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New Crowdfunding Campaign Offers Modular EOMA68 Computing Devices (crowdsupply.com)
A new crowdfunding campaign by Rhombus Tech "introduces the world's first devices built around the EOMA68 standard," which separates a "modular" CPU board from the rest of the system so that it can be easily used in multiple devices and upgraded more simply. Rhombus Tech is now offering a 15.6-inch laptop, a laser-cut wooden Micro-Desktop housing, and two types of computer cards, both using A20 dual-core ARM Cortex A7 processors.
The cards are available with four flavors of the GNU/Linux operating system, and they're hoping to receive RYF certification from the Free Software Foundation.
"No proprietary software," explains their campaign's video. "No backdoors. No spyware. No NDAs." They envision a world where users upgrade their computers by simply popping in a new card -- reducing electronic waste -- or print new laptop casings to repair defects or swap in different colors. (And they also hope to eventually see the cards also working with cameras, phones, tablets, and gaming consoles.) Rhombus Tech CTO Luke Leighton did a Slashdot interview in 2012, and contacted Slashdot this weekend to announce: A live-streamed video from Hope2016 explains what it's about, and there is a huge range of discussions and articles online. The real burning question is: if a single Software Libre Engineer can teach themselves PCB design and bring modular computing to people on the budget available from a single company, why are there not already a huge number of companies doing modular upgradeable hardware?
"No proprietary software," explains their campaign's video. "No backdoors. No spyware. No NDAs." They envision a world where users upgrade their computers by simply popping in a new card -- reducing electronic waste -- or print new laptop casings to repair defects or swap in different colors. (And they also hope to eventually see the cards also working with cameras, phones, tablets, and gaming consoles.) Rhombus Tech CTO Luke Leighton did a Slashdot interview in 2012, and contacted Slashdot this weekend to announce: A live-streamed video from Hope2016 explains what it's about, and there is a huge range of discussions and articles online. The real burning question is: if a single Software Libre Engineer can teach themselves PCB design and bring modular computing to people on the budget available from a single company, why are there not already a huge number of companies doing modular upgradeable hardware?
The forces against this are simply too big and powerful: the industry does not like it (and TTIP will forbid it anyway), the security agencies does not like it (I expect one or more of those guys to be charged with sex offences if they do not see the light) and politicians do not like it. It will end badly and if you donate, you will end badly too.
Very expensive for a pi zero clone in a metal case and then in some wacky 3d printed/laser casing... Not to mention support. At least the pi has a community.
A20 now has open source graphics driver? is it actually usable for accelerated graphics (composition in X) ?
Any windowed equivalent since the 98SE interface, fine. The main thing is how easily it plugs into HDTVs, existing i86 machines, or any thing with power and a screen. When I travel and stay in homes or hotels, that would make life easier.
No backdoors? No spyware? No NDAs? Hillary Clinton and NAWBO would never stand for that!!!
The reason that this isn't already a common approach in the industry is that forcing constraints on form factors for SoC devices has some intractable issues. If you have a powerful SoC it demands high power and needs to dissipate heat; so the upper bound of what you can achieve in the packaging and with the connector will be rapidly met u.nless it is massively over specified, and then it will be large and expensive. Also, display technology is not fixed in time, parallel interface signals are already quite out of date as an interface specification , although the actual limit here will probably be down to the PCMCIA connectors impedance discontinuity and consistency after numerous insertions when more modern differential display protocols are adopted. It is a laudable aim, but I doubt this will save the planet from computer waste.
So how exactly do I upgrade the RAM without replacing the CPU?
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. 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. 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).
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. The same kind of approach could be adapted to the slashdot situation, breaking features into development projects, maintenance projects, and ongoing-cost projects.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Magnavox (at least I think it was Magnavox, it could have been Zenith), a long ago TV manufacturer, came up with a modular TV set just at the time when solid state devices were starting to take hold of the market. They envisioned a TV where each separate module could be replaced when it failed (tuner,sound amplifier, etc). It was so complex that almost no one could work on it. It was easier to just throw out the TV and buy a new one. Technology seems to go from very complex and expensive to "use and throw away". Calculators and standard watches are good examples. A calculator will cost you a few bucks at Walmart and when it breaks pitch it and get a new one. Computers will eventually get this way also. Pretty soon your super powerful personal computer (which you pretty much have now but they are called cell phones) will be pretty much like cell phones.
