you'll have to look around, i summarised it already, but i apologise i'm dealing with reading and responding non-stop to comments here as well as other forums and incoming campaign questions. if someone else spots the discussion i'm referring to please do link it here, many many thanks.
And there is still the fact that there is software which is baked in inside the hardware chips, you can not audit that. How do you want to verify and compile that? You just have to trust the manufactures of those chips and their specs, and hope they do not have hidden functions...
the advantage of the modular approach is that we can play one manufacturer off against the other: we can play "Prisoner's Dilemma" at them. not just on security features but also on pricing and on GPL compliance.
it only takes about 6-8 weeks to get an entire new Computer Card made up, on a budget. if we had a team of people and a large budget that could be cut down to a matter of 3 weeks. the "usual" lock-in associated with hermetically-sealed and single-board monolithic designs is now entirely GONE.
"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).
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.
Yep. 99.9764% of all consumers care about "price" first and "sustainability and green-ness" absolutely dead last.
Not one consumer will pay 25% more for a computer that is compostable and will not poison the environment after it is thrown away.
you will be ironically amazed to learn that "eco" correlates *directly* with "price". the more you pay, the more you empower someone to do environmental damage... somewhere and somehow on the planet.
so i've learned to simply say, "long-term this will save you money! buy a $50 computer card every year instead of a $500 laptop every year! saves you money!!! buy two housings and only one computer card and save 40%!" and many other things (without the exclamation marks...) not even *mentioning* the eco-benefits... which *i* know and am confident are automatically inherently a part of reducing the cost (i.e. the materials used).
yes i read the slashdot article a few months back about people being selfish eco-sociopaths, not giving a f*** about the environment but caring about their wallets. irony is that these two things are logically equivalent: the trick is to sell people on the modular approach so that they can save *even more* by selling the older computer cards on ebay so the cost of upgrading is even less than the price of the new computer card... thus... oh look! that older computer card stays out of landfill, how about that, isn't that a turn-up for the books, huh?
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.
i've outlined the process in some detail in other posts, as to how we manage to apply for RYF Certification. see http://slashdot.org/~lkcl and look back in the comments. you should investigate xf86-video-fbturbo - it uses G2D. you do NOT need mali.ko for standard desktop work, and in fact you may end up overloading the processor unnecessarily if you are trying to use the proprietary 3D GPU for nothing more than simple 2D GPU style tasks.
It also quite sad there is still not a more modern ARM SoC besides the A20 that supports SATA directly connected to the CPU.
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...
Currently the CPU in the CPU-cards available in the campaign is an ARM 32 bits ("armhf" for Debian systems).
and a Pass-Through Card just to make sure that people don't get the impression that EOMA68 is restricted to Software Libre, ARM processors *or* processors *at all*... https://www.crowdsupply.com/eo...
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 did a big evaluation here - bear in mind that this evaluation process has been continuous and ongoing for *five years*: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eo...
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.
OpenRISC was not designed around a harvard architecture so is extremely unlikely to go beyond around... 500mhz, even if it was in 10nm, due to insufficient pipeline lengths. it would be ultra-ultra-ultra-ultra low-power in those geometries but would never be capable of going beyond those speeds without a total redesign.
RISC-V on the other hand has been designed from the ground up around the lessons learned from generations of RISC development.... it's just that it's going to be about 3-6 *years* before a decent SoC is made based around it... there was one that *almost* had what was needed... i think this was discussed on the mailing list... basically if it has PCIe and the expectation that the CPU can be married with a PCIe-based Graphics Card, it's already too late: that's a Desktop system, minimum power consumption 150 watts.
my preferred approach is to work with e.g. Loongson Leemote MIPS64 -that's a tried-and-tested design that has hardware-accelerated support for 200+ x86 instructions and i hear some ARM ones as well, that allows foreign instruction sets to be executed at SEVENTY PERCENT of the actual MIPS64's own clockrate. which is pretty amazing.
A20 now has open source graphics driver? is it actually usable for accelerated graphics (composition in X) ?
