First PCB Desktop Layout!

Posted on December 24, 2025 by Communications Team

Today we publish here ( above) an export from PCB design of our PowerPC Desktop motherboard (based on processor NXP T2080) , you can see the motherboard top view with components and connectors, it reflect the progress on pcb design, that is going fast. Before the end of January will be completed !! In January should be defined the costs and timing for the production of the prototypes.

The dispositions of components on the board are not final.
As requested by our association members there are 4 holes 30-42-60-80 for the left M.2 connector.
The two Ethernet are one on top of the other.
There is even a digital audio output.
There are 3 PCIE connectors: 16x, 4x Open ( with space for 8x and 16x), 1x

In the mean time that is in progress the donation campaign for the schematics design we open now the donation campaign for the PCB design.

Payments we should do next days:

Schematics Design

Before 31 December we should balance the payment for the schematics design plus 850 euro needed to fill the review questionnaire asked by NXP, So we have summed the 850 euro to the running campaign for the Schematics.

52.82% Raised

€3,301.56 donated of €6,250.00 goal

30 Donors

3 Days Left

PCB Design

We need to pay at beginning of January the 50% of the cost for PCB design that is around 6100 euro, so we have created the PCB design campaign that is 12500 euro ( 10000+VAT+paypal/stripe fees) .

We thanks donors and collaborators that permit us to finance everything realized until now.

We are going faster as promised, to realize a working Open Hardware PowerPC motherboard in few months , that increase rhythms of design and production, costs and ask us to increase even the rhythm of donations…

Donation is a form of collaboration so apart your one shot or recurrent donation that are welcome, we even ask you to spread all over you can our project so more potential collaborators could join our project.

On 12th December NXP confirm us that the review of our source schematics was submitted, they don’t give us any estimation on how much time they take to do the revision and to give us the permission to publish as Open Hardware the schematics source. After we will have the agreement from NXP we will publish the sources as we do usually, as we have done for our Powerboard Tyche Notebook motherboard sources.

Debian 13 installer for PPC64 and powerpc (32bit)

We are very happy that Debian ports team have published a working Debian 13 installer for PPC64 and powerpc so we have tested on PowerBook G4 and IMac G5. Please join us if you want to help on test Debian PPC64 package or if you want to test even Mint PPC

We have published on our forum how to install it.

Our Devkit after last shipment back was damaged the AC Power Supply substituted and the motherboard T2080 itself so at the moment we are not able to install on our Devkit.

If you want to install Debian ppc64/ppc32 on your G5 or G4 you could appreciate our wiki page updated from our collaborators Debian PowerPC Wiki

PCB Design Costs and Timing

Posted on December 2, 2025 by Communications Team

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.

DIY PowerPC Desktop derived from NXP devkit – 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.

contact us

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!

52.82% Raised

€3,301.56 donated of €6,250.00 goal

30 Donors

3 Days Left

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!

Sfscon – Bolzano – 7th November 2025 – speech Open Hardware PowerPC Powerboard Tyche Desktop

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.

Powerboard Tyche Notebook – MXM video card slot and 2 RAM slot

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…

Image by Tomasz Mikołajczyk from Pixabay

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.

52.82% Raised

€3,301.56 donated of €6,250.00 goal

30 Donors

3 Days Left

Schematics of the Powerboard Tyche Desktop version Completed! Soon starting the PCB design

Posted on October 14, 2025 by Communications Team

We now have the complete electronic source design for our new desktop design in our hands!

This week, ACube Systems and some volunteers from our association will review the design. We expect the manufacturer to start setting up the PCB layout for the new Powerboard Tyche Desktop on October 20th. This is part of our strategy to focus on creating a stable, functional desktop version of the core computing platform by the end of 2025.

The PCB design phase (Phase 2) will begin shortly after the schematics and Bill of Materials (BOM) are sent to the manufacturer. We anticipate that this step will allow the manufacturer to provide us with an estimate of the cost and timeline for the PCB layout design. This cost and timing estimate will then be shared with the community “just in time.”

