Major improvements for Powerboard Tyche despite adversity, but there is still work to be done

Posted on by Communications Team
Photo by mohamed_hassan from PxHere

The hardware designer who created our Powerboard Tyche worked between April and July on one of the three prototypes, focusing on fixing the board firmware. These fixes required a series of checks to determine if any additional adjustments were needed for the board itself, and a complete analysis of electronic signals was performed. This analysis was provided later in September. The same fixes were applied to the second prototype (we have three prototypes).

u-boot 2018.11 enabled AMD video cards

Additionally, Max Tretene from ACube Systems was hard at work on our NXP T2080-based DevKit and completed a newer version of U-Boot in May, which finally 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.

Below is a photo showing the Powerboard Tyche during an electronic test session conducted last August.

In August, the hardware designer sent back two prototypes to our firmware engineer. ACube Systems purchased an oscilloscope to continue analyzing signals on the prototypes, since the oscilloscope previously used by the firmware engineer was on loan.

In September, signal analysis using the oscilloscopes began, comparing the NXP T2080-based DevKit and our Powerboard Tyche to identify differences. Many differences were found in the power-up sequences, so we asked the hardware designer to fix the CPLD program responsible for governing the signals.

Below is a picture of the expected power-up signals as explained in the T2080 Manual.

Below is picture showing the signals from the Powerboard Tyche last August, a picture extracted from the Test Report provided by the hardware designer.

As you can see above there is some difference of PORESET_B and HRESET_B between what was found during the hardware tests on pur board and what is expected in the NXP manuals.

In September, a new series of tests were performed. Below are two pictures from the oscilloscope showing the output of different attempts while reprogramming the CPLD of the Powerboard Tyche.

As we can see on the screenshot even the tension of 2,51 volt was wrong, as it should be not more than 2 volt.

During September and October, there were many reprogramming cycles of the CPLD. Each time, the hardware designer recompiled the HDL of our CPLD and sent it to our firmware engineer, who had two prototypes in hand. Reprogramming the prototypes was quite slow, as neither the hardware designer nor the firmware engineer were working full-time in our project. We sent one prototype back to the hardware designer, and by the end of October, he had completed the CPLD updates. At the end of this hard work the CPLD finally generates the expected power-up signals, reproducing the same signals generated during power-up of the NXP T2080-based DevKit.

The final version of the CPLD firmware (published on GitLab) modifies the behavior of the two signals PORESET (yellow) and HRESET. Indeed, the oscilloscope shows that the two signals now behave differently compared to previous versions.

By the end of October, the signals on the Powerboard Tyche finally looked correct (picture below)

As you can see the now the tension is correct, around 1,95v, in August was 2,51v

Unfortunately, the changes to the CPLD did not resolve the boot-up process of the entire board.

Strangely enough, during tests we found differences in the power-up behavior between two of the prototype boards: one in the hands of the firmware engineer (FE) and the other in the hands of the hardware designer (HE). Here are the three differences we found:

  • On the HE board, the ASLEEP LED stays off if the SD card with U-Boot is inserted and lights up if it is not inserted.
  • On the FE board, the ASLEEP LED always stays on, regardless of whether an SD card is inserted or not.
  • On the HE board, the oscilloscope shows activity on the SD signals, while on the FE borrowed, there is no activity at all.

We are investigating the possible causes of this different behaviors, such as a potentially different patches. We have sent the third prototype, which was in the hands of Roberto Innocenti during the presentation in October-November 2023, back to the hardware designer to verify its behavior.

Differences were also found while performing the usual test with our JTAG debugger, where we encountered some unusual and strange characters in the output.

New Partners to reach the goal

Due to the significant latency and unreliability of the original hardware designer, we are now forced to find other partners to reach our goal of having the motherboard ready for production in 2025. We started the process of searching for a new company in August, and finally, in November, we found a new highly skilled Italian company for prototype production. This company has decades of experience and a new hardware designer with experience in PowerPC design, which is a great accomplishment for us since such expertise is becoming increasingly rare.

In the transition from one company to another, we are now facing some additional work because the current PCB design is based on Mentor Expedition software (a software now acquired by Siemens), while the new hardware designer uses the Orcad software. Fortunately, we have previously worked on such a task and have already attempted the conversion to Altium software. However, we will need to perform the conversion with greater care to ensure that all components are completely and correctly exported.

The past work on the mechanical aspects of the PCB to fit it into the Slimbook chassis was performed by a previous company that unfortunately generated some dimensioning errors in our existing prototypes therefore the new company has to fix also these problems.

Even if this new company was already known as it successfully worked with ACube System in the past, it was not previously selected for working on the laptop because of its somewhat higher cost. So at this point we are left with no choice but to entrust the job to them if we really want to find out what’s wrong with the board.

Required changes to the motherboard

We have already had the opportunity to explain the history of the board to the new company and to the new hardware designer and requested their investigation into the possible causes preventing the board from booting up. We agreed on a complete and in-depth analysis of the entire pre-boot process of the board. Based on their checks, we may need to implement further patches or introduce additional changes to the electronic design as a worst-case scenario.

The new hardware designer , obviously had other projects running before starting ours and will be able to start working on our board by January 2025.

In addition to potential electronic fixes, we have already planned some hardware changes as stated in a previous post (link). The goal is to make new prototypes with changes that will lower the overall cost and to do so, we will drop the SATA3 chipset, which is quite costly and considered obsolete due to the presence of three M.2 connectors. We will also drop the SIM card reader and one of the two EPROMs, as we only need one.

Due to the unknown amount of work required, the cost of the activities to be carried out by the new company cannot be estimated. On top of that we plan to make new, hopefully final, prototypes that should cost around 1500 euros each plus around 2000 euros for setting up the prototype production plant.

