[Arm-netbook] fosdem2016

Wed Feb 3 23:47:20 GMT 2016

On Wed, Feb 3, 2016 at 10:52 PM, Wookey <wookey at wookware.org> wrote:
> +++ Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton [2016-02-03 19:02 +0000]:
>> > I had a quick look but failed to find details of the screen, keyboard,
>> > boards and 3D parts online, other than scattered through many mailing
>> > list-messages. Never mind info like the above. Is there a page that
>> > actually has the info someone keen would need to get started?
>>
>>  eek - sorry :)  i usually maintain a page that has them but haven't
>> put it together yet - give me a mo and it'll be at
>> http://rhombus-tech.net/community_ideas/laptop_15in/
>
> OK, cheers. So battery and touchpad not available in ones and keyboard
> suppiers are idiots. So some associated faff there :-)

 yyeahh... there's a whole stack of that

>>  the boards i want to do another run in the next few weeks, wookey, so
>> if you'd like to buy some you'd be most welcome.  i don't want to get
>> too many done in case they need modifications.  they're only
>> single-sided 2-layer 1.5mm thick so are "bog standard" i.e. dirt
>> cheap.  i think this time i'll get them made up rather than do the
>> component assembly myself.
>
> I am interested, but I was a little put off by the prices you listed
> last time at $120-150 per board and 3 boards.

 a qty 5 figure is $1700 for the CPU Cards (including components and
assembly).  a qty 5 figure for these 2-layer single-sided PCBs is
going to be waaay less than that.  i'd put a guess of around $60 for
PCB1, $50 for PCB2 and $50 for PCB3.  massive difference - just
because of using simple 2-layer and 1.5mm.

 the $120-150 was because i was using eurocircuits.  i think it was
around that much for PCB1 (qty 2).  i'll get everything done in china
this time.

> I don't call that 'dirt
> cheap'. That's $430 + screen+keyboard+panel+printing, which is a
> little more than I want to pay for just 'mucking about'.

 i added up a rough MOQ 200-1k figure today and it came out to a BOM
of around $190, excluding assembly costs.  which honestly isn't that
big a difference from the qty5 figure.

> I could
> afford it but a) I'm tight and b) I don't like buying electronics
> unless I'm fairly sure I'm going to get decent use out of it (all that
> eco-thinking).

 good for you!  so the question becomes: is it worthwhile for you to
spend the time as an early adopter, to help "prove the concept" - i'm
pretty sure it'd be possible to find a home for the end result (i have
to give one to dr stallman for example).

> And ultimately a 2G RAM laptop is 'toy' these days,
> because 'browsers'.

 *sigh* tell me about it...  bear in mind this is only a 1366x768 LCD.

> So I was waiting to see if the upgradability
> aspect looked likely to actually solve this issue, and I have a pile
> of other half-started projects so don't _actually_ need any more :-)
>
 haha

> So, er. 'maybe' :-) How much and when?

 let me work it out more accurately, likely timeframe 2-3 months.  i'd
like it to be before 2 months as i'm leaving den haag end of march.

>>  so if someone can confirm whether this is true or not, i'll
>> re-prioritise the allwinner A64 board back to the top of the TODO
>> list.
>
> Karsten Merker explained this at some length after my talk (he has a
> pine). Allwinner's first-stage (non free, probbaly not even
> redistributable) bootloader initialises the RAM, but we have no docs
> to do it in uboot/uefi. Someone cut out the blob and linked it in
> which works, but that's not redistributable either. So yes RAM init is
> a roadblock until we can get someone at AW to tell us how to do it, or
> it's otherwise revenged.

 you've seen the lichee A64 source code from the a64 sdk, right?
links and mirrors were discussed here about 2 months ago, but i'm
seeing full source including "init_DRAM" which all looks fine... i
mean they forgot (again) to put a GPL header on the file (mctl_hal.c)
but other than that it looks fine... let me just upload the u-boot
source that i have here to hands.com... here y'go:

http://hands.com/~lkcl/u-boot-2014.07.tgz

can you put me in touch with karsten?

> I was going to try and lean on them from the Linaro end (Connect in
> March) and see if we can get any joy, but it may well be difficult.

 well let's see if that source (which includes boot0 full source, it
seems - no .o or .a files) does the trick, first.

l.