No, there is no open source graphics driver for the A20's MALI. However the FSF will look the other way and grant an exception if the GPU is not used and graphics are processed on the CPU. This is what they have done with the one variant of the system they are having certified. They are selling (at least) two others which are not certified.
that's a rather.... that's a misunderstanding of how the FSF operates. i didn't fully understand the criteria until it was explained to me a few months ago by josh gay. the primary concern is, "will a non-technical user end up arbitrarily executing privacy-violating malware WITHOUT THEIR KNOWLEDGE"? so things like the Debian synaptics package manager providing a simple-to-use point-and-click option to enable the "nonfree" repository WITHOUT ANY WARNING WHATSOEVER OF THE CONSEQUENCES is one of their worst nightmares.
this really did surprise me, but in the case of the MALI GPU, because it is entirely memory-mapped, there is *literally* no way for the average end-user to even *know that it's there*. "lspci" returns nothing (because there's no PCI/PCIe bus on the A20). "lsusb" returns... USB peripherals the GUI-equivalents of these two programs would also return... nothing.
now, we may say "but... but... someone who is technically-aware or who could follow instructions could recompile the kernel and add mali.ko!!!! wtf????!!?!?!?!" and the answer is "that's not an average end-user, is it?".
there was a huge debate about this on phoronix a couple of weeks ago - i won't go through all of them, just drop you somewhere in the middle with a link - but basically xf86-video-fbturbo works really well with the libre-compliant, GPL-compliant 2D GPU (called G2D) on the A20, which, for the purposes of doing email, internet, libreoffice, image editing (gimp supports PDF, PS, PNG and many more) - 2D acceleration is actually *better* and more power-efficient than *3D* acceleration. if you ever tried running compiz on a standard intel laptop and wondered why the fan just won't stop spinning, you'll know what i'm talking about. anyway - here's the link to phoronix... https://www.phoronix.com/forum...
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.
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.
yeah by default i'm installing XFCE4 but in the future with more powerful SoCs coming out all the time the sky's the limit. ok in the future i'd really like to see schools, libraries and hotels have EOMA68-compliant HDTVs that you can pop your own computer card into. might not be a realistic vision for libraries (they might *rent* you an "approved" EOMA68 computer card though, just like a book...) or hotels (would need to become as prevalent as memory cards) but for schools, yeah it's on the scenarios in the ecocomputing whitepaper and the cost savings are enormous (no more IT staff, because the *card* is the login and file-server).
but until then, you can always use the HDMI output from the other (user-facing) end of the computer card to plug into HDTVs.
plugging into existing x86 machines though? mmm... i don't quite follow... unless you're referring to the OTG port and using that to charge up the laptop housing's battery, or do file-transfers a la "android OTG"?
What you don't realize is that none of that means it won't happen, it just means Joe Average User won't end up buying it.
There is lots of open, modular electronics already. Your boogeyman didn't pop out.
sorry, i don't understand. could you possibly expand on this, perhaps help review the logic analysis behind the modular standards that i've reviewed over the past five years, if you feel that i've missed any or missed anything, please do let me know. the list that i maintain, including comprehensive analysis, is here: http://elinux.org/Embedded_Ope...
the issues to take into account are: it must be absolutely simple, it must absolutely work, and it must not break (due to mechanical or EMI issues). we just saw a report only last month a journalist (who was happy to say that he has "big fat fingers") trying to assemble and upgrade a Gaming PC - he just couldn't cope. and that's a "modular" design, isn't it? exposed electronics, fiddly parts - all modular mind you! - he was absolutely shit-scared of dropping screws and shorting out $1000+ worth of parts.
by total contrast, robust memory-card-form-factor casework is simple, works, and is protected mechanically and is EMI (static) shielded. if however you know of any other modular industry standards that fit these criteria, please do tell me because i will need to evaluate them and adapt accordingly.
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
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.
we're dealing with that by setting a hard limit for the [re-used, pin-incompatible] PCMCIA "Type I" and "Type II" sockets which are 3.3mm and 5.0mm respectively: the hard limit for these two thinner card types is 5.0 watts. so at around 3.0 to 3.5 watts there's still absolutely no need for fans or any kind of special thermal considerations: passive cooling is all that's needed, and the SoC happens to be in contact with the stainless steel case, which happens to be in contact with the aluminium of the keyboard (in the case of the laptop).
just over that (up to 4.0 watts) and it is possible to use exactly the same graphite paper that's been developed for mobile phones. cheap, readily-available.
at around 4.5 watts it would be necessary to seal the package and flood it with thermal gel.
