Thanks to the generous support of our community, we’ve passed the 50% threshold required to start the required actions to produce our 3 prototype PCBs.
During this phase, most of the costs are related to purchasing electronic components, printing the PCBs and starting up the machinery for the assembly line.
ACube is currently selecting the right assembly line for the production of the prototypes, currently quite a difficult task due to the current global shortages of electronic components that makes it difficult to find the right time to order all components. Once all components will be collected, we will be able to work on a tentative timeline for the production of the prototypes. We plan to publish the estimated times as soon as we can. We are very grateful to all our donors, particularly Jeff Moe, who donated 2048 EUR for the prototypes.
Thanks to the already produced Dummy Board, the hardware designer has fixed a few mechanical aspects of the PCB design to better accommodate the motherboard. The updated design sources of the PCB will be published soon in our repository.
Public Vote for the Motherboard name
In October 2020, we started asking the community to suggest a name for the notebook motherboard. People could suggest names via the powerprogress forum and from Twitter. We collected all names and we had an internal round of vote among the core group in order to identify the best possible candidates for launching a public vote. So now you can vote on your favourite name!
| Tyche | Presiding tutelary deity governing the fortune and prosperity of a city, its destiny https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyche |
| Sam2080 | Suggested from ACube |
| Bellatrix | It’s the third brightest star of the constellation Orion (x86, ARM… Power is _the_ third architecture, isn’t it?). The name also means “female warrior”, because you have to have some Am*ga references…  |
| Oliphant | The antique signaling horn, used by heroes like Roland and Charlemagne, thus conceiving the concept of exotic which gives a strong signal |
| Debbie | “Introduced on July 23, 1985, during a star-studded gala featuring Andy Warhol and Debbie Harry held at the Vivian Beaumont Theater[10] at Lincoln Center in New York City Debian |
| FarStar | A space ship imagined by Asimov in its book “Foundation’s Edge”, a “gravitic” ship with a sophisticated computer interface for controlling its movements through space that responds to the driver’s thoughts |
| Hénon | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9non_map |
| Durandal | The mythical sword of Roland/Orlando, conveices the expession of myth and power, but also the difficulty of our project with PPC. Furthermore the name assonates with several wors. “Dur”, “Durare” (=to last in Italian), “Duro” =(hard, hard to beat, resilient) |
| Lilly | my catty dog, do you remember Jay Miner dog on Amiga1000? Also it’s a girl name as the Amiga custom chips. |
| Velouria | A song from The Pixies. Amiga boards have B52’s song titles as names. Also it’s a girl name as the Amiga custom chips. Song meaning: https://songmeanings.com/songs/view/43064/?&specific_com=73015985030#comments |
| Overture | It’s commonly a term used in symphonies, so it really gives a feel of power and elegance, which are potential benefits of this project. It even gives you a whole registry of follow-up terms centered around music, if subsequent models are produced |
Our desire is to collect around 1000 votes before decide the final name on the PCB.
Our PowerPC Notebook in Amigawave
At the end of February 2021, Guillermo, one of our founding members, was interviewed by Amigawave. For our Spanish speaking readers, you might be interested in listening to a brief overview of the entire history of the Power Progress Community association and its open hardware projects, the interview is available in this recorded live stream on YouTube. In addition to the entire history of our project, you will be able to understand the underlying complexity of a project aiming at building a feature-rich laptop from scratch considering heat dissipation and other design principles.
Amigawave is a YouTube channel very well known by the Spanish retrocomputing lovers. The channel is mainly focused on all flavours of Amiga, but also covers many other retrocomputing platforms. We are fond of that period in computing history. Our followers surely know that, during the 80s and 90s, there was a vibrant diversity of computers and architectures and diversity is one of our objectives.
July 15 – Our upcoming presentation at the British Computing Society
On July 15, 2021 @ 6:30 pm – 9:00 pm (BST) The British Computing Society organize an evening on the theme of POWER & PowerPC, July’s event will be on the theme of IBM’s POWER ISA and PowerPC based hardware. Featuring talks from PowerPC Notebook project and IBM on OpenPOWER.
The title of our upcoming presentation is “Prepare yourself for the Open Hardware GNU/Linux PowerPC Laptop”, the abstract: We expect before the end of 2021 to see the life of the first three prototypes of Open Hardware GNU/Linux PowerPC Laptop. The project started in late 2014, after a brief summary of the previous episodes, we try to describe the scenarios of the immediate future of the project and how each person animated by a certain passion for both progress for all and the sharing of knowledge can be a protagonist in this project.
