Electrical Schematic of Powerboard Tyche Desktop + BOM Campaign
Designer have take fromNXP Devkit design ( 2023 version) everything is related to boot process and many parts from our Notebook design, except what is not needed for Dekstop version, like the Battery part.
SPECS
- Form Facttor: Micro ATX
- CPU: NXP T2080, e6500 64-bit Power Architecture with Altivec technology
- 4 x e6500 dual-threaded cores, low-latency backside 2MB L2 cache, 16GFLOPS x core
- RAM: 2 x DDR3 slots
- VIDEO
- PCIE3 x16 VIDEO Card 1
- PCIE2 x4 VIDEO Card 2
- AUDIO: C-Media 8828 sound chip, audio IN and audio OUT jacks
- USB: 3.0 and 2.0 ports
- STORAGE:
- NVM Express (NVMe)
- M.2 2280 connector
- 2 x SATA2
- 1 x SDHC card reader
- NETWORK:
- 2 x Gigabit ethernet RJ-45 connector
Milestones
Phase 1: Actual Campaign Schematics Design : goal 30.07.2025
Phase 2: PCB Design : goal 30.09.2025 [depend on donations collected]
Phase 3: Prototypes Production: goal 30.10.2025 [depend on donations collected]
Phase 4: Prototypes Tests. : goal 30.11.2025 [depend on donations collected]
The timing of milestone depend from your donation. Thanks!
GNU/Linux PPC64 Distro runs with Video Cards on our T2080 devkit from 2018
You know that we have from 2015 the NXP T2080RDB devkit (in standalone mode together with a PCI-E video card board and an SSD with our Do-It-Yourself wooden desktop) with the same CPU ( NXP T2080) of our Powerboard Tyche design, running Debian 10 PPC64 BigEndian and Fienix from 2018.
Below few video with this T2080RDB that have NOT the features that are included in our design so our motherboard will be more fast thanks to USB3, NVMe ,PCIE 3x with modern video cards and optimized management of the PCIE..
u-boot 2018.11 enabled AMD video cards
As you know u-boot was already setup to boot AMD video cards on our NXP T2080-based DevKit , with enabled graphical output on AMD Radeon video cards during booting. You can find the updated source code on our GitLab. Below you can see the new U-Boot in action booting up the NXP T2080-based DevKit.
Open Hardware Certification
As a final remark, we will try to adhere to the Open Source Hardware requirements in the design of this laptop motherboard, therefore we are strongly committed in avoiding any hardware component requiring an NDA (Not Disclosure Agreement).
For this purpose, we have contacted many chips vendors in order to verify their agreement to distribute as Open Source Hardware our electrical schematics and PCB design obtained in this second campaign.
Among others, NXP which is the company producing the selected CPU, has answered positively for the Powerboard Tyche Notebook that had taken from T2080RDB Revision C design, now we are waiting the level and parts that they agreed for T2080RDB Revision F, that’s the new version that we have use for the new design of Powerboard Tyche Desktop,
The process required to achieve a fully compliant Open Hardware motherboard, was carefully analyzed by students of the Law and Policy Clinic of New York University School of Law. Thanks to their work, are clear the practical implications of the requirements for the OSWHA Open Hardware certification, and cross-checked our approach and adopted solutions with OSWHA personnel.
An important part of being considered Open Hardware compliant (OSHWA Open Hardware certification), require that everything that is under our control and that is used to produce our motherboard, should be publicly disclosed, such as schematics, PCB, Gerber-files and all their accompanying information.
As a consequence, most of the datasheets of the chips used in our schematics are freely downloadable, as well as the schematics and the PCB design.
In case some of the chip vendors will ask us to remove technical details that we were not supposed to disclose, we will comply to their requests by removing the published material, but that will do not impact on our compliance to OSHWA Open Hardware certification because we could demonstrate that we strived to be as open as we could.
We are sure that you will be satisfied by the final PCB design, and you will be proud of being one of the contributors that could make materialize the first and only Open Hardware complaint PowerPC desktop motherboard designed around GNU/Linux!!
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Payment Methods
Online Donation – PayPal
Press Donate and as Payment Method select PayPal You can choose one time donations, or recurring -smaller- monthly donations ( and with others selected frequency). ( How stop paypal recurring payment )
Online Donation – Stripe
Press Donate and as Payment Method select Stripe You can choose one time donations, or recurring -smaller- monthly donations ( and with others selected frequency).
Offline Donation – Bank credit transfer
These are the bank account details for donating:
Bank name: Banca Popolare Etica
Bank account owner: Power Progress Community OdV
IBAN: IT94X0501801600000012339610
Beneficiary Bank (57)
Code BIC/ SWIFT: ETICIT22XXX
Banca popolare Etica SCPA Via N. Tommaseo 7, 35131 Padova (PD)
Intermediary Bank (56A)
Code BIC/ SWIFT: POSOIT22XXX
Banca popolare di Sondrio
Piazza Garibaldi 16, 23100 Sondrio (SO)
CAUSE:“PPC notebook donation – NAME and SURNAME”
Where the NAME and SURNAME are the same you will fill in the Donate page.
After you have made the bank transfer press Donate and as Payment Method select Offline Donation.
In Offline donation the recurring donations is only a declaration of intent as the system doesn’t do anything for you.
Anonymous Donations
When you make the donation (offline or online) you can choose to make your donation anonymous.
Preferred payment method and TransferWise / CurrencyFair
Our preferred payment method to receive donations (to keep commission and also your costs low) would be:
- EU donors: Bank Transfer (online or offline)
- Non-EU donors: Bank Transfer with services like TransferWise or CurrencyFair (see here)
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Donations are liberal and not refundable
The Power Progress Community is a nonprofit organization established in Italy. The Italian law allow to collect liberal and not refundable donations meant to pursue the missions and projects of the association and not give back products.
Restrictions for a nonprofit associations in Italy
An organization like ours has to take into account the following constraints:
- A nonprofit association cannot make commercial products;
- The association can receive donations, but cannot refund them;
- The association must be coherent with its mission, and is allowed to ask for donations for their achieving the goals.
So, what we can do to start our project is based on the points below:
- The association can have a particular goal to reach and ask donation to achieve it, but it cannot give back the money (no refunds).
- Donation must be altruist so, no one will receive something back for their donation.
- Italian law allows an association to finance an R&D for a project or activity.
What happens if the campaign fails?
As stated above, we will not be able to refund the donors in any case. Because of that, if the money collected is not enough to fund this research we will use it for another goal within the mission of the organization.
Will all the received money be used for the research?
Almost, as any payment platform available, either PayPal, Stripe or the Bank account transfers, have a fee applied to each donation. As non-profit organization we have inside EU 1,8%+0,35euro of commission, outside EU 2,8%+0,35 euro ( from some country we see that could arrive to 4% of commission) for paypal. In case your bank transfer is from outside EU, for us bank commission cost is high: 6 euro, so we strongly suggest to use service like Transferwise to decrease the commission cost for both.
