New Life in Openmoko Phones

joakim at verona.se joakim at verona.se
Tue May 19 15:17:11 CEST 2009


Nils Faerber <nils.faerber at kernelconcepts.de> writes:

> Wolfgang Spraul schrieb:
>> 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
>
> This is in general great!
>
> But sorry to be a little sceptical here - but hardware != software. What
> I mean is that collaboratively developing software is pretty easy since
> we have the internet to share and most of us have a PC to develop upon.
>
> But with hardware development the situation is a little bit different.
> Even if the collaborate development effort succeeds, i.e. KiCAD is
> sufficient and a hardware design becomes ready, it still needs to be
> produced - and here troubles start, from buying the parts, making PCBs
> etc. running up the whole stack to asembling the whole device and
> testing it. This cannot be done as open source effort with volunteers.
> Here real money is involved - a lot of real money. And this needs to be
> done several times, for prototypes, small A-series, probably a B-series
> and then final devices.
> But you should know better than me about this process (at least by now).
>
> What are the plans or ideas to enable later on production?
> Pleas eget me right, I would love to see such a project succeed and
> maybe even contribute to it but I really cannot imagine any possibility
> how such a hardware production should work in the end without a big
> sponsor in the background.

It was many years since I did any serious electronics work, but from my
uninformed viewpoint this seems to be workable because:
- The case is not changed and can be reused
- no parts are changed so existing inventory at OM can be used for
prototyping

I dont know what making a PCB and populating it costs these days, but if
it costs a couple of hundred euros per populated board, I would sponsor
at least one out of my personal curiosity. I used to be good at
electronics assembly, maybe I could even put it together myself if I
find a SMD oven etc.

> Cheers
>   nils faerber
-- 
Joakim Verona





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