troubleshooting topics zooms past 1000 (now 6000)

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. You have to wonder how many of those issues are caused by two or three design decisions that, in hindsight, were very poor.

It's easy for us to criticise now, but I wonder if I'd have made similar choices to hit the $25 mark.

All said though, it's the response to any issues that paints a much clearer picture of any organisation - and that applies to everyone, not just the RPF.  There are some UK xDSL providers that make the RPF look positively wonderful

I don't think that we are trying to criticise, we are just reviewing, testing, analyzing, reporting and trying to have an open discussios on issues that could be fixed or improved to make the R-pi and its users experience much better.

Based on the volumes we are talking, even before they realized that demand was much much higher than anticipated, the $25 target, and the credit card size, are just BS. What's the difference between a $25 product that has design and reliability issues to a $28 that works properly ?

As far as I remember, the community was not invited or welcomed during the hardware design process, not even preliminary schematics were available, errors like the one I found wrongly connecting the VDDCORE pin of the LAN9512 to the 1V8 line could have been corrected before mass production, after going through alpha and beta boards, distributing boards among people I find surprising that there are so many issues being reported, some of which could be hazardous to kids.

The $25/$35 is really a joke, when you factor in that you need to buy a keyboard, a mouse if you want to work in graphics mode, a power supply or several of them you need to try to make sure they work and don't blow up your TV, a collection of SD cards to figure which one works with your Pi, a powered USB hub (of which some were reported not to work properly) if you want to have some extra stuff or even power hungry USB devices connected to the Pi, the HDMI cable, and if you don't have one, a monitor. Plus if you want to provide some protection to the board, a case.

What one really can criticise now, is that it does seem that there is no intention to listen, acknowledge and correct the problems.

-J

Indeed.  And since the engineering process starts with identifying problems, that process is effectively dead for the community as far as the hardware is concerned.  It's interesting that the software guys at RPF don't have that mental block.

criticise was maybe the wrong word... What we're doing though is analysing their decisions in hindsight and thinking we'd have done something better/differently. Morgaine got it right on the CSI/DSI connectors - we really don't know what the design criteria were and they're not about to tell us. 

You're absolutely correct that $28 for something that works perfectly is better. But is it better if it fails the unknown (to us) design criteria ?

What one really can criticise now, is that it does seem that there is no intention to listen, acknowledge and correct the problems.

Which is exactly what I was getting at, their reaction to the problems is terrible.

  It's interesting that the software guys at RPF don't have that mental block.

It's much harder for the software guys to have that block. Especially when someone posts a patch to fix it

I do find it interesting that a number of significant software improvements have come from outside the RPF, and that it is encouraging to see them incorporated into the 'official' releases.

  It's interesting that the software guys at RPF don't have that mental block.

It's much harder for the software guys to have that block. Especially when someone posts a patch to fix it

I do find it interesting that a number of significant software improvements have come from outside the RPF, and that it is encouraging to see them incorporated into the 'official' releases.

Well, that's exactly how the GNU community is supposed to work, and there is no need to debate if it is effective or not, just look at how Linux evolved since its early inception.

-J