Currently the CPU in the CPU-cards available in the campaign is an ARM 32 bits ("armhf" for Debian systems).
In the future, if things go well, there are plans to launch other CPU-cards that meet requirements of low power, hw and sw freedom (not requiring proprietary firmware blobs to run), etc. Other CPUs have been already considered, including different architectures, like MIPS. The housing (laptop, micro desktop, etc.) can be reused, it's just a matter of swapping the CPU-card -- that's one of the main points of this project.
I'm hoping that there's enough interest in the project and goes ahead, that the ecosystem thrives and other CPU-cards based on free designs like OpenRISC or RISC-V will be produced in the future.
Probably interesting for many folks around here... there are plans to submit these projects for the Free Software Foundation's Respects Your Freedom program (contacts already started).
Volume is king in electronics. Surely everyone knows that here! In case you had not noticed, a computer is made from -
The last three items are one-off costs, spread over the entire production volume. If your volume is high, they are negligible, if your volume is low, you are stuffed.
PCB design is a non-issue - if you don't pay the going rate. PCB test, debugging and verification, not so much. Hint: you cannot do your own quality control - no one spots their own errors.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
"The real burning question is: if a single Software Libre Engineer can teach themselves PCB design and bring modular computing to people on the budget available from a single company, why are there not already a huge number of companies doing modular upgradeable hardware?"
Well, because it is economical BS. 99.9% of the market doesn't give a damn about modularity (cf. scaling back of the project Ara from Google) or whether or not the device designer had to sign an NDA to get documentation for a chip or not or whether there is only libre software in it. All that only makes the hardware more complex, more difficult to produce and in the end more expensive.
The fact that they have to crowdfunding campaign (which isn't exactly going gangbusters) is the evidence.
The openness, the libre software, the modularity are things which matter to geeks but are not a sustainable business model alone. These people need to get out of their ivory tower sometime.
While not impossible, I find it hard to believe. I also have an A20 ARM board, a Lamobo R1 that after I cut physically the damn realtek ship is very similar in architecture to this card. Guess what...it is not open, it needs binary blobs to boot in graphic mode at least. It also quite sad there is still not a more modern ARM SoC besides the A20 that supports SATA directly connected to the CPU.
Wasn't there a brief modular TV trend in the early 90s where the idea was that the TV was a monitor and you bought components like a stereo, or probably more correctly, they were thought of as stereo-type components to be added to the component stereo system?
I think it was at about the peak of VHS as a technology, when TV broadcasts were in stereo and VHS had hi-fi stereo audio and better TVs had at least composite if not SVHS video.
Now most people use them that way despite the TV industry never giving up its thick feature set, tuners (which later became cable-ready, then digital capable and then worthless with digital cable boxes), and now smart features.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Note that the EOMA-68's HW and SW is Open Source, which means — among others — that:
But better yet: the laptop housing's Embedded Controller, the microprocessor which controls the keyboard, track pad, power and a few other things, is open too!
Add to this the fact that the track pad is actually a LCD and touch screen, and the possibilities are endless. You could develop new features such as:
This could be cool for an HTPC emulator kind of thing, there doesn't seem to be much mention of the graphics/video playback capabilities though?
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
They claim that they removed the Mali GPU from the SoC in order to be 100% free. Is that even possible? Did they get AllWinner to make them a special chip without the GPU? And how are the graphics handled if there is no GPU?
Mada mada dane.
I don't know what brand it was but back inn the early to mid 80s, we had a TV that was ghosting the immage and the sound would cut out at times. The TV repair guy still actually came to the house back then and I watched him work on it. He replaced two modular boards which was new to me because i was use to the tubes. He said the boards would be fixed back at a shop but was in and out in about 30 minutes complete with running test patterns on the screen and some audio thing for the speakers.
I don't know if that is the same or not. I'm wanting to say it was an RCA tv but it was a console with a 32 inch screen and was more like a piece of furniture than modern sleek TVs that sits on top of furniture.
"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.
Unless the "card" is a whole new computer that slots into a thin plastic case, this is 100% impossible.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
When is the last time you check all the code.
