On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 1:57 PM, John Miles <jmi...@pop.net> wrote: > Life is too short to turn your basement into a > one-person Chinese sweatshop. Meanwhile, the value offered by preassembled > eval/development/training boards can be considerable.
Even in "Chinese sweatshops" where people work cheap they do not hand solder 100-pin chips. I too have been impressed by existing FPGA development boards. Prices have fallen dramatically and there is the advantage that that do not have to be designed and no one has to organize a group buy. Of course more hardware than just the board is required but that is where the effort should go, into specialized things you can't buy as a commodity. The bottleneck will be software (or firmware if you care to make the distinction). The best way to address that is to get as much hardware as you can fielded. If you limit hardware to only those willing to hand solder under a microscope then not so many units will be fielded and you will have fewer potential software contributors. This effect may even be non-linear because maybe those who can write software are disproportionately unwilling to solder and vice versa. -- ===== Chris Albertson Redondo Beach, California _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- time-nuts@febo.com To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.