So at 27th September at “Pianeta Amiga” event, we were able to have one prototype of our Open Hardware Powerboard Tyche, more details in our past post.
Thanks to every donor we are very near to reach the goal for Prototype Campaign, we have other 48 hours to conclude, no other time left. After this last strong effort needed to pay the prototype to the manufacturer we have reached the mountain peak.
To our project have been awarded grants from NLnet Foundation and NGI Zero
The final effort Around 2000 euro to donate in 48 hours
What means that we ask you to concentrate your support before this 31th October 2026, because we need to pay the manufacturer before 31th October 2026 and the funds we will receive in December. For the next few months, we shouldn’t have to pressure you to make large donations on short notice.
Thanks of this donation campaign we will pay for three Dekstop Powerboard Tyche physical prototypes, a very important step that will: put the PCB design to the test allow to learn how to correctly initialize the hardware enable the fine-tuning the configuration of U-Boot The sources for our desktop board have been reviewed by NXP Open Hardware Schematics Sources Our GitLab repository https://gitlab.com/power-progress-community/oshw-powerpc-desktop-tyche/-/tree/main/KiCad?ref_type=heads the OrCad schematics source, converted to Altium and then imported into KiCad, thanks to our association members.
€9,460.00 donated of €9,100.00 goal
Our firmware and hardware engineers testing on our Powerboard Tyche Desktop
The CPLD and uPic programming is done so you can see few SPD messages.
Until today, the Prototypes campaign covered five prototypes with a goal of €11,000. We have now reduced the number of prototypes to three in order to cut costs, so the campaign goal has been updated to €9,100 — great news!
Powerboard Tyche Desktop rendering based on the PCB design loaded for Prototype production
Power Progress Community ODV and ACube Systems are putting our hearts into this challenge: we have signed the contract with the manufacturer to start prototype production, even though we have less than three months left to raise the remaining funds needed to cover the production costs.
All the donors who have supported this project for years — first for the Notebook prototypes, and now for the Desktop — want something tangible and functional. This is why we have signed to start prototype production, aiming to have the prototypes ready by the end of September 2026.
Our desktop design reuses a significant part of the latest (2023) version of the solid, proven source design of the NXP T2080RDB Development Kit, combined with elements of our own design — USB3, audio chip, dual RAM slots, and other features we originally defined in late 2017 for our first notebook motherboard, with additional features added in 2025 for the desktop. You can go more deep on this redesign.
In January 2026, our desktop board design was reviewed by NXP, resulting in a few fixes that allowed us to improve the quality and robustness of our design
Prototype production setup will begin after the summer holidays, starting on 24 August 2026, and we will keep you updated on progress. It is possible, though not easy, to have the prototype ready by the end of September 2026 — we are doing our best to make that happen.
Over the past months, your support and donations have been incredibly generous, allowing us to fund the PCB design quickly and already reach a good percentage of the current donation campaign. Thanks to your generosity, we believe we can reach the goal in time.
We remain fully committed to making an open-hardware, notebook-based PowerPC machine a reality. The desktop version is the right step to let more people own, enjoy, and test software on this platform while spending less money.The notebook fork will resume once the desktop version is in production.
A closer look at our desktop motherboard
As you can see in the board block diagram below, here are some more details about the board:
High-quality audio (optical digital audio inputs and outputs, six analog RCA connectors for 7.1 surround sound, separate ground connections for the analog and digital sections to ensure maximum sound clarity)
Two DDR3/DDR3L slots
Three PCIe connectors (one PCIe Gen3 x4 on an x16 slot for a video card, one PCIe Gen2 x4 for a secondary video card, one PCIe Gen2 x1)
I2C/UART connector
Two M.2 slots (one 80 mm, based on PCIe Gen3 x4, for the primary SSD; one 30/42/60/80 mm, based on PCIe Gen2 x4)
Two SATA2 connectors
One microSD slot
Four USB3 ports (2 rear, 2 front)
Two USB2 ports (rear)
Two Ethernet ports (allowing firewall use)
The NXP T2080 Processor include DPAA incorporating acceleration for the following functions:
Packet parsing, classification and distribution up to 24Gb/s (FMAN)
Queue management for scheduling, packet sequencing and congestion management of up to 2^24 queues (QMAN)
Hardware buffer management for buffer allocation and de-allocation with 64 buffer pools (BMAN)
ntegrated security acceleration (SEC) to 10 Gbp
Decompression/compression acceleration at up to 17.5 Gbps (DCE)
Signature detection (PME) to 10Gb/s
DPAA support of RapidIO® messaging (RMAN)
Powerboard Tyche Desktop Silkscreen
Running Debian PowerPC from 2016 with PowerPC NXP T2080 processor
Since 2016 we have been testing Debian PPC64 on our T2080RDB devkit, which was also used during 2023–2025 to test our past notebook prototypes (it broke down this year, likely due to the stress of transport), as well as on the many Mac G4/G5 machines owned by our volunteers.
