it's a little early but i wanted to get a poll out of people who might be interested to buy the PCBs (and other parts) as a kit, for both the libre laptop PCBs and the microdesktop units.
when i say "early" i mean "there's pretty much no software" - i have preliminary working firmware that i'm using to confirm that various hardware functions work (keyboard, touchscreen, battery monitoring), however as for actual "useable drivers", those do not exist and will need to be written.
this is therefore a solicitation for assistance in writing the drivers as much as it is an offer for people to be involved and have extremely-early hardware. the casework for the laptop is available as GPL pyopenscad files: i could potentially print some up for people but would prefer it if you used an online 3d printing service or local hackerspace.
the micro-desktop, in direct contrast to the laptop, requires absolutely no drivers whatsoever and works straight away.
estimated low-volume (5-10) pricing is going to be somewhere around:
* eoma68-jz4775 CPU Card: $300 (cost of 5 PCBs is $1500) * eoma68-a20 CPU Card: same. * laptop main PCB1: $150 * laptop E/C PCB2: $120 * laptop PMIC PCB3: $120 * microdesktop PCB: $150 * laptop battery: $12 * 15.6in LCD: $50 (obtainable on ebay) * Chicony Keyboard: $20 (again, obtainable on ebay) * USB-UART: $5 (obtainable on ebay or adafruit or digikey or anywhere)
there are various other sundries that are needed - cables, connectors etc. i can put together kits for people.
if we can get as high as 25 units on particular boards, that pricing is likely to drop by something like 25%, at least.
if anyone is considering this, please *do* consider prioritising getting the micro-desktop as well, i find it is very useful to have a working setup with the micro-desktop, separate from the laptop PCB, in a totally separate area of my desk.
please also bear in mind, i am going through to a 2nd revision of all of the above PCBs, so we will be looking at about 2 months before these boards can go to a (larger) run - i wanted to give people an opportunity to say if they'd like to be involved.
l.
On Wednesday 16. December 2015 14.00.49 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
it's a little early but i wanted to get a poll out of people who might be interested to buy the PCBs (and other parts) as a kit, for both the libre laptop PCBs and the microdesktop units.
I'm definitely interested in the eoma68-jz4775 card and microdesktop board. The laptop is interesting in its own right, but I don't personally have much of an interest in using laptops these days, so I probably wouldn't want to pursue that part of this straight away.
[...]
if anyone is considering this, please *do* consider prioritising getting the micro-desktop as well, i find it is very useful to have a working setup with the micro-desktop, separate from the laptop PCB, in a totally separate area of my desk.
please also bear in mind, i am going through to a 2nd revision of all of the above PCBs, so we will be looking at about 2 months before these boards can go to a (larger) run - i wanted to give people an opportunity to say if they'd like to be involved.
It would be nice to get involved, certainly.
Paul
On Wed, Dec 16, 2015 at 1:19 PM, Paul Boddie paul@boddie.org.uk wrote:
On Wednesday 16. December 2015 14.00.49 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
it's a little early but i wanted to get a poll out of people who might be interested to buy the PCBs (and other parts) as a kit, for both the libre laptop PCBs and the microdesktop units.
I'm definitely interested in the eoma68-jz4775 card and microdesktop board.
great.
It would be nice to get involved, certainly.
great. so, i'll put you down for the jz4775 and udesktop.
would you (or anyone else) possibly be interested in helping with the firmware on the STM32F072? it's basically porting things like the linux i2c touchscreen driver (which is in c) to the stm32f072 with libopencm3 (which is also in c). i've done the hx8357d SPI driver already - got the initialisation and screen-writing done. the main thing is making it all "hang together" - interleaving USB CDCADM with USB HID for mouse *and* keyboard - three separate USB endpoints - and creating some power-management routines, status of which can be monitored over the CDCACM serial interface. and writing an appropriate linux kernel driver to work with that.
l.
On Wednesday 16. December 2015 16.09.21 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
great. so, i'll put you down for the jz4775 and udesktop.
Yes, please do!
would you (or anyone else) possibly be interested in helping with the firmware on the STM32F072? it's basically porting things like the linux i2c touchscreen driver (which is in c) to the stm32f072 with libopencm3 (which is also in c). i've done the hx8357d SPI driver already - got the initialisation and screen-writing done. the main thing is making it all "hang together" - interleaving USB CDCADM with USB HID for mouse *and* keyboard - three separate USB endpoints - and creating some power-management routines, status of which can be monitored over the CDCACM serial interface. and writing an appropriate linux kernel driver to work with that.
