Hi all,
you may be wondering how progress is.
First of all, I have currently 11 GTA04A5 working boards on my
desk (one did work initially but failed since now) which boot
fine.
It turned out that our hw-test script was not testing all
components as good as possible, so I have worked on it to
be much better. Now it also tests WLAN, Bluetooth, GPS
and some other components. In total it was much more effort
to put into kernel and hw-test to really be able to do
such an automated test. Reason is that you also have to test
the tester... And make the kernel and user-space work stable
for almost all chips and interfaces.
I did run the hw-test for all 11 boards and the result is:
10 boot fine,
1 is not charging the battery through USB but
USB-Ethernet gadget works.
It is planned to copy the test results to http://www.gta04.org/serial.php
but that might need some smaller fixes for the serial.php script since
the tester database format has changed a little (but not much).
Still to be done is a real test phone call to evaluate antenna,
microphone, and earpiece. This means: place a board into case,
insert SD&SIM cards, boot and run the /root/dial script and check
if a phone call has good sound. Repeat for all others boards...
Quite tedious.
But assuming (since the GTM601W reponds to AT commands on all 11
boards) this runs fine as well, the result will be good since it
looks as if 10 GTA04A5 become ready to ship by end of this week.
Plus maybe up to two spare GTA04A4 boards which I found recently
and also have to test.
This is good.
But 11 still isn't enough to fulfill all preorders. So there is
still the big task ahead of doing rework.
This is blocked by not having finished the negotiations with
the production company. They claim that the problems come
from using some aged components provided by us...
I claim that it is the warping of the (newly bought) DM3730
(and they knew the problem from the OpenPandora where they
finally got it soldered but were not able to repeat the success
this time).
Before this is settled it makes discussions about who should
repair what and who owns the excess material (I need some
fresh components to do rework) a little difficult.
On the software side I have upgraded to letux-4.10.2 which
fixes some minor issues and comes with the new hw-test script.
Maybe this is the kernel which will be finally flashed into NAND.
Letux.4.11-rc1 isn't booting stable. Maybe -rc2 will fix the
issue - or we have to dig into it ourselves. I have built it
but not found time to test.
Default rootfs in NAND shall get Simple-GSMGUI by akemnade
and is just missing a visible shortcut on the desktop.
So despite some frustration the project goes on.
But the project could still need donations [1] to cover the
financial loss... And - if we can collect a really big bunch of
money - we might be able to afford to finance more soldering
experiments. Unfortunately we are only in a free as free speech
(and mindset) but not in a free as free beer environment.
BR,
Nikolaus
[1]: http://shop.goldelico.com/wiki.php?page=GTA04%3ADonation
_______________________________________________
Community mailing list
Community@tinkerphones.org
http://lists.goldelico.com/mailman/listinfo.cgi/community
http://www.tinkerphones.org