Technical Components and NXP Review

We have verified that the availability of SATA2/3 controllers is poor, and the chip Lattice Silicon Image SiI3132 chip that we selected is no exception. We decided to include it in our desktop board to ensure backward compatibility with SATA devices, such as DVD and HDD.

We do not use the on-chip T2080 SATA2 controller because we prefer to use the T2080’s three x4 PCIe Gen3 configuration to optimize the speed of video cards and storage controllers. This configuration cannot coexist with the on-chip SATA2. In any case, the best performance is possible thanks to our M2 motherboard interfaces.

In our board design, we have an SPI connection for an external LCD, which can be used as a secondary screen or for debugging and diagnostics. It is also useful when setting up u-boot and when no video card is connected to the board.

Our board design includes GPIO connectors that can be used to connect other devices that don’t use USB, SPI, or PCIe buses.

Our desktop design is derived from our old notebook design and the original NXP T2080 RDB (Release F) design. We are integrating many components specified in the reference board, including critical monitoring hardware.

This includes the OnSemi ADT7481ARMZ thermal monitor, which has been upgraded to the OnSemi NCT72. The ADT7481 is used as the thermal monitor or temperature sensor on the original NXP T2080 reference design board. On that board, the ADT7481 (designated U34) is usually connected via the I2C_1 bus with the address 0x40. The T2080 processor itself contains a temperature diode designed to be used with system temperature monitoring devices, such as the Analog Devices ADT7461A. This similar part is mentioned in the documentation for the T1042 chip, which highlights the standard use of such monitoring.

Designers have changed other components from the original T2080 RDB design and our notebook design due to the availability of new compatible models, such as the N25Q512A13 FLASH SPI, which is substituted for the EvKit Micron MT25QL512A due to its limited availability.

Due to the changes in components, we will need to modify the VHDL code of the CPLD chip when we have the prototypes in our hands. Therefore, we must take into account the additional cost of this task.

To ensure full compliance and open-source publication readiness,

The designer will fill out the NXP review questionnaire [draft post 2025-10-12] simultaneously.
The questionnaire and the Cadence schematic source will then be sent to NXP.
The main goal is to receive a full or partial agreement to publish the parts of our design derived from the original NXP T2080 RDB (Release F) as open hardware.

We anticipate a robust boot-up because the components and firmware are similar to those of the stable T2080 RDB. The specific CPLD is programmed using the original CPLD source code of the T2080 RDB. Once NXP grants the necessary agreement, we plan to publish the source schematics and evaluate the use of a recent CERN Open Hardware License version.

Upcoming Project Phases

The next anticipated milestones, pending finalization of cost estimation:

Phase 2: PCB design. (tentatively scheduled two months after the completion of the schematics).
Phase 3: Prototype production (tentatively scheduled one month after PCB design).
Phase 4: Prototype testing (tentatively scheduled one month after prototype production).

We continue to rely on the community’s support. Recurring donations are dedicated to the campaign aimed at recovering costs already incurred for notebook testing and CPLD firmware fixing.

We are searching volunteers to test Debian PPC64 and fix packages

Finally, we need more volunteers to support the necessary software efforts, including Debian PPC64 testing, as we cannot ask for additional donations for this purpose.

Below is an updated list of specs for the desktop board being designed.

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 x16 VIDEO Card 2
AUDIO: C-Media 8828 sound chip, audio IN and audio OUT jacks (3x2)
USB:  2 USB 3.0 ports
      2 USB 2.0 ports
      2 USB 3.0 ports internal for FRONT
STORAGE:
    2 NVM Express (NVMe)
    2 x SATA2
    1 x SDHC card reader
NETWORK:
    2 x Gigabit ethernet RJ-45 connector

52.82% Raised

€3,301.56 donated of €6,250.00 goal

30 Donors

3 Days Left

New Powerboard Tyche Desktop design Faster then Ever!

