[Arm-netbook] tablet, microdesktop and laptop progress

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

well... some good news, we have sponsors for both the 7in tablet and
also a 15in laptop, which is amazing!

the laptop we have chosen a 15.6in 1366x768 LCD because anything lower
than that (either in size or in pixel resolution) is no longer
properly fashionable, it appears, whereas i am surprised to find that
15.6in 1366x768 LCDs are not only extremely popular (over 50,000 for
sale on panelook.com), but also their power requirements are far more
modest than one might expect: around 3.5 watts for the backlight which
is pretty incredible.

with the popularity of netbooks and tablets taking over, it kinda
makes sense that even 13.3in LCDs are just not hugely popular.  so...
15.6in it is.  i do want to do a 1920x1080 15.6in... but not right
away.  i don't want to push things too much (EMI wise) and also even
finding the faster RGB/TTL to eDP or dual-LVDS ICs is... tricky.  so
we tackle that later.

the only downside of using 1366x768 is that it is above the limit of
1280x800 set for EOMA68 in a 5.0in form-factor.  i am not going to get
massively unhappy about this, but the CPU Card has to remain *inside*
the unit as a non-user-removable part.  the hilarious thing is that
the ICubeCorp IC3128 will actually work!  i tested it yesterday and it
can run 1280x1024 at 60hz (if you set 8bpp - 3Red, 3Green, 2Blue).  i
find this to be very very funny.  a $USD 2 Quad-Flat Package processor
running in a 15.6in laptop.

with sufficient funding however we may be able to go straight to a
1920x1080 EOMA68-compliant laptop, by redesigning the EOMA68-A20 to
fit within the 3.3mm PCMCIA form-factor.  that will require some
metalwork tooling costs, hence why this hasn't been done yet.

the tablet: apologies but i did some _more_ layout changes, i decided
to move the USB hub IC right next to the EOMA68 connector, in order to
reduce the possibility of impedance mismatch problems (making the USB
tracks leading to the USB hub incredibly short).  that meant moving
the microsd card, that meant moving the power connector and
lengthening the board on the right-hand siiide... maan this 3D stuff
is tough! :)

oh, if anyone is interested, the pyopenscad source code for both the
tablet and the laptop are available here:
http://hands.com/~lkcl/eoma/kde_tablet/3dcase/ under the GPLv3
software license.

l.