arm-netbook July 2019

arm-netbook@lists.phcomp.co.uk

12 participants
8 discussions

Schematic and PCB layout CAD files
by Arun Isaac 01 Feb '22

01 Feb '22

Hi, Are the schematic and PCB layout CAD files for the EOMA68 computer card and the various housings available for download? I'm wondering if I can fabricate some of the housings on my own using a CNC mill. Hence, my interest in them. Sorry I had to ask. I searched very hard through the crowdsupply page and the rhombus-tech site, but couldn't find them. Thanks, Arun.

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Fixing the fex file once and for all
by David Niklas 22 Jul '19

22 Jul '19

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 Dear luke, Although I can't find the post, I do remember you writing about the fex file and how hard it is to modify it. I've encountered some similar problems when programming and I've always thought of doing things like Donald Ervin Knuth recommended. That would be, I would use literate programming. I've not read the official paper through because I did not know it was available (and I did not buy the book which I did know about). As it is, when I went looking for you for some information on the subject I found more then I had expected for you. A paper: http://www.literateprogramming.com/knuthweb.pdf Website: http://www.literateprogramming.com/ Criticism: http://akkartik.name/post/literate-programming The criticism shows how this method can be taken to an extreme and be a complete waste of everyones time. Hope it helps, David -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iQIzBAEBCAAdFiEEL2N7+xWmVOJDQxWGm3XCrhg2YP8FAl0v5yIACgkQm3XCrhg2 YP8cLBAA6ujfFmCm6sFq73l5WLf3L1GTABduglRrkUj5LwhnyTFhII/fiTy+mNLS d6CkKSuJp3iu/wizYy4Pyb/EIt6n8D4dG6Vq7nGTQWIABS/4KW6n5c2iIFmQajXK /LkRkCdFvMJHF9Ok1XutvCNTFQm5EBh1RdZQ2buERLkOJpjcfGWRo4SztouQzhpW AK0ekRRxqolQOuS1hKeRG+rUb6hnGj+aMQcpYVcMFIKmzNGsOAVsA2Hkxyc5m6ZB Yn1sU7IQ/zia9nirfoeOZWA70/iSpWUn13UeU7m84Mw3NPoJ8utsL5zqJ1PtiITG 8PXOH1FIQZhdqpqvOb+h79KdGs1U4EAHEMIYHoSGXdsK74foyBcN+maKK0E0gMGS Cb5f7RtC2t8tNZ+0pthcwOlOUYqtoiWyIOeWCX1lReknzVcdO4rgOUu45WK2amCC RCb+O5w6Tvptq6RFH0BJypI1SbgVRi5n8S3dKSPlXFfVecsdPU91vUERpqlFpGRH qWFNfNsLH9MgKg3LNceN+Rm2SRqnwKpxQFoFv/eeeBiH6EpOXrJgPKWzsV8CUtBo 8iFqMMvXccNWyHnyXiUB5lT+ysBMV6UdD+7njRLc+aPWG4ngkbqkZ0Wevdh3qC8g QaWpdjMDCfZ8uou+yVk6b1vh92lT/9H0S58QE49JHkok83VpxyU= =9fnZ -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Ubuntu as a moral ideology applied to "Guilds"
by J.L. 17 Jul '19