We have a second T2080RDB devkit, kindly lent to us by an NXP employee over the past two years, which we have used to develop the U-Boot Radeon driver and for comparison testing against our notebook prototype board — and which will also be useful for testing the new desktop board with our JTAG debugger.
We even tested successfully the latest releasee 47.3 of ArcticFox Browser for PowerPC (32bit) oWe have also successfully tested the latest release, 47.3, of the ArcticFox browser for PowerPC (32-bit) on a G4.
Having a modern browser that runs on PowerPC is vitally important. ArcticFox runs exceptionally well on PowerPC — without it, what would we do?
If you’d like to try ArcticFox on any of its supported platforms (Mac OS X 10.6+, Linux [PowerPC, x86, amd64, ARM, MIPS], NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Windows XP), you can reach out directly at https://github.com/rmottola/Arctic-Fox or If you’d like to help bring ArcticFox to PowerPC you can contact us.
There are two open issues to resolve for the upcoming ArcticFox 48.0 release, both related to Big Endian compilation (required for PowerPC and PPC64):
As of 31 May, we have completed the fundraising campaign to cover the cost of the PCB designs for our Tyche Desktop Open Hardware Powerboard. Thanks to your generous donations, we have exceeded the campaign’s target, meaning that the new campaign to produce prototypes of the board is already underway with 15% of the funds raised.
All the donors who have been supporting the project for years – first the Notebook and now the Desktop – want something tangible and functional; this is why we must continue this race against time to raise funds so that we can produce the prototypes by September 2026.
We remain absolutely committed to making an Open-Hardware Notebook-based PowerPC machine a reality. The desktop version is the right step to allow more people, spending less money, to soon own, enjoy, and test software on this Desktop version. With a few changes and reintegrating the battery part of our previous Notebook, it will give rise to the Notebook version!
Prototypes of Desktop Powerboard Tyche
Thanks of this donation campaign we will pay for threeDekstop Powerboard Tyche physical prototypes, a very important step that will:
put the PCB design to the test allow to learn how to correctly initialize the hardware
enable the fine-tuning the configuration of U-Boot
The sources for our desktop board have been reviewed by NXP Open Hardware Schematics Sources
The timing of milestone depend from your donation. Thanks!
Headline
Payment Methods
Online Donation – 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 – 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 – 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:“liberal donation – NAME and SURNAME”
( for person with italian fiscal code if you specify your fiscal code your donation is tax deducible)
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
<br...
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.
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
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!!
It is so important that every country, every community needs to have people capable of designing, producing and validating electronics and software powering every building, vehicle, hospital, medical devices, school, university, aqueduct, sewage treatment, power plant, every piece of the infrastructure we depend on for our lives.
And that’s why is so important that we complete an Open Hardware Desktop designed around free software, involving students, and young, and previously young people, to be able to build the bricks of our society.
Thanks to your support, this Open Hardware Desktop first, and then the Notebook, will demonstrate in practice that a group of common people could create computers that respect our freedom.
In case you have not PowerPC hardware we can give you access to the Power9 VM we have free at Open Source Lab at Oregon Stage University. thanks to the support of , so you can test and fix the package inside this VM.
We have been on the Fediverse for a few years now. You can find and follow us at: hostux.social/@powerprogress. Please follow us and share our posts to spread the word. Thank you for your continued support!
The PCB design is finally complete, and we are officially ready for prototype production.
However, before taking the big step, we need to balance the PCB design costs:
3,050 euros at the end of April;
3,050 euros at the end of May;
To produce the first five prototypes, we need a total of around 9,000 euros. Until we have the cash flow to make this commitment with the manufacturer, we will not sign the contract to go into production.
Thanks of this donation campaign we will pay for three Dekstop Powerboard Tyche physical prototypes, a very important step that will: put the PCB design to the test allow to learn how to correctly initialize the hardware enable the fine-tuning the configuration of U-Boot The sources for our desktop board have been reviewed by NXP Open Hardware Schematics Sources Our GitLab repository https://gitlab.com/power-progress-community/oshw-powerpc-desktop-tyche/-/tree/main/KiCad?ref_type=heads the OrCad schematics source, converted to Altium and then imported into KiCad, thanks to our association members.