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..
right. i spent five years analysing this and the impedance of PCMCIA (which, again, just to emphasise, we are *NOT* electrically or electronically compatible with: EOMA68 merely REUSES the PCMCIA connectors, housings, sockets and assemblies) is 100 ohms.
the EOMA68 standard uses RGB/TTL because that allows you to go all the way from 320x240 up to 1366x768 which works out to be around 80mhz. 80mhz over 100 ohm impedance is just about acceptable: you remember those "gold shields" on PCMCIA? those were designed to reduce EMI. the cards we're using for the initial prototypes have the metal case covering the entire connector, both sides.
why use RGB/TTL? this is covered in the eco-computing white paper in detail, section on "interface selection" http://rhombus-tech.net/whitep... basically if you consider the cost of 320x240 LCDs and take a look on http://panelook.com/ they're peanuts cost and they're *all* RGB/TTL. if you added a converter IC it would be a massively-disproportionate percentage addition to the BOM. however if you go up to a 1024x600 which costs $18 approx and you add a $1 SN75LVDS83b LVDS converter IC.... that's not so bad, is it?
"Don't play Pokemon GO!!!" said user {insert microblogger's name here} on {insert country of origin here} microblogging site. "It's so the U.S. and Japan can explore {insert country of origin}'s secret bases!"
i'm sorry, but it states clearly in company's articles of incorporation, on penalty of the directors being struck off and imprisoned and/or the shareholders suing them, that they MUST maximise profits, to the absolute pathological exclusion of all else.... so why is *anybody* surprised at the consequences? what am i missing? this is blindingly obvious to me (to the point where i'm actively doing something about it in the tech sector- see http://crowdsupply.com/eoma68) so why is everyone else simply complaining about the consequences instead of taking action to do something about it? what is it that i don't understand?
the source code of android, albeit under an inappropriate license which encourages closed and proprietary behaviour, into which the linux kernel is "lumped" due to ignorance, is entirely and fully available. copyright law is simple: if the source has been released under a license, it may not be retracted (unless copyright law is changed and changed retroactively). therefore there *is* no way that the code can be "yanked".
however, what *could* happen is that because companies are critically relying on google - trusting them to just keep on rolling out releases that are blindly trusted, huawei and other companies could get themselves into a situation where they have no developers, have no expertise, have no knowledge of how OSes work *at all*, in-house.
in *this* way they could potentially end up over a barrel, so it makes more sense that they are just making sure that they have the programming expertise in-house, not least so that they have people that they can trust to review the source! what amazes me is that they are in effect admitting that they didn't have this expertise in-house before.
this sounds very much like "Project Insight" from Captain America Winter Soldier, and also the film "Minority Report". we know how those worked out - people got murdered or jailed for just being alive...
there is some empirical evidence - nothing concrete that can be shared publicly - which tends to suggest that the RSA private key that Intel uses is already known and in use. if nothing else, you should not be reassured that there have been no "gagging orders" that come out of the U.S. Government on a regular basis, preventing and prohibiting companies from telling anyone that "yes we have had the NSA knocking on our door and yes we were forced to give them the RSA private key because otherwise they threatened that whoops, it would be really hard to get export licenses for our processors".
this kind of threat by security services is not outside the realm of possibility: it already happens, and i have met someone who was present at a meeting (with GCHQ) in which this type of threat to destabilise their business model was actually made.
there is a really simple solution, here: don't buy systems with intel processors. that assumes of course that people are making systems for sale that don't have intel processors... and that's exactly what i'm doing. i'm not one for complaining *without* actually doing something about it, so if you'd like to sign up for the crowdfunding campaign which will launch very shortly, you can do so here - http://crowdsupply.com/eoma68
"For instance, the company charges $599 for replacing the display on the iPad Pro tablet. Which sounds insane when you realize that you can almost certainly purchase a new iPad Pro under $700."
Well, on a iPad, the display is everything. So, it is something to expect replacing the display will nearly top the price of the device itself. You pick the most expensive part to compare the brand new one price to the repair. That's not a fair comparison. Almost the rest of the iPad components worth nothing.
from designing eco-conscious products i've had a lot of time to think about this, and the revelation that occurred to me very recently is that "worth" - the monetary value - correlates directly with the amount of environmental damage a product does. even the WEEE (electronic waste disposal) Directive from the EU has to have an effect, as the cost of disposal has to be incorporated by the seller into the price of the product.
basically put, the higher the monetary cost, the higher the environmental cost.
so "it's not a fair comparison" is highly misleading. *it doesn't matter* that it's the highest-cost component: what matters is the monolithic design that causes people to throw away the entire product into landfill.
