Rakshat, perfect perfect, thanks a lot for your mail and bringing people together. It's great to know you are out in beautiful Jaipur supporting the Qi project :-)
Your mail made me think about the bigger picture, a little reflection after a solid 3 years of Qi: We built and continue to sell two major products, the Ben NanoNote and Milkymist One, and a number of smaller prototypes, accessories and developer boards, the most interesting one for me being Werner's atrf boards. Creative activity in the Qi core community, as nicely documented by Werner's monthly stats, has more or less been reduced to just Werner himself and his unstoppable drive and inspiration. So I think most people got most everything out of Qi that they could. Open hardware is the future, clearly. We need large corporations to keep investing large amounts of capital to innovate on high-tech materials and processes of all kinds. But we don't need large corporations to control items that relate to our taste and culture and private preferences, or our data, friends, how we communicate, and so on. It's not needed and luckily we found that the principles and technologies of the free software and content worlds can be applied to hardware design and manufacturing just fine. Black boxes have been demystified one after another - it's all in the Qi archives, from our perspective (there are many similar minded projects which we are trying to follow through the Qi planet). If creative (editing/designing) activity slows down more, I am leaning towards writing a big "Qi Hardware - 2009-2012" banner right on the Qi wiki homepage to highlight the formative years of the project. Now back to your TI device question. > building a small clamshell similar to Nanonote in size and feature > (keyboard+ screen+sd card) based on the beaglebone (www.beaglebone.org) > platform or the AM335x processor. ... > My question to the list is how and if can we take this forward? (thanks for the kind words about quality and such in between) To me the TI idea feels like time travel back to the beginnings of Qi, that's why I was thinking about "Qi 2009-2012" and what we learned. What did I learn? - make products for regular people - rigorously test the product in all its functions to make sure every function performs beautifully and without disturbances and naturally. the magical 'it just works'. - stay away from technical jargon when explaining the product The TI idea would lead me away from all of those, but it's not 2009 anymore, and I want to build upon our hard won foundations. So no, it makes no sense to me, as you guessed. But thanks again - and thanks a lot!, for thinking about us. I hope my answer included some background information to explain myself better. Maybe someone else is interested? Cheers, hope to see you again in Jaipur soon, I think I miss India :-) Wolfgang _______________________________________________ Qi Hardware Discussion List Mail to list (members only): [email protected] Subscribe or Unsubscribe: http://lists.en.qi-hardware.com/mailman/listinfo/discussion
