On Friday 29. August 2014 15.34.38 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighon wrote: > > i think it was only very very recently that ingenic licensed mips! they > have a completely independent implementation (MIPS-compliant) and > i cannot see a chinese company taking orders from a US-based > corporation any time soon :)
Or even a UK-based one. As long as the PowerVR stuff isn't stuffed into what they're producing, they might still have some interesting products. > i've been speaking on and off with ingenic and they seem to have learned > the lesson not to use proprietary non-chinese software libraries and > hard macros (e.g. the vivante VPU / GPU), which is great. Indeed. [...] > um, yes it would :) and, if you look hard enough, you can find GPL'd > schematics to create your own CPU Card later, i will be happy to > issue a royalty-free license for Open Hardware designs (yeees it > does have to be licensed, and yeees, it does have to be verified > as compliant because there is the risk of incorrect implementations > causing actual physical harm if there are short-circuits for example) My advice would be to try and adopt an existing licence and to be as transparent and, at the same time, as non-threatening as possible. I think people have seen various scary statements made over the years and have thus probably steered clear of the initiative until now, but if you could put everyone at ease about the licensing, I think people would be a bit more eager to get involved. I know that the initiative has produced working hardware - or that's my impression from various mailing list messages - but I don't think many people are aware of that, and they maybe don't hang around for long enough to discover it, either. Getting people to go with what you're doing rather than some random (and potentially non-delivering) Kickstarter is fairly important, but I doubt you need me to tell you that. :-) > so, you could start with a 2 or 4 layer PCB doing a redesign to the > ben - very simple - and then never have to redesign the base, or > the casework, ever again [unless components go EOL]... > > ... just do a new CPU card and the new Ben will always be "current". > individuals may also choose, instead of throwing the old CPU card > away as e-waste, to recycle it downstream. > > lots of benefits to EOMA68. I agree with all this. Given that I have yet to get into PCB design, "you" in the above will have to mean "people". ;-) > > what happened > > > > to those people who wanted to use the EOMA68 stuff in a portable games > > console? Did they get beyond the CAD models for the casing? > > yes. their PCB designer quit so they found another couple of people. > manuel is, amazingly, despite the delays, patiently committed to making an > EOMA68 games console. > > i even offered to do the PCB for him but he wants to encourage people to > do it using KiCAD. Well, I think there are virtues in using freely available tools. I pay some attention to various retrocomputing communities, and KiCAD appears to be taken more seriously in those communities now, amongst people who would otherwise just use whatever proprietary stuff they happen to have access to. When people need to collaborate, they quickly find that using proprietary tools excludes or burdens potential collaborators, and there's a wider appreciation of such issues now. [...] > yes. pay day soon so i will negotiate with a prototyping company, find > out pricing for 5 samples and get them started probably.... within 2 > weeks. It's nice to see things progressing again. And I admire your perseverance and continued enthusiasm for the initiative. :-) Paul _______________________________________________ Qi Hardware Discussion List Mail to list (members only): [email protected] Subscribe or Unsubscribe: http://lists.en.qi-hardware.com/mailman/listinfo/discussion