Not that simple. You can't just suddenly wish a bunch of people smarter. That won't stop the pileup of toxic waste.
but the manufacturers could be smarter... or could they? they're running on the pathological lines of a Corporation (see the first 5 minutes of the documentary "The Corporation"). they cannot do anything other than pathologically maximise profits. but, to their credit, manufacturing efficiency is what allows them to stay in business *at all*. it's just that considering a modular design as a way to reduce environmental e-waste long-term unfortunately equates to reduced income, which means reduced profits, which means they're directly violating the Articles of Incorporation of the company (maximise profits above all other considerations)... and that means that the Directors can be sued by the shareholders, struck off, prosecuted, given a *criminal record* and never permitted to be a Director of a Corporation ever again.
now, whilst this seems rather extreme it's just a plain and simple pathological fact - a logical chain of cause and effect. we allowed Corporations free rein (by supporting them financially by buying products from them), we therefore brought these consequences on ourselves, out of simple ignorance.
having realised what's going on, i've set out to deal with it, and the crowdfunding campaign for the first mass-volume modular computer card products is due to launch very soon. so that people don't feel that this is an "advert" i'll provide two keywords and leave it at that - crowdsupply and eoma68.
to be absolutely honest i'd really very much prefer that there was someone else dealing with this than me, but the fact is that corporations *can't*, for the reasons above. it's going to take changes to the law (to turn all Corporations into US "Benefit Corporations" for example) to get people's attention. but in the meantime, we can at least individually make a conscious decision to take responsibility and do what we can.
Slashdot Mirror
What you really have is an overly expensive slow phone clone, with ugly ass cases.
it's not a phone, but i get your point. if you could do better, what would you do on your available personal budget that would be better?
No backdoors? No spyware? No NDAs?
i know, right? such a novel concept! and we can play prisoner's dilemma with the SoC manufacturers as well, to keep them honest.
Hillary Clinton and NAWBO would never stand for that!!!
who? what? non-US citizen and geek to boot... :)
you'll have to look around, i summarised it already, but i apologise i'm dealing with reading and responding non-stop to comments here as well as other forums and incoming campaign questions. if someone else spots the discussion i'm referring to please do link it here, many many thanks.
somebody asked this on reddit - full answer here: https://www.reddit.com/r/frees...
Wow, Just a regular tech story and this nonsense gets modded up. Has /. gone over to the dark side.?
dunno about /. but EOMA68 definitely has... https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
And there is still the fact that there is software which is baked in inside the hardware chips, you can not audit that. How do you want to verify and compile that? You just have to trust the manufactures of those chips and their specs, and hope they do not have hidden functions...
the advantage of the modular approach is that we can play one manufacturer off against the other: we can play "Prisoner's Dilemma" at them. not just on security features but also on pricing and on GPL compliance.
it only takes about 6-8 weeks to get an entire new Computer Card made up, on a budget. if we had a team of people and a large budget that could be cut down to a matter of 3 weeks. the "usual" lock-in associated with hermetically-sealed and single-board monolithic designs is now entirely GONE.
wooden, actually (for the current micro-desktop)
and a laptop case which is mostly plastic,
... don't forget *3D printed* plastic.... :) so you can repair it yourself or replace the casework parts if you want a change of scenery.... :)
"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.
They claim that they removed the Mali GPU from the SoC in order to be 100% free
no we didn't.
Is that even possible?
no it isn't
Did they get AllWinner to make them a special chip without the GPU?
no we didn't.
And how are the graphics handled if there is no GPU?
answered here https://slashdot.org/comments....
Yep. 99.9764% of all consumers care about "price" first and "sustainability and green-ness" absolutely dead last.
Not one consumer will pay 25% more for a computer that is compostable and will not poison the environment after it is thrown away.
you will be ironically amazed to learn that "eco" correlates *directly* with "price". the more you pay, the more you empower someone to do environmental damage... somewhere and somehow on the planet.
so i've learned to simply say, "long-term this will save you money! buy a $50 computer card every year instead of a $500 laptop every year! saves you money!!! buy two housings and only one computer card and save 40%!" and many other things (without the exclamation marks...) not even *mentioning* the eco-benefits... which *i* know and am confident are automatically inherently a part of reducing the cost (i.e. the materials used).
yes i read the slashdot article a few months back about people being selfish eco-sociopaths, not giving a f*** about the environment but caring about their wallets. irony is that these two things are logically equivalent: the trick is to sell people on the modular approach so that they can save *even more* by selling the older computer cards on ebay so the cost of upgrading is even less than the price of the new computer card... thus... oh look! that older computer card stays out of landfill, how about that, isn't that a turn-up for the books, huh?
