[Arm-netbook] rev0 a10 eoma68 board bringup

[Derek LaHousse]

On Sun, 2012-12-30 at 14:06 +0000, luke.leighton wrote:

> 
> this leaves us with a rather hard choice: carry on trying to debug the
> 85x55mm rev0 samples and try to bring them up so that we can provide
> them to people (including some rather large clients who have been
> waiting like we have and everyone else has for several months for
> them), or we ask wits-tech to focus on doing the [appx] 48x75mm
> version.
These aren't mutually exclusive...

> 
> as part of the 17-hour marathon i shrunk the board to 47.8 x 72.75 mm
> (just to see if it was possible to do) and it turns out that yes it's
> possible - there may even be enough room (2 or 3 mm can be added back
> in - maybe) to not have an absolute dog's dinner rats nest for the 28
> pins RGB/TTL interface to be equal length tracks [the autorouter put
> them eeeeeverywhere].
> 
> the caveats: in order to get down to the smaller size (and to make my
> life easier when learning PADS) i had to lose the following:
> 
> * all but one TSSOP-48 NAND Flash (on BOTTOM, leaving TOP as room for
> the capacitors for the A10 and NAND)
> * the FPC-45 *and* the DIL2-44 are both gone.
> * the RTC battery, its 32mhz XTAL and associated components (this
> isn't so much of a loss because the STM32F has an RTC)
> * the HP Audio is definitely gone.
> 
> our thoughts at present are to focus on getting samples ready that can
> go into the upcoming KDE Tablet (and developing a pass-through card to
> go with that, so that it can at least be tested).
Confusion: The pass-through is usually a card that takes the EOMA header
on one end and extends it to external connectors on the other, so that a
laptop or engineering board can drive it.  What's the distinction here?
> 
> as a second phase - after getting successful samples up and running -
> we thought about doing a version of the board which is square-ish in
> size which has a stack of connectors - RJ45, USB2, 5V Power etc. etc.
> - which would be suitable for engineering and educational purposes.

Do we need 'another' engineering board?  What would distinguish it from
the Mele, the Olimex a10-ino, or the mk802{,+,ii} boards?  I've pointed
out before that the Olimex board, plugged into an STM32F board, is a
valid engineering device with no extra design work necessary.