.. _history:

History of the Librem5
======================

Developing a dev kit and eventually a phone is a long process that 
requires many hardware iterations over time to test and determine 
which pieces are good to use in the final product and which aren't. 
What defines a good hardware component for the Librem 5 phone? There 
are several metrics such as  performance, freedom of the firmware 
(if any), physical size, voltage required, features supported and 
more that are taken into account when selecting hardware components 
for the Librem 5 phone.

On the freedom front, we have been committed to the i.MX line of 
CPUs as opposed to something less freedom respecting such as Intel 
hardware. Since the i.MX8 CPU had not been released when the Librem 
5 team started testing (January 2018),  we started our investigation 
with the `Nitrogen6 MAX i.MX6 board <https://boundarydevices.com/product/nitrogen6max/>`_. 

Once the i.MX8 CPU was released, and the 
`EmCraft i.MX 8M SoM <https://www.emcraft.com/products/868>`_ 
was available, a few were ordered so the rest of the dev board 
could be designed around this EmCraft SoM. The :ref:`imx8_devkit` page is where
you will find information on the hardware and how to set up your development
kit to start using it.