On Thursday, May 1, 2014 2:53:36 PM UTC-6, Gerald wrote: > > If you get boards from anyone without the logo, they are in fact at that > point your board. So you can do whatever you like. Make whatever changes > you want. And, you can build the board as long as you want. > > I am aware of the many benefits of making our own board, as well as the associated costs.
I was actually asking a facetious question about support for a board without the logo, but that got me thinking about what you mean by support. The BBB SRM says: "These design materials referred to in this document are *NOT SUPPORTED* and DO NOT constitute a reference design. Only “community” support is allowed via resources at BeagleBoard.org/discuss." So it seems like the boards with a logo are not supported either. In fact the first five pages of the SRM are full of disclaimers of various sorts. I understand that this is required in this day and age of lawyers with itchy trigger fingers. So what is it really that you are providing to the community users that you don't provide to commercial users? > Once we change a board, we no longer make the old revision. If I start > making changes for commercial users, then I am faced with the task of > making sure none of the other commercial users are upset with these > changes,I end up being a free product engineering department for all these > commercial users. I choose not to go down that path. I can't win no > matter what I do. > > This is where I think you show that you believe that commercial users have different expectations that your community users. If you simply remove the word commercial from your statement above, you have an equally true statement. You shouldn't be making changes simply because users, commercial or not, request them. Rather, you should be making changes only when you believe they will improve the product. Commercial users should not expect any preferential treatment for their suggestions, but at the same time their suggestions should not be discarded for no other reason that the source is a commercial user. The good ideas should and will stand on their own merit. Also, all commercial users are well aware of the potential problems that could result from a BBB design change that adversely effects their use of the board. That is where the open design becomes a life saver. If you do make a breaking change we can always make our own boards using the prevoius design, though it will undoubtedly cost more. In addition, the change you want means I have to add a bigger buffer. More > cost. PCB layout charges. New stencils.Change the P&P program. Scrap the > current buffer and order new buffers and try to get them in here fast > enough not to shutdown my production line. Multiply this by say 500 > commercial users. > > I don't want you to make a change, I have merely suggested what I believe is an improvement that could be made. Furthermore, I would not suggest scrapping any parts. You said you 80,000 PCB to use up with the current design. You can use up your stock building those boards, and then depending upon how you implement the change (you could use a different 4 channel buffer, or place two of the same 2 channel buffer parts) you may not have to waste any parts even if you currently have more than 80K in stock. At your current production rate of about 12K per month you should have about 6 months to revise the board and order the new stencils and new parts (if required). As I said before there would be some NRE costs, but those are spread thin over the 100K quantities you are ordering boards in. I don't understand your multiply by 500 concept. Just because you have 500 commercial users doesn't mean that all of them have suggestions for design improvements. Furthermore, even if many do have suggestions, that doesn't mean that all of those are widely applicable improvements, Ultimately, that is up to you to decide. Finally, if you do decide to implement an improvement, that does not preclude you from making multiple change in one revision. You can spread the NRE costs over multiple change done in parallel. You have already made seven revisions from A4 to C, and you will probably make some more along the way. You can surely pool the good ideas into the next release and continue on. In any case I think I have beaten this horse to death. I probably won't be able to wait 6 months for a new release with this feature, so I will have to find a different way to do what I need, but I still think it is an improvement worth considering. Dennis Cote -- For more options, visit http://beagleboard.org/discuss --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "BeagleBoard" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