We will only be able to publish the open-source design after paying the design costs and only when prototype production is underway. This is for two fundamental reasons:
Before paying, we do not own the rights to the source files.
The source files will only be considered final after physically testing the prototypes.
Furthermore, our manufacturer ACube Systems can only afford to produce the Desktop board for the first time if no one else beats them to the market. After all the hard work done to make this dream a reality, it is our duty to protect them.
A special campaign: win the historic laptop PCB!
Since the current donation flow is insufficient to cover the design costs and start production, we are exploring new ways to raise funds.
One of the ideas we are considering is a special giveaway: we will raffle off a PCB from our previous prototype (the laptop version) among all donors who contribute from now until we reach the 9,000 euro goal.
Please note: this is a “dummy” PCB (non-functional), produced solely to verify the physical dimensions of the board. It was never an operational prototype. We hope this piece of our journey’s history can motivate the community to help us cross the finish line!
T-shirts, gadgets, and the “DY Maker” spirit
We are preparing T-shirts and other gadgets dedicated to the PowerPC Notebook and Desktop projects, also linked to our association DY Maker mindset.
We collaborate with volunteers to create the opportunity to experience hands-on learning, to inspire creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving by trying to conceive, design, and produce what we need or desire. We encourage this culture from primary schools to University, with no age limit.
Soon we will ask you to vote on different options for T-shirts and gadgets. After that, we will open pre-orders for t-shirts, stickers, and much more!
Our recent events
We have been very active locally:
March 13 – Bolzano, Italy: We shared our project with electronics students at Free University of Bozen · Bolzano – Faculty of Engineering – Electronics and Information Engineering, just as we did in Milan in May 2025. In agreement with the professors, we discussed possible university theses in collaboration with our association.
March 14 – Trento, Italy: We were hosted by Hack in Povo in collaboration with LinuxTrent, where we presented the history of our projects.
Desktop board specifications
Our Desktop board is a Micro ATX measuring 244 mm in height and 172 mm in width. When it comes to audio, we didn’t hold back: it features optical digital audio inputs and outputs, 6 analog RCA connectors for 7.1 surround sound, and separate ground connections for the analog and digital sections to ensure maximum sound clarity.
Software and PCB source roadmap
Stage 1: Soon we will convert the Schematics source files from Cadence to Altium, and then to KiCad. In the meantime, there is a free viewer for Orcad sources at this official Cadence link. We also point out an interesting open project that has started importing Orcad sources directly into KiCad: OpenOrCadParser.
Stage 2: Thanks to your donations, once we have collected enough funds to balance the design and prototypes, we will merge and import the PCB source files from PADS directly into KiCad. This is now possible thanks to the brand new importers introduced in KiCad 10: learn more on the KiCad blog.
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.
€4,100.00 donated of €4,100.00 goal
Let’s stay in touch!
We have been on the Fediverse for a few years now. You can find and follow us at: hostux.social/@powerprogress. Please follow us and share our posts to spread the word. Thank you for your continued support!
This project has been in the public eye for several years now, working together with supporters who have backed us through the long process of creating notebook prototypes. Over the last eight months, we have focused on developing a desktop version largely redesigned to be immediately functional
As promised, the sources for our desktop board have been reviewed by NXP. They suggested a few changes, which we have implemented. The review process cost us an additional €850, but it was worth it: we have improved our schematics and PCB design just in time for the prototypes.
Great news: NXP confirmed we can publish the schematics with an Open Hardware License! We have already uploaded the PDF version to GitLab.
However, before publishing the raw source files, we need to convert them from the proprietary OrCAD format to KiCad to ensure everyone can use them. As such, we need collaborators to help us bridge the gap.
If you would like to reserve a production desktop board this summer, we need donations to cover €6,100 for the remaining costs of the PCB design, as well as the expenses associated with prototypes and testing in the coming months. ACube Systems will handle the production because we are a nonprofit organization not allowed to sell physical products.
We are doing the necessary work to reach production, despite the obstacles. The difficult part, the uncertainty, is behind us. Now we are missing a very simple ingredient: funds. We need to raise a few thousand euros in a window of 2-3 months. Simple, but not easy.
Join us on this journey!
Donate, tell your friends, and share our project. In order to enjoy the PowerPC motherboard later, we must all work together now by joining the donation campaign in large numbers.
