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joerg_rw's Avatar
Posts: 2,222 | Thanked: 12,651 times | Joined on Mar 2010 @ SOL 3
#1
so it begun:

Introducing the Neo900 project - the first true successor for N900


we (the Neo900 team) are currently in the planning phase about a maemo5/fremantle-compatible successor of N900, with N900 look-alike (aka case) and a processor with more grunt and RAM.

This is already beyond the state of vaporware, see www.gta04.org which this will base on.

I.E. the GTA04 exists (350+ working units sold), what we're talking about are slight modification to GTA04 board to make it fit into a
Neo900, with housing, display, digitizer aka touchpanel, cameras etc sourced from the commercial N900 spare parts market. (though our primary target is to provide ready-to-run complete devices, we will also offer an option for you to buy the GTA04-NeoNinehundred board only, instead of the complete Neo900 device, to upgrade any N900 you already may have)
So it wll look like a N900, feel like a N900 and work like a N900, just way faster, thanks to the DM3730 CPU @1GHz and at least 512MB RAM (1GB depending on chip availability) plus maybe a few GB more of fast RAM-based "storage" as swap.
And - that's our plan - it will have all the functionality you're used to from N900 plus sturdy USB (that won't fall off the PCB) with full OTG support, all sorts of new nice sensors like gyro and altimeter and compass, and at your choice a GSM/UMTS (3.5G) or LTE (4G) modem that doesn't break (or when it ever would then you can fix it).
The AV/headset connector will offer new stereo line-in function on top of the usual mono mic and stereo-out and video.
We will add a general purpose expansion interface under that battery lid - funny enough it turns out it's a superset of what Jolla is using on their TOH interface.

Plus the whole device is 100% open, you get all the schematics and links to all the datasheets of the 'free' chips that are used. *), we don't work behind walls.

The project is about the hardware, we can't run a software development department to port maemo to the device. It's up to a community effort to establish this. Two volunteers already hollered: freemangordon whom you all know from CSSU, and FatPhil, an ex_Nokia kernel maintainer :-) Many thanks to both! And I mustn't miss to mention that a lot of other community members also offered to help wherever they can in our newly formed fremantle porting task force. Many thanks to all of you too.

Stay tuned for more to come :-) Please note Dos1's excellent post#5 below!


*)
what we we possibly will hand out later on only are the Eagle project files to feed the fab with. We won't hand out the "shopping list" with all the commercial contacts. What's also not available are docs about the powervr graphics core, but device works without using that core. We don't have access to any modem firmware sourcecode or sources for other subsystem firmwares.


cheers
jOERG

PS: I added a public poll, to allow for evaluating if we might reach the minimum of 200 preorders with a target of 700EUR per complete device (just ballpark figures!)

Context Links:
http://www.mwkn.net/2013/36/front.html
https://blogs.fsfe.org/pboddie/?p=430
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=91308
http://mobile.slashdot.org/comments....3&cid=44840495

some timeline: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=1374716
disclaimer: this project is not related to or driven by the maemo community council, nor does it get any support from council or HiFo

Update:
FUNDRAISER succeeded, development started - see http://neo900.org
FOR SHIPPING DESTINATIONS PLEASE NOTE http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=1383775 and http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php...99#post1407199

Update2[2014-06-17]:
Sorry for neglecting this post#1 for so long, we shouldn't have urged you into reading 1000s of posts in several threads to get latest status.
The project is now under responsibility of a company dedicated to Neo900 exclusively: the (surprising name ) Neo900 UG
We're still about to complete the process of transferring assets from GDC who originally held responsibility, to the new Neo900 UG - however that's basically irrelevant for our supporters since nothing really changes for you from this.
We started to accept donations again, after we had to suspend this for a while during the GDC->UG transfer, see http://neo900.org/#donate . This is still low profile since we need to sort out our "fineprint" to be in line with the way we promised to handle your donations, but we're about to improve this during the next few weeks.
On the technical side we are about to build our 3rd version of prototype boards with a lot of exciting stuff that's unique and new with Neo900, compared to both of its ancestors N900 and GTA04 (well, the latter obviously has more already of the sensors and stuff we plan to cram on protoV3) - we're just on hold until the majority of our donors transferred their donation from GDC to UG, so the UG can actually order the proto hardware to get built. So if you donated and haven't taken care to add an according note to your GDC order management page already, please do that now. Thanks for your support and patience to all our donors. The V3 will demonstrate working display, working modem incl the more relevant part of our security concept to monitor the modem, working charging and possibly battery hotswap incl improved charger detection independant of CPU support.
Finally I missed to officially introduce Werner Almesberger here. We're very glad to welcome him on board of the Neo900 core developer team.

Please stay tuned for us doing a major overhaul of our website http://neo900.org to represent more in realtime all the progress we made so far. We're going to get a microblog there really soon now, to keep you up to date with what's going on.

Update3[2014-06-23]
microblog added to website
donation now open again, even via PayPal. Stay tuned, bitcoins may be around the corner.
Hoping to continue with ProtoV2 (in some locations called V3 since it's 3rd PCB) next week.
Please all donors (those wo already donated) check your GDC order page if not done already. Aso see http://neo900.org/donate-gdc

Last edited by joerg_rw; 2014-06-22 at 22:43. Reason: update 3
 

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