rhombus-tech.net · Domains · Slashdot Mirror

Re:Yes, but... by lkcl · 2018-01-20 21:51 · Score: 2 · on 'Is It Time For Open Processors?' (lwn.net)

... but it takes a massive amount of money to design and make chips. It's not going to happen "open source" unless some very wealthy individual or organization decides to do so for altruistic reasons.

funnily enough this is precisely what has happened, quite recently, in the form of the Indian "Shakti Project". we could, up until a couple of years ago, have dismissed the Indian Government's security "paranoia" as simply... well... "paranoia"... except that it's not paranoia if they *really are* out to Get You. and thanks to the Intel ME fiasco, we know that the NSA really is screwing everybody.

so the Indian Government has basically given the Shakti Project UNLIMITED resources to, and i quote, "Piss All Over ARM And Intel". the only thing they are not allowed to go after is Memory and NAND because if they did so it would annoy S.Korea, Taiwan *and* China, take away various Triads in those three countries main source of income, and those countries control the major Foundries... the Shakti Team would have a hard time making *anything*, anywhere. so: Memory and NAND is out... but everything else is Fair Game.

in speaking with the head of the team last month he is happy to extend the opportunity to the Libre Software and Libre Hardware community... for free. why? well, because if you want to be able to VERIFY the entire source and the actual hardware, the entire design right to the bedrock HAS to be completely open and transparent...

anyway i will be working with him to design a processor, anyone else is welcome to get in touch http://rhombus-tech.net/riscv/...

Re:How does an open source chip solve the problem? by lkcl · 2018-01-06 20:51 · Score: 2 · on Can We Replace Intel x86 With an Open Source Chip? (zdnet.com)

Being open source doesn't magically prevent bugs from reaching the silicon stage of a chip's design, nor does it make it any easier to fix bugs baked into a completed design. There are only so many people in the world smart enough to even fully understand modern superscalar designs let alone contribute usefully to it.

interestingly the head of the shakti team, madhu, is an advocate of something called "bluespec". it's similar to Berkeley's "chisel" except that, because bluespec is writteen in Haskell it's possible to do *formal mathematical proofs on the designs*.

there was a talk at ccc just last week about doing mathematical proofs on designs, but it's much harder to do if the underlying programming language for the ASIC doesn't really support formal proofs.

anyway, this is extremely interesting timing as i am, puzzlingly, in a position to be the go-between to actually get this done http://rhombus-tech.net/riscv/...

Phonebloks disappointment is half the story by lkcl · 2016-09-02 03:30 · Score: 1 · on Google Cancels Project Ara Modular Smartphone Plans, Says Report (theverge.com)

https://davehakkens.nl/news/re...

dave hakkens is the person who really inspired the modular smartphone movement and brought it to prominence (buglabs was the first to really implement the concept, almost a decade ago). however we don't really have an actual explanation of what went wrong with project ara. here's some hints (search in this document for "ara" obviously): http://rhombus-tech.net/whitep...

basically it's down to the fact that google has more money than they have creative sense. they therefore tried to use "financial brute force" to solve problems. the summary is: with their financial resources they created a "backbone standard" called MIPI UniPro... forgetting that in the process it would be patented by the partners, thus AUTOMATICALLY locking out ANY kind of interoperability and competition for the next 20 years. how, exactly, is that supposed to be "open"???

if we want modular smartphones to be successful, we need PROPERLY OPEN STANDARDs that have no vendor lock-in, but that are also properly protected by a Certification Mark (the standards-equivalent of a Trademark) and a Foundation (or CIC or Benefit Corporation), which is given the financial clout by its sponsors to jump on anyone who wrongly implements the standard in such a way as to cause short-circuits (and end up killing someone due to lithium battery fires for example). it's not like a software standard, where interoperability failures cause a segfault: a HARDWARE fault can genuinely be dangerous.

