<biot>
there's a sometime contributor I know in argentina, and it's nearly impossible for him to import electronics now, even really cheap things from china
<biot>
no foreign currency, you know
<biot>
the only way they can get gear at his university is through the *military*
<wpwrak>
that, and also simply scary things. like restrictions on acquiring foreign currencies.
<biot>
wrap your head around that :-(
<wpwrak>
yeah, that issue :)
<wpwrak>
import should still be fine if you avoid a few traps
<wpwrak>
but you either need a credit card that works abroad (in theory most do) or directly have money outside the country
<wpwrak>
(traps) like connecting to mains. a big no-no.
<biot>
eh?
<wpwrak>
also, declared value should be below USD 1000
<biot>
what do you mean, connecting to mains?
<wpwrak>
anything that connects to mains needs to be certified. argentina has its own certificate, not shared with any other country. only very few products are certified for use in argentina. so if they spot that customs, you drop out of the normal customs process.
<wpwrak>
connecting to 220 V
<biot>
oh damn, sounds terrible
<wpwrak>
so no power cable, no wall wart, etc.
<biot>
right
<biot>
it's stuff like this...
<wpwrak>
what you can do it ask the sender to remove any power supplies before shipping. they usually can do this.
<wpwrak>
you can also try to ship the power supply separately. sometimes that passes. and if it doesn't, you just scrap the shipment.
<wpwrak>
because, if it gets red-flagged, it stops at customs. for courier, that's at ezeiza (the international airport of buenos aires). then you have to go there, no matter where in the country you live. there, they will tell you to get a customs broker to resolve the issue.
<wpwrak>
things you can't do (according to the customs officials) are: 1) just remove the offending bit and accept the rest of the shipment. 2) return the whole package to the sender.
<biot>
haha
<roh>
i just was told from somebody working at a us chemical company that they also opened up a factory in china because of the shipping issues to europe
<roh>
its easier to recieve stuff from china in europe than from the us.
<roh>
so its not only argentinia doing more than stupid things
<wpwrak>
now you have three options: 1) decide it's now worth it, pay the storage fees and abandon the shipment. 2) get your device certified, which involves at least three additional parties, should cost a handsome amount of money, will take time, etc. 3) have the customs broker negotiate a bribe.
<wpwrak>
roh: nice paradigm shift :)
<biot>
wpwrak: I'm guessing 3) is the commonly used option
<wpwrak>
yup. that's the most reliable and efficient way to resolve such issues.
<roh>
wpwrak: ack. actually its funny.. i only ever recieved one package from china declared correctly.. and that was from wolfgang *g*
<wpwrak>
supposedly, just not having a wall plug in the box is sufficient to avoid trouble. e.g., if you have a device that connects directly to mains via a cable, remove the cable. but i haven't tested that hypothesis yet.
<roh>
all others were marked gift on the CN22 form
<roh>
there are even packagings which have the CN22 printed on, with the tick in the 'gift' field already marked
<biot>
wpwrak: the implication is that they open EVERY package to check, which is in itself pretty surreal
<whitequark>
china is a very charitable country
<whitequark>
didn't you know that?
<wpwrak>
roh: this may be a good thing. if everything from china has bad paperwork, customs simply can't make a fuss about it
<roh>
wpwrak: i think so ;)
<wpwrak>
biot: oh, they certainly do
<wpwrak>
at argenting customs, you can also run into "soft" problems. things you can resolve with the only trouble being that you have to go to the airport. e.g., if the paperwork is incomplete or if they suspect you're trying to sneak something illegal past them. e.g. they once suspected smartphone parts to be some contraption to "blank" stolen phones.
<wpwrak>
(as if i really had to import anything if i wanted to do that ;-)
<biot>
haha
<biot>
they fancy themselves pretty smart huh
<wpwrak>
well, there's probably a few thousand phone "recyclers" for each hardware developer in the country, so i guess a false positive every now and then shouldn't come as a surprise
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<lkcl>
hi folks has anyone tracked down a reference design set of schematics and PCB files for the jz4760?
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<larsc>
doesn't ingenic have them on their website?
<lkcl>
larsc: no. they have a PDF. that's not a set of schematics in ORCAD format, and it's not a 6-layer PCB file in e.g. PADS format.
<lkcl>
freescale commissioned boundarydevices.com to produce a reference design with the iMX6 - full schematics including PADS files were released.
<lkcl>
TI always release full schematics and PADS files
<larsc>
write them a mail
<lkcl>
samsung not so much
<lkcl>
i did. i was just wondering if anyone else had already done so
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<wpwrak>
wow. ingenic are releasing data sheets again ? wow. and there's even the 4740. alas, no PM.
<wpwrak>
(unless it's hiding in a tar)
<larsc>
did they depublish them again?