I don't have that much Linux driver-writing experience, although I've peered into the murky depths of various drivers, including USB-related ones, which was horrible. Still, if you can't find anyone with the expertise who can do this kind of thing in an afternoon, I might be of some assistance. I have looked at USB controllers before now, so it's not completely alien technology to me.
Paul
On Wed, Dec 16, 2015 at 3:18 PM, Paul Boddie paul@boddie.org.uk wrote:
On Wednesday 16. December 2015 16.09.21 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
great. so, i'll put you down for the jz4775 and udesktop.
Yes, please do!
alright, awesome. i've got 5 very-very-first jz4775 cpu cards in assembly at the moment (delayed by the xmas rush),
I don't have that much Linux driver-writing experience, although I've peered into the murky depths of various drivers, including USB-related ones, which was horrible.
haha
Still, if you can't find anyone with the expertise who can do this kind of thing in an afternoon, I might be of some assistance. I have looked at USB controllers before now, so it's not completely alien technology to me.
microcontrollers are actually a very small amount of memory, so if you are writing lots of code, you're doing something badly, badly wrong. it is however a bit of a mind-bender: everything has to be state-driven. it's single-process (no threads, no state-swapping), interrupts and DMA. so everything is done as a huuuuge state-machine... or on polling with sleep loops.
l.
On Wednesday 16. December 2015 16.28.09 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
microcontrollers are actually a very small amount of memory, so if you are writing lots of code, you're doing something badly, badly wrong. it is however a bit of a mind-bender: everything has to be state-driven. it's single-process (no threads, no state-swapping), interrupts and DMA. so everything is done as a huuuuge state-machine... or on polling with sleep loops.
Well, the microcontroller stuff I have a bit more experience with, having messed around with a USB controller (MAX3421E) with the Arduino, but then using the NanoNote to do the same thing because it was easier and I was being lazy. ;-) But in other words, not Linux driver stuff.
Paul
On Wed, Dec 16, 2015 at 3:56 PM, Paul Boddie paul@boddie.org.uk wrote:
On Wednesday 16. December 2015 16.28.09 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
microcontrollers are actually a very small amount of memory, so if you are writing lots of code, you're doing something badly, badly wrong. it is however a bit of a mind-bender: everything has to be state-driven. it's single-process (no threads, no state-swapping), interrupts and DMA. so everything is done as a huuuuge state-machine... or on polling with sleep loops.
Well, the microcontroller stuff I have a bit more experience with, having messed around with a USB controller (MAX3421E) with the Arduino,
oh great - yeah the STM32F072 is like a grown-up version of the arduino. none of this bullshit installing 160mb of java runtime, a toy-for-an-IDE that does nothing more than wrap sdcc and avr-utils even to the point of modifying simple Makefiles for you. i bought an OSMC back in 2001, it had the same PICs as the arduino, and *nobody* arsed about with 250mb of crap to wrap 5mb worth of libraries and command-line compiler tools!
rant over.... :)
yeah using libopencm3, it's just Makefiles and gcc arm cross-compilers with no stdlib [gcc-arm-none]. the community surrounding libopencm3 is quite large, so there are actually plenty of examples out there as well as people who can help.
l.
Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net writes:
On Wed, Dec 16, 2015 at 3:56 PM, Paul Boddie paul@boddie.org.uk wrote:
On Wednesday 16. December 2015 16.28.09 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
microcontrollers are actually a very small amount of memory, so if you are writing lots of code, you're doing something badly, badly wrong. it is however a bit of a mind-bender: everything has to be state-driven. it's single-process (no threads, no state-swapping), interrupts and DMA. so everything is done as a huuuuge state-machine... or on polling with sleep loops.
Well, the microcontroller stuff I have a bit more experience with, having messed around with a USB controller (MAX3421E) with the Arduino,
oh great - yeah the STM32F072 is like a grown-up version of the arduino. none of this bullshit installing 160mb of java runtime, a toy-for-an-IDE that does nothing more than wrap sdcc and avr-utils even to the point of modifying simple Makefiles for you. i bought an OSMC back in 2001, it had the same PICs as the arduino, and *nobody* arsed about with 250mb of crap to wrap 5mb worth of libraries and command-line compiler tools!
rant over.... :)
Pretty much exactly why I helped make sure that the java stuff is optional on Debian -- see the 'arduino-core' and 'arduino-mk' packages:
https://packages.debian.org/jessie/arduino-mk
Cheers, Phil.
