But not free...
Think of it as Lego. Dumping a pile of Lego bricks in front of a child does not do very much if the child is not already familiar with the product. Putting a picture of a space ship or an excavator on the box gives kids ideas and something to aspire to, and this is what sells Lego bricks. So you need a killer app, a poster child, which only your board can do.
- Martin's salary during the time when he was designing boards for the courses. You need to design your own boards, because you need some material for teaching and also, you need to have something what people use for practicing. You can not use other people's / company's projects because of intellectual property. Designing the boards took approximately 1 year.
- Then, you really would like to teach about something what works perfectly and reliably. You need to build & test the boards. The cost: over 10 000 USD (to manufacture PCBs, to buy components, assemble the boards, testing them, ... )
- And, you still do not have the course. Add 3 months of work just to record the videos. I have recorded over 10 000 files which needed to be sorted out and connected together.
Wow! Where you gets all the ideas?
I want people to be able to go well beyond the existing level of complexity and I am developing something that should help with that (I hope).
Yup, the tiny Eflite UMX one, with added custom micro FPV setup w/headtracking
Hardware. Mechanics to be specific.
Awesome! I love the camera!
You must be really good in flying it. I have exactly the same plane - but I have crashed it every time (I have landed only once)
By defining a common base for all open source boards like yours we can make several boards work side by side on a common architecture.
Think of how the 19" rack is ubiquitous in the industry but it never got applied to PCs because the Wintel alliance prevented it by coming up with their own proprietary form factor and bus.
That's what I see from the camera when flying (the recording is shitty though):
Isn't there a thing called Ethernet that's already quite appropriate to allow cooperation of multiple boards side by side with the advantage of not imposing a common architecture?
I see little interest in defining a standard architecture in the open source world - it will probably serve a couple of projects but to me most people designing such open source boards have an idea in mind with some requirements, and they will just want to do it how they'd like it to be and precisely avoid adhering to someone else's design reqs. That leads to the current diversity of SBCs which I don't think is bad, and IMO if they had constraints to follow most of those who made some wouldn't have bothered.
Most boards already have some commonality, as they usually share either the Arduino interface or the RPi one, or both.
By defining a common base for all open source boards like yours we can make several boards work side by side on a common architecture. This would let us increase the complexity of possible projects by orders of magnitude.
It would also let us prevent planned obsolescence to a significant extent. We will be able to rely on re-usability of components once again.
Isn't there a thing called Ethernet that's already quite appropriate to allow cooperation of multiple boards side by side with the advantage of not imposing a common architecture?
It never got applied to PCs because it was not fit for the purpose while the AT* formats were...
Who in a home/office environment would want to have to install a rack to mount their PC in?!
- What do you think the "common base" should be like?
To define a standard may have at least two quite hard problems to solve: how to make many people to agree on one standard and how to tell people to use it in their designs. What I see, many standards are defined by big corporations which don't want to fight between them, so they agree on same way to do it .... or the other way how standards are created is if you sell something what is wide spread and other companies intentionally design their boards the way to stay compatible.
- That really is very well written and it's true not only for open source, it's true for commercial boards too.
how can we give maximum freedom to the designer and still have a standard? Seems like a conflict but it isn't really.
Ethernet is only for communication between two boxes with some meters between them. There are also simple board to board signals within the same box and different formats for chip to chip communication.
How will I make people use it? I won't. If it is good enough I shouldn't have to, people will use it anyway, if not it will fade away.