]

Key between Fn and Alt (Menu)

How to map the key between Fn and Alt to SUPER / META ?

The initial setup in many desktop environments maps the key between Fn and Alt to MENU. Although the menu key can be useful as well (e.g. spell correction in the browser) many desktop environments and window manager use the Super key for many other useful functions. And users are probably more used to have the META key near Ctrl and Alt.

In X-windows the following command maps the key between Fn and Alt to META and the Caps-Lock key to MENU. 

setxkbmap -option caps:menu,altwin:alt_super_win

Set display brightness in the terminal

To set the display brightness in the terminal use xbacklight (if available in your distro): 

xbacklight -setXX

XX is the percentage (%) of brightness. E.g. for 70% brightness 

xbacklight -set70

If you use LXQt you can also use: 

pkexec lxqt-backlight_backend --inc
pkexec lxqt-backlight_backend --dec

For an alternative solution please see the scripts discussed in this thread: [2]

Get battery % in CLI

As ACPI is not compatible with ARM, to gather the % battery this can be used: 

cat /sys/class/power_supply/battery/capacity

Firefox font size

How to get a useful font size with firefox ?

To have every web page displayed in a larger more readable font size type about:config in the search bar and confirm on the first page that you want to make changes. Then search for this parameter: 

layout.css.devPixelsPerPx

and modify the value (right click) to something between 1.2 to 1.5 depending on your preferences.

In addition to that you can set in Preferences -> General -> Fonts & Color -> Advanced Minimum font size to 16

Disable wireless power management

If having issues with wifi connectivity, try to disable power management in the 8723cs module options, adding rtw_power_mgnt=0 in /etc/modprobe.d/8723cs.conf 

options 8723cs rtw_initmac=00:ba:ch:16:85:46 rtw_power_mgnt=0

Touchpad acceleration and scroll direction.

To set touchpad parameters from the cli you can use the command xinput. To use it correctly you first need to determine the device id / name for your touchpad. Use 

xinput list

to do so. You are looking for a line like this: 

HAILUCK CO.,LTD USB KEYBOARD Mouse      	id=7	[slave  pointer  (2)]

With the device id = 7 found you can list the parameters that can be set with xinput. 

xinput list-props 7

The result looks similar to this: 

device 'HAILUCK CO.,LTD USB KEYBOARD Mouse':
...
libinput Natural Scrolling Enabled (256):	0
...
libinput Accel Speed (265):	0.000000
...

To change the parameter use xinput set-prop

To set reverse scrolling for the touchpad use this command 

xinput set-prop 7 'libinput Natural Scrolling Enabled' 1

To set mouse speed 

xinput set-prop 7 'libinput Accel Speed' 0.95

Check different numbers for 0.95 to meet your needs.

For more details on xinput and mouse speed also see the Archlinux Wiki [3]

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