also the standard needs to be made up of *other* standards that are unencumbered and royalty-free, so that companies and makers alike are incentivised to create modules (using 3D printers and low-cost off-the-shelf circuits), for example this one, under development: http://elinux.org/Embedded_Ope... . Google *literally* did the total opposite of this strategy in every single conceivable way. paying companies to develop new chipsets (patented, proprietary) and saying "here! it's open! sign our NDA, agree to our policy, and you'll be fiiiine!" i'm just staggered by the naivety of a billion-dollar company that had to add me to a special list "stop phoning this person to invite them to interview, you've called them five times already over the past 10 years".

the other thing is, whilst i am delighted at dave's success in bringing the benefits of modularity to a wider audience, he doesn't have any technical knowledge. he views an *increase* in the number of companies on the phonebloks.com front page as being a good thing. the key question which illustrates the point without having to spell it out: are any of the products listed on the phonebloks page interoperable in *any* way?

so. if there is anybody who would like to see this done properly - in an open fashion so that the mistakes of both google and fairphone are not repeated (see http://blogs.fsfe.org/pboddie/...) do reach out on the arm-netbook mailing list http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/mail... i've been investigating and researching this for years and waiting for the right opportunity. often it's good to wait for "big" corporations to fail to deliver, because it means that the hugely-public lessons sink in. a "small person" saying "this ain't gonna work no matter how much money they throw at it" tends not to be believed until the predicted failure comes about.

just as i did with the successfully-crowd-funded modular libre eco-laptop i've set up a stub page (for now) http://rhombus-tech.net/commun... which is a hybrid phone that acts "dumb" and may be upgraded to "smart" by plugging in a computer-on-a-module in Compact-Flash form-factor. "peripher

Phonebloks disappointment is half the story by lkcl · 2016-09-02 03:30 · Score: 1 · on Google Cancels Project Ara Modular Smartphone Plans, Says Report (theverge.com)

https://davehakkens.nl/news/re...

dave hakkens is the person who really inspired the modular smartphone movement and brought it to prominence (buglabs was the first to really implement the concept, almost a decade ago). however we don't really have an actual explanation of what went wrong with project ara. here's some hints (search in this document for "ara" obviously): http://rhombus-tech.net/whitep...

basically it's down to the fact that google has more money than they have creative sense. they therefore tried to use "financial brute force" to solve problems. the summary is: with their financial resources they created a "backbone standard" called MIPI UniPro... forgetting that in the process it would be patented by the partners, thus AUTOMATICALLY locking out ANY kind of interoperability and competition for the next 20 years. how, exactly, is that supposed to be "open"???

if we want modular smartphones to be successful, we need PROPERLY OPEN STANDARDs that have no vendor lock-in, but that are also properly protected by a Certification Mark (the standards-equivalent of a Trademark) and a Foundation (or CIC or Benefit Corporation), which is given the financial clout by its sponsors to jump on anyone who wrongly implements the standard in such a way as to cause short-circuits (and end up killing someone due to lithium battery fires for example). it's not like a software standard, where interoperability failures cause a segfault: a HARDWARE fault can genuinely be dangerous.

also the standard needs to be made up of *other* standards that are unencumbered and royalty-free, so that companies and makers alike are incentivised to create modules (using 3D printers and low-cost off-the-shelf circuits), for example this one, under development: http://elinux.org/Embedded_Ope... . Google *literally* did the total opposite of this strategy in every single conceivable way. paying companies to develop new chipsets (patented, proprietary) and saying "here! it's open! sign our NDA, agree to our policy, and you'll be fiiiine!" i'm just staggered by the naivety of a billion-dollar company that had to add me to a special list "stop phoning this person to invite them to interview, you've called them five times already over the past 10 years".

the other thing is, whilst i am delighted at dave's success in bringing the benefits of modularity to a wider audience, he doesn't have any technical knowledge. he views an *increase* in the number of companies on the phonebloks.com front page as being a good thing. the key question which illustrates the point without having to spell it out: are any of the products listed on the phonebloks page interoperable in *any* way?

