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1082 discussions

User Replaceable Sockets?
by Alexander Stephen Thomas Ross 01 Apr '15

01 Apr '15

i was wondering about how things like usb sockets and audio and power barrow jacks could be replaced by users or if not then at least not so hard to replace? as they do seam to get knackered due to accidents that happen (partly due to risky living but even then mistakes can and do happen -it only takes one hard tug of a cable to damage the socket.-). would it be possible for rhombus-tech products to have a feature like this sooner than later? or to do it really nicely does it need more ££££ to pay for fancy plastic to click n' replace and therefore with the challenge of just getting products out there and waiting and seeing how things go with the first products it's a feature that if it's going to be implemented, it's one that would be put off for future products? btw you can get magnet usb plug cables: http://www.conrad.de/ce/de/product/1008652/magneticUSB-20-Kabel-USB-20-Micr…

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update mar 2015
by Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton 25 Mar '15

25 Mar '15

ok apologies i haven't been keeping people up-to-date recently as much as i used to. lots still going on. first thing: i learned that the rule "plan to do 3 revisions" applies equally as well to 3D CAD/CAM as it does to software. so with the 15.6in laptop casework i've started again - it's still an Open Hardware project - the 2nd version is simpler and also will be only around 17mm high. the simplicity comes in part from fitting the PCB connectors to protrude from the left hand side instead of from the back, and secondly from having a bit more of a clue about how to put parts together! in the redesign, top-facing parts of the base mostly go front-to-back, whilst underside parts of the base go left-to-right and interlock (overlap) with the top parts. it... also looks better :) also i'm kinda mulling over the idea of filling in the middle parts with bamboo (or other wood / recyclable) laminates, then using very thin stickers to cover the top and bottom to give a smooth surface. second: i was lucky enough (thank you to the shenzen hackerspace member for the introduction) to be referred to factoryforall, which it turns out is run by tully (he worked on the openmoko years ago). tully has set up shop, now, in shenzen, and has a pick-and-place robot, 2 and 4 layer PCB manufacturing facilities, PCB oven, has the contacts for component sourcing, plastic and metal casework... awesome stuff. anyway i've asked him if he can quote for making the EOMA68-JZ4775 CPU Card samples - it's much smaller and more compact than he's used to, but that's just what makes it more exciting :) hampoo will make the 6-layer PCB (they're very very good... just very busy at the moment). later on i will ask tully if he can handle the prototypes for the base units (laptop and so on) as he can do 4 layer in-house no problem. thirdly: thank you to alexander and others who have offered to write up testimonials, as well as the gratipay [1] donations - the idea is to reach lots of people for whom even something like $1 to $10 a week is well within a reasonable budget for them. your help finding people willing to support what i'm doing very gratefully received. l. [1] turns out that gratipay is software libre! https://github.com/gratipay/gratipay.com

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Arietta G25
by joem 25 Mar '15

25 Mar '15

Arietta G25 http://www.acmesystems.it/arietta Cute - 30 euros - plays Doom on touch TFT 400MHz ARM running Linux 3.16.1 kernel.

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libreplanet 2015 is tomorrow, live chat available.
by Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton 20 Mar '15

20 Mar '15

https://libreplanet.org/2015/ which i encountered via this: https://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:Hardware/Freest

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Allwinner's LGPL violation
by Lauri Kasanen 20 Mar '15

20 Mar '15

Hi, There's bit of a stink over Allwinner using LGPL'd code in their binary-only media lib, and then a few days later they try to conceal it by changing function names. Luke, what is your take on that? - Lauri [1] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Allwinner-Obfuscating-Co… [2] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/linux-sunxi/NKyOR4gxYgY

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gratipay
by Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton 19 Mar '15

19 Mar '15

ok i was kindly referred to gratipay, earlier today, as a way to help sustain living expenses whilst these projects are being expanded and completed. i set up a profile here, if anyone would like to help: https://gratipay.com/luke.leighton/ also, this is why those testimonials are important, as i can place a link on that profile page, and anyone reading it can then check that i am actually doing what i say that i am committed to achieving. ... have another go, alexander :) l.

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fsf-endorseable ingenic jz4775 cpu card can go ahead
by Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton 12 Mar '15

12 Mar '15

good news: after being very patient and persistent, my contact at ingenic put me in touch with a support engineer who confirmed that the limitation on the jz4775's reported maximum resolution (1280x720) is for the *video decoder* not the actual LCD output capabilities. the actual LCD output may go as high as something like 1700x1700 (not at 60fps obviously) but that things like 1280x800 @ 60hz (the crucial limit of the eoma68 spec) are fine, as is even 1366x768@60hz. however he did kindly point out that if 720p video decoding [for which the full source is apparently available, which is also great] is attempted to be displayed on a 1366x768 LCD (or greater), there is a bandwidth memory limitation between the video decoder and the lcd buffer which would prooobably end up stalling slightly so that 30fps would be hard to achieve, at full-screen. honestly, i really don't see this as being a huge show-stopper enough to warrant exclusion of a low-cost SoC that could be the first FSF-Endorseable candidate to run GNU/Linux OSes with a decent amount of RAM (2Gbytes). as i've had the first revision PCB done nearly 4 months ago, that just leaves financing of the first revision jz4775 CPU Card to arrange. i have one potential sponsor: if anyone else would like to help out that would be great. we're likely looking at around $USD 1,500 for 5 PCBs. l.

