rhombus tech eoma68 jz4775 cpu card

Luke Kenneth Casson Leighon luke.leighton at gmail.com
Fri Aug 29 13:34:38 UTC 2014


Paul Boddie <paul at ...> writes:

> 
> On Wednesday 27. August 2014 12.23.17 lkcl . wrote:
> > hi all,
> > 
> > i don't know if anyone here has been following the rhombus tech
> > project but it basically involves a simple upgradeable cpu card
> > standard where any card is compatible with any base unit it's plugged
> > into.  several revisions of the first standard (eoma68) later and the
> > ingenic jz4775 qualifies as an SoC that's suitable.
> 
> I saw this come up on the arm-netbook list. It was a bit of a surprise that it 
> might qualify for use in a device running only Free Software, what with 
> Imagination Technologies buying MIPS and the inevitable consequences for 
> anyone licensing stuff from them, which I think Ingenic do these days.

 hi paul nice to hear from you on this list.

 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 :)

 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.


> 
> > i've been working with ingenic to get a first prototype eoma68-jz4775
> > cpu card ready, and i am planning to send the gerbers off to a company
> > to get some samples made up, in the first week of next month
> > (september).
> 
> It's nice to see some progress again, especially after the apparent bad luck 
> and nasty surprises of the last year or so.
> 
> > basically i wanted to let people know that the project is going ahead,
> > because there may be projects that people are doing where a
> > self-contained ready-made 5mm x 85mm x 54mm cpu card with an ingenic
> > JZ4775, 2gb of RAM, a GbE PHY, standard interfaces such as SD/MMC,
> > SPI, UART, 2 USBs, I2C, 18-pin RGB/TTL and some GPIO including PWM and
> > two dedicated EINT lines would be useful to have as a way to greatly
> > simplify project development.
> 
> Thinking that this would make a powerful upgrade to the Ben

 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)

 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.

>  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.

 we recently went over a design review and picked the latest tiny STM32F0
 i think it was, it's an improvement over the STM32F103 and a lot cheaper
 than the STM32F20x series, having USB2 and enough GPIO and ADCs to
 cover the 17 buttons (without a keyboard matrix: gaming remember?),
 3 analog joysticks and so on with enough pins to spare
 
> > so if anyone would like to take a risk to get some early first
> > revision samples (with no guarantees or even any software installed),
> > or if you would like to wait till later for a 2nd revision, please do
> > say so.
> 
> I guess you'll know a bit more about the details after you get the first 
> boards back from the manufacturer:

 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.

 l.

> It sounds rather interesting, I'll admit.

 :)




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