fura64

Random stuff for the original 2016 Pine64 A65, with LCD. I've tried many times to make something useful with this thing but I alway struggle to find the resources I need, so I decided to collect my findings here, as I go along.

I might, however, turn this into something more specific, if I ever find a use case that works well for this device.

I most recently planned to use this for my "Smart Doorbell" project, but I didn't have much luck with the GPIOs on this thing (using Python at least), so I think I won't even bother with that, and just use a normal Raspberry Pi instead.

Other potential ideas:

• A system monitor that shows live status of servers and services
• If I get GPIO to work: KVM control

Also, its definitely worth checking out posts #6 and #7 of this forum thread.

Armbian Version

The Pine64 A64(+) LCD does not seem to work with any Linux (pine?) kernels newer than 3.10 so I recommend using Armbian_5.90_Pine64_Ubuntu_xenial_default_3.10.107_desktop

Getting the LCD and Touchscreen to work

1. Edit the file /boot/armbianEnv.txt, setting pine64_lcd=on instead of off.;
2. Edit the file /etc/modules, adding a line with gt9xxf_ts

Getting the LCD to maximum brightness

Run the script max_lcd_brightness, it can be set to run automaticall on startup by adding the maxlcd.desktop file to ~/.config/autostart

Python 3.8

Somewhere, eg in ~/Downloads/ , and as root (or using sudo, depending on debian flavor) run the following to install Python 3.8

apt install libffi-dev libbz2-dev liblzma-dev libsqlite3-dev libncurses5-dev libgdbm-dev zlib1g-dev libreadline-dev libssl-dev tk-dev build-essential libncursesw5-dev libc6-dev openssl git;
wget https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.8.0/Python-3.8.0.tar.xz
tar xf Python-3.8.0.tar.xz
cd cpython-3.8*
./configure --prefix=$HOME/.local --enable-optimizations --disable-profiling
make -j -l 4
make altinstall
cd ..
rm -r Python-3.8.0
rm Python-3.8.0.tar.xz

Then add to ~/.bashrc:

export PATH=$HOME/.local/bin/:$PATH

Python GPIO control

I don't think this ever worked completely for me, but still.

Somewhere, e.g. in ~/Downloads/:

git clone https://github.com/swkim01/RPi.GPIO-PineA64.git
cd RPi.GPIO-PineA64
sudo python setup.py install
sudo chmod -R $USER:$USER ./

Then add to ~/.bashrc:

export PYTHONPATH=$HOME/Downloads/RPi.GPIO-PineA64/:$PYTHONPATH

Adjust for installation dir, if not Downloads.

I had various issues with this, most lately that importing RPi.GPIO gives an error that it's unable to find RPi._GPIO which I believe is the actual C-bindings. Somwhere I read that removing the underscore '_' from the file RPi/GPIO/__init__.py, i.e. changing the line from RPi._GPIO import * to from RPi.GPIO import *, would resolve this. This seems like an odd fix to me, and while it indeed removed the error, it didn't seem to actually import the module... which is maybe not that surprising, given the 'fix' :)