zachtronics IRL over here

mysterious MNT Pocket Reform mainboard 2.0 is real, as evidenced by this JLCPCB confirmation photo :0 hope i didn't make too many mistakes and the bringup will go smoothly once it arrives...

i have to confess that sometimes i talked to my phone to set up a tea timer (because the UI hoops to get there is unnecessarily complicated). which is the only use case i ever had of talking to my android phone. but that's also broken now :D also quite dystopian that they're sending my pleas for a tea timer to gemini cloud. longing for a linux phone, and some simple short command CLI for common tasks. oh, now the tea timer went off. so it worked and didn't work at the same time. nice.

MNT Reform Next mainboard, version 5! now with 2x SSD slots, especially one for (up to) 2280 size. that one has 4x PCIe 3.0 lanes routed to it with the RK3588. minor checks and cleanups tomorrow. then, steadily towards production!

almost forgot to post: @theawesomerandomness recently sewed a batch of "Holo" sleeves for MNT Pocket Reform, unlocking a bunch of MNT shop orders!

trying cadquery for mechanical integration tests on MNT Reform Next case + electronics parts. it's cool that it can load BREP (skips lengthy STEP parsing) and that the loaded files can have defined positions/rotations etc so i can reexport in kicad and reload in cadquery without having to reposition again.

doing a brutal last-minute change for MNT Reform Next: primary M.2 SSD now full-size (2280), secondary M.2 SSD (2230/2242) now on the back of the mainboard. microSD Express gone, but could still live in an adapter in any of those 2 slots if needed.

"programming as theory building", peter naur, 1985

working prototype of MNT Reform Next with MNT Quasar 8550 processor module (based on Qualcomm QCS8550). speedy!

hey, that's OpenBSD arm64 bootloader on RK3588 MNT Pocket Reform making use of EFI GOP for framebuffer and other services (like keyboard) provided by @barebox and display driver porting work by @ailurux