novena - Xobs' Blog

novena

A collection of 13 posts

Clustering Novena

Server clustering is a topic I've been cirous about for a rather long time, from back in the Slashdot days where one would constantly "imagine a beowulf cluster of" any given low-powered device. With modern clustering software, such thoughts become practical reality. And with some cardboard, everything goes together nicely.

Novena-as-a-Keyboard

There's just something magical about watching text flow along a screen. It's the basis for Defcon boards made popular by the movie Wargames, and is popular in the background of most movies. It's rare that such a display happens in the real world, but I actually had the occasion to

Desktop Factory Test

We've just shipped the desktop factory test off to the assembly line, and they'll soon begin the process of turning bare boards into desktop models. We ran the initial factory test -- the one I mentioned earlier -- on every board we produced. This first test ensures that the board

Senoko Battery Board as a Device

The Senoko battery board contains an STM32 chip, and runs its own separate operating system. The computer itself has 10 kilobytes of RAM and 64 kilobytes of storage space, where the operating system lives. This operating system is responsible for keeping the battery charged, monitoring the power button, acting as

Factory test

We're doing the factory runs in batches, since there are multiple configurations of boards. Every board that leaves the factory will start out life as a "bare board", and will have features added to it later on. The factory test itself serves to do two things: Test the board, and

Novena First Run

Right now, I'm in the middle of packaging up various bits and bobs for the final Novena disk image. We have a kernel mostly decided, and we have a base set of packages. Furthermore, we have a script that creates a bootable disk and installs all of the support packages

Novena progress: RTC, Headphone, Suspend

When designing your own laptop, the most mundane of things become exceptional. When you get something working, life becomes that little bit sweeter. Like cracking your knuckles, or getting that bit of food from between your teeth, getting even the smallest part of the system working well is such a

Audio driver merged

The es8328 audio codec driver has been accepted by the ASoC maintainer. That means the driver will make its way upstream, and should land in Linus' tree in a few weeks. One more hurdle down on the road to mainstream. This week we'll be focusing on getting more of our

Progress report: Sleep, Audio, and Power

It's been a month since my last post, and things are moving along. We've been hard at work improving both the hardware and software. There's a backer update describing much of what we've been up to, and snce I'm working with the kernel I'll go into some detail on the

Thank you to our supporters! Here's what we'll work on:

Thank you to each and every one of our supporters. I'm honoured by all of the positive talk about the project. Now that the campaign is over and funded, it's time to get started. Or rather, continue our work. If you've seen either bunnie or myself at conferences, you'll have

From Chips to a Laptop

There's a certain thrill to board bringup, to be the first person in existence to have code running on a brand-new board. To even get your first "Hello, world!" requires a lot of components to be running correctly. Computers are complicated beasts, but then again they have a great deal

Pre-Boot enviroment weirdness

The world of early board boot is a weird one. Hard-and-fast rules of programming don't necessarily apply here, and things have an annoying tendency to work only sometimes. I finally revisited the pre-boot environment this week, due in part to bringing up the dual-core version of Novena, which differs from

Novena PVT / Senoko DVT

This post is coming to you from Novena PVT, running off of Senoko PVT on battery. In engineering, there are several different versions of pre-release hardware. Novena itself has gone through three: EVT (engineering verification test), DVT (design verification test), and PVT (production verification test). The first revision was very