EOMA68 Earth-friendly Modular computing campaign hits $50k

lkcl writes: The EOMA68 Crowd-funding campaign launched last month and has just reached $50,000 and so far has 541 backers with 28 days still to go. EOMA68 and its creator have featured regularly on slashdot over the past five years: a live-streamed video from Hope2016 explains what it's about, and there is a huge range of discussions and articles online. The real burning question is: if a single Software Libre Engineer can teach themselves PCB design and bring modular computing to people on the budget available from a single company, why are there not already a huge number of companies doing modular upgradeable hardware?

Awesome!

[Chris]

Can't wait to get one.

Re:

[lkcl]

thanks - there's an update coming out, we're actually 81% towards the critical threshold of 250 Computer Cards + Passthrough Cards, which is where we've agreed orders of 250 of certain key components with suppliers. so that first critical threshold is actually around the $63k mark. we can deliver if we reack $63k... just about: beyond that it gets a heck of a lot easier.

update

[lkcl]

... gone out: https://www.crowdsupply.com/eo... [crowdsupply.com]

Fully open, even the laptop embedded controller!

[aaribaud]

It's important to note the EOMA-68's HW and SW is Open Source, which means — among others — that:

• - your EOMA-68 won't sport any hidden feature which you shouldn't know about;
• - your OS will not stop being maintained at some point just because "the product is not on our catalog any more";
• - you can actually fix (or have a more technically inclined friend fix) OS or firmware bugs without having to wait until a company issues an update (if it ever does—see previous point);
• - you have a much be

Future CPU cards (different CPU architectures)

[mafm]

Currently the CPU in the CPU-cards available in the campaign is an ARM 32 bits ("armhf" for Debian systems).

In the future, if things go well, there are plans to launch other CPU-cards that meet requirements of low power, hw and sw freedom (not requiring proprietary firmware blobs to run), etc. Other CPUs have been already considered, including different architectures, like MIPS. The housing (laptop, micro desktop, etc.) can be reused, it's just a matter of swapping the CPU-card -- that's one of the mai

FSF's Respects Your Freedom certification

[mafm]

Probably interesting for many folks around here... there are plans to submit these projects for the Free Software Foundation's Respects Your Freedom [fsf.org] program (contacts already started).