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

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

Dummy board being finalized

Posted on April 14, 2021 by Communications Team

It is with great joy that we present you the first tangible result after years of spending time on planning, ideas, projects and schematics. Below you see pictures of the dummy board, a non-working prototype that was printed with a two-layers PCB that was paid thanks to the ongoing donation campaign.

The primary use of this dummy board is to perform mechanical checks in conjunction with the Slimbook notebook chassis. The board is not finished yet, the PCB designer still has to mount additional mechanical components such as connectors to ensure the final working prototypes will fit perfectly in the Slimbook Eclipse chassis.

The PCB designer in charge of the job is carefully working to fine tune the gerber design files and already adjusted some minor details, proving that a preliminary dummy board was very much needed.

We would like to thank Gerard Schneider that kindly offered us a ATI Radeon 7970 MXM card, it will surely help us testing the working prototypes that will be produced later on. We welcome anybody else willing to send us other Radeon MXM cards that may lay unused in a corner, we would like to start as soon as possible to test various GPUs in the upcoming working hardware.
[UPDATE 2021-04-22] Unfortunately our notebook board is set to work exclusively with MXM-A 3.0 (type A) with a size of 82mm x 70 mm and with a maximum power consumption of 55W, whereas the MXM card provided by that Gerard Schneider is an MXM-B (type B) with a size of 82mm x 105mm and a maximum power of 200W. Thank you anyway Gerard, your card will be useful to check and eventually fix the video drivers but it will not be used inside the prototypes.

Even if it is “just” a dummy board, this is a great milestone, and we are really happy about it because we can finally touch something with our hands. We would like to thank all the people that made it possible to reach this point, and we really hope that the donation campaign financing the final prototypes will speed up because now we all want to see more!!

Are you willing to help?

Being part of a project like this could be an amazing experience, you meet new people, volunteers of other projects, companies devoted to open source and everyone is willing to help. We are continuously giving examples of this in our blog posts but, in the last weeks, we are especially grateful about the support received from KiCad developers and Slimbook.

Collaboration Survey

Two additional enclosures for our prototypes.

Slimbook is a company making a huge effort in promoting an Open Source environment. They produce notebooks, mini-PCs and desktop computers targeting mainly Linux users. As an example of their commitment to the open source community, they have a very have a good relationship with the KDE project and together they collaborate on the creation of laptops meant to use primarily KDE. Despite being a small company, they are having success selling their products worldwide and these are very appreciated by the Linux community.
As you may know, we started our collaboration with Slimbook more than two years ago and they have been always quite helpful promptly responding to our requests and providing information about the enclosure design or the related components that will be also used in our notebook (screen, keyboard, dissipation devices, etc.). All their support and time was kindly offered for free. Besides that support, we have received two Slimbook Eclipse enclosures to continue our tests. This will make possible to assemble three prototypes of our PPC Notebook. Again, they did it for free. We have no words.

*A Slimbook Eclipse enclosure kindly donated by Slimbook.*

Export our PCB to KiCad, a difficult journey

At the very beginning of this adventure, we were trying to find hardware experts to design the motherboard but the level of expertise required for such type of hardware made this challenge unachievable for us. Of course, we have experts on that field but the complexity of this design demands quite a lot of time, impossible to carry out solely using the volunteers spare time. So we opted to look for a company experienced in motherboard design and even more difficult, a company that was experienced with the PowerPC architecture.

We were lucky enough to meet ACube Systems and its circle of collaborators. However, as most for-profit companies do, the ACube System subcontractor company had its own proprietary software tools which generates file encoded using non-open outputs formats. In our case we end up with files created using Mentor Xpedition, a software that cannot exporting to KiCad. To convert our Mentor Xpedition source files we were told to import them into Altium, and import the converted Altium files into KiCad.

Unfortunately, the KiCad importer for Altium files is still heavily under development, and it is far from being complete. We contacted the KiCad developers and they kindly accepted to perform some testing with our Altium PCB files and that helped spotting various errors in the conversion procedure. These error were identified by the developer in charge of the Altium import module for KiCad and he is currently addressing the encountered issues. Regarding the BOM (Bill Of Materials) the guys at KiCad recommended to import the Altium schematics to KiCad, and generate the BOM from there.

Obtaining an open source format for publishing our motherboard PCB is very important for us, as it allow anyone to easily access the result of our efforts to deliver a truly and fully compliant Open Hardware design.

After a few attempts, the guys at KiCad suggested another option: instead of converting the original Mentor Xpedition files to Altium, they suggested to load them using FabMaster. In fact, KiCad has another importer dedicated to FabMaster (for the board only) and the result of this import module should be useful to understand the level of accuracy of the Altium importer. In theory, the Altium import should produce better results with respects to the FabMaster importer as it is a newer. We are currently investigating if we can follow this path, as it seems to require a full Xpedition license, therefore we are in the process of contacting the subcontractor engineer to explore this solution.

An AmigaOS4 AHI driver for our sound chipset

Our notebook motherboard is open to any operating system supporting PowerPC. Among the operating system that could possibly work, there is AmigaOS 4, a closed-source system that already works on the E-AON AmigaOne X5000 that mount either a NXP P5020 or a P5040, which are both PowerPC Book3e e5500 CPUs. These CPUs can be considered the previous generation CPUs with respect to our T2080 (PowerPC Book3e e6500), one of the main differences is that they lack the Altivec unit, which the T2080 has.

On the April 1st the Dutch developer H. Kanning (nickname “geen_naam”) announced the availability of an AHI sound driver supporting HD Audio compliant chips, and explicitly supporting the C-MEDIA C8828 that we selected for our motherboard. At first we though it was an April fool, but then it was confirmed to actually exists and work, meaning that another operating system is one step closer to being supported. Great job!

Signal Integrity Analysis of the PCB Design

Posted on September 9, 2020 by Communications Team

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.