Campaign Change and Upgrade.

We particularly thank to all recurring donors that keep a constant contribution allowing us to keep the project ongoing.

We have updated the current donation campaign, postponing the heat pipe redesign for a later stage, and refocused on supporting the required work to make the Powerboard Tyche function correctly.

To reach the new goal, we need to pay a new hardware designer that will help us understand what is wrong with the current motherboard prototypes, potentially leading to a partial electronic redesign. We need to produce a new prototype with mechanical fixes, ensuring the correct placement of the board inside the chassis and some connector placement adjustments. Additionally, we plan to drop the SATA3 chipset, the SIM card reader, and the unnecessary additional EPROM.

In addition, we still have to pay the firmware engineer, who was fundamental in making progress in 2024. Without his strong work in fixing and comparing signals between the NXP T2080-based DevKit and our motherboard prototypes, and his continuous feedback to the hardware designer, the needed fixes on the CPLD (Lattice LCMXO640C-3TN100C FPGA) would not be possible.

65.65% Raised
€10,504.00 donated of €16,000.00 goal
59 Donors
Campaign has ended

Call for a Scientific & Technical Committee

We are setting up in our not-for-profit association a Scientific & Technical Committee that, for example, will provide solutions for our Open Hardware project, examine other Open Hardware projects, adopt other OpenISA CPU, and develop additional Open Hardware Notebook design. Anyone of the associated member of the Power Progress Community will be able to join this committee.

By establishing this committee, we intend to make our association and our PPC Community a suitable place allowing the personal and social development, sharing the motto “Knowledge in solidarity and to be in service of liberation from conditions of constraint and oppression and for freedom of choice”.

Call for developers

We ask any capable developer to increase the number of software supporting PowerPC 64 bit platform (aka PPC64) as the target architecture. In particular, we welcome anyone willing to introduce support for the big-endian variant of the PPC64 architecture, the only one supported by the NXP T2080 CPU that we selected for out PowerPC notebook.

We are currently revising our GitLab based repositories that we setup during the last years while trying to add support to the PPC64 platform. We invite existing and new collaborators to identify potential libraries and GNU/Linux applications to which they are willing to work on, even adding support to a small piece of software may allow bigger application to start working on PPC64 architecture, do not underestimate what even a small contribution may achieve in a bigger picture.

More software working on PPC64, means a better chance for our Powerboard Tyche notebook to become a useful piece of hardware for a bigger number of people, making it an appealing alternative for a broader community.

In case you want to help out on any kind of software stack, please contact us or fill our collaboration survey. In case you are already a contributing volunteer to any existing open source software development, adding support for the big endian PPC64 platform is more than welcome.

If you do not have direct access to a physical PPC64 hardware platform, we can provide you access to our IBM Power9 based environment that is kindly provided by OSU Open Source Lab that we thanks so much for their support.

Spring restart

Posted on by Communications Team
Image by Agata from Pixabay

Winter was an hibernation period for what it concerns issues preventing the booting of our Powerboard Tyche. A number of unfortunate contributing factors caused our paid engineers to be unable to work for us. Notice that they are paid for a fraction of a full-time engineer but, they are passionate about the common goal and they are working during week-ends and their spare time. Personal reasons did not put them in a position to works during winter on u-boot . On the positive side, we had more time to receive donations to cover their work. In fact, up to now we were using funds collected to pay for the CE certification for our two paid collaborators, but thanks to the new fundings coming from your donations, we have now a more or less balanced budget.

We particularly thank to all recurring donors that keep a constant contribution allowing us to keep the project ongoing.

We discovered that our online donation system did not work properly, and some of you kindly warned us. We were totally unaware that such a problem existed, and we were unable to track down when it first appeared. The problem preventing users to enter the amount of money they want to donate is now solved, so please, if any of you tried in the past, please, you may now proceed contributing to the project. Do not hesitate contacting us if you face any problems.

65.65% Raised
€10,504.00 donated of €16,000.00 goal
59 Donors
Campaign has ended

U-Boot development

The cost faced up to now for developing U-Boot for a better support of the T2080 CPU, reached around 3000 euros, while the cost for the jtag hardware debugger was around 700 euros. On the other side, donations for the current campaign reached 3600 euros. So, to keep up with upcoming costs for developing U-Boot further, the hardware debugging process, and the required board electronic design changes, some additional funding is required.

https://gitlab.com/power-progress-community/oshw-powerpc-notebook/u-boot/-/merge_requests/1

Struggling to identify what prevent the board from booting

The hardware engineer that designed and made the PowerBoard Tyche prototypes for us was busy during the entire winter season, as he was working in other PowerPC related hardware project for A-Cube (see A-EON A1222). Starting from April 2024, the work on our prototypes will restart. This work will focus on identifying and solving the problems preventing the board from booting.

As you may know, our not-for-profit association is made of volunteer hobbyists, and like you, we are all looking forward to put our hands on a working PowerPC notebook. No one (donors and volunteers collaborators), have a big amount of funds to allocate to face the problems that are arising along this project. As a consequence, we have quite a limited capacity for action. As an example, we cannot afford full-time professionals working 100% of their time on solving issues. We should go with the availability of professionals that shares our goal and are willing to dedicate some of their time and settle for a quite a modest salary.

