This week in the life of CL1B

[John Watlington]

The A2 wiki page has been updated (new photo and info):
http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO_1.5_A2

The good news is that we have a solution for the occasional SD errors!
Details at: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/XO1.5_SD_card_ECO

I have a good circuit modification which enables 500K+ suspend/resume  
cycles.
The bad news is that I'm having trouble getting Quanta to accept it,  
as they have
an alternate one (which crashes after 100+ cycles).  Much of the past  
week was
spent trying to prove that there was a difference in the ECOs.
Quanta assigned a new power engineer, and he found a nasty power supply
layout problem on his first week.

As is usual with these early prototypes, I end up playing around with  
different
ECOs for a while before finding appropriate ones.  This leaves a  
workbench
scattered with "fuzzy" motherboards in various states of ECO.  Now I  
have to
go through and restore these earlier versions and debug/fix any  
stragglers.

Nine of the A2's have left 1CC, one temporarily.   Two motherboards  
are dead
and six are sick, in one form or another, and two more are testing  
some particular
ECO.  Four units are used by 1CC developers, and most of the  
remaining units
require ECOs for proper performance of either suspend/resume and/or SD.
I will ECO the remainder and we will send more out after using them  
to run
tests for a couple of days.

The B1 motherboard is going through layout right now.   We are trying
to stay with a 6 layer board, for FSB and DDR2 trace impedance reasons,
but the WLAN daughtercard cutout is restricting routing.   I am being  
a real
pain about getting both the processor serial port and SPI programming  
port
on the bottom (exposed) side of the motherboard.

The hurdle for next week is to test SD card access under Linux  
suspend/resume,
and to do the power measurement wiring I meant to do last week.

It looks like B1 pre-build will be mid-August, which means B1 laptops  
should become
available beginning of September.

Cheers,
wad