Posted on August 31, 2025 by Communications Team

To complete the schematics design, the designer will need around another two weeks.
From the beginning of August we already have in our hands a large part of the new design (Desktop version of Powerboard Tyche motherboard). We have started a fast review thanks to a few members of our association that were able to check the schematics. As usual in Italy, during August companies close for at least two weeks for vacations, so the designing is slowing down. For that reason, the PCB design will start after the middle of September.

We are proceeding faster than ever. We started the “Powerboard Tyche Desktop Electrical Schematics Design” donation campaign on 14th July, and the design itself started at the beginning of July. So after 1 month we already had a good part of the schematic done! Comparing that time with around 12 months that took the Notebook schematics design, now we are proceeding more than 4 times faster!!!

Thanks to the previous work done, our previous design and experience doing Powerboard Tyche Notebook designs and prototypes, the designer can realize the Desktop Design faster, integrating the NXP T2080 RDB design (revision F – year 2023). That design is possible thanks to the 5400 euro of the dedicated Donation Campaign. The old donation campaign to design the Schematics of Powerboard Tyche Notebook was 12600 euro, so now we are spending less than half.

So every past effort and past donations for the Notebook version campaigns have been invaluable and permit us to speed up time and limit the cost to design the current Desktop version.

52.82% Raised

€3,301.56 donated of €6,250.00 goal

30 Donors

3 Days Left

We remain absolutely committed to making an Open-Hardware Notebook-based PowerPC machine a reality. The desktop version will be the right step to allow more people, spending less money, to soon own, enjoy, and test software on this Desktop version. With a few changes and reintegrating the battery part of our previous Notebook, it will give rise to the Notebook version!

You can check our timeline from 2015 to 2025 and milestones of the project during the years.

NXP will review our Powerboard Tyche Desktop Electrical Schematics Design before we can publish it (completely or partially), as we have received from them Cadence source of the NXP T2080RDB (revision F – year 2023) that the designer has modified and partially integrated with our previous Notebook design (you can see our architectural study published even in the last post). We thank NXP for having provided us this source (revision F) that actually is not published. For that reason we need to have their agreement to publish, with an Open Hardware license, the parts that we take from their source. The Notebook version is published with a CERN Open Hardware license 1.2 version.

Hardware designers in NXP, as our old designer and the new one, use Cadence to design schematics, so that forces us to have the source in Cadence. We are not hardware designers.
The PCB design of the Notebook board was done in Mentor Expedition and the Desktop Design will be done in Mentor Pads.

As we did with our Powerboard Tyche Notebook design, we will convert the Cadence and Mentor Pads sources to Altium and then to KiCad, hoping that the conversion to KiCad has been further improved and allows nothing to be lost.

For us, it is of fundamental importance that our board is Open Hardware (we will certify it as Open Hardware with OSHWA when it will be completely functional) and the prototypes are realized thanks to your support and donations.

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 (in 2019). Thanks to their work, we clearly understood the practical implications of the requirements for the OSHWA Open Hardware certification, and we cross-checked our approach and adopted solutions with OSHWA personnel. An important part of being considered Open Hardware compliant (OSHWA Open Hardware certification) requires that everything that is under our control and 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 ask us to remove technical details that we were not supposed to disclose, we will comply with their requests by removing the published material, but that will not impact our compliance with OSHWA Open Hardware certification, because we can demonstrate that we strived to be as open as possible.

What’s more, we thank NXP for reviewing our design. We had to fill a deep questionnaire that permits them to go deeper into the review. This is an added value that NXP gives to our board: they use their time and resources for us, and we are grateful for that.
In the worst case, they will ask us to mask some parts of the source that are copied from their design. That is the reason why, before publishing the schematics sources, we need to complete it and wait for their review. In this way, we have sped up the design process; we are going on with our design phases without waiting for NXP review. The review only delays the moment in which we start publishing the open source designs.

We are searching for volunteers that would like to improve our Open Hardware license and evaluate if it is better to use a newer CERN Open Hardware version than continuing with version 1.2.

