fkeel:
I have been playing around with the GPIO pins. For me those are the most exciting aspect of the pi. Guess I will eventually connect some nice ADCs vie I2C.
Yeap I agree with that. For some like me who likes hacking hardware the GPIO are the RPi's most attractive feature
The APC IO looks a great board, but there's no info on what GPIO is got. Connector J3 is a mystery, perhaps that's got GPIO or I2C.
fkeel:
question to you guys: If you could mod the pi (or if you will mod the pi) what will/would your first hardware ad-on be?
Already done my first, second and third addon board for the Pi: Prototyping Board. BBC like I/O User Port. MIDI Interface.
Just waiting for my PCB's to arrive and then my old soldering iron won't know what's hit it
Not me: I'm officially giving up on it. I've had it with their "bleep you" attitude toward potential customers. After seeing a posting the other day that said they were finally taking orders, I discovered that what they were actually doing was allowing some of the people who signed up months ago to backorder units for possible delivery in a month or so. And still not a word about if (much less when) they're ever going to start shipping in quantities that would allow people to actually buy them for practical uses.
I've spent more than 2 decades working in technology start-ups, and many more years as an end-user, so I understand the growing pains and glitches that arise in bringing something new to market. But this nonsense of "Don't call us: we'll call you. Someday. Maybe.." is beyond the pale.
its really quickly falling into my vaporware pile, While I dont have decade or even years (yet) in production, just my handful of months in it, there seems to be a lack of commitment in producing the units.
You must remember that this is just five people who are amatures at production. World wide intrest has taken them aback somewhat.
You can't just turn on a tap and have product come out. This sort of volume can take up to a year to plan. I have worked for companies that do this sort of volume and more and it is not a smooth process.
At the moment they are trying to meet the demand on a first come first served basis, so there is a queu, one way of handling it is to have a waiting list - registration of interest - and then an invertation to order.
How would you handle 100,000 individual orders on day one, when you only had 10,000 boards in the pipe line?
For what it's worth, mine arrived yesterday. I was one of those that 'expressed interest' on launch day (being too late to actually order then), and I got to place my actual order about three weeks ago.
No real idea what I'm going to do with it yet. Not sure whether to try and learn python, or just stick with C. Or just stuff XBMC on it and have a tiny media player.
dxw00d:
Or just stuff XBMC on it and have a tiny media player.
That is one of the major selling points to me, I have been looking at e-bay every now and then trying to get a media centre for cheap. So when I saw it had HDMI and supported XBMC I was very pleased, except I could have had a media centre months ago.
How would you handle 100,000 individual orders on day one, when you only had 10,000 boards in the pipe line?
I would make sure people knew they were signing up for a maybe oneday item instead of selling them in every shop as if they existed, its a Tucker
I mean I go to their website, I see no status, no availability information, no plans, I do see that they think they are awesome and we should vote for them in not one but TWO web awards thingies and that they are going to maker fair to show off a product that is currently unavailable in the markets in which it was released with no word of IF it will hit the states.
Meanwhile other big players are gearing up to make similar products in a similar price range, and potential customers like me are already spending more for other pico systems available in quantity now.
Grumpy_Mike:
You must remember that this is just five people who are amatures at production.
Why? With all the out-of-work, retired, and bored single engineers and production management people out there, why are these 5 amateurs trying to go it alone, instead of recruiting some volunteers with a clue? One would expect that an engineer from a fabless semiconductor company that sells lots of bleeding-edge chips to startups would already know from watching other people's fiascos how essential that "boring detail work" is.
How would you handle 100,000 individual orders on day one, when you only had 10,000 boards in the pipe line?
I'll second most of what Osgeld wrote (although I wouldn't be quite as harsh). Instead of blogging about how totally kewl it is to unexpectedly be a celebrity, I'd spend the time putting together a webpage with:
a. A semi-realtime counter (updated at least daily) of how many people are queued up to buy,
b. a table/chart showing how many boards we plan to ship, and when, and
c. a weekly-or-so update indicating whether we're on track to meet those goals.
That wouldn't satisfy everybody, of course, but it should satisfy enough that you could blow off the rest with a clear conscience. And come off looking like you're trying to satisfy, and learning how to do it, instead of just playing.
At a total cost that's probably less than the taxi ride from the airport to a Maker Faire.
The point is they didn't. Do you want to do better, you are free to try. For the record I think the made a total farce of it as well. I think they were steam rollered into going faster than they planed to. Mainly because the spent too much time stoking up publicity and not enough time testing the board. There are some quite serious problems with the USB and the power.
At a total cost that's probably less than the taxi ride from the airport to a Maker Faire.
I don't know. Have you ever taken a taxi in New York, I was taken aback I can tell you.
