XO-1.5 C1 bringup News

[John Watlington]

Greetings from cloudy Shanghai!    We are completing the
XO-1.5 C1 bringup at QSMC, and it is going OK.

Mitch Bradley, Richard Smith and Paul Fox spent the last two
and a half weeks working on getting the manufacturing tests
integrated into Open Firmware.   This both gives us more
control over the testing and run-in phases, and builds
these tests into the laptop for use throughout the life cycle.
They have both pulled out significant amounts of hair
trying to reverse engineers the details of communication
with the Quanta manufacturing infrastructure.

We ran half the laptops through assembly yesterday to
flush out any final problems, and expect to run the remaining
laptops tmw.   Overall, 100 laptops are being built, with
45 going to Cambridge for serious testing over the next month.

Hardware-wise, we've run into some interesting bugs but in
the end they were caused either by simple manufacturing
mistakes (programming the pick&place to drop a resistor where
a cap. should be) or by known flaws discovered after
the C1 motherboard was released to manufacturing.
We will be making one more motherboard, C2, to fix a number
of remaining small problems.   C2 will be the one entering
mass production.

I'd like to express thanks to members of the OLPC software team
around the world for pulling together the software releases which
make the hardware actually work.   We are also grateful to the
Quanta team, including Gary Chiang (THE expert on XO hardware),
Arthur Huang (project manager), Beckham Chen (EE), and
Wei-Heng Lin (test software).

Cheers,
wad