On May 31, 2015 4:10 PM, "Bruce Boyes" <[email protected]> wrote: > > You may be right on those specific items. Apologies if my comments were based on out of date information. And it does seem Seeed's documentation has improved a bit since I was last on their site several months ago. > > The BBB Green announcement is from two weeks ago; I had not heard of it. Thanks for the link. I watched the video. It's hardly an endorsement of Seeedstudio. Jason goes on to say at 1:50 that Seeed has not licensed the BB logo and are not fully participating in the BBB 'ecosystem', and cautions that any mistakes they made will not be fixed by BBB.org since they are effectively 'forking' (my terminology) the design. So I am left wondering how well this "impressive amount of value" will be supported. > > Seeed took off HDMI (bad call for my use, we plan to use HDMI touchscreens on at least some BBB systems to provide a user-facing GUI), and added two Grove connectors. Searching on the Seeed site there is no reference to the new Beaglebone Green. The video says a USB Micro B was added - for what? This already exists on BBB Rev C. Grove seems like a cool idea. So I decided to check it out. Maybe I was wrong... I am trying to be optimistic about this... Comments here for the BBB Grove shield http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/Grove-Cape-for-BeagleBone-Series-p-1718.html indicate that the example code they provided for Grove components is just for Arduino - no actual examples for BBB? What's up with that? The link on the page to Github for the alleged Grove BBB drivers has an extraneous ')' in it so fails unless you take that off - the github for this is correctly https://github.com/Seeed-Studio/Suli - which indeed says that as of today only Arduino is there now. So if you buy the Grove BBB shield you are on your own for drivers: you can't actually use the Seeed BBB hardware you buy out of the box. > > Grove appears to be just I2C - at least here http://www.seeedstudio.com/wiki/Grove_-_Digital_Light_Sensor - so adding two I2C connectors to BBB is hardly adding a lot of value IMHO. > > I have seen other simple clones which also add no value: whistLED for one. Do they pay the author any royalty (I don't know, do you? I'm honestly curious). All the info links just pass through to the real developer's website. What value is added there? > > Here's another http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/Triggertrap-Shield-p-1350.html originally funded by Kickstarter ( http://www.tested.com/tech/photography/2559-trigger-trap-kickstarter-offers-an-open-source-arduino-camera-trigger/), and https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/photocritic/trigger-trap-the-universal-camera-trigger, this product is now obsolete and if you bought it from Seeed you are stuck with no documentation at all - I have tried to find schematics anywhere with no luck. This is a beef with both Triggertrap and Seeed - neither seems to have any documentation available for this product, though on the KS page you can see the promise to do so. > > My belief is if you are going to sell a product, even one you did not design, you have the obligation to your customers to maintain at least user documentation for the product for some reasonable time - at least five or ten years, or as long as it is in use. Maybe I just picked the worst examples, but Seeed doesn't appear to consistently do this. > > You accuse me of an irrational premise. My premise is this: if companies simply clone OSHW, without "joining the ecosystem" (Jason Krinder's wording) and just try to undercut on price, without contributing back into the community (e.g. as Adafruit does, see https://learn.adafruit.com/category/beaglebone), all they are doing is trying to profit from others' engineering. How does that make the world a better place? If my premise is truly irrational and I am missing the whole OSHW concept please explain it to me. > > Conclusion: you have not changed my opinion of Seeed, and I don't see the "very impressive amount of value" from Seeed's BB Green which you do. I'd love it if you had persuaded me otherwise since the more vendors really adding value to OSHW, it would seem that the better off we all will be.
I've been coordinating with seeed to ensure their board works out of the box with bb.org present images and future. There is a lot of things going on behind the scenes, even before the green was announced. Regards, -- 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.
