Sunday 13 September 2009

Weekly News for 13th September

Welcome to the second edition of #gta02-core-news, for September 13th 2009.

About this blog

Hasn't been easy to write this on Fridays, so I've decided to do it during the weekend, when I have more spare time. Thanks for your understanding :)

Progress

Again this has been a very quiet week. Only a handfull of emails were exchanged on the mailing list, and those only cover a few aspects of the project. I guess most of us are back to work after the big holydays, meaning less time to work on #gta02-core. I expect more people to join us, now that we are moving torwards completion of the first prototypes.

Finances

There's an ongoing discussion on the mailing list about project finances and prototype cost. Werner did an initial estimation of 500-1000€ perprototype (these are prototypes so there is some amount of uncertainity about whether they will fully work, work to some extent, or just draw some smoke when we first power them on).
Getting some funding to help us making the first prototypes has been also on top of the table, but this is very time consuming and sometimes even disappointing. Nathael brought us attention to the fact some of us cannot really afford that prototype cost, but might be interested in donating some smaller amounts of money to the project, and even build some website to capture external donations. Let's see how this idea evolves on the next weeks.

The new GSM modem

As you know we dropped our old GSM modem (TI Calypso) and replaced it with a Telit one. This week Dave Ball decided to have a first stab at schematics, and raised a lengthy discussion about RF, and power issues (glitches, ON/OFF circuitry). One important aspect of the discussion is removal of external GSM antenna circuit. Addition of some more test points was also discussed, these will surely make all those hardware hackers happier for sure.

Quotes of the week


Ah, what's the trouble ? I'm good at fixing fped ;-)

Werner Almesberger, author of fped

By the responses we've had so far, I'm happy to go with the internal antenna only, which should be simple enough even for me! :-)

Dave Ball

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