Dear Backers!

We’ve been working hard to make Novena a reality for you, and wanted to update you on our progress on both the hardware and the software fronts.

For the hardware, we’ve got all the PCB components ordered, and all the custom production tools are in process, except for the speaker box. We’re still deciding upon a final dimension for the speaker cabinet — the trade-off we’re mulling is whether to optimize for hack space in the case vs. sound output.

We’re mostly on schedule, with a plan to do a first-fit build of the production tooled case sometime in September. We’re going to use-test these a bit, make some tweaks, and then move into mass production.

If you haven’t checked it out, here are the final production design sources for the hardware.

For the software, we’ve been focusing on refactoring the Senoko battery board. It now runs ChibiOS 3.0, and has the ability to take commands from the main CPU. This will allow the Novena mainboard to, for example, send a command to turn power off to the system, and tell whether AC power is connected.

Xobs also attended the Flock to Fedora conference this month, where he gave a keynote about Novena. While there, someone took him up on the offer to install Fedora on Novena, which required enabling a few more kernel features. As a result, the Novena kernel can now boot Fedora in addition to Debian.

We’re still working on mainlining the audio driver, and we’re very close to merging the device tree file. Once that’s done, we’ll have basic upstream support for Novena, and can get to work on the more specialized components such as Senoko and the eDP adapter board.

As always, you can track our progress on our wiki and get in touch with us at our forum.

Thanks,
bunnie & xobs