Finally, everything is done 🙂
Docks are ready and will transfer to post office in two days.

I have some experience:
1. I heard many bad stories about the quality of “made in ShenZhen”(or made in China), I am a little “scared” before I do it , very carefully to choose the factory. I asked many friends and search,search,search…(I am a Chinese, but be honest, I do not have much confidence.)
But finally, I find most of the stories are not true.
When I talk with the materials provider, they just give me two lists, one is from original factory(always big factory), one with fake on it(from country side, electrical rubbish etc). To get good one, you have to cost twice or even more. They just tell everything and leave the choice to you.
Of course, I choose the good one. The benefit is obvious, VoCore good rate is over 99.9%, rest 0.1% issue is some antennas lost in SMT…So in another word, the good rate is almost 100%( from test. 🙂 )
The higher the price, the better the quality of the merchandise.

2. Assemble/SMT. There is not much to say, due to 90% work are done by machines, the machines are all from Samsung(their main job is to do work for Samsung Phone/Pad etc), only test part there is a little human work -> put VoCore to the test fixture…They click “Start” on my test application, wait, until the app say “Yes” or “No”.
The factory engineers are very experienced, they help me a lot when I design the test application. I think this is bonus for made in China, most of the production made here, you do not have to cost time and money to design a new test process, but just improve current test process, and get a even better quality.

3. Some suggestions for hardware hobbyists all over the world. If you want to make your production in ShenZhen, better to have a Chinese in your team deal with the factory, some factories have salesman speak English, but engineers do not speak English, if they have problem in the production(this always happen), it will be hard to communicate.
99% of Chinese people are good, if you meet the 1% bad one, you will lose everything. To avoid such problem is easy, just compare, compare, compare…and most important thing, careful if the quote is too low(especially some small factories, their quote is always unbelievable low, 40%~60% as the good quality ones), they use second-hand chip or rubbish chip and you will never know, they can pass your test, even 20% production is NG, they still earn a lot, unless you stay there and monitor them in factory everyday.

Finally, I do not care VoCore is OSHW or not, I do not intent to make it as a “sell” point. I just remember when I was very young, the electrical products are all have schematic in the manual, and my father helped me study the radio…
do not know when that disappeared, just want the happy days back. ^_^

Now, all source are able to download from http://www.vocore.io/wiki/index/id:11, as I promised, once the package shipped, the code open.
That layout file is .asc which should be imported by PADS2007 or later version.(The PCB factory only accept PADS due to they only have PADS) Welcome to change it to other CAD format. 🙂

Two days busy on the shipping and dealing with factory about the dock assemble test, here are some news:

First News:
Intel Edison comes.

I made a simple compare 🙂

VoCore Win
Size:
VoCore -> 25.6 x 25.6 x 3.4;
Edison -> 35.5 x 25.0 x 3.9;

Output:
VoCore -> 1.8V 200mA, 3.3V 300mA;
Edison -> 1.8V 100mA, 3.3V 100mA;

Input:
VoCore -> 3.3V ~ 6.0V
Edison -> 3.3V ~ 4.5V

Price:
VoCore -> 20USD
Edison -> 50USD

Edison Win
Edison: x86 x 2, 1GB memory
VoCore: MIPS, 32MB memory

Edison: BlueTooth
VoCore: N/A

Edison: 4GB eMMC
VoCore: 16MB SPI Flash

Fair
Input:
VoCore -> 5V, 200mA
Edison -> 3.3V, 300mA

FCCID:
VoCore -> passed, without shell
Edison -> passed, with shell

I am so happy my VoCore still have some points beat the Intel Edison 😀 VoCore is totally open source, but I think Intel will never do that.

Second News:
MT7688 is coming, I heard some rumours, the final chip has two versions, one with 8MB memory(not enough 🙁 ), one without memory, speed is same as MT7620, 580MHz, but power consume is 0.6watt(is this greater than AR9331’s 0.5watt?)

New forum is ready: forum.vocore.io

Now I am trying to move the old vonger.cn/?forum=vocore threads to the new forum. 🙂

This should be the final forum shape.

The VoCore without dock shipped today 🙂

I am crazy…
The factory just made a new big mistake(or accident), they deleted all the test log, just for a stupid reason, those test logs took too much disk space…and they ‘think’ the productions had done the test, that should be useless. Simply ignore my notify, ye, I notified them to keep the log at least three times, in face or phone call. T-T Now they are trying to recover the deleted data…
I planed to use that log to trace the production quality…If user gets the VoCore but has problem, at least I have some data to trace.
They agree if the log can not back, they will test again, but I can not wait. Just hope the log be recovered.

Enable two UARTs for VoCore, one UART lite, one UART full.
Just need to change DTS a little:(VOCORE.dts under openwrt source code)

First, enable uart@500

uart@500 {
    status = "okay";
};

Then, remove uartf from ralink,group:gpio.

pinctrl {
    state_default: pinctrl0 {
        gpio {
            ralink,group = "jtag", "led"; -> remove "uartf"
            ralink,function = "gpio";
        };
    };
};

Finally, delete the code that export uartf as gpio:
in gpio-export section, remove gpio7, gpio8, gpio9, gpio10, gpio11, gpio12, gpio13, gpio14. If we keep them will get some error in log, but no effect to system boot.
PS: find a possible bug here, gpio10 and gpio11 are missed 🙂

Now good news is the two UARTs work same time, bad news is we lose eight gpio. 😉
Hope one day a hero will make a new rt5350-uart driver, so that allows ralink-function=”uartf,gpio”, then we can save 4 gpios. It is a good chance to practise Linux driver code. 😀

