Four months have passed since we started our donation campaign aimed at the PCB design and we are now at around €6500 (27%) of the goal €24000 for the entire phase 1 of the design, and we must admit that the rate of donations is slower than what we had hoped for.

Phase 1 is subdivided in two subtasks:

• 1A) PCB Project € 19000
• 1B) Fast SI bus simulations €5000

In other words, we reached an encouraging 34% of what is required for subtask 1A.

As we really want to speed up as much as possible the activity, we decided to formally split phase 1, and not to wait to reach €24000 to start the design of the PCB.

To do so, we signed a contract with ACube Systems (company we rely on for the design) just for subtask 1A. Doing so gives the chance to start right now the PCB design. At the time of signing the contract, we paid €6000, the amount required by the designer to start working.

One of the reasons forcing us to speed up the planned activities, is linked to the availability of the Slimbook model “Eclipse” that will not last forever, very much like any other commercially available products such as the electronic components we selected during the electrical schematics design phase. In fact, the electrical schematics are customized for the pinouts of that specific Slimbook model, and the PCB design will be specifically shaped to fit in the Slimbook Eclipse chassis. Because of these constraints, we have to finish the PCB design (phase 1A), the fast SI bus simulations (phase 1B) and the prototypes (phase 2) around this summer.

We fixed the end of April 2020 as the time-limit for phase 1A, so we have 3 months left to raise the remaining €12500. As you may well understand this goal is quite ambitious, but it is necessary if we don’t want to risk to fail.

For the above reasons, we kindly ask all people wanting the PowerPC laptop project to succeed, to do an extra effort to help us increase the rate of donations right now

As the entire project will adhere to the Open Hardware principles, we do not foresee any company donating to the project, as they will not get an exclusive competitive product out of it. Therefore, the only solution we foresee to speed up the donation rate, is to increase the number of people donating to the project.

Please, please, help us to spread the word about the project, and help us to convince more and more people to donate to it.

Alternatively, if you are aware, or better, you are involved in some sort of publicly funded research project meant to finance activities that benefit to the masses, help us establishing a link to get some funds.

A few hints on how you can spread the word about the project:

1. publish comments in your blogs, websites, social profiles, or forums talking about the project, reporting one or more of these key elements: 

• Our project have already started the design of the motherboard PCB.
• Power Progress Community aims at completing its open source hardware notebook during this summer and needs donations now.
• Power Progress Community, the user-based and not-for-profit association promoting the project, releases all of its design documents compliant to the Open Source Hardware (OSH) principles.
• The electrical schematics that came out of the first campaign are already available at https://gitlab.com/oshw-powerpc-notebook/powerpc-laptop-mobo

1. post a comment in tech or ethical blogs or forums asking people to give  the project a chance, based on these facts:

• Our project promotes technology diversity (different from x86 and ARM) through its Open Source Hardware laptop.
• Free yourself from spyware and backdoors helping our Open Hardware Notebook Project.
• Anyone will be able to freely customize any aspect of the laptop (shape, components), for example making a stripped-down version similar to a single-board computer.
• Being completely open, the project will deliver useful material for students, that will be able to investigate any aspect of a laptop computer.
• Any company will be able to produce the motherboard without paying any fee, and will be allowed to customize it without any restriction.

1. ask to a blog or online newspaper to publish a news item about  the project taking into account any of the above mentioned fact.

We are available for any form of collaboration, if you like contact us or fill the collaboration survey.

More information on the PCB Donation Campaign