On Wed, Dec 16, 2015 at 6:02 PM, Philip Hands phil@hands.com wrote:
Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net writes:
oh great - yeah the STM32F072 is like a grown-up version of the arduino. none of this bullshit installing 160mb of java runtime, a toy-for-an-IDE that does nothing more than wrap sdcc and avr-utils even to the point of modifying simple Makefiles for you. i bought an OSMC back in 2001, it had the same PICs as the arduino, and *nobody* arsed about with 250mb of crap to wrap 5mb worth of libraries and command-line compiler tools!
rant over.... :)
Pretty much exactly why I helped make sure that the java stuff is optional on Debian -- see the 'arduino-core' and 'arduino-mk' packages:
ah! yes, i remember you mentioning that to me a couple years back, i vaguely remembered, but now you mention it i had installed....
$ dpkg -l | grep arduino ii arduino-core 2:1.0.5+dfsg2-4 ii arduino-mk 1.3.4-1
... those exact same packages, to do the SPI-testing with an adafruit hx8357d LCD and an arduino uno, a few weeks back. yaay, so the maintainers listened to your advice, split out the core stuff? which is absolutely awesome.
so, thank you phil :)
btw just for the record (for anyone else reading this in the archives, later), these are the other packages i have installed, to program arduinos *without* the crap 200mb of java-based runtime and IDE:
ii avr-libc 1:1.8.0+Atmel3.4.4-1 ii avrdude 6.1-2 ii binutils-avr 2.24+Atmel3.4.4-1 ii gcc-avr 1:4.8.1+Atmel3.4.4-2
this is enough to be able to simply grab Makefiles online (there's lots of examples out there, usually you can search "debian arduino uno makefile" [1]) and e.g. entire adafruit libraries and example programs and get them up-and-running very very quickly and just type "make" and then "make upload".
l.
[1] http://www.itopen.it/arduino-1-0-development-with-a-makefile/ - if following those instructions replace the first "apt-get install arduino" with phil's recommended packages "apt-get install arduino-core arduino-mk".
Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net writes:
On Wed, Dec 16, 2015 at 6:02 PM, Philip Hands phil@hands.com wrote:
Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net writes:
oh great - yeah the STM32F072 is like a grown-up version of the arduino. none of this bullshit installing 160mb of java runtime, a toy-for-an-IDE that does nothing more than wrap sdcc and avr-utils even to the point of modifying simple Makefiles for you. i bought an OSMC back in 2001, it had the same PICs as the arduino, and *nobody* arsed about with 250mb of crap to wrap 5mb worth of libraries and command-line compiler tools!
rant over.... :)
Pretty much exactly why I helped make sure that the java stuff is optional on Debian -- see the 'arduino-core' and 'arduino-mk' packages:
ah! yes, i remember you mentioning that to me a couple years back, i vaguely remembered, but now you mention it i had installed....
$ dpkg -l | grep arduino ii arduino-core 2:1.0.5+dfsg2-4 ii arduino-mk 1.3.4-1
... those exact same packages, to do the SPI-testing with an adafruit hx8357d LCD and an arduino uno, a few weeks back. yaay, so the maintainers listened to your advice, split out the core stuff?
Not advice -- turning up cold and giving people advice often goes quite badly (as I think you may have demonstrated once or thrice ;-) )
I built the arduino-core package (including the makefile), and getting the author of the best of the several makefile forks to accept some nice patches from other forks of it, so that there's now one obvious upstream makefile to use, while also working out with Scott (who had already done the full 'arduino' package) that we could eliminate the duplication and have the main package depend on mine, and build it all out of the same source. He seems to have since split out the Makefile into the -mk package.
btw just for the record (for anyone else reading this in the archives, later), these are the other packages i have installed, to program arduinos *without* the crap 200mb of java-based runtime and IDE:
ii avr-libc 1:1.8.0+Atmel3.4.4-1 ii avrdude 6.1-2 ii binutils-avr 2.24+Atmel3.4.4-1 ii gcc-avr 1:4.8.1+Atmel3.4.4-2
this is enough to be able to simply grab Makefiles online (there's lots of examples out there, usually you can search "debian arduino uno makefile" [1]) and e.g. entire adafruit libraries and example programs and get them up-and-running very very quickly and just type "make" and then "make upload".
l.
[1] http://www.itopen.it/arduino-1-0-development-with-a-makefile/ - if following those instructions replace the first "apt-get install arduino" with phil's recommended packages "apt-get install arduino-core arduino-mk".
You only need:
apt-get install arduino-mk
since that depends on arduino-core, which depends on all the other bits.
Cheers, Phil.
arm-netbook@lists.phcomp.co.uk
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Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton -
Paul Boddie -
Philip Hands