The truly open smartphone
that cares about your privacy.
The truly open smartphone
that cares about your privacy.
Oct 28, 2016, hellekin
Yet another spooky October week: power, flexibility, URL loss,
debacle... Well, almost ;o).
Must be the season...
"The power tree looks perfect", Joerg said. The power tree shows the distribution of electricity in the system.
Our current draft for the power tree in proto_v2 still has
specificity for the BB-xM assembly (since that acts as external CPU
for testing the prototype), yet it anticipates the final design, so we
can ensure the components can already be put in the right places.
proto_v2Connecting the BeagleBoard-xM was not obvious though. At first
Joerg and Werner considered using FPC. Then Joerg remembered the
Sony NT-1 digital audio cassette recorder from 1994, that used a flex
PCB folded 4 times to fit the case! o_O
Then they decided a ribbon cable would do the job just fine, without all the weirdness, and added difficulty and costs.
This draft illustrates how BB-xM and proto_v2 will be
placed with respect to each other; notice how the UPPER PCB extends
far beyond the rear of the case and connects to the BB-xM. This is
how we build proto_v2 to use BB-xM instead of the embedded SoC.
OK, we did it: no more terrible QUERY_STRING URLs in our public Git
repositories that where unreadable, hard to remember, and hardly
pastable. Now everything looks like it's made to last:
Redirections are not in place yet, so if you find an old URI that's broken please blame how900 on Freenode and it will be fixed soon.
Oh, and we ditched Gitweb for CGit, killing one stone with two
angry birds.
W. Martin Borgert (AKA. 'debacle' ;o) opened a wishlist bug to
the Debian BTS to package eeshow, Werner's "Schematics renderer and
viewer for KiCad". His "justification for packaging" is a nice praise
for Eeplot:
Eeplot fills a gap: So far I was not able to produce a searchable PDF with KiCad, because it always made plotted lines from text. Eeplot does it right!
Praise debacle :D
In the last couple of months we've been experimenting with publications to find our marks in delivering timely, updated, interesting, sometimes humorous contents (or vice-versa) and keeping you informed of the development of the Neo900. It's not always easy to ponder what's newsworthy and what's not, and how to convey the spirit of Neo900 as well as noteworthy 'events'.
So far we only had news hard-coded into our website. Lately I've been trying to find balance and distinguish several types of 'news':
weekly updates on Neo900 development, that are short summaries of current events (like this one)
discoveries about my personal EE n00b view trying to understand what our great engineering team is doing, thanks to their patience and will to share knowledge (like that one)
and longer, more in-depth articles addressing Neo900 labs research and the Neo900 features and market. E.g., the ASN.1 vulnerability.
So in the coming weeks and months I'll restructure the website to reflect this undercurrent dialogue informing experts and profanes alike on the pulse actualizing Neo900.
Thank you for your attention,
hellekin for the Neo900 team
P.S.: I'm now how900 (~Neo900@neo900/coreteam/communications/how) on Freenode IRC
« Neo900 Board-to-Board Connectors vs. the Tombstone Effect
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.