Remember The EOMA68 Computer Card Project? It Hopes To Ship This Year

The EOMA68 computer card project is the open-source hardware effort that aims to be Earth-friendly and allow for interchangeable computer cards that can be installed in laptop housings and other devices. The ambitious concept relying upon ARM SoCs raised more than $170k USD via crowdfunding in 2016 but its lineage dates back to the failed Improv dev board as well as the failed KDE Vivaldi tablet years earlier. It turns out in 2018 there is hope of EOMA68 hardware finally shipping.

Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton, the main person behind the EOMA68 Libre Laptop project and EOMA68-A20 computer card, continues work on this effort. He spoke last weekend at FOSDEM 2018 about these efforts.

The current EOMA68 card work is around the Allwinner A20 SoC, which by today's standards is unfortunately a bit slow with being dual-core Cortex A7 CPUs and backed by Mali 400 MP2 graphics. The processor performance is sadly crippling compared to today's other hardware and the Mali graphics still don't have fully working and libre graphics driver support. The computer card is also still aiming for 2GB of RAM and 8GB of NAND.

The project's Crowd Supply page is reporting the computer cards should begin shipping in June along with the micro-desktop housing but it is not expected to be until November when the laptop housing kit begins to ship.

Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton's FOSDEM presentation can be found embedded below for those interested in learning more about the EOMA68 computer card effort.