Hello,
Good to see another update:
https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop/updates/new-factory-equipme...
I hope Mike is bearing up in the face of his recent difficulties. With regard to your funding proposal [1], I see that you wish to revive the other computer cards, and this brought to mind a couple of things I saw recently.
One of them was the StereoPi crowdfunding campaign:
https://www.crowdsupply.com/virt2real/stereopi
The relevant aspect of this is the use of the Raspberry Pi Compute Module as the core of the solution. Previously, the Compute Module was rather "unobtainium", shall we say, but given that Adafruit and the like seem to actually have the latest models in stock, I guess that they are being made and sold to real people.
Although things like the StereoPi have developers as their audience, and so it doesn't really bother people that bare boards and edge connectors are the basis of modularity, it would be nice to be able to pitch EOMA68 (and related profile) products for these kinds of things. But these kinds of campaigns do help to demonstrate the case for EOMA68 and modular computing.
Another thing that I noticed was in perusing the Dingoonity forums, where there is a fairly active forum about Ingenic-based handheld devices:
https://boards.dingoonity.org/ingenic-jz4760-devices/
As the URL indicates, a lot of them seem to be based on the JZ4760, but there was a curious remark about the JZ4770 used in the GCW Zero:
"There's no GCW Zero clone. H350 is its presumed internal name. The factory illegally sold prototypes from the initial test runs. Apparently the factory is hogging the last JZ4770 SoCs in existence. So don't expect a third party to jump in and start manufacturing a compatible device."
https://boards.dingoonity.org/ingenic-jz4760-devices/gcw-zero-14324/msg18412...
Of course, the JZ4770 is the Vivante-based product variant, alongside the JZ4780 (PowerVR-based) and JZ4775 (no GPU). The latter two are still featured on Ingenic's Web site and are presumably active products. Hopefully, there are no availability issues, although one may wonder whether the JZ4760 might be a fallback if there is a glut of those (as evidenced by the continual stream of handhelds) and a shortage of the others.
Again, EOMA68 would be a good way of enabling products for this market. People seem to end up chasing discontinued products and settling for random imports, often being disappointed with some aspect of them or other, plus the software is not exactly responsibly produced, either.
Paul