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Any news?
by Paul Boddie 02 Mar '15

02 Mar '15

Hello again, I keep checking the recent changes page on the Rhombus Tech site [1] for progress, but it seems a bit dormant at the moment. Has Chinese New Year (and other seasonal pitfalls) served to keep the pace of development a bit more modest than us impatient onlookers might have liked? ;-) Paul [1] http://rhombus-tech.net/recentchanges/

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LCD cables - anyone know where to get them?
by Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton 13 Jan '15

13 Jan '15

does anyone know - preferably have already bought from and so knows they can do it - of a source of LCD cables? i need QTY 3 cables with an I-PEX-20453-040T connector at both ends, length 0.5 metres. wires not FPC. i found a company in germany however they quotes only deal with companies quotes. l.

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Re: [Arm-netbook] The Unplanned Obsolescence of the First Fairphone Device « Paul Boddie's Free Software-related blog
by Paul Boddie 12 Jan '15

12 Jan '15

Joining the discussion late and breaking the threading... ;-) Nico Rikken wrote: > > Having had recent contact with the Fairphone-team on this issue (as a > potential customer), they state that above all they are interested in > working with the community to get this sorted. Now that they have a > dedicated Software Developer in Kees Jongenburger hopefully they'll be > able to turn things around for future models. We know the difficulties, > but they clearly underestimated the impact of their hardware decision. I must admit that I felt a bit bad complaining about their software strategy when there is someone who does seem to care about the matter (at least now, anyway). But I still feel that the initiative managed to store up a lot of problems that they could easily have avoided. As I noted a year-and-a-half ago [1], the publicity materials seemed to play fast and loose with things like software sustainability and platform openness: mocking up Skype running on a phone (or perhaps just taking a screenshot from an existing phone) might work for much-needed stock images, but it sends the wrong message on a number of issues (Skype being proprietary software, uses a proprietary network, has various intelligence agencies and corporations eavesdropping on conversations, is controlled by a single corporation who happens to have a competing software platform and is shaking down Android product vendors for patent licences). Of course, a lot of the potential audience don't care about that: they just want to be reassured that the materials in the phone are ethically sourced before reaching for their usual toys, and they hadn't then (and probably haven't now) widened their ethical concerns in the areas of privacy and transparency. My impression is that those running the initiative either didn't have such widened concerns, didn't want to tackle such things as well as the other stuff, or just got some bad advice. The sad thing is that good advice could have been had for a tiny fraction of the effort that these people have gone to in the areas of materials sourcing and fair working practices, which as far as I can tell, have been thoroughly dealt with and require a commitment to social justice that involves dealing with some fairly entrenched and, particularly in the case of the minerals supply chain, some rather horrible problems. I have to note that I wouldn't have been so aware of the dubious practices of the hardware business myself if it hadn't been for Luke and others documenting it on this list and elsewhere, or of the mishaps that plagued the first attempt at the Vivaldi tablet, but those lessons have been out there for people to learn from, and it seems now that either those responsible for the groundwork just didn't have the community awareness or that they felt that things would mend themselves when selecting manufacturing partners: itself a compromise between the flexibility to get the software done the right way (potentially treading on toes and "offending" existing suppliers), and the flexibility to change their other practices to make the manufacturing workplace generally fairer. But then again, running a choice of a MediaTek product by just a few knowledgeable people would have been enough to set the alarm bells ringing. Maybe Fairphone would have made the same decision, anyway, and as the notorious Stephen Elop speech [2] noted (dredged up recently in another blog post of mine [3]), cobbling together MediaTek designs and throwing them over the wall was (and undoubtedly still is [4]) common practice, to the point that doing something else might have been a struggle. But as we all know, you have to make and sustain investments to do the right thing. If you look for short-term fixes, you get short-term solutions, and that's what some of Fairphone's customers will be experiencing in the coming months and years. Again, Fairphone have committed themselves to ongoing investments in other areas, and it's a shame that they didn't consider the technological realm worthy of the same consideration. Paul P.S. I just realised that this could have been another complete article. Sorry to make it a long message for this list! :-) P.P.S. For those who haven't read it yet, Bunnie's MediaTek reverse- engineering article [4] below is long but interesting reading. You've got to admire Bunnie's determination! [1] http://blogs.fsfe.org/pboddie/?p=168 [2] http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/08/nokia-ceo-stephen-elop-rallies-troops- in-brutally-honest-burnin/ [3] http://blogs.fsfe.org/pboddie/?p=835 [4] http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297

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