 Hello everybody and welcome. My name is Svetano Zunov. I am from Olimax. And today I will talk about one of our projects or attempt to make a completely open source hardware laptop and to do this with kick-up. So Olimax is a small company in Bulgaria already 27-year-old. We do some electronic designs, development tools, programmers, small genus computers and we have about 600 products which we have been developing during the time and half of them are open source hardware. All this happened about two years ago when I saw in my house pile of laptops and all of these laptops had some issues very small issues. Some just got obsolete because they have enough RAM to run modern operating system or they had slow processor but anyway it was huge pile of laptops and I talked to myself that this must have some simple solution and what I started thinking of is a laptop with the modular design so when some part gets obsolete you don't throw away the whole laptop you just change the motherboard or the detail which is obsolete. For instance in this pile I had a laptop with broken LCD or with dead battery or just power supply jack is with some problem but the manufacturer made them totally repairable. Everything put on single board. If you broke your LCD the new LCD cost almost like a half new laptop and you think for yourself why to repair this laptop through the half price I will just get new one and this is exactly what they want you to do. So I told that with my design laptop which is totally open source so everybody can tailor to his own taste, to his needs the modular design still to be with elegant shape not to be looking like a brick to be easy to assemble because part of the fun is to assemble this laptop by yourself so you know every bit of your laptop if something breaks you have source for low cost spare parts and you just exchange this part which has broken nothing else. Also I wanted it to be simple and to be light so you can carry with yourself and the battery has to long cost as much as possible. So later this idea involved why not to add to this laptop some kind of laboratory functionality. So you get this laptop and you have inside the laptop digital storage of field scope tester and logic analyzer. So this is how it started it was November 2015 and the whole process took about two years. Why so long because this project split to many other smaller projects first we had to source good plastic for the laptop because we knew electronics but we don't know mechanics we cannot draw plastics we cannot do this so obviously I had to find something which is available on the market in which I can convince the buyer to purchase so I can use like a base for the laptop which we will design. Then we had to select different LCD because it appears that the laptops don't use the normal parallel RGB signals they use EDP mostly because they need less signals and they can be made with the teeny cables which pass through the hinges of the laptop. So we had to of course select the main processor and actually this job for the laptop turned out that we had to design several other boards to evaluate different components which we intended to use in the laptop design. One of these is the Allwinner A64 SoC. At that time it was pretty new to the market and I decided that it might be a good idea to implement the laptop with it. Then we had to make another design with FPGA to my implement the oscilloscope and logic analyzer. We made fast ADC and DIC modules EO modules and etc. So it took us two years because we had basically designed many, many different other boards to evaluate to make several revisions of each of these boards while we achieved some good results which could be useful. Around August 2016 we already had few prototypes to show on one local conference, Tuxcon, which is implodable where Olimax is located. So this is where we probably presented the laptop with the very first prototypes of the PCBs. In February we already had working hardware on FOSDEM. We had a table. Some of you may remember they passing by and the hardware was working but the software was in totally useless shape. So it kind of worked but absolutely not as we wanted to see it working. A lot of things changed since then and in October we started actually to the sales. We built very small initial batch of 100 laptops because I was afraid to go with some higher number. We didn't know what to expect because you test everything and the feedback was very good because it appeared that we still missed few corner cases. One of these for instance was the LCD backlight and some LCDs in some conditions one inductor started to resonate on some very high harmonic and it was hearable. The LCD backlight works on 300 hertz but you can hear visible sound around one kilohertz because we assembled just I don't remember five or six laptops because we made 100 laptops. We couldn't assemble them all to check if they were because the fund was people to assemble the laptop themselves. So we, all of the laptops we built had no this issue but when we shipped 100 laptops to the customers few of them complained about this sound. So we had to think about patching and so on. Another issue was with the touch screen with the touch panel buttons because we have lack of GPOs we use it ADC and put some resistor dividers which has been five percent. And let's say about two percent of the laptops we shipped some people have started to complain that when they press left button they read right button and vice versa. This was fixed with one percent resistor later but it was again some corner cause we missed. So where we are now software wise we still have Ubuntu with made in usable state but it's not optimal solution. I hope I think Igor is somewhere here that soon we will have mainline support for A40 64 and we will have Rmbm with mainline support. As a hardware the minute we release the board some people started asking can we have more memory can we have faster processes. Again good tip from Rmbm member was to look after RK3328 which will allow up to four gigabytes of RAM. One of the most asking question was can I have the 3D models for the plastic because I want to change the keyboard to French layout I want to change the keyboard to German layout I want to make something else and the problem is that we actually didn't have these files because we just buying the plastics but fortunately some of the people who bought laptop they start reverse engineering the plastic and they start making this and this is one US customer who didn't like the way these cables basically this is the most trickiest part when you assemble the laptop. There are many tiny wires and you have to place them in exact position otherwise it doesn't snap so well. So he made his own version where he is assembling the laptop much easier than our original design. Then I block about this and one Bulgarian company contacted us and said okay we can scan this plastic part because this is what we are doing for living and this is how you have problems. So I guess we will have soon 3D models plastic parts and people really can start changing them up to their needs. This is what we are doing now. We integrated Sigrock in the image. So you can see here the laptop is working as oscilloscope and digital logic analyzer and you can put some complex triggering in the Sigrock to catch signals. It's still on prototype stage but I hope in couple of months we will have something almost finished like a module which you can put inside the laptop and turn it in the laboratory too. So when we start working on the laptop it was natural choice to start working with to make it with kick-out. For us it was very important to have open source tool to make this open source project because you cannot use Altium and to say to your people buy this tool for 8000 euro and you can