Amiga FPGA accelerator (shutdown dead topic)

Community Bar Sport
1

"another socket puppetry" shutdown
thanks AWOL.

2

I know the Bar is pretty free-form, but I'm trying hard, and failing, to see any significance here.

3

dally:
have you read carefully his letter?

No, I found I was losing the will to live about three lines in.

what happened on ebay is ... interesting, ain't it?

If I have an interest or involvement, maybe, otherwise, no.

4

dally:
this makes no sense

Are you at all interested by my recent eBay purchases of drill bits and ND filters?
No, I thought not.

5

trying hard, and failing, to see any significance here.

I see it has having significant relevance to the whole "open source hardware" thing, and OSSW to a lesser extent.
If you design a piece of neat Open Source Hardware, you might have a couple of goals:

  • Found a company to sell it and get rich, like those Arduino people. (hah! but... maybe a decent living, at least?)
  • Do a kickstarter-type one-time build as a way to fund something else.
  • Support other enthusiasts in a particular niche.
  • demonstrate your expertise and brilliance so that someone will hire you to do other things.

Let's talk about (3), which seems to be the case here. This guy designed and built an Amiga Accelerator, presumably for the few (?) remaining Amiga enthusiasts. Excellent ! He's apparently been selling the thing for a low price, for "friends and fellow enthusiasts." Cool! Some of those people have apparently not been actual enthusiasts, but quick-typing opportunists who have been re-selling the board at a 5x or so markup. NOT GOOD! This is a lot like ticket-scalping for some sporting event, where some people who don't care much about the actual event buy up a lot of tickets (as many as they can get) and then re-sell them at much higher prices to people who DO care about the event. They've snapped up a scarce product (adding to the scarcity) and are making an income that in no way helps the people actually doing the work. This ranges from illegal (actual ticket scalping), to sleazy (this case), to a legitimate but rather predatory business (flipping houses, trading antiques.) It is discouraging to the people who actually ARE "doing the work."

When you solder by hand about 3200 0402 capacitors and loads of other parts sacrificing in front of everything my health and then when you see that someone else is making money from your hard work then you start to wonder what are you doing wrong.

Well, yeah. They did lots of things wrong.

  • They failed to accurately calculate "assembly costs" in setting the price of their product.
  • They failed to place sufficient value on their own labor and time.
  • The failed to realize that in producing N of something, the "fun passtime of putting things together themselves" would become an onerous chore.
  • They failed to get help.
  • They failed to find an alternative manufacturing process.
  • They failed to accurately predict the "value" of their product.

(All this just based on the text quoted. I'm not familiar with the actual product or project.)
You can compare this to Arduino's early days. There's a rule of thumb that says an electronics "thing" will have a customer price about 5x the cost of the components, by the time you factor in the cost of manufacturing and distribution. A $30 Arduino board based on an ATmega168 is ... right in that ballpark. And it worked (mostly), both as a thing and as a business. And it was great, because frugal hobbyists could save some of that 5x markup by doing the work themselves, or leaving out some of the parts, or whatever. It's one of the problems I have with things like Due and BeagleBone. Sure, they're "Open Source", but your chances of being able to put one together on your own are a lot lower than with a simpler board.
(Now, if you manage to sell enough where putting together automated assembly becomes cost effective (or "affordable" at a start), you enter a whole different realm of ... stuff. (10 million Raspberry Pis!!))
I mean, I'm an engineer, I've always been an engineer, and I have the typical engineer's low opinion of jobs like "Marketing." But they have a job that's important. Back at when we hired our first actual "marketing" person, the first thing he had us do was raise our prices. And he was right.