Hi everybody, (sorry for the cross-posting, I thought spreading the word about gta02-core and new stuff from Openmoko was worth it...)
Today Openmoko released additional pieces of documentation about Freerunner hardware: board outline, footprints and netlist. Same as all other releases before - under Creative Commons Share-Alike license. Available at: http://downloads.openmoko.org/developer/schematics/GTA02/gta02_outline_footprints_netlist.tar.bz2 What is this and who is it for? Well, definitely not for end users, not for software developers, not even the typical kernel hacker. The release contains cryptic text files containing data points about our hardware - basically additional information complementing our PDF-formatted schematics release last year. The reason we released this is to support an exiting new project that has emerged over the last few weeks - gta02-core. http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Gta02-core "gta02-core is a community project to create a new hardware revision of the gta02 hardware" They chose a 100% GPL layout tool, KiCAD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kicad), which uses only text-based files hence they can be checked into typical revision control systems. Since they are text, they are also 'scriptable', i.e. scripts can extract and process data from the layout files. Werner and Dave Ball got it rolling, and are currently working on the re-layout of gta02 (http://docs.openmoko.org/trac/browser/trunk/gta02-core). The way I see gta02-core is that it opens up a path to new, fully open phone hardware. For the future of the software we are all working on right now - whether it's the kernel, FSO, Paroli/Ophonekit, etc., we either need to design new fully open hardware specifically for it, or we need to find ways to hack into phones that are 'closed' by default (either accidentally or on purpose). gta02-core focuses on the first option, and I hope will receive more attention from the community, and definitely from Openmoko the company. The path is long, even KiCAD itself may need improvements, but if a few more people get interested and join, we may have new fully open phone hardware in 6-12 months. No worries, in all this time of course the Freerunners will remain available (we have enough in stock and are ready for new production runs if necessary), and hopefully they continue to be an interesting development platform for mobile free software projects. Right now, if you want to join the revolution in open hardware development, read the gta02-core wiki page carefully (http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Gta02-core), and join the mailing list (slightly confusingly named gta03 :-)) at http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/gta03 Then see where you can contribute - it's a wide open field with many possible tasks, no matter which background you are coming from. I'll see what I can do. Best Regards, Wolfgang _______________________________________________ hardware mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/hardware
