I've been receiving emails from this list for years, and I don't reply too often, but I feel now is the time. The Ya would be perfect right now. It's a down market. People are looking for cheap, functional devices, and we have the capability to offer that. Our best bet would be to partner with a hacktivist site, think Adafruit, give them the opportunity to help us rebuild what we had. The Ben community never really started the way it could have because Ben is missing so many useful features. It has no pointing device, no wireless networking, no USB host, a tiny lcd, no touchscreen, a boot process that requires shorting a damn wire, and a keyboard layout that is, at best, janky. All we need to succeed is this. Laptop clamshell, a screen that can at LEAST do 640x480, a processor with a gpu (perhaps the FPGA work could come in handy here?) That can at the very least play Quake 3, because that's the bare minimum these days, a good keyboard, and some form of wireless networking out of the box. 6LoWPAN, WLAN, Bluetooth, whatever. It just needs something that will enable it to communicate without a snarl of wires. Like I said, put it through adafruit, or a similar company. Give it a breakout board, price it at 100. ARM processors are best for this, but what about the longsoon, like the Lemote Yeelong that rms has? That thing is functional and incredibly cool. The fact that it's a niche processor arch appeals to some people. Another way is using the opencore SPARC documentation to make the first non sun sparc machine. Geeks like me would go CRAZY over the opportunity to play with sun like hardware without dealing with Oracle. I know there are places that can make a SPARC using the opencore spec, there have to be. If we can make a clamshell with more than 2 hours battery life and some of these features, people will lose their minds. We only need to make one. If we can make a prototype, and put it on indiegogo (a smaller alternative to kickstarter that allows you to get funding even if you don't fully hit your goal), and put it up on Reddit, as well as a few other social media sites as a new open clamshell from an already successful company, it'd be unstoppable.
Just my opinion. On Feb 28, 2013 9:03 AM, "Paul Boddie" <[email protected]> wrote: > 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 >
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