However, that when no where beyond Dave's personal use because there was
no way for regular people to get the board. The design was open so you
get everything you need to make your own, but that was it. So, from my
point of view, that was just wasted enthusiasm on my part.
Why? That effort can be revived. My guess (without knowing the whole
story) is that it didn't go anywhere because it doesn't make economic
sense for people to download gerbers and order prototype PCBs to
hand-solder by themselves. If I'm right, then for this to go anywhere,
it would be necessary to get funding, build a certain number of
boards, and then sell them. I don't know if this is possible to do as
part of an Apache project (my guess is it's not) so physical hardware
boards might need to be a completely separate effort.
Certainly it could be revived. But no one wants that responsibility. I
think that we would want to revisit the board features and
connectivity. Dave designed the board for his personal needs with less
interest in the inputs or objectives of others.
Living in Costa Rica I cannot get boards or parts locally so building my
own is really not something I could or would consider doing.
But if someone waited to contract out the PCBs and build-up, then I
would be happy to buy boards from, say, Tindie.com or CrowdSupply.com
More questions:
But, again, why consider custom hardware at all if COTS hardware is
readily available at a much lower cost. What sense does that make?
Having the logo and "Power by NuttX" is cool, but not essential to the goal.
And beyond that, why adopt a reference board at all. If we could have a
deployable, generic test framework with well defined interfaces, anyone
could build up the test framework to work on the hardware of their
choice. It would be better for NuttX if the automated tests were ran on
a wide variety of hardware; it would be better for hardware developers
if they could run the automated tests on the hardware that they have a
vested interest in.
I would vote NO for any reference platform. At least not with the
recent bad experiences and the current state of things. We don't need a
reference platform.
Greg
