Project update 5 of 15
Thanks and Interactive Diagrams
by Lukas HThank You
In the name of my team, I want to thank you all for making the first real batch of our open hardware laptops a close reality. I am extremely excited that our work over the last two years is valued and that we can directly proceed to polish the remaining edges, write the documentation, and build and ship these devices to you. And there are still 4 more weeks of campaigning left.
Motherboard Revision
A few days ago, I finished revision D-4 of the motherboard which mainly includes some bugfixes, adds a high-pass filter for the speakers, and increases the size of the bypass capacitors for cell balancing so we can balance a bit quicker. A handful of D-4 boards will arrive at the beginning of next week. We’re in the middle of assembling the devices for our 8 beta testers and most of them will receive this motherboard revision. One will also go to EMI (electro-magnetic interference) pre-testing.
You can always follow along with hardware, firmware, mechanical, and documentation commits in the Reform repo.
Documentation
Apropos documentation: With today’s update, I want to present the first version of the interactive system diagram for MNT Reform, as well as a set of interactive PCB explorers (IBOMs). I generated the former with a combination of Graphviz, kramdown, and CSS, and the latter with the InteractiveHtmlBom tool for KiCAD.
The interactive system diagram gives you a high-level technical overview of the MNT Reform electronics. You can click on any node in the diagram to see corresponding information on the right side. This information currently includes explanations of the context of the part, links to source code and datasheets and will grow over time (pull requests welcome!). A later version of this will also be adapted for the printed manual.
You can use the PCB explorers to look up any component’s value, part number, manufacturer, and what it is connected to. They are linked in the diagram, but you can find them all here, too:
As always, your feedback via Twitter, Mastodon, the project question form, or email is very welcome.
All the best, Lukas