We are exhausted by the constant delays we are facing, delays that we could not foresee, and neither we are able to eradicate. Just image how we feel having the physical prototypes in our hands since December 2022, and being unable to even booting them up. We are so grateful to Max Tretene from ACube-Systems that last autumn tried everything possible from the firmware point-of-view to boot the board. Unfortunately, neither Max nor us were able to extract anything meaningful from the messages coming out of the serial port appearing in the JTAG debugger when trying to boot the board, messages that we never encountered in any tests we performed on the T2080 Developer kit from NXP. As all other paid collaborators have performed all conceivable tests to solve the boot problem, together with ACube Systems we decided to ask the original engineer that designed and made these boards to identify and solve the issue we are facing. We really hope that a solution will be found as soon as possible.

Another NXP T2080RDB devkit for developing U-Boot

Thanks to the kind contribution of NXP, we are able to provide Bas Vermeulen, our Dutch developer working on U-Boot, a NXP T2080RDB devkit. With the direct access to a hardware based on the very same CPU adopted for our PowerPC based notebook, we all hope that Bas will be in a better position to fix problems and extend the support to the T2080 CPU in U-Boot and also provide better support to AMD based video drivers, allowing a graphical output at boot time. To make a more suitable environment setup for Bas, he also fit an AMD RX 550 video card in the devkit, a perfect environment that greatly facilitate his precious work.

T2080RDB Devkit + RX550 Video Card ( Bas Development setup )

You can find the Bas contributions on our GitLab repository at

The ati_radeon_fb driver is no longer present 

Configure the device tree to support the correct PCI spaces 

Create a driver for the AMD/Radeon GPU 

U-Boot 2018-11 recognise Radeon HD and Radeon RX

One of the goal was to make U-Boot recognize modern Radeon video cards. Up to now we were not able to get any video during U-Boot initialisation, and only when the Linux kernel kick in we could obtain an output from the video card.

Thanks to Max Tretene of ACube Systems that worked on U-Boot 2018.11 sources, Radeon HD and Radeon RX are now supported. Unfortunately. More recent versions of U-Boot cause problems while trying to compile and cannot be used at the moment.

To enable the graphics card in U-Boot, Max used the same solution adopted for other motherboard produced by ACube Systems such as the Sam440 or the Sam460. The solution adopt a BIOS emulator driver, which emulates, via x86 instructions, VESA calls necessary to initialise the video card via its BIOS. The code used by Max is quite old, most probably created at the time of the release of the first AmigaOne cards on the PowerPC G3 and G4 processors.

Some changes to the PCIe bus settings were necessary as well in the U-Boot sources, because in the configuration of the T2080RDB included in U-Boot there is no video output at all.

u-boot 2018.11 with our DevKit T2080RDB that recognize Radeon HD and RX
u-boot 2018.11 with our DevKit T2080RDB that recognize Radeon RX and HD

New MXM video cards

While trying to solve the problems preventing the notebook motherboard from booting, we were looking for new and affordable MXM video cards, as in the past their availability on the market was quite limited and quite costly. We luckily found a new MXM video cards supplier in Hong Kong, but ordering them from Italy proved to be both quite a long and quite an expensive journey because of very high extra-European bank transactions fees and importation taxes. Nevertheless, these are quite cheaper MXM cards, compared to the previous ones we found last year, and in addition these new cards have higher specs, and are based on the AMD RX550 chips with 4 GB of GDDR5.

We plan to test these new MXM cards as soon as the notebook motherboard will boot properly, and if confirmed to work, these new MXM boards will allow ACube Systems to lower the cost quite a bit for the mass production of the notebook.

Each of these new MXM card is sold for 90 euros, we bought two of them, so 180 euros, plus 32 euros for the bank transaction, and another 32 euros for the extra-European importation taxes, for a total amount of 244 euros. For comparison, last year we spent a total amount of 950 euros for two MXM cards with lower specs.

Powerboard Tyche with the two newer MXM Radeon RX video card

Changes to the Powerboard Tyche PCB design

As we have already stated in our last post, some changes in the mechanical design is needed to better accommodate the motherboard in the Slimbook Eclipse chassis. As we really would like to avoid further issues of this kind, we are going to perform an high resolution 3D scan of the chassis to be able to precisely simulate the volumetric design of the motherboard.

In addition, we plan an upgrade to the PCB design in order to apply changes to the original electronic design, to reduce the final production cost. So far, we come up with three changes: 1) removal of the costly Sata3 Marvell controller, 2) removal of the SIM card slot, and 3) removal of the second NAND rom. In particular, leaving out the Sata3 controller was initially criticized by some of the contributing volunteers, but we demonstrated that existing M.2 connectors could easily replace its functionality using cheap M.2 to Sata3 adapters.

Powerboard Tyche Notebook Chassis

We are waiting an answer from Slimbook regarding the availability of their Eclipse Notebook Chassis. Already a year has passed since the last time we checked, and we are worried because four years has passed since we first identified this solution, and even more years has passed since these chassis became available on the market.

Powerboard Tyche inside the Eclipse Notebook body

At the same time, we are looking for potential alternative options for another notebook chassis. However, as notebook with MXM cards require extra internal space and appropriate cooling systems, finding a suitable solution is difficult.

We were in contact with Framework as we are currently investigating whether their quite modular chassis is suitable for our motherboard. Unfortunately, it seems that because of the MXM card would cause the need for a major rework of the chassis, particularly regarding the custom Expansion Bay Module.

Call for 2024 membership

Currently, PowerProgressCommunity, our not-for-profit association responsible for running the notebook project, consists of around twenty members that pay the annual fee of 30 euros. In addition, there are recurrent donors, which are another twenty (being five of them members of the association)

Paying 30 euros to become a member of the association allows you to take part in the decisions made about the PowerPC notebook project, by participating in our internal discussions. Collected funds are used to support the expenses required for the various websites we run on commercial hosting companies and to pay for the donation platform, a commercial product we use for managing the funds, at the moment for the PowerPC project only.

