[Gta04-owner] ANN GTA04A3: Milestone reached!

[Dr. H. Nikolaus Schaller]

Hi all,
I am happy to announce that almost all of the produced GTA04EA boards
have passed the tests and are ready to ship on Monday!

They already passed the automatic tests (using the GTA04 Tester
system) some days ago, which did show that CPU, GPS, WLAN,
Bluetooth, I2C sensors work and the UMTS module responds on USB.

Each board will have a test report like this:


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One final test made us quite some headaches: is the board really
a Telephone?

After successfully initiating voice calls on the first 3 boards, the
next 4 boards did not work. And, the originally tested for good
boards didn't pass the test again. So we did fear that our software
damages the modules. Or that we have a loose connection, opening
with increasing temperatures.

After two long days of trying everything (even soldering small
wires to the PCM voice interface to inspect the signals) it turned
out that we better should not send one specific AT command to
the module, if the call is already established. It will simply mute
the PCM voice channel within the module but will not interrupt
the line...

Now everything appears to work well enough that we
don't expect that you have to send the unit back on the next day :)

Here they are:

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Thanks again for your patience and encouragement! Without
knowing that you are out there eagerly waiting for a new
powerful and state of the art motherboard for the GTA02
system, it would have been much easier to give up and buy
some <insert brand> and try to port Linux onto it. And have in
approx. 2 years just 95% working :)

But now we know all details of the design and there will be
plenty of documentation of every GPIO line.

So what will come after we have shipped the EA boards?

We will start to make a new GTA04A4 layout to fix the hardware
bugs, without having to cut traces and add small wires which is
very expensive in production. And, we will ask for quotations
for PCBs, components, production etc. As soon as we have that,
we can finally annouce price and timing and start to accept
preorders for the next batch.

Nikolaus Schaller