ANN: GTA04A2 engineering sample is now running Linux / will be shown at LinuxTag

[Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller]

Dear all,

after all the previous announcements that were certainly not encouraging
and making everybody happy, I have this time really good news. And hope
that there are only good news to report in the future...

We have finally found a way to patch the power supply issue of our first
engineering sample board and are since this morning able to boot Linux and
demonstrate LXDE on Debian. We will present this unique unit during
LinuxTag on 11-14th May in Berlin. So please come!

This power supply hack was to solder an additional 1.2V LDO chip
(TPS73601DCQ) to give the CPU more supply power [1]. Apparently this
is sufficient to solve the spurious shutdown issue, which was coming from
a very suboptimal PCB layout of our engineering board.

Anyway, the new GTA04A3 boards (which are already in production) have a
heavily improved board layout so that I expect that they will never
show this problem and are much more robust. After knowing how much
the layout can and should be improved, I am still surprised that hacking the
hardware with a 2 € LDO chip was a sufficient work-around...

Here is finally a brand new video showing the device in (battery!) operation: [2]

So we are looking forward to get the new GTA04A3 boards from SMD
assembly (in approx. 4 weeks), connecting a display, inserting a SD card
and a battery ...

Happy easter time to everyone,
Nikolaus Schaller


[1]: http://download.goldelico.com/gta04/images/DSC00784.jpeg
[2]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KnJc7eImQ4