[Arm-netbook] http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/07/22/2213244/eoma-68-based-kde-vivaldi-tablet-engineering-boards-ship

[luke.leighton]

On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 4:00 PM, Ottavio Caruso
<ottavio2006-usenet2012 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> http://hothardware.com/News/Vivaldi-KDE-Linux-Tablet-Reaches-QA-Status-To-Ship-Soon/

 oooOo

> But who is shipping the tablets? I thought you were shipping only the
> boards, not the finished product.

 yeah it's all a little confusing but generally accurate.  the
original post by aaron only refers to the micro-engineering boards
that christopher put together.  the link has generally been made /
assumed that aaron's referring to the actual _tablet_, which is in the
final phases of development, and is also not far off.  the company we
asked to do it, the boss really wants to do a final triple-check of
both the case design and the PCB and schematics before he signs it
off.  given that it's been described by other people we approached as
an "old school" design this is probably a good idea!

 if you recall, waay back when i did the initial schematics and PCB
layout, we're using PWM for audio via the STM32F, and the plan is to
use adamgreig's "followingrobot" code to basically have the STM32F
handle the camera *as well*.  i'm strictly speaking not an actual real
hardware engineer, found everything "off the internet" and threw it
together, so it really does need double-checking.

 ordinarily (i.e. nowadays) you jam a few chips together, they're
digital, y'know, ya just wire a Wolfson Micro Audio IC to the AC97
bus, ya wire this to that and it's all happy.

 so that it's future-proof and completely independent of whatever CPU
Card is in it _and_ reasonably low-cost and also because none of the
companies with USB Audio or USB Camera ICs would answer my enquiries,
we've taken a much more "analog" DIY approach that's going to need
some programming of the STM32F to get the product out the door.

 none of that was mentioned in the news articles because aaron was
_actually_ referring to the Micro-Engineering Board :)

l.