[Oberon] List of boards in the Wikibook

[Skulski, Wojciech]

Peter:

  thank you for posting RiskZero. The phrase "not so expensive" can now be quantified. I posted the quoted $$ from PCBcart on my web page. It provides some degree of reality to our earlier discussions how much should a board cost. This can be now quantified depending on the production volume. I saw no point in quoting production of more than 100 units.

The sensible technical strategy for launching any board is to order a few pieces in the first run, shake down all the bugs, and go ahead with the actual production. Manufacturing any board similar to RiskZero will cost about the same. You can compare the Digikey prices from the BOM and the quoted cost of the parts and you will see that PCBcart are right on target to within a few $$. You can drop the cost a little bit if you change ZBT to some sort of DRAM. ASRAM will cost about the same as ZBT, and IMHO ZBT is better, so there is little point to go back to ASRAM to save on the parts. But DRAM would help, if we can swallow caching and loss of determinism. (Which was actually my main motivation to avoid DRAM yet.)

The quote says that this board will be "rather expensive" because it is a niche product. It is unlikely to become very popular. It means that any board targeting just Oberon has to retail for close to $300 or more, as I calculated on the website. If you want to drop the cost then you need to increase the volume, which means marketing outside the Oberon community.

Another possible direction could be making it into a project and seeking funding not for the product, but for the project. The product then becomes an add-on to the project. A few hundred dollars is actually a very low cost if the goal is to write compilers or try out novel software solutions.

I also propose to add notes which board is open hardware and which is not. RiskZero is open hardware. You can make your own clones if you wish.

Wojtek
________________________________________
From: Oberon [oberon-bounces at lists.inf.ethz.ch] on behalf of peter at easthope.ca [peter at easthope.ca]
Sent: Sunday, June 7, 2020 12:47 PM
To: oberon at lists.inf.ethz.ch
Subject: [EXTERNAL]  Re: [Oberon] Oberon books bibliography website?

RiskZero is now in the hardware section.  And a few other edits.  Feel
free to correct or complain.
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Oberon