The EOMA68 Upgradeable ARM Board Faces Another Setback: HDMI Connectors Don't Fit

[polarathene]

The Unipro specification?
I believe that GreyBUS, was the application Layer, L1-L4 of the OSI model..
I believe it had a big Overhead.. but was created to be modular.

Don' t know what happened with that Ideas/Project( Google brought what we know as project ara, to create a modular phone.. ).
Initially I tough it would be a good Idea,
But then Google also found out, that "selling parts", would prevent them from selling phones

I think( not sure ), people wanted "modularity for free", but with it, comes complexity/bigger amount of processing power/big latency, which defeated the initial idea..

Yes, they didn't seem to make business sense for such a market. They require more physical space due to additional components and connecting them, and generally that's going to push up initial costs for a complete phone too. Likely reduces profit margins that can be had from selling a whole phone(as mass production of smaller components/blocks would likely be cheaper and thus more competitive), along with upgrades to newer products(Assuming you retain the customer for all parts), far more accessible to a customer than PC parts. Along with potential added support/maintenance/compatibility burden. Equivalent phone would have higher BOM and not perform as well or be able to have the same flexibility in design/aesthetics as an all-in-one model.

The technology though is still useful from a customer perspective, especially in other markets like we're discussing here. I don't know what the actually bandwidth can be, but the raw line width is apparently close to 12Gbit/s and lower power requirements than USB3. Even with overheads, that's probably still going to be ok.

> They created a proprietary port, but one that uses an open standard, UniPro. The phone has six, and each one can push up to 11.9 gigabits of data per second, in both directions. Ara chief Richard Woolridge spits out crazy edit-video-while-you-computer-vision use cases, but says the spec boils down to this: It can handle anything. And it only consumes a third as much power as USB 3. - Source

Mostly I just like the magnetic lock(electropermanent magnet) with capacitive data/power connection. I've seen it used for a Microsoft backed IoT education product(they were modules in hexagon shapes that I saw demonstrated in a Chinese expo last year, but rather expensive), and another one is from Seeedstudio with Grove Zero: https://www.chmakered.com/GroveZero

[tuxd3v]

Yes, they didn't seem to make business sense for such a market. They require more physical space due to additional components and connecting them, and generally that's going to push up initial costs for a complete phone too. Likely reduces profit margins that can be had from selling a whole phone(as mass production of smaller components/blocks would likely be cheaper and thus more competitive), along with upgrades to newer products(Assuming you retain the customer for all parts), far more accessible to a customer than PC parts. Along with potential added support/maintenance/compatibility burden. Equivalent phone would have higher BOM and not perform as well or be able to have the same flexibility in design/aesthetics as an all-in-one model.

Agree with that..

The technology though is still useful from a customer perspective, especially in other markets like we're discussing here. I don't know what the actually bandwidth can be, but the raw line width is apparently close to 12Gbit/s and lower power requirements than USB3. Even with overheads, that's probably still going to be ok.

I believe that 12 Gb/s is already ok to a lot of things..
Currently only USB3.2( over usb-c ) has 2 new SuperSpeed+ modes of 10Gb/s and 20Gb/s.
usb4 will be 40+ Gb/s because it is based on thunderbolt3, and backwards compatible til usb2.0..

USB is a very complicated protocol, once we program for it, we realise the complexity it is..

I didn't knew about GreyBUS 1/3 power consumption for ~12Gb/s,
If that is true.. then USB doesn't make sense in a lot of places..

[polarathene]

I didn't knew about GreyBUS 1/3 power consumption for ~12Gb/s,
If that is true.. then USB doesn't make sense in a lot of places..

I haven't looked into it further since it doesn't appear as accessible to develop for as a hobbyist. Presumably they meant a third at the lowest required not necessarily for achieving 12Gb/s, "power" wasn't defined in the citation either so it's quite vague. Perhaps they meant voltage or amperage(USB 2.0 outputs load units of 100mA up to 500mA and USB 3.0 150mA up to 900mA) could have been in wattage, for USB 2 that's what.. 500mW, if GreyBus was running 3.3V@50mA, that'd be 165mW(third of the 500mA roughly).

As a bus, that 12Gb/s would be distributed across all the connected modules, not 12Gb/s each(assuming there is a single controller managing all modules).

[tuxd3v]

I haven't looked into it further since it doesn't appear as accessible to develop for as a hobbyist. Presumably they meant a third at the lowest required not necessarily for achieving 12Gb/s, "power" wasn't defined in the citation either so it's quite vague. Perhaps they meant voltage or amperage(USB 2.0 outputs load units of 100mA up to 500mA and USB 3.0 150mA up to 900mA) could have been in wattage, for USB 2 that's what.. 500mW, if GreyBus was running 3.3V@50mA, that'd be 165mW(third of the 500mA roughly).

As a bus, that 12Gb/s would be distributed across all the connected modules, not 12Gb/s each(assuming there is a single controller managing all modules).

Thanks for the clarification..
Yeah, looking into it that way, it seems plausible to me.

I read a bit about it, and one nice feature is exactly, what was described above, the capacity to 'shutdown' or "startup/enable/disable" or wherever a part of the phone, by software or Hardware, in a safety manner, or in a "atomic way"..

But it seems to lack ASIC's implementing and driving it, I believe( maybe a advantage of other protocols out there.. ).