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.
PCB Design of Desktop Powerboard Tyche
Starting from the source of the Electronic Schematics design design the PCB means prepare all physical PCB layers lanes and components disposition and connection to go in production with prototypes.
Designer have take from NXP Devkit design ( 2023 version) everything is related to boot process and many parts from our Notebook design, except what is not needed for Dekstop version, like the Battery part.
SPECS
Form Factor: Micro ATX
CPU: NXP T2080, e6500 64-bit Power Architecture with Altivec technology
4 x e6500 dual-threaded cores, low-latency backside 2MB L2 cache, 16GFLOPS x core
RAM: 2 x DDR3 slots
VIDEO
PCIE3 x16 VIDEO Card 1PCIE2 x4 VIDEO Card 2
AUDIO: C-Media 8828 sound chip, audio IN and audio OUT jacks
USB: 3.0 and 2.0 ports
STORAGE:
NVM Express (NVMe)M.2 2280 connector2 x SATA21 x SDHC card reader
NETWORK:
2 x Gigabit ethernet RJ-45 connector
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If you registered an account, please enter your details below to login. If this is your first time, proceed to the donation form.
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Milestones
Phase 1: Schematics Design : started on 14.07.2025
Phase 2: PCB Design : goal 31.01.2026 [depend on donations collected]
Phase 3: Prototypes Production: goal 01.04.2026 [depend on donations collected]
Phase 4: Prototypes Tests. : goal 01.06.2026 [depend on donations collected]
The timing of milestone depend from your donation. Thanks!
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Payment Methods
Online Donation โ PayPal
Press Donate and as Payment Method select PayPal You can choose one time donations, or recurring -smaller- monthly donations ( and with others selected frequency). ( How stop paypal recurring payment )
Online Donation โ Stripe
Press Donate and as Payment Method select Stripe You can choose one time donations, or recurring -smaller- monthly donations ( and with others selected frequency).
Offline Donation โ Bank credit transfer
These are the bank account details for donating:
Bank name: Banca Popolare Etica
Bank account owner: Power Progress Community OdV
IBAN: IT94X0501801600000012339610
Beneficiary Bank (57)
Code BIC/ SWIFT: ETICIT22XXX
Banca popolare Etica SCPA Via N. Tommaseo 7, 35131 Padova (PD)
Intermediary Bank (56A)
Code BIC/ SWIFT: POSOIT22XXX
Banca popolare di Sondrio
Piazza Garibaldi 16, 23100 Sondrio (SO)
CAUSE:โPPC notebook donation โ NAME and SURNAMEโ
Where the NAME and SURNAME are the same you will fill in the Donate page.
After you have made the bank transfer press Donate and as Payment Method select Offline Donation.
In Offline donation the recurring donations is only a declaration of intent as the system doesn’t do anything for you.
Anonymous Donations
When you make the donation (offline or online) you can choose to make your donation anonymous.
Preferred payment method and TransferWise / CurrencyFair
Our preferred payment method to receive donations (to keep commission and also your costs low) would be:
EU donors: Bank Transfer (online or offline)Non-EU donors: Bank Transfer with services like Wise or CurrencyFair
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Donations are liberal and not refundable
The Power Progress Community is a nonprofit organization established in Italy. The Italian law allow to collect liberal and not refundable donations meant to pursue the missions and projects of the association and not give back products.
Restrictions for a nonprofit associations in Italy
An organization like ours has to take into account the following constraints:
A nonprofit association cannot make commercial products;The association can receive donations, but cannot refund them;The association must be coherent with its mission, and is allowed to ask for donations for their achieving the goals.
So, what we can do to start our project is based on the points below:
The association can have a particular goal to reach and ask donation to achieve it, but it cannot give back the money (no refunds).Donation must be altruist so, no one will receive something back for their donation.Italian law allows an association to finance an R&D for a project or activity.
What happens if the campaign fails?
As stated above, we will not be able to refund the donors in any case. Because of that, if the money collected is not enough to fund this research we will use it for another goal within the mission of the organization.
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Will all the received money be used for the research?
Almost, as any payment platform available, either PayPal, Stripe or the Bank account transfers, have a fee applied to each donation. As non-profit organization we have inside EU 1,8%+0,35euro of commission, outside EU 2,8%+0,35 euro ( from some country we see that could arrive to 4% of commission) for paypal. In case your bank transfer is from outside EU, for us bank commission cost is high: 6 euro, so we strongly suggest to use service like Transferwise to decrease the commission cost for both.
Open Hardware Certificaion
As a final remark, we will try to adhere to the Open Source Hardware requirements in the design of this laptop motherboard, therefore we are strongly committed in avoiding any hardware component requiring an NDA (Not Disclosure Agreement).
For this purpose, we have contacted many chips vendors in order to verify their agreement to distribute as Open Source Hardware our electrical schematics and PCB design obtained in this second campaign.
Among others, NXP which is the company producing the selected CPU, has answered positively for the Powerboard Tyche Notebook that had taken from T2080RDB Revision C design, now we are waiting the level and parts that they agreed for T2080RDB Revision F, that’s the new version that we have use for the new design of Powerboard Tyche Desktop,
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. Thanks to their work, are clear the practical implications of the requirements for the OSWHA Open Hardware certification, and cross-checked our approach and adopted solutions with OSWHA personnel.
An important part of being considered Open Hardware compliant (OSHWA Open Hardware certification), require that everything that is under our control and that is 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 will ask us to remove technical details that we were not supposed to disclose, we will comply to their requests by removing the published material, but that will do not impact on our compliance to OSHWA Open Hardware certification because we could demonstrate that we strived to be as open as we could.
We are sure that you will be satisfied by the final PCB design, and you will be proud of being one of the contributors that could make materialize the first and only Open Hardware complaint PowerPC desktop motherboard designed around GNU/Linux!!โ
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.
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.
During the last shipment of one of the Devkit at our disposal, the power supply (already replaced) and the T2080 motherboard were damaged, so we are currently unable to test Debian 13 on it.
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
