[Community] GTA04A5 / Letux 2804

[Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller]

Hi,
it is time to take a look onto the GTA04A5 campaign.

We have currently collected pledges for 19 units.

This is good, but not enough to start a new production run to reach a fairly reasonable final
price for those preorders.

The calculation is simple. The setup cost of a new production run for a GTA04 type of
product is in the range of 4000€ .

This is cost that occurs before the first device is produced. It is for getting the PCB produced,
getting new stencils for solder pasting, and setting up the pick&place machines. It is so high
because the micro-via type of PCBs for 0.4mm BGAs is not a standard technology and setting
up the Pick&Place machine is manual work depending on the number of components.

Usually it would even include the engineering cost for designing the new PCB, but I
do that for free (because it is fun and not difficult if you already have a GTA04A4 design done).
So this is my personal donation to the community...

So if we want to produce 20 units, each one must cover 200€ of these setup costs. In
addition to batch size dependent cost like chips (which also become cheaper if we buy
more of them), energy cost for running the pick&place machines etc.

I we reach a batch of 100 units, this one-time cost goes down to 40€ per unit. I.e. a saving
of 160€ per unit (and even more by component cost savings). Just by s/20/100/.

So please think again if you want to upgrade your GTA02 with a GTA04A5 board.

If you are looking for a Letux 2804 (GTA04 complete) and don't own a GTA02, we still
have a handful of used GTA02 devices with a GTA04A5-upgrade rebate.

And there have been some generous offers recently by community members for GTA02
devices that collect dust... They are also nice candidates for a GTA04A5 upgrade.

Please note that the GTA02 is the only 5 years old smart phone where you can get
full support and even a motherboard upgrade. This is very unique and sort of "modular"
concept.


So how will be the future of the GTA04?

It will be further supported and we are working heavily to get as much of the kernel
modifications into mainline. The 3.12.7 kernel is available and working quite well.
And we are focussing on getting the device tree to support everything in 3.14.

As soon as this big construction site becomes a little more stable I hope that we can
better address the remaining power management aspects of OMAP3 again. Currently there
is so much change in certain subsystems that things change while you are analysing
and the results may no longer be valid after some kernel upgrade...

For 3D GPU support we are waiting that TI releases a new 3.12/13/14 compatible
SDK.

Improving Replicant 4 is also on our to-do list, but we could need some help.

QtMoko is something Radek should comment about, if he wants to upgrade the kernel.


Nikolaus
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