Questions and Requests about the Rack Reform

[josch]

@ail

The main reason I’m interested in the Rack Reform is to have an easier platform than the laptop to test other operating systems on. One of the issues with doing this on the Reform laptop is that you essentially have to unscrew the bottom acrylic plate to access a serial port which makes for an awkward arrangement on the desktop and makes spontaneous debugging a bit cumbersome to do. I thought the Rack reform would be a great platform to do this on.

To tinker, you still have to open up the Rack Reform box. What you need is just something to attach your motherboard to for easy access and debuggability, no? This is the setup that I’m using for evaluating new reform-tools releases. It currently has the LS1028A installed:

In the corner there is a tiny RP2040 board with a few lines of micropython on it which sends p1 or p0 to the motherboard to switch it on and off, respectively. Here is a close-up together with the USB-UART adapter:

The whole thing is powered by a regular ATX PSU, powering the Reform with 12 V.

To create a header that is a standard RS232 serial port directly to the motherboard.

To do that on my regular reform, I have a USB-UART adapter integrated into the chassis and expose the micro-usb plug through the left-hand-side-panel:

Adding LTE Modem and other USB devices

Hi, after reading this topic while also coming from using a Thinkpad T450s with the option of adding a miniPCI LTE modem and SIM card for mobile internet, I got motivated to mod my reform to have the same functionality. TLDR; here is how my final result looks like: [PA032017] We cannot add an LTE minipcie card because there is only a single slot available that is already occupied by the wifi card. Finding a minipcie card that offers both wifi and LTE seems to be impossible. There exist pcie…

As I recall, the HDMI port isn’t supported without specific adjustments? This is related to my second request

The HDMI port works just fine with the imx8mq. The only quirk is, that you have to select and boot with a different device tree to make use of it. You do that by running reform-display-config dual. This is disabled by default because if active, the internal display is run by a less performant display engine (LCDIF instead of DCSS) and the panel is run at a lower freq, so we can’t just default to it.