GTA04 testing status

Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller hns at goldelico.com
Sun Jun 26 19:44:42 CEST 2011


Dear all,
you may be wondering what is going on behind the GTA04 scenes...

Well, first of all the team did need some break (aka holidays/vacation).

Christoph and Rene did receive the first two mostly populated GTA04A3
boards [1] last week and did the first tests. One board did boot fine
(Christoph already reported) while the other didn't boot at all.

We have tried to trace down the HW bug in the failing board and it
appears that there are two short circuits to GND under two BGAs. But we
don't know exactly and have to find out if we have a bad PCB, a stencil
or a soldering problem. Or simply received bad chips.

With the working board we have already verified:

:) mechanical fit
:) power controller
:) CPU incl. PoP memory
:) RS232
:) all sensors (compass, accelerometer, barometer etc.) are visible on I2C
:) touch works
:) display works
:) backlight works
:) buttons and LEDs work (incl. forced shutdown when pressing power
   button for 9 seconds)
:) MMC/SD card slot works
:) int/ext antenna detector works
:| GPS sends NMEA but does not receive anything (not even time stamps)
:| OTG Client mode works (a little flaky)
:) Vibra motor and control works (although it makes a high pitch
    whistling noise when used in PWM mode)
:) Headset jack audio out appears to work (we have verified only
    one channel yet)
:? internal USB port (for the UMTS modem) appears to respond
    but is not tested if it can drive the modem

Now comes our problem child:

:( WLAN/BT module

It is recognized as mmc1 by the kernel and it appears that the
libertas_sdio driver loads and installs the firmware as expected.
But we get timeouts, i.e. no answer for real WLAN operation (e.g.
iwconfig, iwlist).

And the chip gets unexpectedly hot. Bluetooth wasn't accessible
either.

This needs a deep analysis and in the worst case we may have to
ship the early adopter boards without (working) WLAN/BT and fix
it in the GTA04A4. But before doing such a decision, we have to find
out what is going on.

If someone on this list is experienced with bringing up a W2CBW003
chip, please contact me.

So the next tasks will be:

* check if the internal USB works well enough that we can risk
   mounting a UMTS module?
* test remaining parts of the sound system (speakers, earpiece,
   microphone)
* find out why the WLAN/BT does not work and if we can fix it
* find out why one board has two short circuits

Only if we have solved these issues we can plan the exact timing
(and pricing) of the next batch for everyone...

Despite these problems I think we already have achieved a lot.
We can already use it as a (e.g. Debian based) music player and/or
PDA. Only the wireless functions are missing.

Thanks for supporting [2] a really open smartphone platform,
Nikolaus

[1]: http://download.goldelico.com/gta04/images/DSC00972.jpg
[2]: yes, we are still happy about donations:
      http://www.handheld-linux.com/wiki.php?page=GTA04








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