On Thu, Jun 16, 2005 at 12:43:57PM +0100, Cliff Lawson wrote:
That's £100, isn't it? Or was it originally sold for more than that?
£100 is roughly what we were thinking. I couldn't guarantee that it would be exactly that might be a bit more (or possibly less even). The more I look at other Linux dev systems the more I think £100 (inc the 480x320 colour LCD) is really cheap. Others have pointed me in the direction of www.gumstix.com and http://www.kwikbyte.com/KB9202_description_new.htm#BuyNowKB9202 as examples of other "cheap" dev systems. But they have dramatically less resources on the board and obviously no sign of an LCD, let alone a colour one.
Yeah, it's definitely cheap. Simtec (http://www.simtec.co.uk/) have a board for £99, but it's only a 7500FE and still needs RAM/display etc.
Do I think you'd sell these for £100? Certainly, especially if it was packaged nicely. I bought an E3 for the purposes of hacking on partly due to the fact that the idea of decent SIP/IAX phone appealed. You'd probably find others who felt the same way and who would buy something in the style of the E3 but without the Amstrad proprietary software but a development environment instead.
To be clear this (probably) wouldn't be in the style of an E3.
Sorry, I wasn't saying it should be, more that if you wanted to cut your work you could probably get away with the current cases.
...
I think we probably would put a JTAG header on it for those interested in such things (though maybe this isn't such a necessity now that Linux is ported)
JTAG is useful for people who'd want to play with alternative boot loaders; one of the more commonly used ARM ones perhaps.
Personally, it's unlikely I'd buy a developer model at the start - not because I don't want one, just that it's hard to justify even more toys at present. :)
Fair enough. If you know others doing Linux development then feel free to mention this and see what they think. I'm just interested in as much feedback as possible right now to decide whether to launch off in this direction. While there (hopefully!) wouldn't be much work to be done on our part, there would be some and we need to gauge whether such effort would be economically justified.
Sure, if I can think of people who'd be interested I'll mention it to them.
J.