Our association focus in supporting alternative technologies as a way to guarantee the freedom of choice, allowing anyone to opt for solutions that are not mainstream, even at the cost of minor downsides. The more we are, the more viable these alternatives becomes.

Joining the association is a win win situation if you like to be protagonist in our projects because its a coherent and happy move. With your membership to the PPC association, we could be more intelligent and strong to face our goal. The Association mission is not limited to this project but is open to other projects that aim passion for Free Software and Hardware and “Knowledge in solidarity and in the service of liberation from conditions of constraint and oppression and for freedom of choice.”, “Creating social conditions of equal opportunities.” and other goals.

Call for a Scientific & Technical Committee

We are setting up in our not-for-profit association a Scientific & Technical Committee that, for example, will provide solutions for our Open Hardware project, examine other Open Hardware projects, adopt other OpenISA CPU, and develop additional Open Hardware Notebook design. Anyone of the associated member of the PowerProgressCommunity will be able to join this committee.

By establishing this committee, we intend to make our association and our PPC Community a suitable place allowing the personal and social development, sharing the motto “Knowledge in solidarity and to be in service of liberation from conditions of constraint and oppression and for freedom of choice”.

Call for Membership 2024

Changes in the association statute

In Italy, anyone can decide to allocate 5 per thousands of the paid national tax in favor of not-for-profit associations conforming to certain administrative standards.

We started the administrative procedure to update the statute of our not-for-profit association required to conform to the required standard that will enable us to receive this kind of contributions. Thanks to this formal change, anyone in Italy will be able to select PowerProgressCommunity as the target association for donating a small percentage of their tax, a huge opportunity to raise easily more funding, at the cost of a slightly more complex internal administration.

Call for developers

We ask any capable developer to increase the number of software supporting PowerPC 64 bit platform (aka PPC64) as the target architecture. In particular, we welcome anyone willing to introduce support for the big-endian variant of the PPC64 architecture, the only one supported by the NXP T2080 CPU that we selected for out PowerPC notebook.

We are currently revising our GitLab based repositories that we setup during the last years while trying to add support to the PPC64 platform. We invite existing and new collaborators to identify potential libraries and GNU/Linux applications to which they are willing to work on, even adding support to a small piece of software may allow bigger application to start working on PPC64 architecture, do not underestimate what even a small contribution may achieve in a bigger picture.

More software working on PPC64, means a better chance for our Powerboard Tyche notebook to become a useful piece of hardware for a bigger number of people, making it an appealing alternative for a broader community.

In case you want to help out on any kind of software stack, please contact us or fill our collaboration survey. In case you are already a contributing volunteer to any existing open source software development, adding support for the big endian PPC64 platform is more than welcome.

If you do not have direct access to a physical PPC64 hardware platform, we can provide you access to our IBM Power9 based environment that is kindly provided by OSU Open Source Lab that we thanks so much for their support.

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Long marathon to see u-boot start on the Powerboard Tyche

Posted on by Communications Team

Last November quite some work went into trying to boot up the Powerboard Tyche prototype. In particular, Max Tretene from ACube Systems worked on:

  • the calculation of a newer RCW, the Reset Configuration Word
  • trying to program eeprom over I2C
  • trying to boot U-Boot from the SD
  • debug our Powerboard Tyche using an Oscilloscope according to indication of the motherboard designer

Programming the eeprom over I2C

Programming the eeprom over I2C is not possible with our USB programmer because the power supplied to the chip also powers other components on the notebook board. Since the power consumption is high, the USB port goes into protection, and even if we supply power to the notebook board at the same time, the programmer does not work.
We have tried by not feeding it from the programmer but by powering the board and carrying only the I2C and MASS signals, but without success.

For the I2C eeprom we have used ground and I2C signals, powering the board, but the programmer again fails to program it as it reports an error IC not responding (chip not responding). If we use only the I2C signals without ground, with the board powered, then it sees the chip, but seems to write blank as it then only reads all zeroes values when checked.

After all these unsuccessful attempts, the motherboard is now in the hands of the electronic designer that will try to solve these problems.

Output from the serial port

Running programs from the SRAM. When downloading a test program to the SRAM and after setting the corresponding switches to RCW hardcoded, the program runs, but the output from the serial port is illegible. This is a problem of the prototype because repeating the procedure on the NXP T2080RDB DevKit the output from the serial ports reads “Core0-Thread0: Welcome to CodeWarrior!”. However, when we run the same program from the SRAM, but we deviate the output to the debugger console, the messages correctly shows up.

Even if we checked many aspects to search where the problem lies, we could not find anything wrong. The cable we are using is working correctly on the NXP T2080RDB devkit, and checking the electronic design in the prototype does not reveal errors, it is quite similar to the corresponding design as in the original NXP T280RDB DevKit schematics, even the connector is the same.

The picture below show a debugging session on the SRAM. At the bottom right of the debugger console, you can see the correct message output, but that is not the case on the serial port.

sram debug sram output on console

Tests on the NAND programming were successful. We dumped the memory to a file and then we verified that U-Boot was flashed correctly. However, when selecting the switches to boot from NAND, the prototype board does not seem to do any booting. In fact, the ASLEEP signal LED stays ON, and from the power supply bank, it seems that the CPU is asleep.

The DDR cannot be initialised in any way. We do not have any further information about this initialisation at the moment because only very few simple SRAM tests can be run on the board.

The output on the serial, but the text is illegible, on devkit the output is readable and is this:
Core0-Thread0: Welcome to CodeWarrior!

Debugging the Powerboard Tyche to find out why it does not boot

The Sys_Clock have the same clock of the NXP T2080RDB DevKit.

