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.

Progress on PCB Design and on Software

Posted on March 13, 2020 by Communications Team

Updates on Schematics are being transposed to the PCB design

In February the designer analyzed the Pericom PI7C9X2G608GP PCIe Packet Switch with the direct support of Pericom staff. Now, the Pericom PCIe Packet Switch is fully tested and all the needed setup is completed, so the designer has completed the inclusion of all required information in the updated version of the schematics and is starting to unravel the PCB.

The designer has updated the SerDes connections following our suggestions taking into account the notes we have provided, so a new version of the schematics is expected soon.

Arctic-Fox 27.10.1 PPC64 in our Repo

The main contributor to Arctic-Fox – Riccardo Mottola – member of our Power Progress Community association – has released the new version 27.10.1+b0 that we have compiled and packaged in our Debian PPC64 repo. Riccardo says: “Session Store, code greatly improved compared to past releases, performance improvements in both the html engine as well as a new build system imported from Firefox. This release is definitely a great improvement compared to 27.9.19 right at start”

Arctic-Fox 27.10.1 PPC64 running on our T2080-RDB, that has the same processor as our future notebook.

Repository moved to our Power Progress Community GitLab group.

We have created a Gitlab group called Power Progress Community and we moved all our gitlab repositories under https://gitlab.com/power-progress-community. What is important to know is that all URLs have changed and any cloned repository must be rebased. If you have cloned our repositories you should update git remote origin.

Working on Unreal Engine for PowerPC64 Big Endian

We are working on a port of UnrealEngine (UE) to PowerPC 64 Big Endian. We started by forking the PowerPC64 Little Endian (PPC64le) version and we are currently trying to compile the sources. The original PPC64le port for UE 4.23 was developed by Elvis Dowson and Raptor Engineering and can be found at https://github.com/edowson/UnrealEngine/tree/4.23-ppc64le. Access to the UE4 sources requires accepting the Epic Games EULA as described in https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/ue4-on-github.

We have modified the original scripts to compile for PPC64 Big Endian but so far, we still have to solve multiple errors leading before being able to generate a working binary. You can find our fork and ppc64 branch here https://github.com/robyinno/UnrealEngine/tree/4.23-ppc64 ( to access it you need to accept Epic Games EULA). We are building the source using both a Power9 virtual machine provided by Open OSU and OpenPower Foundation, as well as on our NXP T2080-RDB development kit using Debian PPC64 SID unstable. If you want to help us on fixing the compilation errors, you can start from our UnrealEnginePPC64 Wiki, please contact us.

A screenshot of the ongoing compilation of Unreal Engine on our NXP T2080-RDB developer kit, that has the same PPC64 Big Endian CPU of our future notebook.

PCB Design Started! Carpe Diem!

Posted on January 27, 2020 by Communications Team

Four months have passed since we started our donation campaign aimed at the PCB design and we are now at around €6500 (27%) of the goal €24000 for the entire phase 1 of the design, and we must admit that the rate of donations is slower than what we had hoped for.

Phase 1 is subdivided in two subtasks:

1A) PCB Project € 19000
1B) Fast SI bus simulations €5000

In other words, we reached an encouraging 34% of what is required for subtask 1A.

As we really want to speed up as much as possible the activity, we decided to formally split phase 1, and not to wait to reach €24000 to start the design of the PCB.

To do so, we signed a contract with ACube Systems (company we rely on for the design) just for subtask 1A. Doing so gives the chance to start right now the PCB design. At the time of signing the contract, we paid €6000, the amount required by the designer to start working.

One of the reasons forcing us to speed up the planned activities, is linked to the availability of the Slimbook model “Eclipse” that will not last forever, very much like any other commercially available products such as the electronic components we selected during the electrical schematics design phase. In fact, the electrical schematics are customized for the pinouts of that specific Slimbook model, and the PCB design will be specifically shaped to fit in the Slimbook Eclipse chassis. Because of these constraints, we have to finish the PCB design (phase 1A), the fast SI bus simulations (phase 1B) and the prototypes (phase 2) around this summer.

We fixed the end of April 2020 as the time-limit for phase 1A, so we have 3 months left to raise the remaining €12500. As you may well understand this goal is quite ambitious, but it is necessary if we don’t want to risk to fail.

Continue reading →

PCB for a Happy New Year!

Posted on December 17, 2019 by Communications Team

Orcad Source Schematics Published

At the end of August of 2019 we published the first version of the schematics in pdf format. Then, in October we uploaded the second version and after that the 13th of November we released the Orcad source, accomplishing what we promised.

