http://wiki.vero-apparatus.com/
leant of it via #neo900 on freenode thanks to edwin.
great - they might be interested to start with the laptop casework i designed, instead of trying to retro-fit something.
On Wed, Aug 12, 2015 at 10:35 PM, Alexander Stephen Thomas Ross maillist_arm-netbook@aross.me wrote:
http://wiki.vero-apparatus.com/
leant of it via #neo900 on freenode thanks to edwin.
arm-netbook mailing list arm-netbook@lists.phcomp.co.uk http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/arm-netbook Send large attachments to arm-netbook@files.phcomp.co.uk
+++ Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton [2015-08-12 22:44 +0100]:
great - they might be interested to start with the laptop casework i designed, instead of trying to retro-fit something.
I sit in an office with people working on this. The plan was to retrofit, precisely to avoid the hassle for doing the mech-eng work, which we all know is hard. And we all like our lenovo boxes.
I did show someone your case, but quite a lot of people have been stockpiling x220 cases for a while now, so this probably won't change for the 1st iteration.
We are actually stalled on availability of the AMD part so nothing much has moved for 6 months. We may have to move to another part.
There should be a 64-bit arm laptop prototype at debconf, which will also be interesting. No-idea if that will actualy see the light of day, or when...
Wookey
On Thu, Aug 13, 2015 at 11:57 AM, Wookey wookey@wookware.org wrote:
+++ Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton [2015-08-12 22:44 +0100]:
great - they might be interested to start with the laptop casework i designed, instead of trying to retro-fit something.
I sit in an office with people working on this. The plan was to retrofit, precisely to avoid the hassle for doing the mech-eng work, which we all know is hard.
yes - 6 months and counting... but i've done that 6 months already (for a client that wants to sell libre laptops)
And we all like our lenovo boxes.
... i know - they really are good. back in 2009 i considered doing a drop-in board into some suitable legacy casework. i was still seriously considering it by about 2011... and the more i learned, the more i realised it was a bad idea to use pre-existing casework.
... but, y'know... if you haven't had the experience, it sounds like a really good idea, and y'know, maybe the team you're working with will pull it off.
the rest of the answers, below, i've written on the assumption that the team you're working with would be interested to have a glimpse of some of the kinds of questions and issues that they will need to consider, if the project is to be a success.
I did show someone your case, but quite a lot of people have been stockpiling x220 cases for a while now, so this probably won't change for the 1st iteration.
well, do invite them to consider what happens if the project becomes popular, and there are not 100 people but 500 or even 2000 people who want arm64 laptops, especially over the next 3-5 years.
also, invite the team to consider if they could source say qty 50 x220 cases in a couple of months, in order to fulfil an order by thinkpenguin, gluglug or one of the other libre-hardware suppliers.
also, wookey, do invite them to consider learning from the mistake that i made, which was to have the casework [of the tablet] designed *BEFORE* doing the component selection and PCB design [i did tell the person we paid $10k to do both at the same time, but he didn't listen].
also, here's some immediate questions to consider:
(1) can you get hold of enough LCDs? (2) are they still in stock? (3) are they affordable? (4) if not, can you find a replacement that fits *exactly* in the available space, including routing the cables correctly? (5) can you get hold of enough keyboards? (6) can you get hold of enough mouse trackpads? (7) can you get hold of the batteries? (8) have you reverse-engineered the battery connections? (9) have you checked to see if there's some DRM or communications hardware in the battery which, if you don't monitor properly, would prevent it from charging, operating, or would even cause it to blow up if you got it wrong? (10) have you checked that the battery charging IC compatible with that *very specific* battery is still available? (11) if the battery's not available, have you considered that you would need to reverse-engineer the battery casework to create a replacement?
that's just what i can think of off the top of my head. the number of questions that you have to be absolutely, absolutely positive of the answers, is just... it's overwhelming.
one mistake [one component that's absolutely critical and you absolutely absolutely have to have it because otherwise it won't fit in the pre-selected case] and everything you've done up until that point will have been completely wasted.
so it costs.... upwards of $4k to $10k (depending on how you go about it) to get a PCB made that fits *exactly* in the (pre-selected) casework....
.... and you made one mistake, have to abandon the pre-selected case, and all that money spent on PCB design is gone. wasted. you have to start again, with a totally new design that fits precisely and exactly into the next casework selected, and you have to check that aaaalll the components of the newly-selected casework also fit, and are available, and are affordable.
and that takes months - literally. all that checking.
