The truly open smartphone
that cares about your privacy.
The truly open smartphone
that cares about your privacy.
Sep 03, 2017, sn0wmonster
Kickin' it with KiCad and ballin' with metacollin! Work begins as a new engineer comes in!
The road to layouts and manufacturing has taken some winding turns, tested the team's resolve, and reminded us all of the gloomy state of affairs for hardware openness in the industry.
Nevertheless, the Neo900 project has remained uncompromising in its agenda to provide a completely open and transparent stack for all its developers and users. Ultimately, this stance has caused us to take pause when dealing with mainstream layout engineers and foundries who would have Neo900 conform to their interests. This has ultimately led the team to turn to Freenode for what it was intended for -- open source collaboration -- and utlimately discover a new team member.
We welcome metacollin to the core team, an experienced electronic design engineer, native KiCad expert and active contributor to the KiCad project.
metacollin's invaluable addition to the team not only makes v2 of the Neo900 prototype more of a reality, but provides us the necessary KiCad support when needed.
As metacollin settles in to his role of layout engineering, and managing the production and assembly of the first run of the proto_v2 boards, we'll have more technical updates to share.
The current expectation for v2 prototype layout completion is 5 weeks.
The whole Neo900 team thanks the community graciously for their much needed patience as we continue to build and bring this project closer to your palm.
The Neo900 project aims to provide a successor of N900 Nokia Internet Tablet™ device, with faster CPU, more RAM and LTE modem, basing efforts on an already existing, mature and stable free platform - the OpenPhoenux GTA04, following the spirit of freedom known from Openmoko devices.