Schematics Source in EDIF published and ready to be converted to KiCad

Now we have exported it even to EDIF format, to make easier for new volunteers to convert it to Kicad Format. To convert from EDIF to Kicad we have found edif2kicad tools https://github.com/svn2github/edif2kicad but we are sure you will find other tools or even you will be able to create a new one

OpenStack Debian 10 PPC64 Big Endian created

Continue reading →

Donation Campaign for PCB design of the PowerPC Notebook motherboard

Posted on October 15, 2019 by Communications Team

Open Hardware release of the Printed Circuit Board (PCB) design for the motherboard of the GNU/Linux PowerPC Notebook.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h6-66RyyzU

The initial 2,703 euro of donations of this campaign arrive most from recurring donations that continue to arrive from the old campaign after reached the old campaign goal.

In short:

Our hardware group identified in early 2017 a desirable list of components and a set of features of the laptop. In June 2017 we launched a first donation campaign that was aimed at paying ACube to design the electrical schematics and a year later, in June 2018 we reached the goal of collecting €12,600 and finally started finalizing the design. Here you may download the resulting schematics of the 1st donation campaign.

As of today, the notebook specifications are the following (subject to change):

Continue reading →

The PCB design Donation Campaign has started!

Posted on October 12, 2019 by Communications Team

This long awaited campaign finally begins!

Few days ago we announced that Slimbook will provide the enclosure we need for our Open Hardware PowerPC notebook. In addition to that, we have published in our repository the pdf containing the new version of the schematics. Further updates will arrive during the following days ( the Orcad source files will be available during October)

Continue reading →

Bookmark the date for PCB donation campaign start

Posted on December 24, 2018 by Communications Team

Bookmark the date of our PCB donation campaign (details below), now that the electrical schematics that came out of the first donation campaign are in our hands.

The schematics are now under review by our hardware volunteers and at the same time, during this month, we have been preparing the steps to certify our hardware design as Open Source Hardware following the OSWHA Certification procedure.

Open Hardware Compliance

OSHWA Certification Process

Through our OSWHA colleagues, we contacted the NYU Technology Law and Policy Clinic. They helped us for free to see how we could certify the motherboard project as Open Source Hardware. Students and Professors of the Clinic have analyzed how to find the best path to achieve OSHWA certification. In the meantime we have contacted the chips vendors to verify their agreement to distribute as Open Source Hardware our electrical schematics and the future PCB design. Among others, NXP has answered positively. With the Law and Policy Clinic we have extensively studied the practical implications of the requirements for the OSWHA Open Hardware certification, and cross-checked our approach with OSWHA personnel.

So most of the datasheets of the chips used in our schematics are freely downloadable as you can see below.

An important part of being considered Open Hardware compliant ( OSHWA Open Hardware certification), imply that everything that is under our control and that is useful to produce our motherboard, should be publicly disclosed, such schematics, PCB, Gerber-files and all their accompanying information. Still is Open Hardware If we have done what was in our power to use open components, but a third-party sources impose us restrictions to share some information related to their components used in our design.

Bookmark the date of our PCB donation campaign

Bookmark the starting date of the PCB donation campaign: mid-January 2019.

That is going to be the time when we will make publicly available the reviewed electrical schematics that we were able to obtain thanks to the previous campaign. If you have reserved some donations to our project for the Christmas you can donate using the old donation campaign, will be automatically transferred to the PCB campaign, or you can wait until mid-January when will start of the PCB donation campaign. Please if possible “alert” even other passionate people about the imminent campaign.

Finalized list of components

Having received the finalized version of the electrical schematics – we are currently revising them prior to publication- the list of components is now also finalized, even if the revision could imply few minor changes.

The laptop external connectors, that depends from the notebook chassis, are not final due to the interdependence with the laptop chassis, will be added later when the notebook chassis will be finally selected.

You will find the details related to a significant part of the selected components in the datasheets accompanying the electrical schematics that will be made publicly available in mid-January, despite sometimes a login could be required.

Here is a preview of a part of the components:

CPU: NXP T2080: Datasheet ( login needed )

Sata3 Controller: Marvell 88SE9235

USB3 Controller: Renesas μPD720201 Datasheet

PCIE Switch: Diodes Pericom r PI7C9X2G404SL

HDMI Transmitter: ON Semiconductor CM2020-01TR datasheet

Power Convertor: LTM8064EY#PBF datasheet

Smart Battery Charger Controller: LTC 4100 datasheet

Gigabit Ethernet Transceiver with RGMII Support: Microchip KSZ9031RNX datasheet

MXM3.0 Compatible Connector: JAE MM70-314-310B1-2-R300 datasheet

Others:

Frequency Synthesizer : DT9FGV0641 datasheet

100V UV/OV and Reverse Protection Controller with Bidirectional Circuit Breaker: LTC4368 datasheet

4-channel I2C-bus switch with reset: NXP PCA9546A datasheet

block diagram

PowerPC Notebook motherboard Block Diagram

Phase One donation campaign Goal Reached!

