Weekly News for 20th September

Welcome to the third edition of #gta02-core-news, for September 20th 2009.

Progress

Some good news from USP, Brasil!. Read below for more details. Besides that project is evolving slowly. I hope we can start the layout soon.

Finances again

Werner has posted a lenghty message about the state of project finances, where he states "I'd estimate the total budget of the project that will still need covering, with pooled and individual costs at something like EUR 15'000-25'000", not counting other costs like usage of openmoko infrastructure and the components we'll be "offered".

News from Brasil - USP

Some great news for us all. Werner went to Brasil this week, to USP (University of São Paulo) and was happy to tell us that Prof. Marcelo Knoerich Zuffo of the University of Sao Paulo (USP) has offered gta02-core the use of his SMT facility. As if this wasn't generous enough, all he asks for in return are a few of our prototypes for his team to play with.. There was much rejoice, because this opens way for quicker and cheaper production of the first prototypes. He also took a pic of the SMT facility. Many many thanks to Prof. Marcelo Zuffo, and to Jon "maddog" Hall for his help (although he declines all and any responsability for it :P). There was some discussion on the same thread about PCB manufacturers, their capabilities and cost. We have quite a lot to choose from, you can read all the gory details on the mailing list archives.

Quotes of the week

It did not take a lot of convincing.
Jon "maddog" Hall

IIRC, we still have a hole where the connector for the external GPS antenna used to be.
Rask Ingemann Lambertsen

Heh, the things we do to make it into Alvaro's quotes of the week ;-)
Werner Almesberger

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

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

Goals and Objective

Hello all,

Although I am not a blogger, I think we need alternative ways to let community know what we are doing at #gta02-core project. So I decided to start this blog and hope it will help community to get in touch with latest news from our project.

For those who do not have a clue about what #gta02-core is about, take a look here

http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Gta02-core

If you still have doubts, please drop me an email and I'll be glad to dissipate those. But there should be enough information there, like mailing list address and archives.

So I'll try to weekly post news about the project here. Very summarized, since I am not someone that speaks or writes too much.

I will try to post here every Friday.

Let the power of Open Design Hardware be with you.

Álvaro