On Wed, Dec 4, 2013 at 9:14 AM, joem joem@martindale-electric.co.uk wrote:
On Tue, 2013-12-03 at 11:35 +0000, luke.leighton wrote:
On Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 10:00 AM, joem joem@martindale-electric.co.uk wrote:
- You need the internal 3.3V line brought out from EOMA68 to one of the
pins for general circuit design reasons.
not going to happen. sorry. designs need to take that into account. apart from anything there will be boards in the future that don't *have* a 3.3V line (for whatever reason).
Not a request. The 3.3V line is the pull up line for GPIO lines. Something to get right in next revision.
joe: it's still not going to happen. there are not enough pins. I/O board designs will need to generate the correct 3.3v compatible TTL levels by having the correct regulators on the I/O board. as 3.3v TTL levels are the same everywhere this is perfectly feasible.
there is therefore not only enough pins available, but also this is a non-issue.
also there is the issue of backwards-compatibility if there are revisions. any further revisions require complexity to be introduced into future revisions of both CPU Cards *and* I/O boards. that is not going to happen.
therefore please accept that i have carefully considered what you have said and the answer is no.
- Not sure about the USD75. Is it going to get cheaper any time soon?
in quantity 10k and above, probably yes. because they will be designed differently. and be a different product entirely. so... no.
plus remember that $75 is for *two* boards, and tax, and shipping, and testing, and packaging, and profit (a small one) and everything else.
Its $75 for CPU board and meb + shipping + taxes.
yes. QiMod Ltd is acting as the distributor, not the end-user supplier. the choice of price for the pair of boards, being supplied by a 3rd party, is completely outside of QiMod Ltd's control.
- At the moment there is no way to cooperate with everyone using closed sources PCB packages and the list of hardware mistakes are piling up as cost somewhere. This is driving a wedge through all things good and possible. I only want to work in open sourced KiCAD. The limitations are not significant
they are a complete show-stopper for someone with my limited available time, lack of knowledge and insufficient expertise. simple as that.
KiCAD web site has added a lot more video tutorials recently.
the tutorials are not relevant, here. joe: i've been working with KiCAD for around 4 to 5 years. i am familiar with it. compared to PADS it has completely inadequate functionality and design rule safety checks.
regarding the speed at which designs can be created: that is completely irrelevant if i am creating completely wrong designs, isn't it?
so until someone takes over designs who has the required knowledge and expertise, i have to stick with "safe" software packages.
l.