Raspberry Pi Pico

ROFL - I bit, looks cool. Who can beat it at $4 ?

Click BUY NOW, cost $7.99 ...none available 

Always a bridesmaid, never a bride :-)

There is a wide range of experiences - as usual it depends on how well the corporate interests align with each other. I've had manufacturers where I couldn't get the time of day, but I've also had manufactures that fly a team of engineers in to discuss how they can modify their chip to make it suit our application better.

It shouldn't be a surprise that chip manufacturers are careful with their IP. A lot of money gets spent reverse engineering chip designs, so there is a big motive to shortcut that process by using industrial espionage and consequently a big motive to prevent it.

In this case the Raspberry Pi folks chose companies that were unlikely to try and clone the chip, and they only gave them a few weeks of advance notice of information that was going to be released publicly anyway, so they could afford to take the risk of reduced IP protection processes.

cstanton  wrote:

 

>It sounded like exaggeration though

 

It really isn't. 7 years ago I experienced similar, and it's obviously burned other people as well...

I've been there. Some big companies act like they are doing YOU a favour, and make you jump through all the hoops they come up with. That can add up to significant costs for smaller companies.

Also, "Signing an NDA" is never that easy - lawyer costs can add up quickly, and often even if you do get your lawyers pointing out dangerous things, the big companies won't budge: "that's our NDA, take it or leave it".

I think the point was that dealing with some large companies can get very cumbersome, time consuming and expensive.

Maybe that part was directed towards a specific company they had just dealt with, along with some strong hinting meant specifically for them.

Best,

-Nico

It's been the VideoCore mainly, for a long time developers have had to work with the 'binary blob' for the GPU component.

Raspberry Pi Trading have done considerable efforts with people to work on having open source OpenGL and OpenCL support for the VideoCore rather than resorting to the blob, though I believe Broadcom still have some lockdown limits on it.

It's definitely not through lack of trying and I'd say Raspberry Pi have done great work to handle the limitations they've had with the platform in this regard and continue to work towards their goals, especially as an education platform which is their main aim.

BigG  wrote:

 

Mind you, RPI's approach has also drawn criticism from many open source hardware developers for showing favouritism.

Perhaps this is due to traditionally the RPI's are not actually Open Source unlike something like a Beaglebone. They keep their chip design as propriety and do not let folks have access to it. I would image NDAs are involved if they did allow access to the secret sauce.

Although fun to do so, bashing the "terrible chip giants" in a public video might not be the most productive means of getting things done with them.  In the end, it really is for a $4 dev board. I could be wrong though.

Yep, this tends to happen when young companies are still growing and thriving. Mind you they did hit on the two key elements that are important to any development led business... namely will this cost me time and money. When organisations add in layers or departments that have separate budgets, these management layers tend to focus on justifying their worth by keeping busy (i.e. lots of meetings to discuss things). However, there is a sting in the tail. Young companies tend to forget the other important criteria, which has serious teeth but is seldom drawn, namely risk or a costly failure.

It did seem a bit childish - Adafruit can do their bit and it's useful, but they aren't going to be building many state of the art wafer fabs. I'm quite impressed by just how many new chips and how much support the big companies like ST, Analog, TI etc manage to pump out.

MK

Are we talking about the same segment in the video?

To summarise, it amounts to Adafruit feeling they have too many zoom calls with marketing, and an insistence that they spend a week in-person which must be an exaggeration, because how would it scale if each semiconductor manufacturer spent a week with each potential customer?

EDIT: Also they talk about NDAs. Pretty sure it doesn't take five zoom calls to exchange their pre-prepared NDAs. I've seen a 'battle of the forms' where both sides want the other side to use their NDA, but this isn't unusual, and very quick for Adafruit to get their lawyers to review, if they are so agile.

>It sounded like exaggeration though

It really isn't. 7 years ago I experienced similar, and it's obviously burned other people as well, and that experience has stayed with them and likely isn't giving the companies another opportunity/chance.

It's mainly very different now, partly because it's been forced to be (thankfully). That's all I'm going to say.

I agree there were some great comments. I think they were really taking pot shots at their national champions, who have not really had a need to evolve their business models. In my opinion, the company who is doing things differently, when it comes to launching new products is Nordic Semiconductor. Another one, although I do not know much about them, so I could be wrong, is CEVA. Both appear to work off some sort of licensing model.

Mind you, RPI's approach has also drawn criticism from many open source hardware developers for showing favouritism.