17 Jul '19

In the vaguest-broadest historical sense, guild means a loose hierarchal collective identifing with one category of labour (the craft), who make potentially predictable aspects of the craft less unpredictable through exposition and memorization. Trust pre-requires any "cathedral" such as a "guild" to not abusively attempt to solipsistically shape reality by shaping the perception of reality, such as by investing in predictions disporportionately with certainty in those predictions merely as an expression of desire for those prediction's to be true. Ubuntu roughly translates to "a state caused by social justice called personhood" represents a practice of protecting the differences of others as well as yourself through intentionally detached means, essentially giving attention to whether others are who they want to be and seeking to keep them who they want to be even while fighting them. At scale, that equates to maximizing agency (or choices on who or what to be agent of). Ubuntu fits in the semantics where I placed the keyword 'abusively' or where one might believe in 'solipsism'. A "cathedral" such as a "guild" indubitably makes bets which shape reality solely by shaping the perception of reality, whether one literally believes in solipsism or figuratively believes people build according to what any "cathedral" facilitates their visualization of. Thus, one might claim ubuntu obligates a "cathedral" such as a "guild" to describe reality in a way maximally motivating to the most extremely detached interests. The following video (licensed creative commons) at one point uses agile as an example, while describing in detail (without explicitly mentioning the word) how give ubuntu to others from the most socially abstract (a leadership) position in the terran civilization (earth): (if the author had heard about ubuntu, they would probably agree with ubuntu) https://invidio.us/watch?v=VaWNQjFtGD0 Note some grammatical nuances: 1 i say socially abstract rather than leadership, to support the notion of invisible unstructured entirely anonymous influence over a "standalone complex"; socially abstract describes the state of mind and epistemological faculties rather than any particular identity, such as how the (what I'd call) 'temporal identity' of 'the laughing man' is controlled by ideas rather than a person. 2 i say terran civilization to include all intelligent or potentially intelligent species on any terra-class planet, rather than any more limited more common category 3 ubuntu traditionally recognizes animal species as having the potential to achieve more ubuntu than humans on occasion, therefore calling the state humanity contradicts the nature of ubuntu in a fundamental way for no relationship has more potential for detachment than beings physically (not merely cognitively) in capable of communicating the same language. The following video attempts to describe ubuntu explicitly. The author very prolifically documents popular ideologies commonly referred to as "philosophy" particularly "greek philosophy", which should give them some accreditation to judge the merits of ubuntu. The author currently lives in west africa, which should accredit their ability to accurately research african philosophy. https://invidio.us/watch?v=E_naFb_kdCQ I would definitely like to get in contact with the author to ask them about licensing all their awesome contributions the internet's commonwealth of information, as creative commons. To any one interested, I still have interest in updating the rhombus-tech wiki including the tables summarizing the scale and freeness of known major open source projects. I still have interest in PocketCHIP's hardware (though the backing company failed/collapsed), though I believe heavily in urbit's OS architecture so I want to focus my effort in studying urbit with the intention to perhaps one day have hardware such as EOMA (novice) or PocketCHIP (hacker) form a bottom-up libre computer boot to an urbit userland with as minimal middleware as possible. I need to learn/develop-in-mind the standards (or, one might say, the most ubuntu way) first, then make progress in that direction. In short, I want as certain about where I want to go as possible, prior to taking steps in any direction. Please don't discount me for my absence : P Side-note: I've joined the U.S. Navy (not a fan of the U.S. military, yet hope to make a difference) -- CC0

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co can see IP without paying through the roof, how nice of ARM.
by David Niklas 17 Jul '19

17 Jul '19

1 0

Fwd: Funding ideas
by Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton 15 Jul '19

15 Jul '19

---------- Forwarded message --------- Date: Sat, Jul 13, 2019 at 4:51 PM Subject: Funding ideas To: Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl(a)lkcl.net> Hey. Sad to say I had little progress on my "Why EOMA for crypto" article/promo campaign but at least I have some ideas to share. 1. Education What is a good susbtance for education? Something open and available. You can't teach and study the making of computers on closed Intel hardware and software. You can use open platforms like OLPC or Minix but most of them have a drawback - they are either purely academic/educational, or unpopular/unsuccessful in the wild. With EOMA and Libre RISC you (as an educational institution) can have both: something that is open down to the bone and can be a great learning substance for studens, _and_ something that is a real commercial product in the wild. The idea is to grow partnerships with schools/unis/academia (and possibly win some grants). For EOMA there are potential strategic benefits - it will be very hard to kill something that generation(s) have studied in schools/unis. If your random geek neighbor can fix or upgrade your device I'd call it a win. 2. OSS funding platforms Recently I ran across some OSS funding movements emerging in the crypto space. One is called Gitcoin. It is a general bounty platform for funding open source. Recently they had quite a lot of overlap with Ethereum https://gitcoin.co/blog/radical-results-gitcoins-25k-match/ Another one is GitHub - they recently integrated a sponsorship system that allows to fund individual developers. Repository admins can now increase visibility of funding options for their open source projects via the FUNDING.yml file, which currently supports GitHub Sponsorship, Patreon, Open Collective, Ko-Fi, Tidelift, Community Bridge, as well as custom URLs. https://help.github.com/en/categories/supporting-the-open-source-community-… https://help.github.com/en/articles/displaying-a-sponsor-button-in-your-rep… I'm sure there are other such platforms. The common thing is they all look how to match donors with workers. 3. Grants from specific crypto treasuries Zcash Foundation grants is just one example. This is obviously not general and is Zcash specific. Since the focus is Zcash, I guess they might need clear understanding what will Zcash gain - in our case this is a non backdoored, fully auditable, cheap device that allows one to run a light crypto wallet and that you can easily carry around. Example funded initiative: https://zengo.com/zcash-foundation-funds-research-project-by-kzen/ The above idea applies to any cryptocommunity that might be interested in cheap and trusted computing device. It also applies to Decred - we now have a platform where anybody can pitch an idea to stakeholders, run a vote and possibly get funded. Like 10 or 20 initiatives have already been funded. They were all specific to Decred, but I hope that the understanding of importance of hardware will grow and stakeholders would approve some joint funding for decent projects like EOMA. 4. Meta: reuse existing research The problem is not new. This guide has collected various approaches and case studies: https://github.com/nayafia/lemonade-stand Feel free to share this to anyone who might advance these ideas.

