(Kinda) Weekly News for April 20th, 2010

Welcome to this edition (sixth) of #gta02-core news, for April 20, 2010.

Why no posts since October 2009?

My fault, I'd should update this more often, but there were actually several reasons. Some changes on my personal daily life, many projects going on, work, few developments on #gta02-core project, all account for the lack of news.
I hope at least the latter will force me to update this blog, but that will depend on a lot of factors.

So, what are the latest developments ?

Well, let's try to summarize. A lot of background work has been done in fped and other not-so-visible areas of the project. Our beloved mentor (Werner) also had a twist on his life (he moved), and no one actually stepped up for his "job". Most news are actually not so good news, I'll try to explore those as we move along.

Fedora Electronic Lab

The guys at Fedora included support for kicad, fped and openocd on their Fedora-12 release, making development of Electronic Hardware Development a lot easier on their platform.
Thanks!

The pending ECN

A lot of ECN have been worked on: ECN0019 (buzz fix), ECN0024 (GPS ground and layout), ECN0010 (Audio amplifier) [which includes changes to power unit], ECN0015 (Calypso headset), ECN0032 (EMI/ESD protection), ECN0017 (BT to main PCB), and others like
ECN0031, ECN0033, ECN0036, ECN0037, ECN0011 (varistor cleanup), ECN0008 (mistery caps), and ECN0038.

Component status

Trying to understand what components actually Openmoko had in stock started last year (as you can read on this post).
Werner posted a list of the inventory back in January, and the the BOM process we ought to
follow on this post, followed by a list of missing items.

Then, we realised we have another big problem - some components are not easily sourceable, so we need to move to other alternatives.

To focus, or refocus

I did a lenghty post back in February about to focus on current hardware, or instead updating our design to match newest devices, like iPhone and HTC. We'll stick to our
current design.

Cashier needed

We need to figure out how to deal with all donations project is receiving, and perhaps have someone focused on dealing this this issues. If you're interested, please stand up.
There's also an discussion going on with Jon "maddog" Hall about the subject.

Researching component alternatives

Some of our components are hard to source, and there's work to be done to find where we can get those components from. For some of them we need to look up alternatives, if you find something similar and easy to source, please let us know. One late component that was found hard to source is the backlight LCD inductor. Alternatives were using a larger footprint but max. current compliant one, or to use a smaller one and live on the incertainty. We decided for the larger one. Another list of missing components came up, so if you have some time helping us locating those, please do.

Again the backup battery

ECN0040 was revisited recently, since we actually never had a concrete desision on this. We'll probably move to a large capacitor and drop the battery.

Quotes

Whoa ! I should frame this, nail it to the wall, and show it to any
Openmoko veteran who comes visiting ;-)
Werner Almesberger

This news is a great Christmas gift ;)
Patryk "LeadMan" Benderz

Done - wouldn't want anything fishy going on :-)
Dave Ball