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.
i've outlined the process in some detail in other posts, as to how we manage to apply for RYF Certification. see http://slashdot.org/~lkcl and look back in the comments. you should investigate xf86-video-fbturbo - it uses G2D. you do NOT need mali.ko for standard desktop work, and in fact you may end up overloading the processor unnecessarily if you are trying to use the proprietary 3D GPU for nothing more than simple 2D GPU style tasks.
It also quite sad there is still not a more modern ARM SoC besides the A20 that supports SATA directly connected to the CPU.
i know... well the R40 is coming out soon.
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...
Currently the CPU in the CPU-cards available in the campaign is an ARM 32 bits ("armhf" for Debian systems).
and a Pass-Through Card just to make sure that people don't get the impression that EOMA68 is restricted to Software Libre, ARM processors *or* processors *at all*... https://www.crowdsupply.com/eo...
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 did a big evaluation here - bear in mind that this evaluation process has been continuous and ongoing for *five years*: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eo...
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.
OpenRISC was not designed around a harvard architecture so is extremely unlikely to go beyond around... 500mhz, even if it was in 10nm, due to insufficient pipeline lengths. it would be ultra-ultra-ultra-ultra low-power in those geometries but would never be capable of going beyond those speeds without a total redesign.
RISC-V on the other hand has been designed from the ground up around the lessons learned from generations of RISC development.... it's just that it's going to be about 3-6 *years* before a decent SoC is made based around it... there was one that *almost* had what was needed... i think this was discussed on the mailing list... basically if it has PCIe and the expectation that the CPU can be married with a PCIe-based Graphics Card, it's already too late: that's a Desktop system, minimum power consumption 150 watts.
my preferred approach is to work with e.g. Loongson Leemote MIPS64 -that's a tried-and-tested design that has hardware-accelerated support for 200+ x86 instructions and i hear some ARM ones as well, that allows foreign instruction sets to be executed at SEVENTY PERCENT of the actual MIPS64's own clockrate. which is pretty amazing.
No, there is no open source graphics driver for the A20's MALI. However the FSF will look the other way and grant an exception if the GPU is not used and graphics are processed on the CPU. This is what they have done with the one variant of the system they are having certified. They are selling (at least) two others which are not certified.
that's a rather.... that's a misunderstanding of how the FSF operates. i didn't fully understand the criteria until it was explained to me a few months ago by josh gay. the primary concern is, "will a non-technical user end up arbitrarily executing privacy-violating malware WITHOUT THEIR KNOWLEDGE"? so things like the Debian synaptics package manager providing a simple-to-use point-and-click option to enable the "nonfree" repository WITHOUT ANY WARNING WHATSOEVER OF THE CONSEQUENCES is one of their worst nightmares.
this really did surprise me, but in the case of the MALI GPU, because it is entirely memory-mapped, there is *literally* no way for the average end-user to even *know that it's there*. "lspci" returns nothing (because there's no PCI/PCIe bus on the A20). "lsusb" returns... USB peripherals the GUI-equivalents of these two programs would also return... nothing.
now, we may say "but... but... someone who is technically-aware or who could follow instructions could recompile the kernel and add mali.ko!!!! wtf????!!?!?!?!" and the answer is "that's not an average end-user, is it?".
there was a huge debate about this on phoronix a couple of weeks ago - i won't go through all of them, just drop you somewhere in the middle with a link - but basically xf86-video-fbturbo works really well with the libre-compliant, GPL-compliant 2D GPU (called G2D) on the A20, which, for the purposes of doing email, internet, libreoffice, image editing (gimp supports PDF, PS, PNG and many more) - 2D acceleration is actually *better* and more power-efficient than *3D* acceleration. if you ever tried running compiz on a standard intel laptop and wondered why the fan just won't stop spinning, you'll know what i'm talking about. anyway - here's the link to phoronix... https://www.phoronix.com/forum...
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.