so. if there is anybody who would like to see this done properly - in an open fashion so that the mistakes of both google and fairphone are not repeated (see http://blogs.fsfe.org/pboddie/...) do reach out on the arm-netbook mailing list http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/mail... i've been investigating and researching this for years and waiting for the right opportunity. often it's good to wait for "big" corporations to fail to deliver, because it means that the hugely-public lessons sink in. a "small person" saying "this ain't gonna work no matter how much money they throw at it" tends not to be believed until the predicted failure comes about.

just as i did with the successfully-crowd-funded modular libre eco-laptop i've set up a stub page (for now) http://rhombus-tech.net/commun... which is a hybrid phone that acts "dumb" and may be upgraded to "smart" by plugging in a computer-on-a-module in Compact-Flash form-factor. "peripher

Re:What are the success criteria? by lkcl · 2016-07-31 14:38 · Score: 1 · on New Crowdfunding Campaign Offers Modular EOMA68 Computing Devices (crowdsupply.com)

Excellent and substantive response, though you ["ikcl", but not sure of your relationship to the project] sound a bit defensive about it. Considering the mixed success history of such projects (which both of us referenced), I certainly understand why.

yeah no i get it. here's the thing: i am happy to admit that i don't know what i'm doing: that's why i'm inviting people to participate and point things out. if it succeeds, it succeeds as a *group* project, and that's really valuable. the approach that i'm taking seems to be working: we got this far, y'know?

I followed http://rhombus-tech.net/crowds... and read some more, but it seems to me that your approach is too orthogonal to what I'm trying to describe. You have lots of detail about how you think you can deliver a certain product with certain capabilities within a certain budget. Those numbers seem too fuzzy for me to trust the totals, and I couldn't find the schedule. Other places it felt like you were diverted by details that should not be relevant at this relatively early stage.

i'm talking to the factory owner online, and planning to go to taiwan (and then to HK and Shenzen) in september. leading up to christmas the factories are *stupidly* busy, which is why i will go and collect components personally. the critical window of opportunity is between the two new years: that's when i'd like to get the majority of PCB manufacturing done.

but, part of the issue is: if we go beyond the capacity of the current factory, we'll actually have to find another one, and thus redo the entire schedule. i'll also be able to do injection-molding instead of 3d-printing the casework.... so i put down a best-estimate (it's on the crowd supply page at the end) and we see how it goes. i figured that people would be happy to be kept informed of what's going on.

Re:Missing question in their FAQ by lkcl · 2016-07-31 12:39 · Score: 1 · on New Crowdfunding Campaign Offers Modular EOMA68 Computing Devices (crowdsupply.com)

"Why are you using a shitty old processor like an A20

answered in the update regarding processor selection - https://www.crowdsupply.com/eo...

and exclude the only two good things it has going for it, GbE and SATA?"

answered in depth on the FAQ section - look for "SATA and GbE" and a more in-depth answer on http://rhombus-tech.net/crowds... again search for the keyword "SATA".

Even the old Raspberry Pi 2 is much faster than the A20, being a quad core A7.

only available from broadcom - a hypocritical company that operates on unethical grounds and maintains cartelling business practices, ships proprietary arbitrary untrusted executables that boot the CPU *from* the GPU, and forces children to purchase licenses to watch films, for $2.50. what kind of hypocritical lesson is that, that kids may only educate themselves "so far", but beyond a certain point they can FUCK OFF. great. i think that's a great education. we should all teach kids that they are only allowed to learn up to a certain point and beynd that they're expected to be treated like cattle.

If they wanted to go cheap and Allwinner,

EOMA68 is a hardware standard. read the "processor selection" update as well as the "passthrough card" update.

there's the A80,

uses PowerVR which is known to cause enormous instability problems ever since it came out, on *every* architecture that ever uses it. why would i want to bring out something that i know for a fact would be severely problematic?

H3

not designed for low-power.

or A64.

GPL-violating SDK with a proprietary untrusted bootloader.

sorry dude - don't try to be too clever and sarcastic, and you'll get a much less curt answer. i got too much ground to cover - over 25 forums and increasing.