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OT: Food for thought
by David Niklas 10 Jul '19

10 Jul '19

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256 Dear luke, list, As both luke and I are interested in chip fabrication I'm dropping this email with a link to a story on a SW tool that is designed to help improve designs based on how exactly a foundries process works. Luke, the wording in this article looks very carefully chosen in places. I'm totally in the dark as to why; e.g. "...the platform that analyzes yields enables secure collaboration between the foundry and customer." It's not free software so it might be interesting to try to find something similar offered by the community. Or maybe we'll have to roll our own eventually. https://www.anandtech.com/show/14613/synopsys-to-accelerate-samsungs-7nm-ra… David -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iQIzBAEBCAAdFiEEL2N7+xWmVOJDQxWGm3XCrhg2YP8FAl0fkxQACgkQm3XCrhg2 YP9+tw//QiPvROIL3w1015q4PQY/P5yuWW0udlHNG6gO2PZH5uG5mUwaAyOuf3tC zX1MMK+dLdYfsXDDh7su8XLNObuEZC7GCeTq+16qwUdPwbtgy2m4LxbInPOvOE5Q FWnpaluD0RFgBtUDnFEhQcewTsI4xNgbj669NRikrEYysUxxSsIOcRShbFgWIXgi D4swIshef1Nh7Bc0Rl8FAgY0sWGxHSuTPiaFVce/DFSWIJ/b82PCVyJPWNvAjai+ VjX6IwKTADHaeNQzYAL84kuYXUg4cs3xTJ4kLbLfpgBKHrx+EgJcIPcinyc4+d9b 2nd6yvN/+0QQW+OSv1a3Fc+nvZXKAOvBW3VVIsfD50qFE2Lc7OZG5GbUSe2u/wvy +USS5dgzmZkQTGn66Plq51Hwsle2462hH1GIliyR3okZ+G+FWGAlRU4EHZy1GUVN jJgNojjbBX0nEJUzJS66rPQL/WLIlOdzhS4GvGrr4DA6wLm7ZRFbDBEFcFcbHKVw uPaC6HPeXDxFX82HbwrwbOOoVEwCQHUUbQloRC1N8rcDZqeZUfFnfXnazsFhb8gs 10p62JzcEFezCprMfpJj8d3ZsCF9Hezx59BOfExP0ddw8iJJlz1wbkY7vhOjnyb+ xaIDjrA9EE7dmlZ7IpeKoEHoX2K2WOnF3CEJHJVyuy4X0BMiMao= =bCLy -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Fwd: [eoma68 update] report back from factory on HDMI
by Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton 04 Jul '19

04 Jul '19

---------- Forwarded message --------- From: Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl(a)lkcl.net> Date: Wed, Jul 3, 2019 at 8:16 AM Subject: [eoma68 update] report back from factory on HDMI Mike's staff began the PCB assembly of the run of 100, and had to stop at 36. 20 were ok: 16 of them, the HDMI connector refused to fit. The reason: the CNC machining on the edge of the PCB has not been done accurately enough: it's simply too ragged. The staff did some experimentation, cleaning up some of the edges in the cut-out with an xacto-knife: this did the trick, even though it is shaving something like 0.01mm off the ragged edge of the PCB. The left and right edges do not matter too much, however where the HDMI connector comes in close, it definitely does. Mike is going to talk to the PCB factory to see if there is anything that they can do in future, however with 1,000 PCBs already manufactured, the safest thing to do is probably to *hand-trim* that PCB edge, removing the burrs, on all 1,000 PCBs. Again, to reiterate, because I am still seeing evidence of "complaints" out there, from people who believe this should be easy: these are absolutely ridiculously tiny components and tolerances, and the budget on which it's being done is equally as frugal. 0.05mm on the edge of a PCB. 0.2 mm wide pins, with 0.2mm clearance between them. A "normal" Single-Board Computer product from any other well-funded Corporation would use large (Type A) HDMI, top-mounted, with plenty of tolerances and no need for the PCB edge to be accurately milled. Again, to reiterate: we do not know what will need to be solved next. Therefore, a production date simply cannot be provided, and that really is the end of the matter. Or, the answer is: the production date is "the production time plus the unknown time to solve unknown and unknowable future issues". Mike is sending me the 20 "good" PCBs so that I can test them here, to see if they are okay. The staff will continue with the rest by shaving the burrs on the PCB on every single one of the remaining 80 with an xacto-knife, before putting them through the production line. It is looking like I will need to do the testing of all 100 of this preliminary production run, here, at my home, in Taiwan.

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india shakti core to be available as a SBC
by Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton 03 Jul '19

03 Jul '19

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/19/07/03/016227/indias-first-cpus-are-r… this is amazing, i'm so delighted for them.

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arm-netbook July 2019