...and by that time, the SoC - the core of the project - goes end-of-life because it's not popular enough.
so you get 1/2 way through the *second* $4k to $10k spend on PCB design and prototyping... and you have to abandon the 2nd board, select a new SoC and start entirely again.
We are actually stalled on availability of the AMD part so nothing much has moved for 6 months. We may have to move to another part.
yep... welcome to the insanity of AMD. i got absolutely no response - whatsoever - out of them, either.
repeat that for N manufacturers, fast-forward 5 years, and you begin to understand why i've been making available commonly-available (usually china-sourced) SoCs.
basically i've picked SoCs where the manufacturers either already provide the full source code, full datasheet, as well as either a full Reference Design or at the absolute very least the RAM-to-SoC connections already done.
doing DDR2/3/4 layout is an amazingly specialist task: if you're planning to support SO-DIMMs the job *may* be slightly easier.
but please, if you don't get a response from an SoC manufacturer, move on. and if it's not hugely popular already, move on. chances are that if they're silent, they either consider you to be a waste of time (too small), or they have had so little interest in the SoC that they're embarrassed to admit it was marketed in the first place, and have, incredibly, already written off the $40m investment to get to the point of having working silicon.
now, if you were going to order a million of them, they'd be knocking on your door! but... 100? they won't even give you the time of day - not even if you have contacts at ARM and are a team of prominent Debian Developers.
apologies if you've considered all these things already, and have answers. apologies also if there's so much that it seems overwhelming... but this is what you've chosen to take on, so you do really really need to be considering all of these things, and much much more besides.
There should be a 64-bit arm laptop prototype at debconf, which will also be interesting. No-idea if that will actualy see the light of day, or when...
there's another project... openlunchbox or something... they've set a very high barrier to entry.
l.
On Thu, Aug 13, 2015 at 12:56 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton lkcl@lkcl.net wrote:
(11) if the battery's not available, have you considered that you would need to reverse-engineer the battery casework to create a replacement?
i just thought of another one that's really quite important:
(12) the connectors are very specific heights and very specific dimensions. USB connectors - especially laptop ones - are incredibly varied. can you get *EXACTLY* the right connectors (all of them) that will fit in *EXACTLY* the right places?
USB ports, VGA port, HDMI port (if there is one), headphone socket....
all of these you have to source *exactly* the right part... and i can tell you right now that even a patient and experienced china sourcing agent - given that these parts are simply not properly listed on any web site (it's all word-of-mouth) - is going to need paying, for the quantities involved.
if you cannot find even just one of the connectors, you will need to consider cutting holes in the casework. or re-using an existing hole which was not intended for the purpose, and creating a filler-backplate.
... so can you see, wookie, why it sounds really attractive, initially, to only make a small run of custom PCBs to retro-fit an existing case, but when you get down to the details, the risk of failure to complete just keeps going up and up.
if you were doing just the one, as a "hack" a la "labour of love", i'd say "yeah go for it". it wouldn't matter if the connectors were sticking out wrong (or at all), or were resin-glued into place... but 100 or more?
l.
On Thursday 13. August 2015 12.57.27 Wookey wrote:
+++ Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton [2015-08-12 22:44 +0100]:
great - they might be interested to start with the laptop casework i designed, instead of trying to retro-fit something.
I sit in an office with people working on this. The plan was to retrofit, precisely to avoid the hassle for doing the mech-eng work, which we all know is hard. And we all like our lenovo boxes.
As long as they don't have that stupid touchpad with the buttons underneath it. ;-)
I did show someone your case, but quite a lot of people have been stockpiling x220 cases for a while now, so this probably won't change for the 1st iteration.
It's like they're doing the NeoX220 project. :-) (If you don't get the reference, the Neo900 project re-uses the cases from N900 smartphones, effectively giving the N900 an upgrade.)
We are actually stalled on availability of the AMD part so nothing much has moved for 6 months. We may have to move to another part.
What is the situation with AMD and the Opteron-A stuff, anyway? It sounded like a promising product with the other 64-bit (or server) ARM products vanishing from the market. Is it another case of AMD not delivering?
There should be a 64-bit arm laptop prototype at debconf, which will also be interesting. No-idea if that will actualy see the light of day, or when...
Is there any reason why they didn't choose to go with EOMA-68 or a related modular hardware concept? Also, was the focus on ARM because that's the area of most expertise amongst those involved? Sorry if you end up having to ask those other people our questions!
