[Arm-netbook] A10 CPU Card (revision 0)

[luke.leighton]

On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 2:24 PM, luke.leighton <luke.leighton at gmail.com> wrote:

> the only thing i'm marginally disappointed by is that there simply
> isn't enough room to fit all 4 connectors at the end, as we were
> expecting, so we'll have to drop audio (and put it onto the .
> USB-OTG, Micro-SD and Micro-HDMI.  what we'll likely do is, once the
> Revision 1 cards are done, proven and selling, we'll have enough funds
> in at that point to pay litkconn for a casework redesign.  what we'll
> probably do then is put in a top-loading Micro-SD slot, with a hole
> through the top shield.  this would free up _plenty_ of space at the
> user-facing end: we could probably then fit an S-Video Out or maybe an
> extra USB (powered, so as to get 1 Amp total).

 ok, i just heard from a team that's designing an EOMA-68 product, and
they've pointed out quite rightly that this is a very important
lesson: that the user-facing interfaces on a particular CPU Card
*cannot* be relied on to be there, across the entire EOMA-68 range.
they were going to *not* put an audio connector on... because the A10
CPU Card was going to have audio headphones.

 now they will put one on, and this means they need to redesign the
casework (sorry folks!)

 i'll write up a section (design considerations) on the elinux.org
wiki but please, for anyone reading this now or in the future who is
doing EOMA-68 products, please bear in mind that CPU Cards will be
available which e.g. have 3G antennae at the end; there will be
low-cost CPU Cards with no HDMI (because the CPU doesn't *have* HDMI)
and so on, where the interfaces that *happen* to be on the very first
CPU Card (the A10 one) simply will not be there because there isn't
room.

 so it is necessary to design products taking that into account.

 argh, argh, argh, this totally breaks the "standards must not have
anything that's optional" rule, and that didn't occur to me.
apologies there.

 (btw, gordan, can you see now why it's so important not to have
anything that's optional?  it's not an "academic discussion", it's a
real issue!)

l.