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posted by janrinok on Monday August 01 2016, @05:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the over-to-you! dept.

The goal of the EOMA (Embedded Open Modular Architecture) project is to introduce the idea of being ethically responsible about both the ecological and the financial resources required to design, manufacture, acquire and maintain our personal computing devices. The EOMA68 standard is a freely-accessible, royalty-free, unencumbered hardware standard formulated and tested over the last five years around the ultra-simple philosophy of "just plug it in: it will work".

With devices built following this standard, one can upgrade the CPU-card (consisting of CPU, RAM and some local storage) of a device while keeping the same housing (e.g. laptop). One can also use the CPU-card in different devices (e.g. unplug CPU-card from laptop, plug into desktop); or use a replaced/discarded CPU-card from a laptop for NAS storage or a micro-server. There are housings currently available for a laptop (can be 3D-printed in full, or in part to replace parts that break) and a micro-desktop; and there are plans for others like routers or tablets in the future.

There are multiple articles talking about this project and analyzing the hardware, for example from ThinkPenguin, CNXSoft or EngadgetNG. There is also a recent live-streamed video introducing the project.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Foobar Bazbot on Tuesday August 02 2016, @12:21AM

    by Foobar Bazbot (37) on Tuesday August 02 2016, @12:21AM (#382891) Journal

    First, let me be clear -- I'm going to talk as though this standard has succeeded already, and there's multiple CPU cards and multiple systems to use them in; after all, the whole point of this is to bootstrap the EOMA68 ecosystem, and if it only results in a single A20 CPU card, a laptop, and a minidesktop/breakout, it hasn't succeeded at all. So i won't address issues like "But there's no point in modularity if there's only one module that fits!". Those aren't invalid criticisms, but they're inevitable at this point -- and you'll have to judge for yourself the risk it never gets past this point.

    Anyway, you're coming at this from a desktop perspective, and comparing it to the most desktop-like laptops. Note that quite a few laptops do have soldered-down RAM. Storage is arguably a downside, but even there, a few of the netbook/chromebook type laptops that this actually competes with have soldered-down SSDs as well. Your perspective is absolutely not wrong, but it's not the most useful to understand what EOMA68 could achieve compared to its direct competition.

    ATX is great for desktops, but it doesn't do a thing to help with laptops, tablets, and embedded devices -- and that's what the EOMA68 standard is about. It doesn't really extend down to mobile phones, though a brick-phone with EOMA68 is just conceivable, and I personally would love it. It also only covers part of the laptop region, specifically netbook/chromebook type things, though the eventual type-III PCMCIA-based version, with higher power limit, will stretch that range. The reason it's currently focused on laptop and mini-desktop is partly historical chance (a KDE-based tablet was actually planned as the first mass-produced chassis, but fell through), and partly their usefulness for development on other platforms. (Plug a CPU card into a mini-desktop for development, plug it back into your new tablet chassis for testing, repeat till it works.)

    I mentioned "embedded" -- to be clear what sort of thing I mean, you know the trend of people taking appliances that would normally be connected to a PC (especially 3D printers, but other stuff too) and sticking a Raspberry Pi or similar with a small display on to make them standalone? EOMA68 is great for this sort of thing, because you get choice of processors easily (compare adapting a Raspberry Pi hat into a BBB cape), and potentially "free" upgrades with hand-me-down CPU cards. And if you're making a project with a custom PCB, it's relatively easy to add an EOMA68 slot -- the CPU card has all the difficult and/or multilayer stuff done, so you can add it to a simple double-sided PCB. Or you can make your own projects designed around the EOMA68 from scratch -- it's no harder than designing a "hat", "cape", or such for other single-board computers, but you gain futureproofing and choice.

    The EOMA68 actually helps a little with hardware failures (after all, compared to a tablet with everything soldered, at least you don't also have an LCD, touchscreen, battery, etc. rendered useless by your eMMC failure), but that's just gravy; the main point (from the consumer perspective) is to beat the upgrade treadmill. When the next hot processor comes out, and everyone bloats up their code to require it, you pull the still-working card from your laptop chassis and put a new one in. Then you put the "old" card in some other system (e.g. digital picture frame, router, 3D printer), replacing its even older CPU, and it gets a "free" upgrade. Or to put it another way, the cost of the new CPU card is amortized over two, three, or even more devices that receive upgrades, whether directly or second-hand.

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  • (Score: 1) by mafm on Tuesday August 02 2016, @06:15PM

    by mafm (6305) on Tuesday August 02 2016, @06:15PM (#383240) Homepage

    Thanks for your comment, it really highlights the strengths and key points that the project tries to address.

    Yes, desktops are still quite modular, but the devices that have cropped up in the last few years do not work in that way, and as soon as some component fails or lags behind (e.g. memory of a tablet) the device is as good as dead. I have several of these gathering dust around the house.