Dear Backers,

June was a busy month. We’ve fully engaged Jon Nettleton and delivered his promised campaign money, and Novena T-shirts have shipped; some backers have received them by now.

Beyond that, we’ve finessed the design for production and prepared most of the fabrication documentation. Not surprisingly, Novena is a fabulously complex piece of hardware to manufacture. We will be making no less than:

• 8 unique PCB assemblies of varying complexity
• 2 custom flat-flex cables
• 7 custom cable assemblies
• 27 custom mechanical parts, requiring
• 11 steel tools for injection molding and metal bending/stamping

This doesn’t count the efforts of MyriadRF, who have already sent us a sample of their updated SDR for fitting into the case, and so far everything looks good on that front.

We are also in the process of purchasing hundreds of line items worth of components, and if a single one is overlooked or missing, we will not be able to ship on time. It’s a monumental task, but we are working closely with our sub-contractors to make sure everything comes out right. Collectively, we’ll be putting in thousands of man-hours to make this happen!

On the firmware front, we’ve been working hard keeping up with the Linux mainline. Our Novenae are running Linux kernel v3.16-rc2, which brings with it performance improvements in ARM crypto, suspend-to-disk support, and a first draft of working suspend/resume support.

We’ve completely rewritten the audio driver and submitted it to the Linux audio maintainers. The new driver performs better, removes audio pop, and more importantly is destined for long-term support. We’re waiting to hear from the maintainers on whether the driver will be included in its current form, or if we need to make additional changes. Getting the audio driver included is one of the last steps to go before we submit the Novena device tree file for mainline inclusion.

Keep an eye on our forum and our wiki for updates, and remember we’re also in #kosagi on OFTC!

Thanks,
xobs & bunnie