January Post Update PCB Campaign

Schematics design: February 2019

The schematics are still under review by our hardware volunteers and Acube itself, we hope to publish the initial schematic design before the end of February 2019 in our gitlab repository. It will be a Work-In-Progress schematic design. As the schematic design is a Work-In-Progress we will only publish the pdf.  We will publish the Orcad files when the schematic design will be finalized. In parallel to the schematic design being released to the public, we will begin the PCB Layout Donation Campaign.

The schematics will be updated later including all laptop external connectors actually present on the laptop chassis, due to the selection of the chassis to use is still pending.

We plan to begin the PCB Layout Donation Campaign before the end of February 2019.

You can find more information related to the chip components inside the schematic design you can find in the previous post

Sfscon Bolzano – Italy – November 2018

At 16th November 2018 at Sfscon.it we have made our project presentation speech in the bigger room with the presence of around one hundred people ( even though it was late and it was the penultimate) .

We have talked about the steps done by us for our project of Open Hardware PowerPC GNU/Linux based Notebook. We have disclosed a preview of our electrical schematics and informed about the next steps.It was for us an honour to present our project near important speakers and just before Simon Phipps  which is the President at the Open Source Initiative (OSI). We thanks so much IDM Südtirol and Linux User Group Bozen-Bolzano-Bulsan of the Free Software Conference Bozen, South Tyrol, that are the organizers for such an opportunity. You can find the program of the Sfscon 2018 at this link.

SFScon18 – Free Software Conference 2018

Stand at Paris Open Source Summit (POSS) – France – December 2018

Power Progess Community was represented for the first time at the Open Source Summit held from December 5 to 6, 2018 in the vicinity of the French capital

The annual Open Source Summit event focuses on the promotion of free and open source softwares in the Paris region, bringing together both the various associative communities and companies.
We had for a first presence many visitors interested in our initiative.

We’d like to thank the team at Parinux.org and Franciliens.net to allow us to participate to the POSS event. Open Source Summit – Paris – December 2018

POSS 2018 – Eduard that inform about our PowerPC Notebook project

Open Source Laptop Chassis Design

Thanks to some collaborators there is a first setup of the design of a future Open Source laptop chassis design, done in FreeCad. You can find the design in our repo.

If you like to collaborate to the Open Source Laptop chassis design please contact us.

For more information you can check in the dedicated site

Building in the Minicloud

We want to thank the University of Campinas in Brazil for their support and for the excellent service (called Minicloud) they are offering. The Minicloud provides free access to POWER virtual machines that can be used for development, testing or migration of applications to POWER. The virtual machines of Minicloud run on OpenStack, which supports running a large number of virtual machines on a single scale-out Linux server. We are using their infrastructure to build our Yocto based distribution. Currently we are upgrading all the project to Yocto 2.6 and this task is being performed in a Minicloud VM. If you have a project which follows the basic rules explained before, you can ask for an account here https://minicloud.parqtec.unicamp.br/minicloud/ .

First engineering task to be started soon

First engineering task to be started soon

https://www.flickr.com/photos/takkaria/

After reaching the 4000€ milestone we are ready to sign our first contract with ACube Systems. This will allow to start the engineering work and we want to thank all the donors for making this possible! All supporters are contributing to keep us moving enthusiastically forward. Of course, we still need to achieve the 12600€ goal to end up the analysis phase and to produce the complete electrical schematics and deliver an extensive documentation, but we feel confident in our long term success.

In the meantime we are making progress on our T2080  CPU based development boards. We are working on  booting them  with a Radeon graphic card, so please, if some  uboot expert  like to contribute, please contact us .

Regarding the Radeon card, a few days ago ACube confirmed the inclusion of an MXM connector in the notebook. This is a very good point, as it gives us the possibility to deliver the basis for an upgradeable laptop.

Finally, we would like to end this article reminding that any  help is more than welcome. New members joined us to collaborate with the hardware team (i.e. the above mentioned boot process) and many people are contributing in spreading our campaign in the  social networks. We need to reach more donors as they will help us reaching our goal and to release a truly Open Source PowerPC Notebook. So please, tell everybody about this project on forums, social networks, and why not, have a chat about it with your friends during these summer evenings.

News to share from our “social” pages:
http://twitter.com/powerpcnotebook
http://www.facebook.com/powerpcnotebook/
https://plus.google.com/communities/103352717884355831498
https://www.linkedin.com/groups/7300932

If you like to collaborate with us or give us some suggestions you can fill our survey.

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