[Oberon] Development boards (was: Interfacing with Foreign Systems)

[Skulski, Wojciech]

Chris:

> Although I admire the design of the Oberon GUI it is of lesser interest to me. However, it would be a real shame if more boards did not become available in the future to support it. 

My only contribution is/was RiskFive. I made five of these. I can part with three. I can loan you one, if you pay for shipping to New Zealand. 

> In the meantime my understanding is that there is sufficient information available for the Pepino to enable anybody to get a board manufactured. Presumably a batch would need to be ordered to be feasible.

Design files do not seem to be available. I bet that Magnus would run a batch production if there is enough demand.

> Far too often the price (NOTE: NOT the eventual cost!) of a system gets a disproportionate amount of attention. While it is a factor, I don’t think this should be the overriding consideration for anybody who is planning to design a suitable board.

I fully agree. Let's talk of RiskFive, whose production cost me about $500 a piece due to low volume. I only ordered five prototypes. I expected the production to be expensive. I should sell these for $1k a piece to remain on the sane side. This price is outraging when compared with $50/piece BeagleBone, or $100 Pepino. However, $1k is still cheap when compared with *your* development effort. Forget mine. I already paid for the boards. This money is gone. But how much time do you or anyone else want to spend with the board? A month is not unrealistic. (At least a month, I would say.) Multiply by your hourly rate and you will see that $1k is pretty insignificant. 

> Somebody who is really serious about their hobby is more concerned about value rather than cost. You only need to look at the money spent by amateur photographers, model railway enthusiasts, Lego builders, radio-controlled modellers, video gamers, cyclists etc. etc. to see evidence of this.

RiskFive is a high value proposition. It will allow to develop three or four different network interfaces (W5500, W5300, Nordic wireless, and bare bones MAC+PHY). It provides 4 MB of memory, which will enable 8-bit color display and still leave 3 MB for the System. There are plenty of things possible to develop with this board.

If anyone wants to make clones then please e-mail me for the design files. I will release them on the website when I have time, but you can e-mail me if you want the files sooner than that.

Thanks,
Wojtek