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.
yeah by default i'm installing XFCE4 but in the future with more powerful SoCs coming out all the time the sky's the limit. ok in the future i'd really like to see schools, libraries and hotels have EOMA68-compliant HDTVs that you can pop your own computer card into. might not be a realistic vision for libraries (they might *rent* you an "approved" EOMA68 computer card though, just like a book...) or hotels (would need to become as prevalent as memory cards) but for schools, yeah it's on the scenarios in the ecocomputing whitepaper and the cost savings are enormous (no more IT staff, because the *card* is the login and file-server).
but until then, you can always use the HDMI output from the other (user-facing) end of the computer card to plug into HDTVs.
plugging into existing x86 machines though? mmm... i don't quite follow... unless you're referring to the OTG port and using that to charge up the laptop housing's battery, or do file-transfers a la "android OTG"?
What you don't realize is that none of that means it won't happen, it just means Joe Average User won't end up buying it.
There is lots of open, modular electronics already. Your boogeyman didn't pop out.
sorry, i don't understand. could you possibly expand on this, perhaps help review the logic analysis behind the modular standards that i've reviewed over the past five years, if you feel that i've missed any or missed anything, please do let me know. the list that i maintain, including comprehensive analysis, is here: http://elinux.org/Embedded_Ope...
the issues to take into account are: it must be absolutely simple, it must absolutely work, and it must not break (due to mechanical or EMI issues). we just saw a report only last month a journalist (who was happy to say that he has "big fat fingers") trying to assemble and upgrade a Gaming PC - he just couldn't cope. and that's a "modular" design, isn't it? exposed electronics, fiddly parts - all modular mind you! - he was absolutely shit-scared of dropping screws and shorting out $1000+ worth of parts.
by total contrast, robust memory-card-form-factor casework is simple, works, and is protected mechanically and is EMI (static) shielded. if however you know of any other modular industry standards that fit these criteria, please do tell me because i will need to evaluate them and adapt accordingly.
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
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.
we're dealing with that by setting a hard limit for the [re-used, pin-incompatible] PCMCIA "Type I" and "Type II" sockets which are 3.3mm and 5.0mm respectively: the hard limit for these two thinner card types is 5.0 watts. so at around 3.0 to 3.5 watts there's still absolutely no need for fans or any kind of special thermal considerations: passive cooling is all that's needed, and the SoC happens to be in contact with the stainless steel case, which happens to be in contact with the aluminium of the keyboard (in the case of the laptop).
just over that (up to 4.0 watts) and it is possible to use exactly the same graphite paper that's been developed for mobile phones. cheap, readily-available.
at around 4.5 watts it would be necessary to seal the package and flood it with thermal gel.
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. .
right. i spent five years analysing this and the impedance of PCMCIA (which, again, just to emphasise, we are *NOT* electrically or electronically compatible with: EOMA68 merely REUSES the PCMCIA connectors, housings, sockets and assemblies) is 100 ohms.
the EOMA68 standard uses RGB/TTL because that allows you to go all the way from 320x240 up to 1366x768 which works out to be around 80mhz. 80mhz over 100 ohm impedance is just about acceptable: you remember those "gold shields" on PCMCIA? those were designed to reduce EMI. the cards we're using for the initial prototypes have the metal case covering the entire connector, both sides.
why use RGB/TTL? this is covered in the eco-computing white paper in detail, section on "interface selection" http://rhombus-tech.net/whitep... basically if you consider the cost of 320x240 LCDs and take a look on http://panelook.com/ they're peanuts cost and they're *all* RGB/TTL. if you added a converter IC it would be a massively-disproportionate percentage addition to the BOM. however if you go up to a 1024x600 which costs $18 approx and you add a $1 SN75LVDS83b LVDS converter IC.... that's not so bad, is it?
"Don't play Pokemon GO!!!" said user {insert microblogger's name here} on {insert country of origin here} microblogging site. "It's so the U.S. and Japan can explore {insert country of origin}'s secret bases!"
i'm sorry, but it states clearly in company's articles of incorporation, on penalty of the directors being struck off and imprisoned and/or the shareholders suing them, that they MUST maximise profits, to the absolute pathological exclusion of all else. ... so why is *anybody* surprised at the consequences? what am i missing? this is blindingly obvious to me (to the point where i'm actively doing something about it in the tech sector- see http://crowdsupply.com/eoma68) so why is everyone else simply complaining about the consequences instead of taking action to do something about it? what is it that i don't understand?
