On 9/28/2021 at 11:24 PM, john_e79 said:
TL;DR: I'm new here and catching up on things, but wanted to share some preliminary thoughts in different areas in detail. Mostly about the cases, the X8, and the VERA.
Perifractic should make a case for the Raspberry Pis that's like the X16 case and has space for a decent fan like those RGB cooler tower ones....
So I'm just simply saying, there's market potential here for better cases, and I rather liked the X16 case design.
That might be a different kind of thing than the partial case customization he was working on when he was a member of the team. Both the Micro ATX and the Mini ITX cases were customized front ends to existing available cases, where the customization would be done by the existing case maker so long as the quantity order was high enough (IIRC, 1,000 minimum order).
The X16 that we are seeing in the prototype boards is the Micro-ATX sized X16p, the one made as much as possible with through hole ASIC chips. Enough of the kind of people who would like to build their own X16p would also probably like their own case, plus the time required to build the X16p boards holding down the maximum number of built boards that might be offered in a crowdfund that hitting the required volume for the Micro-ATX case might be problematic. That is, at least, my speculation. In any event, the decision has been made to not go ahead with that.
Designing a bespoke case for a RPi would be either doing a new mold or else finding an existing case that could be modified, but unless the customization is 3D printed, the same volume of orders issue kicks in. And in any event, Perifractic would not be likely to go ahead with something like that without clearing it with the present design team. And really, unless/until the design team settles on their new plan for their development path, they wouldn't be in a position to lay out what parallel developments by Perifractic would be compatible/supportive.
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I'm trying to like the X8, but don't know a whole lot about it, and how it differentiates itself from the C64 Mini. I've got one of those here too. If you start saying Raspberry Pi-sized FPGA, I start thinking IoT. The C64 Mini I found is not so good on the USB drivers. I finally got my Raspberry Pi Zero W to work with it as a USB boot protocol keyboard HID on the C64 Mini with some work, but the C64 Mini still doesn't work with my Arduino Nano 33 IoT with basically the same boot keyboard HID descriptor, it's a fiddly mess. I might get around that by changing the VID/PID, but I don't know what that's going to do yet in the Arduino IDE, as in screwing things up to reprogram it later. The more IoT-friendly the X8 gets the better. I start thinking IoT though and some words suddenly come to mind like UART/I2C/SPI, GPIO pins, Analog pins, PWM pins, 3.3V or 5V... I don't know what's all on the X8.
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I think that both the through-hole kit and FPGA should be released. After all the Commodore had the Pet, the VIC-20, the C64, the Amiga...
How it differentiates itself from the C64 Mini is that it's an actual 8bit SOC system, designed on an FPGA platform, rather than being a software emulation of an 8bit system running on a 32bit SOC. It is a 64K RAM system with a small bootloader loading the Kernel & Basic from a serial flashROM, with the video system that is whatever X16 things fit into 64KB ... minus however much of the 64KB video RAM you use as extended memory.
As far as the IoT things on the X8, at present, basically none. There are two pins used for some form of debugger serial access to the X8, and maybe one I/O pin available (maybe not). My idea is that hopefully that debugger serial access pins can also be used as a two pin UART, and to use that extra pin to get multiple external selects on the SPI that is already used to reload the Basic/Kernel system from the flashROM and to access the SD card.
Someone else ... I think @Wavicle ... had the idea of overloading the debug pins with an I2C interface (since the FPGA that the X8 is built on has built in I2C modules as well as SPI modules). But in any event, if it was used for IoT, it would be IoT programming pretty much from the bare metal in 6502 assembly code. That is not going to tick the boxes for 99%+ of people interested in playing around with IoT stuff, but that sounds like fun to me.
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I can see that there are folks adamantly commenting in here that want things cut for cost to hit their ideal price point. The question then becomes, what is your ideal price point, and what can you do with it if you cut down cost too much, will you be able to do what you want to do with it? I'd like to know from those who want the X8 to be at a very low price point what that price point is and what they want to do with it. Make sure to test for feasibility, that's why that emulator is there. It maybe needs an update with an X8 mode for testing.
The point here is that there are several price points that is part of issue of whether to go with the X8. The X8 approach simply is cheaper than making a mostly FPGA based system that is compatible across the board with the X16p ... David's estimate is roughly half the cost.
The X8 already exists. Whatever price point it can be produced at is implied by an existing design. All of my hundreds/thousands of words spilled urging the opening up of the design to allow for a useful "hat" is just about tweaking an existing design. Indeed, none of it is about
reducing cost, so much as about adding useful expansion capability at the
smallest increase in cost.
The process of designing the X16e literally can't
start until the X16p design is finalized, since its whole point would be to be to be the same to software as the X16p.
Remember, we aren't the ones designing any of this. This isn't a "crowd designed" project (indeed, crowds cannot design complex systems). We are just giving (in some cases quite extensive) feedback to the design team. So our opinions about hitting price points and which marketing approach are best are just that ... our opinions. In the end, it'll be the design team's decisions to make.