A couple thoughts: why would anybody want this board? It has audio specific stuff on it you won't find on other general purpose computer boards, specifically an analog DAC output that is significantly better than what is on the Touch, you would have to get at least a $1000 USB DAC to get in this quality range. Very low jitter clocks (much lower than the ones in the Touch, but not as good as some of the best external DACs), a highly optimized S/PDIF coax output that is better than almost anything else out there no matter what the price. The beauty of this concept is that these extra "audiophile" options are easy and inexpensive to add when you are building them in from the ground up. It's when you take an existing general purpose system and try and add this as outboard "add-ons" that it gets quite expensive. I really want to do this with those extra options because that is what differentiates this from say a CuBox.
There ARE large initial setup fees for doing this, that is why I mentioned 25 units, at that price the amortization of the setup charge starts getting lower than the cost of the actual parts. Below that you can still do it, but the cost per board skyrockets. What I am envisioning is a fairly simple first board, primarily designed to be a black box player, I would like to leave off the HDMI for the first board, it adds a significant amount of complexity. Designing this board will be fairly straight forward so something can be done and out there to a few developers quite quickly. I did some more checking and found out that the 1GHz processor is actually easier to layout than the 600MHz one, they did a much better job of optimizing the ball layout. The interesting thing is that the price in small quantities is almost identical. So I'll just go with the 1GHz processor. We have a choice of 256MB or 512MB and keep it with a single chip. The 512MB one costs $20 more and is significantly more work in the layout. (the board won't cost more, but it will take longer to get layed out) Because of the more layout effort I'm thinking it might be a good idea to go with the 256MB for the first board. Once these boards are out the software types can get a working linux distribution with Squeezelite handling the SB part. The idea is that the firmware is one file that gets written to an SD card which when booted by the board has it up and running as a black box receiver. Until that point it WILL be a geek fest to get it working, but because the mission is simple (black box receiver) it hopefully will not take too long to get a firmware file up and running. This process gives a working board that does not need a full blown geek to get working (plug in the SD-card, turn it on), at that point we have something that might appeal to more people and we can start looking at industrial design and options for a more flexible board (display outputs, running server etc), but I think its a good idea to start with a very simple one first to get bugs ironed out and find out what it is capable of doing. John S. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JohnSwenson's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=5974 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=97881 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