Re:What are the success criteria? by shanen · 2016-07-31 10:18 · Score: 1 · on New Crowdfunding Campaign Offers Modular EOMA68 Computing Devices (crowdsupply.com)

Excellent and substantive response, though you ["ikcl", but not sure of your relationship to the project] sound a bit defensive about it. Considering the mixed success history of such projects (which both of us referenced), I certainly understand why. (However, just to refer to another, I think Diaspora may have been the best idea to die for bad planning combined with overfunding from the crowd. Not sure if it should be "literally die", because that depends on the relationship of Diaspora to the visionary's suicide.)

I followed http://rhombus-tech.net/crowds... and read some more, but it seems to me that your approach is too orthogonal to what I'm trying to describe. You have lots of detail about how you think you can deliver a certain product with certain capabilities within a certain budget. Those numbers seem too fuzzy for me to trust the totals, and I couldn't find the schedule. Other places it felt like you were diverted by details that should not be relevant at this relatively early stage.

The way I'm thinking is different. A really short capsule summary might be something like:

If funding is confirmed by September 15, then beginning on October 1, in two months we plan to design a PCB motherboard with the following interfaces. This will involve two people working full time, both of whom have committed to do the work, and who have agreed to payment of $10,000 for their time. At least 5 prototype boards will be produced for testing. The success criteria are (1) that the boards can be mass produced (lot size 100) for a cost of $15 each, and (2) the prototypes will be tested and proved to satisfy the specifications in the table below. The total project cost is estimated at $30,000, calling for 3,000 supporters at $10 each.

Once you have the first project completed, you can start the next step, but I think it's important to keep control over what you're doing at each phase. There are several mechanisms to do that, but I'm getting too long for the slashdot channel...

Re:Because.se one size does not fit all by lkcl · 2016-07-31 07:46 · Score: 3, Interesting · on New Crowdfunding Campaign Offers Modular EOMA68 Computing Devices (crowdsupply.com)

Not trying to be rude.

no offense taken: this is the internet... it's slashdot.... what you wrote is actually really helpful as a counterpoint: chris answered i think really well https://news.slashdot.org/comm...

, bill yourself as a fully open and environmentally friendly alt to the raspberry pi and similar.

*deep, deep breath*..... AAAAAAAAAAAgh no :) *shudder* no, no, nOooo, and no.

ok to explain my reaction, there: those are all SBCs (single-board computers). after six months of supernova-style popularity, they're dead. each manufacturer of each SBC has to scramble like mad to bring out *the next* SBC using whatever processor they can get their hands on, and the next, and the next, in a desperate cat-and-dog bitch-fight of popularity and unethical abuse of the word "open". ... am i painting a broad picture here of the *really* stark contrast between the approach taken by the embedded "educational" SBC clone market and what we're doing with EOMA68?

by total contrast we're creating the beginning of a comprehensive eco-system of hardware re-use which *happens* (through direct correlation) to both save money for end-users and also reduce e-waste.

but more than that: if we took the EOMA68-A20 board and turned it into an SBC, it would *INSTANTLY* be perceived as being a tired total waste-of-time banana pi or cubieboard clone... when in fact the irony is that those products exist *because* of the reverse-engineering and persistence that i applied to Allwinner to obtain GPL compliance. the sunxi community then helped take that initiative over, they've been working non-stop now for years to pressurise allwinner, and i've been helping quietly in the background ever since.

this project has a completely different focus in other words, where it succeeds if there is a *huge* compatible eco-system (tablet, laptop, router, camera, gps, media centre, lcd tv, games console - everything you can see on here http://rhombus-tech.net/commun... and many more) and a huge compatible range of EOMA68 Computer Cards (and an FPGA card and a Pass-through Card and a DisplayLink Card) with a wide price-range and crucially a decades-long-term "just plug it in, it will work" *stable* standard. ... massive, massive difference.

