[Arm-netbook] a10 eoma68 cpu card bring-up

[luke.leighton]

On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 2:46 PM, mike.valk at gmail.com
<mike.valk at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2013/5/15 luke.leighton <luke.leighton at gmail.com>:
>
> Congratulations Luke, et al.
>
>> On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 11:16 AM, joem <joem at martindale-electric.co.uk> wrote:
>>
>>> Congratulations Luke!!!!!!!!!!
>>>
>>> You manage to thread a fine needle through all the hardware and
>>> software, issue after issue, step by step, until you have finally a
>>> bootable EOMA. :)
>>
>>  still am going through repro'ing henrik's kernel compile, all good
>> fun because this revision of the board doesn't have JTAG.  don't ask.
>> really.  just... don't ask :)
>
> Err. Not even a serial (UART) interface?

 only by accident.

> Suggestion for the next iteration of the board. Add an extra micro-sd
> slot.

 yes.  except that requires case rework, which will be an extra $10k.

> Some of the benfits.
> 1. Boot from removable storage. While keeping a swappable storage available
> 2. Less wear on the soldered on flash
> 3. The A10 can expose UART and JTAG via the sd interface
> http://linux-sunxi.org/MicroSD_Breakout
>
> Ehm why aren't you trying UART/JTAG over the SD-Card interface now anyway?

 because they wired the wrong fucking SD card interface *without*
notifying me.  did i say "don't ask"? :)

 it's actually for very very good reasons, namely that the board's
been designed extremely well - 2 GND planes, 1 Power meaning it stands
a high chance of passing FCC - but it's leaving only 3 signal planes.

 so, only 3 signal planes for 4 DDR3 RAM ICs, processor, PMICs, NAND
Flash, MicroHDMI, MicroUSB, MicroSD and a 68-pin connector in a space
only 45 x 75 mm it's a goddamn miracle the engineer pulled that off -
he's extremely competent in that regard.

 so they couldn't route SD0 to the MicroSD because it was on the other
side of the CPU, likewise SD3 would have crossed over.  so the
engineer made a very sensible decision to swap them over... but didn't
_tell_ me.

 and i'd already truncated the GPIO pins from 16 to 8, which cut SD3
in half.... actually now SD0.  if they'd asked i would have said "oi!"
and asked them to drop IR_TX and IR_RX and put the full SD0 on them
instead.

 but yes.  we want a top-loading micro-sd... in the future, not not,
because it's too much cost and time right now.  i shouldn't say
"never": if on the other hand someone reading this can come up with
around $15k we'll do it immediately.

 oh, btw we're more than certainly going to the A20 now.

l.