On the 8th of September 2020 we have reached the previous goal targeting to collect the needed donations to complete the design our Open Hardware PCB (Printed circuit board), a big thanks to all supporters!
In the last 9 days, we received more than 2000 euros.
It allowed the campaign to reach its goal 7 days prior to its deadline, wonderful! Thank you all!
This new campaign (Phase 1B) aims at the “Fast SI bus simulations”, in other words, it will pay for an in-depth analysis of the integrity of signals of the PCB that came out from the previous campaign. We have started the collection of donations right after reaching the 100% of the previous campaign.
The PCB Design , designed with Mentor Xpedition that came out from the previous campaign will be published here soon, a first public draft should be ready by the end of September.
After the in-depth analysis of the integrity of signals of the PCB will be performed, thanks to the current Donation Campaign, an updated version of the PCB will be published.
Our Speak at OpenPOWER Summit NA 15 Sept 2020
On 15th September at OpenPOWER Summit NA, there will be many interesting speaks and projects, our speak will be at 5:35pm ( Europe/Rome Time Zone).
Around 6 years back, we started as a group of FOSS, PowerPC and Open Hardware enthusiasts, with beginning to work on PowerPC Notebook project which was designed around GNU/Linux using Open Hardware. We had very limited funding with limited skills to work. But our enthusiasm and motivation led us to reach fabrication stage for the motherboard. Finally this year we could successfully design its PCB with the help of collaborators and limited funding from donors. There were many challenges faced in this process. Since PowerPC processors have been around for more than 2 decades, but the current implementation on Notebook was difficult to take in the market. Coming to the performance in Big Endian mode is maximized in this with many software need to be patched. In future we plan to upgrade our PCB design to the more recent packaging technology for the processor. Also, with increasing collaborators, it would be possible to design more smaller and cheaper PowerPC board.