Re:Same stupidity from the 90's by lkcl · 2016-07-31 03:32 · Score: 1 · on New Crowdfunding Campaign Offers Modular EOMA68 Computing Devices (crowdsupply.com)

"They envision a world where users upgrade their computers by simply popping in a new card "

Intel had the same idea... and it was a giant failure.

i'm not surprised. intel literally cannot make a low-enough processor without sacrificing their pride. they just had to abandon the entire smartphone and tablet market a few months ago because of their pride.

Unless the "card" is a whole new computer that slots into a thin plastic case, this is 100% impossible.

it's a whole new computer in credit-card-sized form-factor (5mm x 54mm x 86mm - it's PCMCIA casework after all). it's stainless steel thin casework (0.1mm thick). so... not impossible at all. in fact, so not impossible that i managed to do it on a budget of $20k (which i got down to $1800 by the 3rd revision, after teaching myself PCB CAD design).

pictures. here. http://s.4pda.to/9hDP9BsrgvB1a...
and here http://rhombus-tech.net/allwin...
and videos here https://www.youtube.com/result...

and... you get the idea. it *exists*. it's not even 100% impossible, it's actually 100% *possible* i.e. *done* already. ... which still doesn't explain why the hell no major manufacturer hasn't even tried this exact same approach.

Re:Why? Its the economy, Stupid! by lkcl · 2016-07-31 03:16 · Score: 1 · on New Crowdfunding Campaign Offers Modular EOMA68 Computing Devices (crowdsupply.com)

Volume is king in electronics.

thanks anne - appreciate the informative post. amazingly the computer cards are around $35 in volumes of 250 which puts them still well within the "affordable" bracket @ a pledge level of $65. which is one key reason why i have gone with the modular strategy - to get the Computer Cards into people's hands at an early phase. it's part of the bootstrapping process to get up to those mass-volume levels where the Computer Cards would only be around $16 in 20k volumes and the Laptop Housing's BOM would be around $150 or possibly even less.

with a modular approach, many of the NREs associated with product development can be amortised over a far longer time-period or a far greater volume, depending on whether we're talking about housings or computer cards respectively. i outline this strategy in more detail in the ecocomputing whitepaper. http://rhombus-tech.net/whitep...

Re:Won't happen by lkcl · 2016-07-31 02:50 · Score: 1 · on New Crowdfunding Campaign Offers Modular EOMA68 Computing Devices (crowdsupply.com)

Agreed. If computing devices running a fully FSF-approved software stack became wildly popular - 3% or more of the computing market - then the major players in proprietary computing and the surveillance industry would move to block them.

Until then, we're too small to care about and the bad publicity from actively blocking us would probably help us more than hurting us.

i'm counting on that :) i am sooo looking forward to the streissand effect... :)

but to clarify: it's important to emphasise that this is *NOT* restricted to FSF-approved software. it so happens that because it will be really hard for proprietary OSes to fully support all the Housings *unless* they are based around GNU/Linux driver stacks it's *really unlikely* that there will be any proprietary OSes installed on EOMA68-compliant Computer Cards, it's not totally out of the realm of possibility. but, more than that, EOMA68 is a *hardware* standard. it's perfectly possible to have an EOMA68-FPGA card, or an EOMA68 "DisplayLink" card, or a Pass-through card which i deliberately added to the list just to get this point across. boring name for a really exciting and flexible concept, but i'm a techie, what can i say? https://www.crowdsupply.com/eo...

The bigger risk is that the creator mis-estimates some of the financial or technical hurdles in the project and runs out of money before delivering most of the pledge rewards. Up until now, all of my crowd funding pledges have been for games and books.

i'm a software libre developer of over 20 years experience. i've seen open hardware projects rise up and fail. the whole project's run along fully-transparent lines because i loved that i could learn from the mistakes as well as the successes made by the openmoko, openpandora and many many more. i did a comparative analysis (of the laptop-related ones) here https://www.crowdsupply.com/eo...

