On Thursday 28 February 2013 07:48:31 Rafael Ignacio Zurita wrote: > On Thu, Feb 28, 2013 at 01:41:39AM +0000, Alexander Stephen Thomas Ross wrote: > > Been relying msgs. I am out of my depth on these technical things. Here > > is Luke's (One of the top Rhombus-Tech people.) thoughts: > > First you said EOMA-CF would be the answer. After, you said you are out of > your depth on those technical things. mmmmh...
I don't think we should be too unkind to Alexander here. I think he is just bouncing some ideas around, and from what I've seen of the plans of the EOMA stuff, it does at least superficially cater to the general family of products that the NanoNote belongs to, but I would agree that it is difficult to keep track of what the objectives of the initiative really are. Or at least, it's difficult to keep track if on the one hand, peripherals are meant to be "USB-based and/or I2C-based"... http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/pipermail/arm-netbook/2013-February/006899.html ...but if you look at various block diagrams and pinouts (and read various discussions), you see that stuff like SATA and Ethernet are supposed to be supported by the EOMA cards themselves if those features are meant to be available. > But, I understand you pointed Luke L. that we (or werner) think that > EOMA-CF is an optimise-the-design-around-a-single-processor strategy. > > Then, how do you think EOMA is the answer for a next YA NAnonote? I think that if the EOMA cards became available, then they would seem like interesting candidates, although one might regard the form of the cards (with uninteresting interfaces being omitted and lots of pins going unused) to be inefficient in some way, but I don't really perceive board availability to be the most pressing issue. People can do crazy things with boards that are available today... http://www.engadget.com/2012/12/20/pi-to-go-portable-raspberry-pi/ ...but if we ignore such blatant, albeit imaginative, shoehorning of hardware into various forms of device and concentrate on stuff that has been available for years, the problem is less about whether there are nice boards out there and more about delivering the complete physical device (ignoring for a moment any arguments about whether those boards do 1080p-in-3D or whatever people have to be impressed by before opening their wallets). There really is no shortage of nice hardware to play with, but this hasn't produced huge numbers of end-user devices (NanoNote-like palmtops, tablets, smartphones) based on that nice hardware, leading to stunts like the one above, and that would indicate where the real area of difficulty is right now. It may be the case that the people involved aren't interested in solving the problem or accept that it is outside their area of expertise, and that may explain the ubiquitous notion of using 3D printing to finish the product as a kind of hand-waving gesture towards something that will just get done somehow by someone else. The very fact that messages are relayed backwards and forwards between different groups of people doing fairly similar things, as we see above (and I thought lkcl was aware of this list and even participated in it), says quite a bit about how fragmented things still are in the open hardware world, and this doesn't even touch upon the other areas that Werner mentioned where there is expertise that could be brought to bear on these challenges if only the people in those areas were in the loop. Paul _______________________________________________ Qi Hardware Discussion List Mail to list (members only): [email protected] Subscribe or Unsubscribe: http://lists.en.qi-hardware.com/mailman/listinfo/discussion