the source code of android, albeit under an inappropriate license which encourages closed and proprietary behaviour, into which the linux kernel is "lumped" due to ignorance, is entirely and fully available. copyright law is simple: if the source has been released under a license, it may not be retracted (unless copyright law is changed and changed retroactively). therefore there *is* no way that the code can be "yanked".
however, what *could* happen is that because companies are critically relying on google - trusting them to just keep on rolling out releases that are blindly trusted, huawei and other companies could get themselves into a situation where they have no developers, have no expertise, have no knowledge of how OSes work *at all*, in-house.
in *this* way they could potentially end up over a barrel, so it makes more sense that they are just making sure that they have the programming expertise in-house, not least so that they have people that they can trust to review the source! what amazes me is that they are in effect admitting that they didn't have this expertise in-house before.
this sounds very much like "Project Insight" from Captain America Winter Soldier, and also the film "Minority Report". we know how those worked out - people got murdered or jailed for just being alive...
there is some empirical evidence - nothing concrete that can be shared publicly - which tends to suggest that the RSA private key that Intel uses is already known and in use. if nothing else, you should not be reassured that there have been no "gagging orders" that come out of the U.S. Government on a regular basis, preventing and prohibiting companies from telling anyone that "yes we have had the NSA knocking on our door and yes we were forced to give them the RSA private key because otherwise they threatened that whoops, it would be really hard to get export licenses for our processors".
this kind of threat by security services is not outside the realm of possibility: it already happens, and i have met someone who was present at a meeting (with GCHQ) in which this type of threat to destabilise their business model was actually made.
there is a really simple solution, here: don't buy systems with intel processors. that assumes of course that people are making systems for sale that don't have intel processors... and that's exactly what i'm doing. i'm not one for complaining *without* actually doing something about it, so if you'd like to sign up for the crowdfunding campaign which will launch very shortly, you can do so here - http://crowdsupply.com/eoma68
"For instance, the company charges $599 for replacing the display on the iPad Pro tablet. Which sounds insane when you realize that you can almost certainly purchase a new iPad Pro under $700."
Well, on a iPad, the display is everything. So, it is something to expect replacing the display will nearly top the price of the device itself. You pick the most expensive part to compare the brand new one price to the repair. That's not a fair comparison. Almost the rest of the iPad components worth nothing.
from designing eco-conscious products i've had a lot of time to think about this, and the revelation that occurred to me very recently is that "worth" - the monetary value - correlates directly with the amount of environmental damage a product does. even the WEEE (electronic waste disposal) Directive from the EU has to have an effect, as the cost of disposal has to be incorporated by the seller into the price of the product.
basically put, the higher the monetary cost, the higher the environmental cost.
so "it's not a fair comparison" is highly misleading. *it doesn't matter* that it's the highest-cost component: what matters is the monolithic design that causes people to throw away the entire product into landfill.
Not that simple. You can't just suddenly wish a bunch of people smarter. That won't stop the pileup of toxic waste.
but the manufacturers could be smarter... or could they? they're running on the pathological lines of a Corporation (see the first 5 minutes of the documentary "The Corporation"). they cannot do anything other than pathologically maximise profits. but, to their credit, manufacturing efficiency is what allows them to stay in business *at all*. it's just that considering a modular design as a way to reduce environmental e-waste long-term unfortunately equates to reduced income, which means reduced profits, which means they're directly violating the Articles of Incorporation of the company (maximise profits above all other considerations)... and that means that the Directors can be sued by the shareholders, struck off, prosecuted, given a *criminal record* and never permitted to be a Director of a Corporation ever again.
now, whilst this seems rather extreme it's just a plain and simple pathological fact - a logical chain of cause and effect. we allowed Corporations free rein (by supporting them financially by buying products from them), we therefore brought these consequences on ourselves, out of simple ignorance.
having realised what's going on, i've set out to deal with it, and the crowdfunding campaign for the first mass-volume modular computer card products is due to launch very soon. so that people don't feel that this is an "advert" i'll provide two keywords and leave it at that - crowdsupply and eoma68.
to be absolutely honest i'd really very much prefer that there was someone else dealing with this than me, but the fact is that corporations *can't*, for the reasons above. it's going to take changes to the law (to turn all Corporations into US "Benefit Corporations" for example) to get people's attention. but in the meantime, we can at least individually make a conscious decision to take responsibility and do what we can.