There has been a flurry of activity over the last few months trying to see what sort of design might constitute Balloon 4.

There is now an agreement with Toby Churchill Ltd that will fund the development of an Open Hardware board based around their requirements for an embedded processor to replace Balloon 3.

We are still trying to decide on a processor but current thinking is that it should be based on OMAP 3.

This will allow us to tap into a vast amount of open source hardware and software expertise.

The emphasis will remain on designing an embeddable processor board with good accessible IO and onboard programmable logic.

Because the design intent is that the board will be embedded into products it is important that any IO can be broken out to standard connectors off board.

The design team would welcome suggestions of what to include, and what not to include, given that we wish to differentiate from other boards in the market, and that the board will be used in products that will have to gain CE mark approvals.

*It is not our intent to design yet another netbook.*

One major change from the way that the Balloon 3 project worked has also been agreed.

For Balloon 4 we will open the design at the schematic level, publishing the schematic designs and full PCB design files.

It is intended that these will be published in Altium format as that is the CAD package of choice for the design process.

However we will also explore the possibility of publishing the files for one of the Open ECAD packages such as gEDA.

This will allow third parties to develop their own instantiations of the Balloon 4 design.

This move recognises the fact that the barrier to production is the finance required to get a PCB like this into production and the expertise needed to design and debug it, rather than the IP in the design.

It is intended that the schematic design will be created as modular blocks and that these will be published individually.

Each block will then be tagged with a confidence level indicating the level of prototyping, manufacturing and testing that has been applied to it. In this way others can contribute modules at a schematic level without breaking the core design.

For this reason the term “Balloon 4” will now refer to the collection of schematic design modules rather than a specific PCB instantiation.

The BOHL will be modified to encompass this change and the onus will be on organisations that decide to use the Balloon 4 design to make the instantiations they create Open and available for purchase.

Any comments and thoughts are welcome, both on the design and the more open design approach.

David Bisset