powerboard tyche Archives - GNU/Linux Open Hardware PowerPC notebook

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.

98.96% Raised

€13,854.00 donated of €14,000.00 goal

65 Donors

17 Days Left

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.