One test was to check if the serial port have the correct baud rate.

The oscilloscope, the Powerboard Tyche and the Jtag debugger.
Powerboard Tyche serial output on the Oscilloscope.

It looks like that the serial output frequency is not not correctly set. We expect 115200 baud/s whereas from that looks a square half-wave gives approximately 32 Khz.

A second NXP T2080RDB Devkit for developing U-Boot

The U-Boot development process is being carried out by Bas Vermeulen, a Dutch developer working with us. As Bas dos not have an hardware based on the NXP T2080 CPU, he is forced to check any change applied to U-Boot indirectly by sending each newly compiled version to Max Tretene that have our Devkit. As you may have guessed, this process is quite slow and complicated. Fortunately, a dedicated hardware supporting the goal was found thank to the NXP support, and we will be able to provide Bas an additional T2080RDB DevKit next January 2024.

Changes to the PCB design and 3D scanning of the Notebook Chassis

Once we will be able to finally solve the problems preventing the booting of the Powerboard Tyche, we have to update the PCB layout to better fit into the Eclipse notebook chassis. To achieve this goal we plan to perform a 3D scans of the entire chassis so we can rearrange the PCB design according to the 3D model of the Eclipse Notebook Chassis. A preliminary and informal quote revealed that such a 3D scan could cost around 700 euro.

We finally thanks again for your support and donations that allow us to finance all these activities, greatly facilitating reaching our goal in a reasonable amount of time: a very good quality PowerPC based notebook release as open hardware.

Our speeches in Free Software events – October-November 2023

Power Progress Community Foundation’s lecture speech at The South Tyrol Free Software Conference, SFSCON  11th November 2023

Roberto Innocenti – Power Progress Community President + Powerboard Tyche prototype and Chassis
NXP Tech Days 24.10.23 From the left: Powerboard Tyche designer, PPC president and ACube Systems owner
Linux Day Milano 28.10.2023 Power Progress Community updates regarding Powerboard Tyche

fine tuning firmware for u-boot and develop Radeon driver for latest u-boot version

Posted on by Communications Team

It’s a quite some time has passed since the beginning of July when we posted about the start-up ramp that carefully calibrated, programming a complex integrated circuit with some logic (i.e. ramps, voltage thresholds, internal ways of making the PWM regulator work, and so on) and when the Complex Programmable Logic Device (CPLD) (Lattice LCMXO640C-3TN100C FPGA) was programmed for the very first time in order to manage all external peripherals connected to it.

In July we figured out  that a Jtag Debugger was very needed to debug our Powerboard Tyche, the only way to solve the causes of not seeing any U-Boot output. We were able to buy such a debugger thanks to the donations we are collecting with the  current campaign, we thank all donors for their support. 

The debugger is  the NXP CWH-CTP-BASE-HE Jtag Debugger + NXP CWH-CTP-COP-YE “Probe Tip, Removable, For Power Architecture Processors, JTAG to CodeWarrior TAP Base Unit” and, together with one of the three prototypes, we shipped it in August to Max Tretene that kindly accepted to be directly involved in the debug process of the motherboard. Soon, the task proved to be quite challenging, so after an internal discussion, we decided to  offer Max a reimbursement for all the time he was spending on the job, a reimbursement that was made possible to the donations we are receiving with the current campaign.

Dealing with hardware debugging is quite a hard and tedious job, and it was not easy to see something useful on the Jtag Debugger connected to the prototype motherboard. An additional adapter was required to attach the debugger because of the difference in the pin dimensions (2 vs 2.5). Max found it quite useful using the jtag debugger with our NXP T2080-RDB Devkit that was also shipped to him, because it allowed to test the procedure on a working platform and helped understanding the right configurations of the switches to boot up the board.

The two switches on Powerboard Tyche, other related info on Page 5 of our schematics

As our PowerBoard Tyche have not the third switch like the NXP T2080-RDB Devkit a few additional resistors were required to setup correctly the board to be able to switch on the Code Warrior debug connected to our Powerboard Tyche. Not just that, an additional update to the CPLD chip was required to setup the debugging system correctly. Finally, on the 16 of October, Max was able to see some sign of life from the NXP T2080 CPU on SRAM and on NAND Memory, as you can see in the screenshots below. These days we are working on NOR programming, waiting in the meantime for a CPLD update from the hardware designer. The NOR programming is needed to have access to the DDR and then start U-Boot.

SRAM programming – CodeWarrior® Development Suites for Networked Applications attached to Powerboard Tyche
NAND Programming – CodeWarrior® Development Suites for Networked Applications attached to Powerboard Tyche

Some possible changes to the hardware design

All these hardware tests were useful for planning some changes to the hardware design: few missing resistors for enabling the u-boot switches must be added and we need to move one chip because it does not fit quite right in the eclipse chassis.

The recent worldwide electronic components shortages we faced when making  the prototype Powerboard Tyche boards caused an unexpected -and incredible-  increase of the prices. More recently chip prices seem to be coming back to more reasonable prices, with the exception of the Marvell Sata3 controller.

As a consequence, we are evaluating the removal of the Marvell Sata3 controller to both free very-much needed space space and save some costs because at the moment such a chip costs around 90 euros per piece, quite a lot.

In fact, nowadays most SSD are available at a very good price with the M.2 form factor, so a Sata3 connection is not that essential anymore. People in a desperate need for a Sata connection could use the two Sata2 controllers inside the T2080 CPU.

