I wonder if you are able to explain to the potential funders why this is a better board for learning than existing ARM boards like the Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone Black, etc.
I am not
If you have a look at the other companies, they have teams of people for PR and Marketing. And, it's only 2 of us. OpenRex is not even our main project. I wanted to work on something what we would enjoy designing and what would be dedicated only for people to play with. Something what I could handle to my son, he could start playing with a microcontroller, LEDs, buttons, motors, sensors, ... and when he is ready or need something more powerful he would move up to the CPU and Linux. No installation.
There are plenty of boards and plenty of software, but it is actually not very easy to learn program. When I was learning (on ATARI), it was easy. I had one book and I wrote the instructions and that was it. Now, you have to install a huge software first, configure it and when you create a new project it already has tons of code inserted. I have to sit down with my son and explain him what things mean, it's hard for people who are starting ... to actually start.
I love Arudino. Arduino is great to start with, but Arduino is very simple. Too simple for todays world. There are much more powerful things which you can work with. Some time ago I bought Raspberry Pi and I was very surprised, that it is actually not so simple to start with it.
And what I hate most are the software guys who don't want to share their know how. It's so frustrating. Most of the programming stuff is very simple if you know how to do it - but no one wants to tell these simple things, they keep it for themselves. If you ask a software guy, he will tell something like: "It's simple, just write there this ... google it ... follow the manual ...", but they never tell you the exact steps and you have to spent hours and days trying to find the one command line which will do it.
That's may plan about OpenRex - to teach how to design quite complex hardware, to teach how to write firmware for microcontrollers and to teach how to do Bootloader & Linux stuff for ARM boards. All in one place.
Unfortunately, I am not a marketing guy (I am an engineer) and we do not have team of people creating nice videos and blogging / tweaking / facebooking, so I may not be able to explain people why OpenRex is better than the other boards
Guys, please help, what the project would need to have, so you would pay $300 USD to play with it?