Some questions about the usage of the Pinephone pro's board for my DIY phone based on FreeBSD....

[ZioMario]

Hello to everyone.

many of you already know that I'm trying to create a FreeBSD based phone. Well. I tried some boards,but no-one has been able to satisfy my needs. In this post I would like to focus my attention on the Pinephone pro main board. This one :

PINEPHONE PRO 4GB/128GB MAINBOARD with nano-SIM slot - PINE STORE

PinePhone Pro mainboard with 4GB system memory and 128GB Flash memory. Please note that this mainboard using nano-SIM socket and please make your PinePhone Pro inner frame is nano-sim socket cut-out version. For PinePhone Pro mainboard using micro-SIM socket, please email sales team at...

pine64.com

I have some questions to ask you.

1) Can I power on that board using an external powerbank ? How ? I know that's not a board like the RockPro rk3399 or the radxa boards,so I want to be sure that I can.

2) What about the bootloader ? is it blocked ? My plan is not to install u-boot,but the UEFI code of Jared McNeill. Could you enlighten me on the problems I might encounter ?

3) I saw that I can attach an external monitor to the USB-C port. So my plan is to buy a 4 or 5 inches monitor that can be turned on via USB-C instead of using the more common MIPI-DSI method. Again,could you enlighten me on the problems I might encounter ?

thanks.

 

[Espionage724]

3) I saw that I can attach an external monitor to the USB-C port. So my plan is to buy a 4 or 5 inches monitor that can be turned on via USB-C instead of using the more common MIPI-DSI method. Again,could you enlighten me on the problems I might encounter ?

I'm thinking a USB-C dock with PD would allow the board to be powered externally along with having USB stuff/external display hub-powered.

I have a OnePlus 6 and with Android I can't do Ethernet over a USB-C hub and PD charging at the same time (either wired Ethernet/no charging, or charge/no Ethernet) along with no HDMI out. A Galaxy S10+ does all 3 no problem. I'm not sure if Android itself controls that, but I suspect some Android boards might handle charging and USB OTG-like stuff differently (I'm thinking PinePhone would have all those handled fine on a dev-friendly board though).

This implies the bootloader isn't hard-locked: https://pine64.org/documentation/PinePhone_Pro/Software/Bootloaders/ (I'd probably try Tow-Boot first)

 

[ZioMario]

I'm thinking a USB-C dock with PD would allow the board to be powered externally along with having USB stuff/external display hub-powered.

I saw some videos on youtube,yes. I know that works like that. But all the USB-C dock used are very big. I would keep intact the form factor of a phone. So the first thing could be to find a micro USB-C dock with PD because it should disappear inside the case.