Saturday 5 September 2009

Weekly News for 5th September

Welcome to the first edition of #gta02-core-news, for September 5th 2009.

Progress

There has been not much progress this week. Mostly discussion about shielding, debug connector FPC and audio ECN collection. One OT discussion about binary drivers was also very active. And a new schematic - wireless on-board.

Bad news from OpenMoko

Werner brought us some piece of bad news, apparently OpenMoko might not have as many parts in stock as initially thought. We'll have to wait for more information now, but this might put us on a bad position, because some parts are very hard to source.

Shields

Rask has asked a local supplier a quote for custom shields for #gta02-core. I think personally this prices are a bit high, we might have to live with our current shields if possible.

The footprint problems

Werner brought our attention to the fact that several manufacturers have different values for footprint parameters. This will require us to choose some common values ans use them, instead of using some non existent industry standard.

New on-board wlan

Your blogger finished the 1st version of the on-board WLAN module. There's an ECN pending for this module too. Some component names had to be renamed but there will exist a mapping somewhere.

SPI and debug connector

Rask found some inconsistencies in the way we use SPI on the debug connector, which might cause debug connector to interfere with WLAN.

Printed Circuit Board

There has been some discussion on board parameters, like minimum trace widths and vias. Other parameters were also discussed, like surface finishes. We're still trying to find out a good balance between our requirements and total board cost.

Quotes of the week

" At the end, i think we should consider that this will be *only* a prototype and not a usable phone, so we don't need a lot of gimmicks which are not absolutely required. "
Rene Harder

" It really helps then if you don't have to suspect every single solder joint to be a traitor to the cause ;-) "
Werner Almesberger

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for the update. Great to hear that there are activity.

    ReplyDelete