Ready to switch to first Open Hardware GNU/Linux PowerPC notebook & desktop

It's the right time to be protagonist and active to put together the first Open Hardware PowerPC Notebook & Desktop designed around GNU/Linux

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OSHW PowerPC Notebook Chassi + Motherboard

HowTo

Libre Hardware and Software are bricks of our societies and should be in our hands! We as community we have conceived, designed and realized the OSHW PowerPC Notebook motherboard prototypes. Now for getting the core computing platform stable and functional we need your participation.

Group Synergy

Open Hardware Community Driven. Improving and enriching human relations and collaboration among us permit our Community the conceive, design and produce prototypes of our Open Hardware motherboard. What we do is governed and possibile by our Community. New projects will be launched thanks to the arrival of new volunteers like you.

DIY Maker Mindset

We collaborate with volunteers to create the opportunity to experience hands-on learning, to inspire creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving trying to conceive, design and produce what we need or desire. We encourage this culture from primary schools to University and with no age limit.

Open Hardware Community Driven

Our open hardware projects are governed by our Community that is open. Our Community conceive, design and produce and where needed, thanks to donations, we pay engineers. We are quite slow because we solve problems thank to our passion, creativity and obstinacy.

Democratize Electronic design and production

We seek to encourage communities to acquire the skills and capabilities necessary to produce hardware and software independently and to have control over it. Therefore, we promote local and decentralized design and production.

European Presentations – Autumn 2019

Posted on November 21, 2019 by Communications Team

25th October Valencia – Spain

Guillermo is updating about our project on 25h October 2019 at GNU/Linux Valencia Group

For the second time we were giving a talk to the GNU/Linux Valencia Group, a local Linux group located in the city of Valencia, Spain, which is doing a great job promoting Linux and open source in general. Guillermo gave a brief explanation of the project from the beginning to the present, the objectives, technical specifications, other related projects of the Power Progress Community association, FAQs about the project and so on.

In particular the group was updated about everything that has occurred in the project since the last time we visited them. One of the key points was the collaboration with Slimbook, this collaboration started just because of last year meeting with the group as this company is located at the same city and his CEO is one of the founders of this Valencian group. The company will provide the laptop body and is supporting our team giving all specifications we need.

You can find an article covering this meeting in the GNU/Linux Valencia group page (in Spanish):

CRÓNICA DEL HABLEMOS DE OCTUBRE: THE GNU/LINUX POWERPC NOTEBOOK PROJECT

201910 valencia gnu linux es from Guillermo Amat

Guillermo PowerPC Notebook Project Presentation slides at Valencia 2019

Linux Day Milano – Italy 26th October 2019

This year we have as expositor our running DIY wooden desktop case with the T2080rdb devkit, with our new Power Progress Community T-shirt, with our Posters with our “Revivo with Scratch” manifest , searching notebook to recondition.

People are quite exited using our PowerPC 64 Desktop based on the same CPU NXP T0280 of our future notebook motherboard.

Many young people reach our table and talk with us.

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 →

Slimbook to provide the notebook chassis

Posted on September 29, 2019 by Communications Team

One of the main points when you are designing a laptop is the relationship between the motherboard and the enclosure. It is not a good idea to design the motherboard if you don’t have the chassis. At the same time, the enclosure has to take into account how the motherboard will be.

Now we are happy to announce that Slimbook will provide the enclosure we need for our Open Hardware PowerPC notebook. ACube and Slimbook are collaborating since the beginning of this year, exchanging information about components disposition and pinouts, thermal dissipation and so on.

ACube is a well known company with experience in creating PowerPC computers including Sam460ex and Sam460cr motherboards or the AmigaOne 500 desktop system.

Slimbook is having a great success selling their own Linux laptops (such as the ProX) and mini PCs world-wide.

Due to this collaboration we have almost everything we need to achieve our goal in terms of technology.

Electrical Schematics final version

We want to update you that first days of October we will publish in our repository the pdf containing the final version of the schematics. After that, during October, the Orca source will be available as well, tailored for the Slimbook chassis. This means that the design of the PCB will fit inside the Slimbook chassis.

In case you are able to convert Orca source to Kicad you are welcome to do it. If you have any issue when doing so, contact us and we will be happy to provide some help.

New ppc64 applications in our repo

Lastly, we have patched the following applications for ppc64 (Big Endian) : arcticfox, palemoon, mame, fs-uae, libx265, qemu, midori. They run on PowerMac/ImacG5 ( Power4 processor) but also on more recent Big Endian ppc64 processors such as NXP T2xxx and T4xxx.

We are also working on many other complex applications like Blender that require the creation of dedicated groups for the distribution of the necessary effort.

We’re performing tests, reporting bugs and suggesting workarounds to complete the installation of Debian 10.0 using ISOs released by the maintainers of Debian ports for ppc64be.

If you want to join the software workgroup and help these software tasks feel free to contact us.

C-Media supports our Open Source PowerPC design

Posted on August 6, 2019 by Communications Team

We announce the cooperation with C-Media. C-Media is a global leading audio IC/software solution provider.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/zenmama/13930451071/

In this post we want to explain one of our latest achievements. During the present year we have been looking for an audio chip to be included in our motherboard. We found that the CM8828 HD-Audio controller and CM9882A Codec family was a good candidate. After some discussion with them explaining our project, they decided to support us. Furthermore, they have sent the Evaluation Board to Acube.

Maybe more important is the fact that C-Media will provide the needed chips for the production of our notebook. They know that their chips will be in our Open Source Hardware motherboard and will provide us with the needed information to write drivers as may be needed. In addition to this, we have ordered three pci sound cards based on CM8828/CM9882A to test with our T2080 Devkits and for Acube developments.

In the end, all these little steps are very interesting for our project, as this audio chip has high end specs but the most important point is that we have a direct and good communication with the manufacturer. We want to thank C-Media for supporting our project and believe in Open Source Hardware.

Link to download the Datasheet of C-Media CM8828.