Slashdot Mirror
Live Interview: Luke Leighton of Rhombus Tech
Today we're doing a live interview from 18:30 GMT until 20:30 GMT with
long time contributor Luke Leighton of Rhombus Tech. An advocate of
Free Software, he's been round the loop that many are now also exploring:
looking for mass-volume Factories in China and ARM processor manufacturers
that are truly friendly toward Free Software (clue: there aren't any). He's currently working on the first
card for the EOMA-68
modular computer card specification based around the Allwinner A10,
helping the KDE Plasma Active Team with their upcoming
Vivaldi
Tablet, and even working to
build devices around a new embedded processor with the goal of gaining
the FSF's Hardware Endorsement. Ask him anything. (It's no secret that
he's a Slashdot reader, so expect answers from lkcl.)
Sadly it seems like SOC development outpaces your ability to actually put it into a platform. Is this still going to continue for the foreseeable future?
good question! this first one was always going to be the hardest. it's taken.... almost a year to eventually find all the parts and suppliers. Mid-Mount HDMI was a bitch to track down. we'll still need to do the PCMCIA casework, and so on, which will need $6k for the endplate to be modified.
once that first one is done, however, we'll not only have pre-established relationships with all the suppliers, but we'll likely already have spare stock of some of the parts, *and* have the schematics to be able to cut/paste to create the next one, and so on and so forth.
so i fully expect subsequent cards to be vaaastly quicker development time. but, even there, it depends on the level of cooperation of the SoC vendor. if they don't provide EVB schematics, we can expect the PCB development to take longer. etc. etc.
remember - this is a project which will be going for at least the next decade. we're just getting started.