GTA02 Battery Capacity (Was: Re: More about the GTA02)

[Andy Green]

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Somebody in the thread at some point said:
> Am Do  14. Februar 2008 schrieb Andy Green:
>> Basically as a rule hardware is set in stone, it goes double when it is
>> micro BGAs and so on like this hardware, there's not much anyone can do
>> about that.
> That's the reason why polite PCB-designers are planning for a NC-via at least 
> for those BGA-contacts, that you won't get a hold on otherwise. Of course 
> this adds about 2 cent to the costs of PCB for each via, and thus never is 
> done by any commercial hw-mf (except those who had a major field-change-order 
> issue in their history). On the other hand, what's the "tools to open the 
> case" worth for, which surely add to total cost of product as well?

Well its not practical to do this for memory busses and so on.  And the
laser vias found on these boards are smaller than specks of dust.  I
think the fact is at this level of hardware you have to accept you lost
access to most signals -- however much it pains you believe me it pains
me more :-)

> Of course a few vias don't already make a nice protoboard yet, but at least 
> *some* users with smd-soldering experience may benefit. As long as they had 

Hardly anyone can play that game... even coming in on 0402 resistors for
signals is extreme.  I'm all for hackability but the constraints in size
and technology reduce the realistic possibilities here, and --->

> some schematics anyway. All this very suboptimal with regard to an "open 
> phone". All my Sony-gadgets are more open, when it comes to this. At least 
> for those i got pretty nice service-manuals incl. circuit diagrams for free.

Currently this is a political reality, no schematics.  I think its fine
if you keep pressuring about it but no change can be expected since
there are just no levers to pull to make it happen, and the answer is
stuck at "no" out of our scope.  Its just where the commercial reality
of physical hardware manufacture culture has butted up against the
ideals that really are coming from the software side.

As I say it matters a bit less because so many signals are unavailable
anyway, but of course I really understand the point of having them.  To
offset it a little there are bunch of testpoints which are annotated on
the board and will be annotated in the wiki, there are things like I2C
and LVTTL UART on there to leverage somewhat.

- -Andy
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