now, when you know that i've held back from committing to several opportunities over the past five years, because the *standard* is more important than profit-maximisation, that i've designed the standard extremely carefully and comprenhsively and am on record as being committed to the standard's success for at least a decade, and you know that i'm a software libre developer with 20 years experience, and you know that i've evaluated a dozen different alternative standards, and decided *not* to go with kickstarter because they're not completely ethical, and many many other things, you should get the general feeling that i'll be not only making *sure* that i succeed at this, but that, thanks to the transparent way in which the project's run along TRULY software libre project management lines, i actually *want* help and for people to review what i'm doing, and to contribute in any way they feel comfortable. or uncomfortable, if it comes to it. if you feel like shouting at me with a genuine concern - something that could jeapordise the entire project - for god's sake get on the mailing list or the IRC channel #arm-netbook on freenode and do so.

regarding technical hurdles: i answered this in another comment (go to http://slashdot.org/~lkcl it's 2 back from this one) with a funny story about a successfully-funded team contacting a battery manufacturer asking them to violate the laws of physics. i've pretty much comprehensively covered all of the technical hurdles that i can think of - and documented them. and invited people to review them. because this really is an open and transparent project. do take a look: let me know if i missed anything. http://rhombus-tech.net/crowds... and google "eoma68" on youtube, review the videos.

Re:What are the success criteria? by lkcl · 2016-07-31 02:02 · Score: 2 · on New Crowdfunding Campaign Offers Modular EOMA68 Computing Devices (crowdsupply.com)

Sounds interesting, but I'd have to see a complete proposal before I'd chip in. I'd want to see the schedule, the budget, the resources, and the success criteria to know if the project succeeded.

most of the information you've asked for, because this is a *genuinely* open and transparent project, is on http://rhombus-tech.net/crowds... - including the BOM, a full risk analysis, and much more. having been around for a long time, long enough to have seen the openmoko fail, and the pi-top team break their promises, and the shit-storm that resulted from the purism team's deceptive marketing, and the difficulties that the openpandora team had with R.F. and firmware: if you have any specific advice, TELL ME. i WANT TO KNOW. best place to do that is the mailing list because then other people can help evaluate your proposals and questions - http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/pipe...

The summary sounds way too grand, so I think I'd want to see it broken down into pieces that are small enough to understand, too.

it's been five years: that's a lot of time to think, plan and get everything lined up. if you're interested in the background as to *why* i am tackling this, it may help to read the background section (first question) http://lkcl.net/articles/eoma6...

"breaking it down into small pieces" it turns out is extraordinarily difficult. the simplest i've found is, "you know like a pause memory pause card? yeah? well this is a pause computer pause card. same benefits as memory cards except now you move the *whole computer*". but even that often is not conceptually enough. after repeating things about 200 to 250 times at hope2016 (and losing my voice on the first day) there's a live video which you can find at https://www.crowdsupply.com/eo... - i managed to get it down to *only* 3 minutes, to cover *a few* of the benefits. the rest (that i have been able to think of over the past five years) are covered here in the "scenarios" section: http://rhombus-tech.net/whitep...

Also important to make sure nothing is overlooked, such as sufficient testing. Be fine if the same organization that helped check the proposal evaluated and reported on the results (perhaps holding the money, too).

well - it's just me, self-auditing with an "always transparent GENUINELY open approach learned from software libre project management of 20 years" unless other people pop up to help. so, you and everyone else on the mailing list will just have to keep an eye on me. and help out with the testing... because it's a software libre project, and i can't do everything, so *need help*. funny and really cool story: a guy called albert contacted me last month, asked if there was any plans to do a french keyboard. i went (internally), "argh, haven't got time, let's point him at the git repo and tell him about the STM32F072 nucleo boards, see what happens" and surpriiise! turns out he's an embedded hardware engineer... so guess what? he's now joined the mailing list and is helping to do french keyboard firmware and much more! https://www.crowdsupply.com/eo... and you can check the mailing list archives as well.

P.S. I think this is a solution to the general problems with all of the crowdfunding systems that I have examined. No accountability or adequate planning.

you're telling me. i spoke to a battery manufacturer last year: we had a bit of a laugh as he explained that a *FUNDED* project for a head-wearable device contacted them and asked him to violate the laws of physics. they'd used a high