[Arm-netbook] preorder and roadmap clarification

[lkcl luke]

On Thu, Dec 22, 2011 at 1:09 AM, Gordan Bobic <gordan at bobich.net> wrote:
> Luke,
>
> Really appreciate what you are doing here, it sounds great, and I hope
> it works out - it's just that unfortunately this won't quite fit my
> requirements until after the PCMCIA base board has a working u-boot and
> kernel,

 not a problem gordan.

> and there is a working motherboard (that breaks out at least
> ethernet, USB and console of some sort (VGA/DVI/HDMI or serial).

 weeeelll... that means you'd need what i call a "micro" engineering
board, which would be nothing more than a single-sided 2-layer board
on the end of the PCMCIA connector.  actually the only 4 wires you'd
(personally) need would be the ethernet.  everything else you
(personally) need will be on the CPU card itself: HDMI and USB-OTG.

> I added my pre-order entry as such.

 great.

> I would like to know more about when exactly the plan is to have such a
> motherboard that would make this card usable for some kind of a
> production task.

 achh, pffhh - probably pretty much straight away.  it'd take jason
(at the factory) probably about an hour to knock something up that had
the 5 connectors required on it.  it's actually so incredibly simple
that anybody with gEDA or KiCAD could do it in a few hours with no
prior working knowledge of gEDA or KiCAD, as long as the symbols for
the connectors were available already.

>  From what I understand at the moment, the plan is for a bare PCMCIA
> card powered off USB via a USB break-out cable with nothing else.

 yep.  with Micro-HDMI, Micro-SD and a compact 5-pin headset jack that
has both stereo audio and mic on it.

> Can
> you clarify (or at least make a hopeful guess) whether this is the case
> and when a basic u-ATX format motherboard with the mentioned ports might
> be available?

 oo, a u-ATX motherboard's a different matter.  mostly it'd be empty!

 but i did suggest to the factory that they take the allwinner
Reference Design and split it down the middle: EOMA CPU card on one
PCB, everything-else on the other.  the primary reason for doing that
is that they would have something to test, being able to just
literally take the pre-existing binary blobs (as far as they're
concerned) boot up and go "oh yes, now we know the hardware works".

 the end result there would be that there would be a nice lovely
motherboard available as a potential saleable item.

l.