PCB Design Costs and Timing
In our last post we have announced that we were reviewing the schematics of our Powerboard Tyche Desktop; this careful process involved ACube Systems and one hardware engineer from our team from mid-October to mid-November. So on 10th November we sent our schematics to the PCB design company for quote, that resulted to be around 12500 euros (VAT included). In the next ten days ACube Systems, our actual designer and the PCB design Company will meet to refine every detail like the ATX board dimensions, PCB layers, that should be ten layers.
Schematics Sources Publication
Our hardware designer completed to fill the NXP questionnaire to ease NXP review of Powerboard Tyche Desktop source, so we have forwarded to NXP everything they requested us to allow publishing the parts of our board derived from NXP T2080 RDB Revision F. We asked NXP how much time the review will take, but we don’t have an answer so far. Stay tuned!
After NXP green light we will publish the Powerboard Tyche Desktop schematics on GitLab as usual. Since designer and NXP use Cadence ORCAD, we will convert our motherboard sources to Altium and then KiCad.
Steps before Production
We expect that the PCB design will be completed beginning of February 2026, thus we strongly need donations to pay for the PCB design.
After that, prototypes production could be set up, so signing the manufacturing agreement depends on your donations and on your activity to spread the word about our project and donation campaigns to the world.
If donations keep steady, we then expect to have prototypes in a couple of months (April 2026) so that we can afterward perform hardware tests. If everything goes according to the plan, in June 2026 the hardware test will be successfully completed and we will see booting with Debian PowerPC64 and other GNU/Linux distribution as we are doing with our T2080RDB devkit converted in Desktop from 2016.
Powerboard Tyche Desktop and Notebook
Therefore, we expect ACube System to start boards pre-orders in July 2026 and, in the mean time, we will go back to work on the next milestone for the notebook version: please join our notebook work group if you want!
Join the Software Workgroup for PPC64BE
We invite anyone to support GNU/Linux PowerPC distribution like Debian to improve support on PPC64 big endian architecture.
Spread the Word
You can take part to the project success by talking about it in the fediverse or in any kind of forum, blog, website, etc… you think it would be relevant on!
Linux Day Milano and SFSCON
As usual our volunteers were ambassadors at Free Software events as we have done in the past on Freeplanet event, FOSDEM 2020, Open Power Summit Open Source Summit, etc…. : this fall we participated at Linux Day Milano on October 25th and SFSCON on 6th-7th November, and as usual we got to involve some more people in our activities!
We want to underline the meaning of our open hardware projects
We have vehicles, appliances, phones that cannot be fixed, because their manuals are not available, they are locked behind DRM, or spare parts are either unavailable or prohibitively expensive. Even more worrisomely, perfectly fine connected devices become useless bricks just because the original manufacturer do not find them profitable anymore. This creates unbelievable amounts of unnecessary waste.
Nowadays, we see laptops with soldered RAM and GPU, absolutely closed design and mostly running closed OSs. Our design that started in 2017 has 2 RAM slots and a separated MXM video card.
Our notebook motherboard design fits in an already produced notebook shell and uses a PowerPC processor that can keep up with modern mid-end boards, even though its production started in 2012: a true testament of a good design.
In 2006 we have seen that market of notebook and desktop switched completely to x86 (Apple had used PowerPC CPUs until then), but not because of a technical reason. Some of us were looking to a new PowerPC CPU, and since 2012 Freescale (now NXP) produced the second, more power efficient generation of their PowerPC processors, the QoriQ T-Series, we thought that the T2080 could be used in a notebook, being a good tradeoff between the T10xx lower power line and the T4xxx higher performance line. We then started this project website. It was only a faint idea inside someone’s head, then it was shared with some others on this website and then became something concrete, with hundreds of donors, a design made, prototypes produced and tested… In 2025 we haven’t got yet a production-ready Open Hardware PowerPC notebook, but we have completed the second schematics design and thanks to YOU TRULY we will make production-ready prototypes real.
Our modern societies need to control and manage the technicalities in order to run: electronics and software is nowadays pervasive to every bit of our life, in our homes, in our workplaces, in our vehicles, in critical infrastructures like roads, bridges (yes!), railways, ports, utilities, healthcare…
That’s why it is so important that every country, every community needs to have people capable of designing, producing and validating electronics and software powering every building, vehicle, hospital, medical devices, school, university, aqueduct, sewage treatment, power plant, every piece of the infrastructure we depend on for our lives.
And that’s why is so important that we complete an Open Hardware Desktop designed around free software, involving students, and young, and previously young people, to be able to build the bricks of our society.
Thanks to your support, this Open Hardware Desktop first, and then the Notebook, will demonstrate in practice that a group of common people could create computers that respect our freedom.
