Nikolaus is even in DragonBox Pyra team ( http://www.pyra-handheld.com/team.html ), so I guess any experience he gets from the Pyra about working with OMAP5 will be applicable later on OpenPhoenux projects as well

Nikolaus just told that he just finished mech proto PCB rev#2, with better positioning of a number of relevant things like the holes, the switches, the USB etc.
Stay tuned for photos coming soon
[edit] the protos are made of thicker PCB since that's cheaper and those protos are for the Neo900 junkyard anyway. alas this plus some screws not tightened make for a spacer frame gap (no spacer frame yet) that's not exactly looking nice and cute. Thus I wonder if it's a good idea to publish the photos, you might feel disappointed by watching an ugly proto.

cheers
jOERG

Just donated another €200 to help this project along. I have 2 N900s that would love to have another lease on life.

pretty pleeeeaaase..?
EDIT: sugar on top?

That's not really the photo Joerg was talking about, but I couldn't resist

Have an ugly prototype with sugar on top!


Notice the display part being actually connected to it \o/

Well, for whatever "connected" means, yes it's plugged in to a connector we finally managed to source and which is soldered to that prototype but not itself connected to anything.

Since you seem so eager for it, go to http://maemo.cloud-7.de/Neo900/media...-me-proto-nr2/ to find the whole set of photos and video, incl the "ugly gap" ones I'd rather not have disclosed and a soldering oopsie Nikolaus rather not have seen published (the perfectionist he is - I can tell you he's usually doing an extraordinary awesome job at soldering. Nikolaus, consider it as mechanical stress test for the connectors ! We had to do that anyway, eventually).
We promised to be as open as possible to community, so here you are.

The gap is pretty missleading on those pictures, particularly in DSC01853.jpeg (that's why I renamed it to move it all down). Maybe best idea of what the final spacer frame might be like gives DSC01854.jpeg - the gap is still too large, but final spacer frame additional height shall be roundabout no larger than the plastic bridge of case between the USB hole and the gap (which is ~2.8mm) - here the gap is larger due to the thicker PCB material used, and you see best why in other pictures the gap seems optically widened thanks to the design of the display which even on N900 creates some gap-alike discontinuity of >1mm incl the real gap.

enjoy!
/j

I'm sure lots of people would find such a gap horrible but I have to say that I actually would not mind if my N900 would become that fat if it meant that I can have a more free operating system in my pocket If it will be even thinner than that in the end, only all the better!

But then again I also put up with the horrible shape of the gta01/02/04

Thanks a lot for sharing this!

Would it be possible (at least in theory) to run Harmattan on Neo900? (Sorry if this has been asked earlier, I could not find any information about this)

I would like not to derail this thread so if someone is interested to discuss this please use this thread: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=53551 (Harmattan Hacker Edition thread).

I just got second-hand n900 to evaluate possibility of donating for neo900 and so far I'm very satisfied. Resistive screen and physical keyboard are superb, I'm glad you chose this formfactor. I had to fix loose usb though and hope that neo900 will address this design flaw.

Also, seeing that Debian is proposed as default OS for neo900, is there any ongoing project to backport Maemo apps/customizations to Debian? I see several such projects on wiki, but they all seem to be long dead.

And unlike some other posters here I am not going to apologize for derailing thread. For God's sake, this is the only thread which is linked from neo900.org website, I've no idea why you suddenly want to be so exclusively technical here. In that case create separate thread for feedback and update neo900.org website to point there.

That gap is nowhere near as bad as I expected.
Thanks for the images - Puts my fears at ease. Really no issue at all!