On Wed, 2013-11-13 at 19:38 -0600, Christopher Thomas wrote:
we had tremendous problems with thermal dissipation
In the past I have made PIC product with half a dozen switch mode power supplies, charger and fast charger all rolled into one device that needs so many different power supplies for different functions.
The one PIC chip was operating all the power supplies through software rather than hardware.
PIC and ARM Cortex chips are fast enough these days to to generate the signals on the fly in software so that it is possible to get 1.2V, 1.25V, 1.8V, 3.3V, 5V, trickle charger and fast charger functions all into one chip with an optically isolated RS232 or an I2C comms link and built in EEPROM to control internal functions. It should universally wipe out the numerous power solutions that EEs are doing up for their boards and replace it with just the one that is GPL'd, cheap and free to use, and supported by a Linux driver.
May be wrong mailing list to talk up such things, or may be a new mailing list needed to talk up all the infrastructure projects that go into making EOMAs, Cubies, Olixinos, netbooks, IoT devices because these are infrastructure projects with common benefit. The infrastructure projects are fully GPL'd and generate a lot of hard to keep up noise (EE noise and embedded software coding noise) whilst being sorted out.