Posted on June 7, 2018 by Communications Team

It’s with joy that the Power Progress Community proudly announce the complete funding of the Hardware Research and Design phase for the Electrical Schematics. This phase has achieved the identification and design of all aspects of the motherboard reducing uncertainties related to the hardware specifications and, consequently, the production costs.

After reaching the amount of 12600€, the electrical schematics will be delivered to us in a month by ACube Systems. The final design resulting from this phase will be made public as soon as possible.

We are now dealing with the Open Source Hardware Association, asking them if we can certify as “Open Source Hardware” the documentation produced in this phase or, instead, we should wait until the board design will be entirely finalized. What is more important, we now have to choose which Open Source Hardware license to adopt for distributing our Electrical Schematic. If you are an expert on this field, please join us!

We are so very grateful with all the 128 donors that trusted us and actively contributed in achieving this first goal! We also thank all the people that supported us in spreading our project letting us able reaching a much larger audience.

We remind you that this is a first step of a much larger funding campaign planned more than a year ago. We still need new donations, and to do so, we need reaching even more people, so please, do not hesitate spreading the word. We are fully aware on the importance in publishing soon the Electrical Schematics that came out of the first campaign, as we want to show that we are able to respect the promise of delivering a fully open hardware output, hoping that more people will feel confident in further supporting the project.

The list below contains the planned campaigns and their corresponding funding goals:

[Achieved!] Hardware components research, analysis of the architecture, and design of the electrical schematics [12.600 euro]
[Upcoming campaign] Printed Circuit Board (PCB) Gerber format delivery of the electrical schematics [11.950 euro]
Production and delivery of five working prototypes [8.800 euro]
Hardware testing using software provided by the producer (ACube) [14.400 euro]
Pre-certification CE certification [12.500 euro].

Please, do not stop donating, even if the next campaign is not officially launched yet. Any new donations will automatically be transferred to the phase 2 donation campaign called “Printed Circuit Board (PCB) Gerber”.

We will soon circulate the next issue of our newsletter among subscribers that will contain a very short questionnaire asking whether people are willing to donate to the PCB design donation campaign and their advice on how to carry out a better campaign. This will be necessary to evaluate how much we should “invest” on further publicizing our project for enlarging the involved community and will help us focusing on what we should change in order to reach the goal in a shorter period of time.

PowerPC Notebook Block Diagram done!

Posted on November 4, 2017 by Guillermo Amat

Three months have passed since the kick-off of our campaign, and it is now time to share a status update.

We reached the amount of €7100 thanks to more than one hundred donors that contributed, in some cases with more than one donation. We are thinking about how to boost the donations to achieve the €12600 final goal. We have seen that a good number of donors are new followers of the project, so it seems that our communication activities successfully attracted new people. We now want to go even further, so we kindly ask everyone to share more and more our project, for example supporting its advertisement in online tech magazines and forums, websites and other media. To promote these activities, the project was presented last week end at two Linux Day events in Italy, one in Milan by Roberto I. and one in Bolzano/Bozen by Diego M. The very same week-end ACube advertised the project at the very successful Amiga32 event in Neuss (Germany) and many people have shown their interest. On November 11th, Philippe F. will give a presentation at the Alchimie 12 event in Tain l’Hermitage (France).

Do you want the electrical schematics to be ready by Christmas? The solution is only one: prepare yourself for an active contribution, either by donating, and by involving more people!

PowerPC Notebook block diagram

Regarding the work in progress, ACube is working on the electrical schematics design and sent an early block diagram that was extensively discussed with our hardware core team of volunteers. After this discussion, in particular regarding an NDA component, we have arrived to a final version agreed by both sides: almost all components are identified. We are including PowerPC Notebook block diagram a block diagram of our PowerPC Notebook motherboard (without integrated circuit names). We will disclose all integrated circuit names when we will reach the required amount of donations to complete the electrical schematic, as agreed with ACube. Then, we will publish design files when a design phase is completely finished and tending to be error-free and fault-free. Before that, anyone wanting to actively collaborate in the design review can join and participate in our project and association.

In a nutshell, we are working hard to promote the campaign, and ACube is on track to accomplish phase one of the project. We see the light at the end of the tunnel! Keep it up!

Lastly we want to remember the importance of small recurrent donations. The possibility of having many people helping with a small amount of money monthly is very interesting for us as this will guarantee the constant work of the hardware designer.