Below we list the availability and prices of 

  • Marvell Sata 3 controller 88SE9235A1-NAA2C000, in 2022 we had payed around 130 euro per piece + VAT, 1 per PCB, total 3 pieces. NOW Win Source  In Stock, 3450 pieces 87 euro
  • TPS544B20RVFT 4.5-V to 18-V, 20-A synchronous SWIFT buck converter with PMBus programmability and monitoring in 2022 we had payed around 550 euro per piece + VAT, 1 per PCB, total 3 pieces NOW: TI Website: 2000 pieces around $8 per piece
  • 6-port, 12-lane, PCIe 2.0 Packet Switch PI7C9X2G612GP – Diodes in 2022 we had payed it around 250 euro per piece + VAT, 1 per PCB, total 3 pieces NOW Digikey 121 pieces 25 euro per piece
  • Surge Suppressors 100V OV, UV, OC and Reverse Supply Protection Controller with -50mV Reverse Threshold LTC4368IDD-1#PBF in 2022 we had payed it  around 100 euro per piece + VAT, 1 per PCB, total 3 pieces NOW Mouser 2.191  Unit Price around 4-5 Euro

Compile and test of an updated version of U-Boot

We hired Bas Vermeulen to obtain a running version of the most recent version of U-Boot on both the NXP T2080-RDB Devkit and on the Powerboard Tyche prototype. In addition, we asked him to develop an AMD/ATI Radeon driver for U-Boot, a work that he carried out last August. The results of his effort is publicly available on our GitLab U-Boot repository.

Unfortunately, until our Powerboard Tyche will not be able to reach  the U-Boot startup process, Bas will be limited in developing and testing U-Boot on the NXP T2080-RDB Devkit. For that reason, Max Tretene is actively supporting Bas in testing the U-Boot binaries generated by Bas on the Devkit.

As you can see on our U-Boot gitlab repository, Bas was hard at work compiling very recent versions of U-Boot during last August. Unfortunately,  because of causes of force majeure, Bas was unable to continue working during September, but he should be back on track the very next days.

Below a short list of the main issues Bas is working on:

We finally thanks again for your support and donations that allow us to finance all these activities, greatly facilitating reaching our goal in a reasonable amount of time: a very good quality PowerPC based notebook release as open hardware.

We still do not have yet a formal quotation of the design of the heat pipes for cooling down both the CPU and the MXM video card. Informally, we estimated approximately 10000 euros. At the moment we are very much focused in making the Powerboard Tyche prototypes working, at least up to the point of being able to launch U-Boot.

CE mark certification financed! New campaign for the software part and heat pipes

Posted on by Communications Team

Once again we want to thank you all for the great support and great enthusiasm you demonstrated during the CE mark donation campaign. We ended the campaign with a total amount of 12500€ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CE_marking), this is a huge milestone for us all and we are so very grateful.

By financing the CE mark certification you have shown us that you believe in the project and our vision of creating a fully open hardware notebook motherboard based on the alternative PowerPC CPU architecture.

We closed the campaign with around € 4000 more than expected, and this extra money will cover some of the extra and unplanned costs we faced for the increased price of electronic components and the extra costs of the three MXM video cards (360 USD each).

The CE mark certification is a mandatory requirement for selling electronic products in the European Union. It ensures that our notebook motherboard meets the safety, health and environmental standards of the EU. Without it, ACube Systems would not be able to launch and sell our Notebook on the EU market. Getting the CE mark certification is not an easy nor a cheap process as it involves rigorous testing, documentation and quality controls.

Legacy Slimbook Eclipse cooling metal pipes to be redesigned

However, the CE certification process can be performed only when the product can be considered completely finished, and that means once the board works, the cooling metal pipes are in place and all is assembled into the selected slimbook eclipse chassis.

Current activities

The Tyche Motherboard has surpassed all the electrical checks, and now the the key activities being performed concentrate on the hardware initialization procedures.

The start-up ramp was carefully calibrated, programming a complex integrated circuit with some logic (i.e. ramps, voltage thresholds, internal ways of making the PWM regulator work, and so on).

The Complex Programmable Logic Device (CPLD) is a Lattice LCMXO640C-3TN100C FPGA is programmed to manage all external peripherals connected to it (see the block diagram and wiring diagram on page 15), manage the interrupts, data, boot reads, set resources according to the CPU and is able to reset all peripherals.

our Tyche motherboard under testing

Working on U-Boot

Currently, a small team of volunteers are working on U-Boot . We are decided to buy a JTAG debugger, a quite useful tool indeed that will make the hardware debugging much easier.

We learnt how to configure and build U-Boot, and we set up a cross-development PowerPC toolchain and the related Device Tree Blob that is used to describe the physical configuration of each hardware component available on the motherboard. You may keep an eye on our attempts by looking at our GitLab pages. We started by re-compiling our old U-Boot binary dating back to 2019, the one that we are currently using on our NXP T2080RDB devkit and also trying to compile a newer U-Boot version from a the DENX mainline vanilla branch without our patches. We are now kindly assisted by Max Tretene, the same guy working at ACube Systems that compiles U-Boot for their motherboards such as the Sam440 or the Sam460ex. Max is currently available to introduce hardware support to AMD/ATI Radeon graphics cards in U-Boot, (ndr.: he recently told us that his spare times is not enough so we are proposing him to work under payment) stay tuned for more in-depth posts about it. In the hope of speeding up the development, we provided Max Tretene with our NXP T2080RDB devkit in early June.

We want to thank the dedicated small group of volunteers and especially Max Tretene for their precious spare time spent in trying to configure and compile U-Boot, we very much appreciate their availability and effort, even if a successful result is yet to comes. In addition, we greatly appreciated the offer made by a professional engineer – not to be disclosed yet- that is ready to work for us on U-Boot for a very reasonable amount of money.