<roh>
wpwrak: well.. its over for interresting anyhow
<roh>
wpwrak: A10 has won that market already.
<wpwrak>
larsc: in march 2011, they had everything on ftp for a while. when wolfgang congratulated them, they hurriedly pulled them. don't know when they put things back.
<wpwrak>
roh: even though there seems to be even less material on the A10. well, maybe in chinese, but it's kinda suspicious that even sites that claim to have all there is to know about the A10 have only a list of registers definitions fished out of the kernel source.
<lkcl>
PM... as in PMIC? i just found the ACT8600
<lkcl>
wpwrak: not even most employees in allwinner know everything there is to know about the A10 :)
<roh>
wpwrak: i prefer registermaps and workin driver over broken documentation every day.
<lkcl>
it even has VGA in for goodness sake!
<whitequark>
#arm-netbook might know more about A10...
<wpwrak>
lkcl: PM as in Programming Manual. the book that describes the registers, the fileds in them, the values, and with a little luck also the semantics
<roh>
wpwrak: and its atleast not 'prehistoric' when it comes to performance.
<lkcl>
roh: likewise. you've uh... seen the size of the iMX6 reference docs? fiive thouuusand pages...
<wpwrak>
lkcl: you mean if you don't know how it works, you're more confident that you'll get it to work ? (-:C
<whitequark>
exynos 4210 is 11k or so...
<whitequark>
and that isn't even a complete doc. and that doesn't include the ARM reference
<roh>
lkcl: hehe... freescale documentation is usually nice. also their drivers were (dunno about now) well written.. some by i think t. gleixner?
<roh>
the problem with freescale is price. their chips are much too expensive for a not-extremely-high-volume consumer electronics product.
<whitequark>
lkcl: I recall that samsung's partner/subsidiary (?) hardkernel has had great troubles prying documentation on the devkits from samsung
<roh>
within china there were usually copied documentation and even develboards from samsung
<whitequark>
and they're very obviously linked. one of odroids is almost sgs2 (it even looks like one). hardkernel's website is referenced by samsung under "devkits" or so
<larsc>
pengutronix did imx, tlgx is linutronix
<roh>
larsc: ah. thanks for clearing that up. both do good work from by pov
<wpwrak>
roh: nice drivers are boring. i kinda liked the "let's roll up the sleeves, put on the boots, take out the pitch forks and get to work" feeling you got with, say, some samsung stuff
<lkcl>
whitequark: that sounds about right. i have one of the original odroid hand-helds - yyep, kernel source: nnope on docs :)
<wpwrak>
s/pitch forks/pitchforks/
<qi-bot>
wpwrak meant: "roh: nice drivers are boring. i kinda liked the "let's roll up the sleeves, put on the boots, take out the pitchforks and get to work" feeling you got with, say, some samsung stuff"
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<hellekin>
wpwrak: so you prefer broken stuff?
<wpwrak>
stuff that can be salvaged :)
<wpwrak>
well, i have to admit that the biggest part of the joy i felt was that the driver didn't look like a total disaster. just something that needed a bit of cleanup and it could actually go upstream.
<hellekin>
that was not a driver, wpwrak, but a salmon :)
<wpwrak>
*scratch,scratch*
<whitequark>
that's a surprisingly good analogy for the hoops you need to jump through (sic) in order to get your code accepted
* larsc
never jumped through any hoops
* whitequark
has had three attempts to merge trivial patches in LLVM. no replies.
<larsc>
maybe llvm doesn't have an andrew morten
<lindi->
hmm, all of my patches have been merged I think
<wpwrak>
hoops ? i once even had a patch torn from my hands by linus himself :)
<wpwrak>
(okay, that was admittedly a good while ago :)
<roh>
hm. i also never have seen proper patches dropped that way. if they were addressed correctly
<whitequark>
I've pinged them and asked on IRC if they were written/submitted correctly
<whitequark>
no idea :/
<whitequark>
one of them merely replaces bool with LLVMBool
<whitequark>
(was a typo)
<roh>
well.. all my 3-liners were accepted by the subsys maintainers back then
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<larsc>
wpwrak: Back in your days the only prerequisite to get a patch accepted was that the code worked most of the time ;)
<wpwrak>
or that it looked at least as if it might :)
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<larsc>
these days patches don't get accept if there is a newline too much or one is missing
<larsc>
s/accept/accepted/
<qi-bot>
larsc meant: "these days patches don't get accepted if there is a newline too much or one is missing"
<whitequark>
ok, a ping on IRC succeeded this time!
<wpwrak>
yeah, the level of pickiness is quite high. well above what's necessary for most purposes.
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<viric>
sometimes pickiness is not on the proper topics, either
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<wpwrak>
kewl. my keyboard has sun-like "option" buttons that - according to xev - translate to "Muhenkan" and "Henkan_Mode", whatever these may be. life is full of surprises :)
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