What boards should element14 carry besides the Raspberry Pi?

This thread enjoyed pretty much unanimous agreement on which features are pluses and which are minuses.  The problem with such a list when turned into a board spec though is that a highly featured product would be quite likely to cost too much to enjoy high commercial success.  The lack of sales would ensure that the price never drops through volume BOM discounts, and the small community wouldn't generate enough buzz to make all this change.  What Raspberry Pi demonstrated superbly was that the #1 requirement for success is low price.

Although it's tangential to Cabe's question of which boards E14 should stock, what I'd like to propose is that E14 should encourage development of modular and/or extensible board families, so that the family offers the full feature set while individual boards offer only a subset of features but at very low cost.  Modern SoCs make this possible because the SoCs always come in families and their individual devices typically have highly compatible pinouts.

Raspberry Pi Models A and B provide an example of using the same SoC but with varying board features, and BeagleBone and BeagleBone Black are another example despite the board changing significantly between models.  Clearly this approach works well, and there is plenty of room for more family members --- for example, the BeagleBone family could in principle offer variants with two NICs instead of one, and gigabit NIC(s) instead of 100Mbps, because the necessary support is already available in the SoC.  Such variants could become highly popular as very low cost and very frugal Internet servers or firewall/routers, and removing everything on the board that isn't required in an Internet server would keep costs in the BBB ballpark.  It might feel painful to see a BBx released that omits your favourite feature like HDMI, but that just indicates that you need a different variant.

Selecting a different SoC from within a SoC family can be even more powerful than the above.  I like Freescale i.MX6 boards because of the single/dual/quad CPU options, but Freescale doesn't seem to be encouraging "Pi niche" pricing for some reason, or at least no such product has appeared yet.  I hope that a Pi/BBB-priced i.MX6 board will eventually materialize, but currently that isn't possible because designers of i.MX6 boards have piled on the board features, and that is suicide because your costs shoot up.  Price is king.

I suspect that E14/Farnell has a fair bit of influence among semiconductor and board manufacturers, and could encourage this kind of very low cost approach to company and product promotion, while at the same time supporting engineering enthusiasm in the community, for which low cost is almost mandatory.  I'd like to see that, more than seeing them add high-cost full-featured boards to their catalogue.

Morgaine.

It's worth noting that in the time this thread was inactive, the Wandboard Quad was added to the family and features not only a populated SATA connector but also 2 gigs of RAM.  And of course a much higher price tag than the base model, which means that its sales will never rise above mildly buoyant.

Board manufacturers just don't seem to be learning effectively from the Pi and now BBB precedent.  I doubt that they want low sales, but they're just not learning.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

It's worth noting that in the time this thread was inactive, the Wandboard Quad was added to the family and features not only a populated SATA connector but also 2 gigs of RAM.  And of course a much higher price tag than the base model, which means that its sales will never rise above mildly buoyant.

Even so, $129 is still very good for a 2Gb quad core.  Looking at their distributors, future electronics equate that to 79.58 GBP (97.48 from mouser?), not exactly BBB/R-Pi territory, but very much better than Sabre-Lite.

With 2GB ram, a couple of these just got added to my list.. just a pity we can't get them from e14 !

selsinork wrote:

 

With 2GB ram, a couple of these just got added to my list.. just a pity we can't get them from e14 !

I certainly agree with that, and I'll add a couple here!  E14, you have at least 4 guaranteed boards sales if you stock this.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

I certainly agree with that, and I'll add a couple here!  E14, you have at least 4 guaranteed boards sales if you stock this.

I gave up waiting and ordered two WB Quads from Future in the US.

selsinork wrote:

 

I gave up waiting and ordered two WB Quads from Future in the US.

I think you're right.  Farnell still doesn't have A20-OLinuXino listed, not even mentioned as a product in advance of stocking.

I guess there's a moral in this.  Large companies eventually end up sitting on their laurels, and "We are listening" becomes pure PR with not a shred of reality behind it.  9-5'ers probably don't care that they're bringing a company that was "Best of British" into disrepute anyway.  (This might be related to the people who hear us not being British and so feeling no stake in a group reputation built over decades.  The "upgrade" disaster suggests that possibility.)

I might take your lead and order some Wandboards from Europe too as a self-Xmas present.  There's nothing much to challenge the Quad on specs at this time.

Morgaine.

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

 

I might take your lead and order some Wandboards from Europe too

I took a look at the two european distys, Denx & Texim and thought that their shipping & handling charges were somewhat eye watering..  Might skip the export paperwork delay, but I'm wondering it that's worth an extra 50 quid

Niether of them seem to have stock of the Quad right now anyway

Niether of them seem to have stock of the Quad right now anyway