The new site has opened recently 🙂
I try to make the site as simple as possible, hope you like it.
Special thanks to Kovács Kornél, a great work.
Some parts are still under construction, if you have good idea, please mail to vonger@live.com.
Especially the wiki part 😀

Just waiting for factory…So I am on SPI again. 🙂

Last time I have done the driver, but it is not working with mmc. I think there must be something wrong with it, but after my test, the driver works quite well, so I guess I should make some mistake in mmc driver config.
NEW SOURCE CODE HERE: spi-rt2880.c

I soldered another flash to a bare VoCore board, so I do not have to solder the eight wires. Connect CS1->CS0, SPICLK->SPICLK, MOSI->MOSI, MISO->MISO, also pull HOLD/WP to high, so now VoCore SPI1 is controlling the second flash.
It works very well by current openwrt in high speed(>935KHz).

Add the following code to replace spidev@1 in VOCORE.dts, set the flash to 500KHz.

m25p80@1 {
    #address-cells = <1>;
    #size-cells = <1>;
    compatible = "w25q128";
    reg = <1>;
    linux,modalias = "m25p80", "w25q128";
    spi-max-frequency = <500000>;

    partition@0 {
        label = "xxxx";
        reg = <0x0 0x1000000>;
    };
};

Hardware part connection:

From my test, the data is normal.

root@OpenWrt:/sys/devices/10000000.palmbus/10000b00.spi/spi_master/spi32766/spi32766.1# ls
driver      factory_id  modalias    mtd         subsystem   uevent
root@OpenWrt:/sys/devices/10000000.palmbus/10000b00.spi/spi_master/spi32766/spi32766.1# cat factory_id
D26210-44DB40312F

Its log:

Mon Sep 29 02:06:27 2014 authpriv.notice dropbear[1175]: Password auth succeeded for 'root' from 192.168.61.159:58928
Mon Sep 29 02:07:19 2014 kern.warn kernel: [ 1461.940000] m25p80 spi32766.1: low speed mode.
Mon Sep 29 02:07:19 2014 kern.warn kernel: [ 1461.960000] m25p80 spi32766.1: delay = 1000
Mon Sep 29 02:07:19 2014 kern.warn kernel: [ 1461.970000] m25p80 spi32766.1: low speed mode.
Mon Sep 29 02:07:19 2014 kern.warn kernel: [ 1461.980000] m25p80 spi32766.1: delay = 1000
Mon Sep 29 02:07:19 2014 kern.warn kernel: [ 1461.980000] m25p80 spi32766.1: cs = 1, on
Mon Sep 29 02:07:19 2014 kern.warn kernel: [ 1462.000000] m25p80 spi32766.1: bit/x: 8,5
Mon Sep 29 02:07:19 2014 kern.warn kernel: [ 1462.000000] m25p80 spi32766.1: low speed mode.

Read data from the flash is also normal, just a little slow:

root@OpenWrt:/# hexdump -C /dev/mtdblock6 | head -10
00000000  27 05 19 56 d6 62 66 a6  53 88 7f 17 00 01 96 c0  |'..V.bf.S.......|
00000010  80 20 00 00 80 20 00 00  a3 c1 ed e5 05 05 01 00  |. ... ..........|
00000020  53 50 49 20 46 6c 61 73  68 20 49 6d 61 67 65 00  |SPI Flash Image.|
00000030  06 50 00 00 00 00 00 00  00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00  |.P..............|
00000040  ff 00 00 10 00 00 00 00  fd 00 00 10 00 00 00 00  |................|
00000050  e9 01 00 10 00 00 00 00  e7 01 00 10 00 00 00 00  |................|
00000060  e5 01 00 10 00 00 00 00  e3 01 00 10 00 00 00 00  |................|
00000070  e1 01 00 10 00 00 00 00  df 01 00 10 00 00 00 00  |................|
00000080  dd 01 00 10 00 00 00 00  db 01 00 10 00 00 00 00  |................|
00000090  d9 01 00 10 00 00 00 00  d7 01 00 10 00 00 00 00  |................|

I think last time I should did something wrong in the mmc driver config…

Many people ask me about how to pass the FCCID. In fact, the process is not that complex.

That is benefit to there are many module companies’ productions are using RT5350 in ShenZhen, and the foundry I choose has such production already(they also many good software, I am free to use). So I just send VoCore sample to the laboratory, and leave the foundry engineer’s phone number to the laboratory, they did rest for me, that saved me a lot of time.

PS: before the sample send to Lab, the beta version has already tested in factory, all results look good, so my confidence is from there.

About the sample, first of all, the board must in good quality. I am not sure what test they will do, but if the quality is not good, it might broken in half way. My samples are made by machine, better than my hand make ones.

About the test process, I knows little about that, I only know if the EMC can not pass, the laboratory will ask you if you want to add a metal shell, then do the test again(of course, your FCCID production photo will show the shell too, and your final production must have that metal shell)

VoCore passed FCCID in one time without any shell, that should thanks to the simulation software, when I design it, I set its simulation parameters to 1GHz, 3.3V to all traces, the sim result max crosstalk voltage is under 60mV, it should be a good result due to other board such as RM04 the crosstalk value greater than 300mV, its 30% traces even more than 800mV, maybe such reason they have to have a shell. The software I used name is HyperLync. 🙂

To lower the crosstalk voltage, we must keep trace distance 3W at least. And the trace should as short as possible.

Autumn comes, my house temperature is 25C, and test on new VoCore with dock several hours, the max temperature on the surface is lower than 50C, very good 🙂 not hot anymore, just a little warm.