[Gta04-owner] ANN: GTA04A2 engineering sample is now running Linux / will be shown at LinuxTag

[Glenn Moeller-Holst]

Congratulations!

At 23:09 +0200 20/04/11, Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller wrote:
>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...

Its possibly because of those "heavy duty" (at 
least?) 0,5mm dia copper wires - compared to the 
35um ultra-thin and narrow PCB tracks? ;-)


>
>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
>
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Happy easter to you too.

Glenn