Paul
On Thu, Aug 13, 2015 at 1:18 PM, Paul Boddie paul@boddie.org.uk wrote:
Is there any reason why they didn't choose to go with EOMA-68 or a related modular hardware concept?
openlunchbox are planning a modular design, for example.
remember though paul that i've been thinking about what's realistic and achievable (entirely from scratch) for a significantly long time. with a $250k budget you could do absolutely anything you wanted - bring that down to $25k and the options become very very different.
but if they've budgeted around $40k - and if there's enough people in the team with enough of a reputation they may have enough income and/or clout to consider doing that - then the compromises and limits (such as a 5W absolute max power budget, no fans, single-cell batteries for dramatic circuit simplification) that i've learned in order to achieve the goal... many of those compromises do not need to be made.
the thing is, paul, that people only see the low power and the "low" spec of EOMA68 and go "wtf??? that's pathetic! i'm not going to use *that* in my project exclamation-mark, exclamation-mark"...
... they don't realise *why* it was picked... so they set a much, much higher entry level...
Also, was the focus on ARM because that's the area of most expertise amongst those involved? Sorry if you end up having to ask those other people our questions!
looking at the vera wiki they want PCIe, SATA and more besides, perhaps even external (PCIe) for an external 3D GPU (MXM or some-such). basically that's 30 watt and above territory (and another 30 watts for the external 3D GPU).
which is an enormous amount of power (and heat). by contrast, the libre 15.6in laptop is 15W absolute max [5W absolute max for the CPU Card but 3.5W nominal; 3.5 for the LCD... i may have to remove one of the 3 USB2 ports to keep within budget...]
by the time you've accounted for the LCD (appx 10 watts), server-class SoC (appx 10 watts), SATA hard drive (appx 5 watts) and some USB ports (5 watts for 2 USB2s, but 10 watts and above for 2 or more USB3s).
in these designs you need to take into account the *max* rated (peak) power, not the "average" or "scenario design power". surge current on LCDs is often 3x its running current. peak power on these 64-bit ARM processors is... well, the start-up current for the iMX6 was something like 4 amps... you need to assume that the USB ports are all going to be drained at absolute max power...
and that means 3-4 cell batteries (take a look at the novena battery charger circuit - it has cell monitoring - BMS support), you need to consider thermal management, you need fans, heatsinks, 2oz copper tracks to handle a 4 to 5A current [meaning: expensive PCBs]...
in other words i stayed completely away from all of that, for very good reasons, so that what i am doing stands a realistic chance of success.
for the 15.6in libre laptop, literally the only battery charger IC i could find that was single-cell that could handle 4A charging, and provide a 3A 5V supply, and could do USB-OTG charging and power supply, was the Linear LTC4155.
the LTC4155 is an awesome bit of kit, it does the job of about 50 other discrete components which would cost a heck of a lot more, and i hope to god it doesn't go end-of-life because if it does i'm buggered :)
i looked up a review of the speed of the latest class 10 micro-sd cards:
http://highonandroid.com/android-accessories/fastest-micro-sd-card-shootout-...
some of these are 128gbyte micro-sd cards. random and arbitrary as it is, some of these micro-sd cards are doing 85 megabytes per second read speed, and 54mbytes/sec write speed.
not even intel's 120gbyte "enterprise" SATA SSD from a couple of years ago could match that kind of read or write speed.
on slashdot we've already seen announcements - just last week - that NAND is already being retired, and that the top solid-state companies will be doing enormous SD cards using the new 3D flash storage (istrc one was planning a 512gbyte card).
so i really, really question the strict need for SATA ports, these days. in the embedded world, eMMC is really taking off. even the lowly $2 QFP IC3128 has support for eMMC.
l.
On Wednesday 12. August 2015 23.35.02 Alexander Stephen Thomas Ross wrote:
http://wiki.vero-apparatus.com/
leant of it via #neo900 on freenode thanks to edwin.
Interesting! Some familiar Debian names feature on the wiki, and they seem to want to go with the AMD 64-bit ARM offerings, which is a bit brave.
Paul
the allwinner one is $5 - however it's something like 10 watts (!)
On Wed, Aug 12, 2015 at 11:00 PM, Paul Boddie paul@boddie.org.uk wrote:
On Wednesday 12. August 2015 23.35.02 Alexander Stephen Thomas Ross wrote:
http://wiki.vero-apparatus.com/
leant of it via #neo900 on freenode thanks to edwin.
Interesting! Some familiar Debian names feature on the wiki, and they seem to want to go with the AMD 64-bit ARM offerings, which is a bit brave.
Paul
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