[Arm-netbook] My little idea...

[Christopher Havel]

Just a little something I cooked up ;) no pictures yet, but here's a 
wall of text about it...

I've got hand drawn schematics made up for an EOMA-68... er... I'm 
calling it a Carrier Board for now (the PCB that the CPU card goes 
into). This one uses only through-hole components, and all but two (the 
PCMCIA slot and, oddly enough, the Ethernet jack) are very cheap. The 
idea is that someone like me who is rather a bit of a dunce with the 
soldering iron can still put it together in a dedicated weekend, if so 
inclined. *That is, a person with fairly beginner-level hobby skills can 
buy a fistful of parts and a CPU Card, etch a PCB (or get one from 
somewhere) and after a few hours of lead fume inhalation, has a complete 
computer in their hands.* That's a huge gift, I think, to the  Maker 
community, not to mention the technically-inclined poor folk out there 
(I *know* I'm not the only one!)... seriously, it sounds like good stuff 
to me.

My two rules for designing were (1) no surface mount anything at all 
period end-of-story, and (2) use as many very standard parts as 
possible. Every component can be had at Mouser Electronics in single 
unit quantities.

The Ethernet jack has the magnetics built in, so it's (unfortunately) 
the most expensive part on the board -- but I couldn't find a 
through-hole Ethernet transformer... I've probably also omitted some 
necessary things out of simple ignorance (I have a hunch that there's 
more to the USB connection than four wires, a power supply and data 
feed, and the connector itself, for instance). I'm more budding hobbyist 
with this stuff than anything else -- but hey, you gotta start 
somewhere, right? ;)

The only thing I don't like is that it still requires a custom PCB 
unless one wants to do some very creative dongle-making... probably 
doable but it'll be very ugly in a number of ways. That said, I'll be 
quite surprised if this design cannot get away with using a single-sided 
PCB -- meaning any shmuck who can get to eBay can order the supplies to 
make the board at home if they want to. (Sounds a little like me!)

If anyone wants to try reading my horrible chicken scratch I'll send out 
a link to a scanned copy, otherwise I'll try and work up the motivation 
to move it into my graphics software (CorelDRAW X3), since, although I 
have a copy of Kicad, I never really bothered to learn how to use it 
properly...

Any interest at all?
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