open the design files and you can see and tell them this just doesn't work. In this case we have some inside to share. What we are doing is we always use the latest builds. Why? Because if you use these latest builds you don't have to come to the force them to see the new features in the kick-out because you know them. We worked with this new library manager for month. We didn't saw this Eagle import but who cares about it. But the problem is that Ubuntu and Windows binary are lagging way behind because they are considered some stable version which is maybe one year old. Usually people download, install Ubuntu binaries or download Windows binaries. I cannot open your laptop files with this and we start asking yeah please go use the latest builds you will have to access. Maybe we should think about some way these daily builds to be available for Windows and for normal Ubuntu users with remark that it's unstable version and they can use it on their own risk. We can provide for instance machine when these deployments to happen. Of course when you work with the latest builds you have always have to be cautious when you install the new versions. Although the only problem we have seen for the last two years was with this library upgrade. We installed the new version in. We couldn't open our work for me yesterday. The guy who first installed said stop guys don't install on the other computers because I already have no access to the files. So you have to make sure that you work with some virtual machine or first try the new installation on the virtual machine and when everything is sure that it works then to install it to the other machines. The other major problem with the laptop is they download from github the files and they say it search for some libraries. When Kikat opens the files it says I cannot find library for these components. They are inside the design. They are cached in the library but Kikat still complain that cannot find them in the normal library ways and this confuses especially beginners who don't know what they do and they say again oh maybe Olimax didn't upload their libraries or something intentionally so I cannot open these files. Maybe some work around when you save your project in some folder put inside all the libraries and all these things and if you find everything there just don't complain that you don't find it in the normal library path because they are there and to summarize this was one of the most interesting project we have been working about. Now I have in my hands laptop which was the dream machine for me. It does exactly what I wanted from it and it has all the features I wanted to see and it's a template base for all other peoples to make their own version if they don't like this. So it's everything is available soon the plastic will be available so everybody will be able to customize it up to his own need. Many people love this laptop and they really help with the software updates. Most of the software testing was done by our community people who bought the laptop even in our forum they made a parallel laptop image one of them made again to distribution who I don't know who worked with but it's available if somebody wants to build again for the laptop it's available. So there is some questions. What would you do different in the next version of the laptop? What we will do different in the next version in the laptop. Well we already working on more memory more RAM. Just all winner A64 cannot address more than 3 GB and to find DDR with 24 GB is very difficult. It's probably just for the mobile phone or smartphone or something like this. I don't know if you follow the market on the memories but for the last three years the prices just triple and I read that 1.5 billion smartphones has been built last year and this is where those memories are going and it's crazy. If you find memory just buy it and stock it. It's a 4 million phones every day. How much the laptop cost? It's 240 euro and it comes as a kit. You build it yourself. How long we will support it? We will support it as long as we can. For the main boards and for the electronics I'm sure that we will always have these boards even if they are not with the current processor we will just move to a new processor and this is not the current LCD if there is new LCDs with bigger resolution with the brightest backlight. We will just add support for the new LCD. There will be always these spare parts for the laptop. If something breaks we use this laptop by ourselves also. It's just matter of running new script repeating questions. The question was what happens if I want to use another LCD with different resolution or different size or different features. EDP standard allows you to connect any other LCD with the EDP standard on it so it's just matter of configuration in the Linux. What is the current situation? Fortunately this is A53 so it's not affected by this what wood loader do we use? I don't know how close is the laptop from certification by FSF. I don't know because I never searched for the requirements but I guess we pass because we open everything. Ok, I propose three quick questions. You and you. The key card concerns are daily built for binary. Basically we use Ubuntu binaries but the repository keeps some binary from maybe year or maybe more than year. There is a PPA but if you use the standard Ubuntu repository which most people do, they don't go to the key card org and they don't include these repositories to their I don't need anything from the key card we can handle this but they maybe have to think about obviously Windows users because they lack a lot. Ubuntu users they build, for instance we had a workshop we made a workshop for key card with trying to teach community how to use the key card and I think Rangel come with Arch. He had to build everything from the sources so we are showing how to use key card and half day he is compiling key card. If you use Ubuntu you have no problems. How do you handle all the hardware configurations which will accumulate over time like different screens? It's a matter of scripts. How do we think to keep the different configuration which will be available later with different SOC, different screens? So do I see overlays or something like that? We don't have these problems so far sir. Here on FOSDEN? No, no, we don't have stand. I'm on the mind with my kids who are reigning weekend and they loved it. Last question, Tom. Sorry. Yeah, it is separated. It's a main board with the SOC with the memories and EOS and keyboard and other stuff is on different modules so when you want to change SOC you just change this board with the SOC. We don't change other. This is why we did modular. You can have questions. Let's do one, two, three more questions. In terms of actually using key card to design this, what were the biggest pain points? What were the biggest problems you have? I think we start using key card maybe four years ago and at that time I will say that we had to save our work every half hour. People who use it key card, but key card now is totally different states. I don't remember to have any problems for the last two years except this library change which was a big surprise but it was fixed for maybe couple of days, I don't remember. But it was very nervous couple of days because we work on something and we have to stop working because we don't know what will happen. Yes. The guy behind you is... Remember we started... No, absolutely not. Actually it was very funny because when we started working with key card series we were making very complex boards and all people in CERN are still not confident in key card and they don't want to use key card for serious stuff. And this is why I got one laptop now and I will give to him so he can show to his colleagues what can be done with key card. I bought one.