True, practice not meeting theory led to Heartbleed. But Heartbleed woke the industry, and now audits of free software have become somewhat more common. Audits for binary blobs aren't practical at all.
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TheKenThompsonHack
Obsoleted by the David A. Wheeler defense.
This is just expensive hipster stuff with an ugly 3d printed case, no merit...
The merit is ability to show to suits that there exists a market for modular battery-powered computers with additive manufactured cases.
By adding a RAM SSD and putting the swap file on it. Then the SOC's internal RAM becomes in effect a cache for your RAM SSD.
All TV's before around 1978 used vacuum tubes and a few discrete components mounted to boards within the cabinet that were all hard wired together. Around the early 80s they got smart and installed anything they could (sound system, receiver, etc) into plug in boards on the main board along with any vacuum tubes needed that could not be replaced with solid state devices.
I have an ANCIENT (>10 years old) Dell XPS desktop machine - and last week, the motherboard failed. Went to Fry's paid $65 for a new motherboard and $120 for a new CPU (which included a new cooling fan). My RAM modules were too ancient to run in the new motherboard - so I spent another $60 for a couple of RAM modules. To my surprise, the original power supply, graphics card, hard drive, DVD drive and case all fitted perfectly - and a simple reboot got me back into Ubuntu as if nothing had happened - I was back up and running in an hour.
Sure, the CPU socket had changed - and my decade-old DDR-2 memory wouldn't work in the DDR-3/4 motherboard - but aside from that, modularity worked 100% perfectly. I could have chosen from a dozen different CPU's and a similar number of RAM suppliers and any one of a dozen motherboards - and the outcome would have been the same. None of the replacement parts were made by Dell. The screwholes for the motherboard matched up perfectly, the cutouts in the case for the connectors and graphics card lined up nicely and even the connectors for the buttons and USB ports on the front panel plugged in perfectly. The various blanking pins on the connectors prevented me from plugging in the various wires into the wrong connectors...I could have done it without the instruction books.
So the desktop PC "standard" is already an incredibly modular system. The problem is that (by modern standards) it's physically huge.
For small systems like IOT devices, the cost of "the computer" including graphics, networking, RAM, long-term-storage is down to $10 or less...so modularity at that scale is just pointless - increasing the cost by adding connectors between the parts is just silly.
For systems at the scale of a cellphone, modularity is a tough sell because the physical form-factor has to fit perfectly with the shape of the battery and screen and heat management is a big issue - so making a *usefully* modular phone is challenging.
The real issue is modular laptops. It's a real pain if you screen gets cracked or your motherboard or power supply fails. But you don't need modularity at the electronics level - it's all about modular cases and connectors. You could take pretty much any laptop design and simply declare that to be "THE STANDARD" and manufacturers could come up with replacement electronics, storage, screen and keyboard units.
It doesn't take clever design, it takes the political and commercial agreement of a gazillion manufacturers to pick a form-factor, connectors and other interfaces AND STICK TO IT for a minimum of 15 years.
Simply coming up with a new laptop design and declaring it to be "THE STANDARD" is useless unless you can get a lot of very large companies to sign up to it...and that ain't happening. This isn't a matter of technical innovation - it's all about the politics of those big businesses.
Software has been relatively "modular" for a very long time. You can buy software, download free software or write your own - and it's pretty simple to make it work on the trifecta of OSX, Windows and Linux - and trivially easy if you can make it web-based. But it's very evident that the business model of most companies these days is to lock you in to buying music/video/apps from their "app store"...that's where the $$$'s are...so expect to see more moves like MS's efforts to lock down Win-10 so you have to buy apps through their store.
www.sjbaker.org
"Why are you using a shitty old processor like an A20 and exclude the only two good things it has going for it, GbE and SATA?"
Even the old Raspberry Pi 2 is much faster than the A20, being a quad core A7.
If they wanted to go cheap and Allwinner, there's the A80, H3 or A64.
An Amiga 1200 came with a MC68020 CPU. But you could just by an addon board with an MC68030, MC68040 or MC68060, plug it in and benefit from the faster CPU. Same goes for an Amiga 3000 or 4000. You could even plug in boards with MC68060 and PPC603e CPUs for non-symetric multi processing later on.
This idea is so old why is this even news?