Launch of a new fundraising campaign

After quite some internal discussion, we finally decided to launch a new fundraising campaign aimed at support and speeding up multiple actions:

  1. Buy a JTAG Debugger
  2. Design of the heat pipes for cooling down both the CPU and the video card;
  3. Prototype of a heat pipe fitting our Slimbook chassis, a requirement to proceed to the CE certification process;
  4. Development of an AMD/ATI Radeon driver for U-Boot;
  5. Development of the device thee to fully exploit each hardware component of the board;
  6. Compile a custom  U-Boot binary from up-to-date DENX sources;
  7. Provide the entire toolchain for cross compiling U-Boot and the device tree for PowerPC;
  8. Provide the documentation detailing all the technical aspects of both U-Boot and the device tree so that anybody will be able to understand how to rebuild it from scratch and how to customize it.

In carrying out these actions, we will try our best to optimize both the support of the involved volunteers (any additional help is more than welcome!) and the contracted software engineer(s).

At the moment we only have a rough idea of the amount of required hours of paid work required to complete U-Boot and its closely related device tree. After some internal investigation, a reasonable rough estimate could be at least 100 hours, but it may take more to reach the goal.

We do not have yet a formal quotation of the design of the heat pipes for cooling down both the CPU and the MXM video card. During an informal discussion with electronic engineers that have experience in the design and production of these heat pipes, we estimated approximately 10000 euros.

To sum up, the title of next campaign is “Development of software components and heat pipes for the Powerboard Tyche” and its breakdown costs are the following:

  • Around 100 hours of work of a software engineer(s) for the customized U-Boot, the device tree and the AMD/ATI Radeon video driver: 5000 euros
  • JTAG debugger 1000 euro
  • design of the heat pipes and production of 3 of them for the three prototypes: 10000 euro

The estimated amount to collect with the next campaign is 16000 euros.

We really hope that you will assist us once again during this final journey. We are that close to making it happen: a 64 bit, multi core, PowerPC based notebook fully open hardware with up to today’s standards devices and interfaces!

Prototypes testing results

Posted on by Communications Team
Picture by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

The laptop prototypes testing is progressing great. We tested the primary power supply stage of the CPU, one the most power hungry components in the board, and it is being fine-tuned thanks to a programming apparatus. The chip in charge to power up the CPU NXP T2080 is the Texas Instruments TPS544B20RVFT (Switching Voltage Regulators 4.5-18V 20A SWIFT) as explained at page 37 in our electrical schematics.

The start-up ramp needs to be carefully calibrated, a complex integrated circuit with a some logic that needs to be programmed to make it work properly (i.e. ramps, voltage thresholds, internal ways of making the PWM regulator work, and so on).

The other power supplies are a half a dozen voltage regulators and are meant to power elements such as the PCIe, the RAM, the internal peripheral buses, the connected devices, the Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) and the clock generators the are essential to make the board work properly. The Eclipse Legacy Battery was tested and is recharging properly.

The Complex Programmable Logic Device (CPLD) is a Lattice LCMXO640C-3TN100C FPGA and has to be programmed to manage all those external peripherals connected to it (see the block diagram and wiring diagram on page 15 ), manage interrupts, data, boot reads, set resources according to the CPU and reset all peripherals.

Powerboard Tyche, top side. The visible biggest gray chip is the CPU NXP T2080 Power Architecture CPU.

So far so good, the electronic design seems to work correctly, at the moment we are only fine-tuning each electronic component. If all checks continues like this, we might end all electronic debugging in the next few weeks and we can consider this very delicate phase successfully completed. After that, we plan to place the first code in the CPLD, and right after that we should be ready to load U-Boot, the first-stage and second-stage bootloader. We are trying to re-patch a recent version of U-Boot, quite some time has passed since we patched it to make it recognizing the graphic board we mounted on the PCIe port on the NXP T2080RDB board. Not just that, we must carefully customize the device tree to correctly map all peripherals available on the motherboard.

If for it concern the electronical components we can safely rely on the (paid) support of an expert engineer, for setting up U-Boot it’s up to us to make it work properly, and more importantly, to make it correctly recognize all peripherals, especially the SD card, the FLASH and, even more importantly, the two DDR3L RAM slots.

We would like to thank everyone for the continuous flow of donations, and please, continue to do so.

At the moment we still need funding to cover the extra costs we faced for the simply crazy prices we paid for the electronical components mounted on the prototypes motherboards and especially for getting our hands on two MXM graphic boards based on AMD chips.

For two MXM AMD E9174 video cards with 4GB RAM we have spent 780 dollars ( 360 each) and 185 euro of import Tax around 965 euro .Considering all chips, the cost of each prototype resulted 1200 euros higher than what was initially planned 4392 euros more (1200 x 3 + 22% VAT). So we need to collect around 5357 euro more than the goal of the last donation campaign.

Donations and professional for u-boot

In addition, after an initial round of experiments, we are still struggling to successfully customize U-Boot and to properly setup the device tree. Most of us already spent quite some time on the task during our spare time (remember, we are all volunteers with a proper day job and a personal life ;), so we are seriously evaluating to assign the job to a professional to get the job done in a reasonable amount of time, and to do that we need your financial support!

Prototypes ready, let’s proceed to test them.

Posted on by Communications Team

Finally, the three prototypes are ready as you can clearly see from the pictures below.

The resulting cost of each prototype resulted in 1200 euros (without VAT) higher than what was initially planned due to the global shortages of electronic components that have skyrocketed prices of some important chips. So, more donations are needed to fund these 4392 euros more (1200 x 3 + 22% VAT).

Powerboard Tyche, bottom side.
Powerboard Tyche, top side. The visible biggest gray chip is the CPU NXP T2080 Power Architecture CPU.