What happens when the schematics design will be completed?
In the middle of September we should have in our hands the schematics design and the BOM that we will forward to the company that will make for us the PCB design and prototype production.
This manufacturer company is already booked and ready for the middle of September to carry out these activities for us. The first feedback that this company will give to us will be the cost estimation to design the PCB and to produce our Desktop prototypes, so at the same moment we will be able to inform everyone about the costs of each phase (PCB, prototypes).

Then they will start the PCB design (phase 2) and order the electronic components needed for the prototype production (phase 3).
After the prototype production, hardware and firmware testing will start (phase 4). With the CPLD itself, starting from the original CPLD source code of T2080 RDB, our Powerboard Tyche Desktop CPLD will be programmed.
As the components and firmware to boot up the board are the same as the T2080 RDB, we can count on a robust boot up.
If more work is needed to improve the CPLD code, it will be done thanks to the same firmware engineer that helped us fix the CPLD firmware of our Notebook prototype, and in that case we will evaluate the cost (phase 4 bis).

Yes, it’s possible to reach the goal to have a working Powerboard Tyche Desktop before the end of 2025, but is needed an extraordinary effort from donors because we depend on donations to cover all the steps that are coming : Schematics Design, PCB Design, Prototype Production and Tests.

52.82% Raised

€3,301.56 donated of €6,250.00 goal

30 Donors

3 Days Left

Desktop Electrical Schematics Ready! in August.25

Posted on July 15, 2025 by Communications Team

We are very happy to inform you that the Schematics Design of our new Powerboard Tyche Desktop is running fast thanks to the new Designer and to the NXP Devkit source design plus our Powerboard Tyche Notebook design. Designer took from the NXP Devkit design ( 2023 version) everything is related to the boot process and many parts from our Notebook design, except what is not needed for the Desktop version, like the Battery part.

You can check all the details regarding what we took from Devkit design and what we took from our Powerboard Tyche Notebook design.

At the end of July, we will provide the schematic design and the BOM to the factory, which will then begin the PCB design based on the schematics. Therefore, by the beginning of August (before the factory’s holiday closure), we will know the cost for the PCB design and prototype production. New donation campaigns will then start for PCB design and prototype production.

Today, July 14th, 2025, we’ve officially launched the donation campaign for the schematics. Before the end of July, we’ll make the down payment for the schematics design. We already have funds collected from the previous donation campaign for the CE certification (of the Powerboard Tyche Notebook), so we can advance money from that fund. However, it’s crucial to boost this new campaign and encourage everyone to donate so we can use fresh funds specifically for the schematics design.

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)
- 2 x SATA2
- 1 x SDHC card reader
NETWORK:
- 2 x Gigabit ethernet RJ-45 connector

52.82% Raised

€3,301.56 donated of €6,250.00 goal

30 Donors

3 Days Left

Starting from today (July 14th 2025) you can make your donation, thanks!

Milestones

Phase 1: Actual Campaign Schematics Design : goal 30.07.2025

Phase 2: PCB Design : goal 30.09.2025 [depending on donations collected]

Phase 3: Prototypes Production: goal 30.10.2025 [depending on donations collected]

Phase 4: Prototypes Tests. : goal 30.11.2025 [depending on donations collected]

The milestone phases depend from your donation. Thanks!

We remain absolutely committed to making an Open-Hardware Notebook-based PowerPC machine a reality.

As we have already published on our past post we have changed the tactic, focusing on a desktop board first allows us to concentrate on getting the core computing platform stable and functional, tackling the complexities of a laptop form factor (like power management, screen integration, etc.) in a later stage if needed. This is a pragmatic step to ensure we achieve a tangible outcome by our 2025 target. What’s more the Powerboard Tyche Desktop version will be more cheaper than the Notebook version!

We value the experience of making our Open Hardware Powerboard Tyche based on PowerPC from scratch; this is possible thanks to the support of all donors and supporters, and the time and creativity of the activists who have been involved in this project over the years.