Hello FreeCalypso community, I am overjoyed to announce that our FCDEV3B V2 boards are finally here: last night I have tested the first batch of 8 boards which I picked up from Technotronix on Thursday. Here are the findings:
Yield: out of the total of 8 boards in this batch, 5 are good and 3 have defects. Out of the 3 defective boards, one has perfectly working RF but is unable to talk to the SIM in the socket, while the other two have RF defects: one has totally dead RF (both Rx and Tx, all 3 bands), the other exhibits a bad Rx path for the low band, but the rest works. In the case of the board on which only the SIM interface doesn't work, we have previously encountered the same symptoms in one of our earlier FCDEV3B V1 batches, and replacing the SIM socket made it work, hence I am going to try the same on this board. In the case of the two boards with different RF defects, I will have a discussion with Technotronix about failure analysis. But even if we are not able to fix any of those 3 defective boards, we still have 5 perfectly good ones from this batch. V2 changes: unlike our previous FCDEV3B V1 boards, these new V2 boards have perfectly working sleep while keeping our high-capacity Spansion S71PL129NC0HFW4B flash+pSRAM chip! Thus we now have proof that my innovative (not from TI, not from OM, not from Pirelli) flash reset circuit change is working as I intended. With my recent changes to the firmware we have regained flash chip type autodetection, thus we can now populate either this big Spansion flash+pSRAM chip or the smaller Samsung flash+RAM chip that was used by Openmoko and have the same fw build work with both, but for our development boards we are keeping the big version for the obvious reason: large flash and RAM capacity is very handy for development. If anyone ever pays for the development of a commercial FreeCalypso modem module in a small SMT form factor, that version can use the smaller memory capacity more appropriate for a production modem. Out of the 5 defect-free boards in this batch, the availability is as follows: one board I need to keep for myself, one more board is earmarked for Rafael (Rhizomatica), and the other 3 are now available for commercial users at the regular price of $500 USD each. If the latter 3 boards are not bought quickly by the people I have in mind, at least one of them will be reallocated to FreeCalypso marketing outreach purposes: I would like to offer a free board to anyone from the ofono developer community who would be willing to get our FC modem product family properly supported in ofono. Aside from the 3 defective boards which may or may not be repairable, I still have 3 unpopulated PCB panels, enough for 12 more boards before needing another PCB fab run - but I will need to do a thorough round of failure analysis with Technotronix before we assemble that next batch. The next steps for me are: * I need to add the new sleep mode configuration I mentioned before, the one that enables big and small sleep, but not deep sleep, for those users who would rather not be burdened with making their host interface software sleep-aware, and who are willing to live with greater power draw in return for interface simplicity - engineering is all about trade-offs and compromises. * I need to test one of those 8 ohm 0.5 W speakers I bought from SparkFun and see if they perform as well as the similar-looking unknown-origin speaker that was donated to me by a member of my local LUG. If these SparkFun speakers work well, I'll be able to recommend them as an official choice for FCDEV3B lab bench setups, otherwise I will have to go back on the hunt for a suitable speaker. * I will need to write a sleep-aware userspace implementation of the GSM 07.10 MUX (which our FC modem supports) to serve as an exerciser for this feature of our modems, and add it to our FC host tools suite. * Once all of the above are done, I will need to make an updated version of the user's manual for the FCDEV3B, and only then the current iteration of our modem product development will be considered complete. * After all of the above, I will need to get back to the project of bringing up my BeagleBoard-xM and interfacing it to our FCDEV3B, for the purpose of exercising digital voice over MCSI and making it work. If anyone else has a need for this digital voice interface and has something else (othen than BB-xM) to connect to it for testing, feel free to beat me to it! Hasta la Victoria, Siempre, Mychaela aka The Mother _______________________________________________ Community mailing list Community@freecalypso.org https://www.freecalypso.org/mailman/listinfo/community