On Wed, Feb 3, 2016 at 10:52 PM, Wookey wookey@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.