Now the Hardware Tests stage has started, but prior to that we still need to solder the HDMI connector that has arrived too late to be included during the production phase.

Soon, our Open Hardware motherboard called “Powerboard Tyche” will be inserted in its notebook body chassis for starting the multiple hardware tests.
Below, you can see a picture of the old dummy PCB used for testing how to fit in the notebook.

Slimbook Eclipse Notebook
The external view of the Notebook body

The notebook specifications are the following:

  • CHASSIS: Slimbook Eclipse notebook case 15,6”
  • 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 DDR3L SO-DIMM slots
  • VIDEO: MXM3 Radeon HD Video Card (removable)
  • AUDIO: C-Media 8828 sound chip, audio IN and audio OUT jacks
  • USB: 3.0 and 2.0 ports
  • STORAGE:
  • NETWORK:
    • 1 x Gigabit ethernet RJ-45 connector
    • WiFi connectivity
    • Bluetooth connectivity
  • POWER: on-board battery charger and power-management

Powerboard Tyche PCB source

This work was made using Mentor Expedition and it is ready and uploaded into our repository with all reported issues fixed, including issue number 5, the last one corrected . Thanks to our collaborators we are able to export this work using Altium form so the next days we will publish it and we will try to convert it to Open Source Kicad format ( and probably loosing something in the conversion process) . In our older post we have give more details regarding the PCB sources.

Prototypes in production despite heavy chip shortages

Posted on by Communications Team

We were supposed to start the production of the laptop prototypes at the end of last September but we stumble upon skyrocketing prices, especially regarding four fundamental chips. We had no other choice but to pay those incredible much higher prices, the only alternative would have been to stop all our activities.

We are glad to inform you that this week the prototypes production has started and – finger crossed – we are expecting them to be ready in the beginning of November. The following are the four fundamental chips and their actual cost:

  • Marvell Sata 3 controller 88SE9235A1-NAA2C000, around 130 euro per piece + VAT, 1 per PCB, total 3 pieces
  • TPS544B20RVFT 4.5-V to 18-V, 20-A synchronous SWIFT™ buck converter with PMBus programmability and monitoring around 550 euro per piece + VAT, 1 per PCB, total 3 pieces
  • 6-port, 12-lane, PCIe 2.0 Packet Switch PI7C9X2G612GP – Diodes around 250 euro per piece + VAT, 1 per PCB, total 3 pieces
  • Surge Suppressors 100V OV, UV, OC and Reverse Supply Protection Controller with -50mV Reverse Threshold LTC4368IDD-1#PBF around 100 euro per piece + VAT, 1 per PCB, total 3 pieces

The HDMI connectors (2041481-1) were completely impossible to find on the market in a reasonable amount of time. After long research, we could finally solve the problem thanks once again to the kind support of Slimbook, they will soon send us three connectors, one for each prototype.

Considering all chips, the cost of each prototype resulted 1200 euros higher than what was initially planned, 3600 euros more ( + 22% VAT) considering all three prototypes currently in production. You may find more information about these three prototypes in the post of July 2022 and May 2022.

As already stated in our post back in July, we are still asking you to continue donating as to help us supporting the dramatic increase in the actual costs we personally anticipated to proceed with the production. You may continue use the current campaign to donate.

Our presence for October-November in Free Software and IT events

We have planned our next speech at the LinuxDay in Milan (Italy) on the 22nd of October.

We are at NXP Technology Days in Milano on 27th October with our exposition, we are very glad for this opportunity that NXP has given us.

We hope to first show at least one prototype at the SFScon – Free Software Conference – on the 11th of November in Bolzano (Italy) in the occasion of our next speech.

Ready for Prototypes production with reworked PCB design with all available components

Posted on by Communications Team
Image by Dmitry Abramov from Pixabay

AMD MXM video cards in our hands!

As we have already published in July’s post, our AMD retailer informed us that the new MXM video cards will not be available. We have selected a manufacturer that still produce and sell affordable MXM AMD based video cards (Type A – size 82mm x 70mm) .

At the moment, AMD open source drivers are better than NVIDIA ones, so in our opinion it is the best option for GNU/Linux and the unique solution to support Amiga OS derivates. Then, even if it is easier to find NVIDIA MXM Video Cards ( Type A) we are still preferring to use AMD MXM video cards.

As a consequence, we have ordered and received two MXM AMD E9174 video cards with 4GB RAM, actually is the only option available as the 2GB version is not available anymore.

Main Features
AMD Embedded Radeon E9174
Supports DirectX 12, Vulkan, OpenGL 4.5, Open CL 2.0
MXM 3.0 Type A
Support for 5 outputs
128-bit width, 4GB, GDDR5 Memory

They are ready to be tested with our prototypes. We have spent 780 dollars ( 360 each) and 185 euro of import Tax. It was possible to buy them thanks to the last donations that surpassed the goal of the dedicated CE Certification donation campaign so, thanks again to all donors

Published Powerboard Tyche PCB reworked source

Finally, the reworked PCB design source of Powerboard Tyche with the updated available components is ready ( in older posts you can go more deep about “our” electronic components shortage issues). This work was made using Mentor Expedition and it is ready and uploaded into our repository with all reported issues fixed, including issue number 5, the last one corrected . Thanks to our collaborators we are able to export this work using Altium form so the next days we will publish it and we will try to convert it to Open Source Kicad format ( and probably loosing something in the conversion process) . In our older post we have give more details regarding the PCB sources.

Inside Output folder you can find many interesting files easy simple viewable like the “the plot separate sheet” CAM350/DFMSTREAM and the Motherboard Assembly TOP and BUTTOM.

As a conclusion now we have everything to produce and make the hardware tests in September.