Teensy 4.0 released

[SiliconWizard]

recognition could also back fire in people expecting support from the designer

Good point.

But just a thought about the recognition thing.

If said company makes products from an open source project and sells them, it has to clearly show that it's open source, and give references of the project (which in turn would give automatic recognition...)

So if the company actually hides the fact it's open source, it's infringing laws. You can sue. (But good luck with that if you're a lone developer against a big chinese company )

Anyway, the point was interesting. Even if the company does things right, it could pose issues you aren't prepared for.
A good example would be for development tools. A company selling them could actually use the fact that they are open source as a big selling point (engineers and hobbyists like open source stuff), and be perfectly open about it. Then yes you'd get some recognition, but you could have to suddenly deal with thousands of people using your project and opening myriads of tickets on github.
Certainly something to consider as well...

[Nominal Animal]

(FWIW, I do agree with all posts between this one and my own above.)

It is also interesting to consider the various open source software licensing models as reflecting completely different approaches to "bad actors".  Might make it easier to understand their fundamental differences as well.

[Nominal Animal]

I think it's more of a low hanging fruit theory.

Well, yeah.  Those who learn the stuff just to create cheap clones only learn enough to do that.  You can tell from the stupid mistakes on the fakes that even I, a complete beginner in designing my own boards, would not make.

If Teensy is really that in demand, someone can simply use Paul's Arduino port and modify the download script so that instead of using Paul's downloader and bootloader, it uses a new downloader and a downloader chip designed for that.

But for exactly the same effort, you can make your own brand.  Teensy 4.0 is tiny, and that's the niche Paul targets, so one could use a bigger version of the same chip, and break out more pins, and use ones own bootloader/uploader, but otherwise use the same base libraries as Arduino/Teensyduino uses -- and make lots more money than by cloning.

I'm sure programming a USB downloader chip that talks to factory bootloaders in those chips is not a hard task. It just takes more time to do than making Arduino clones.

That, and when you know enough to do that, you can do much more profitable things than you can make money off cloning existing products.
To make Arduino clones, you basically need to know how to order PCBs, and how to get the parts and solder them onto the PCBs.

[ehughes]

etter question is, why hasn't any microcontroller manufacturer employed somebody like him, to generate not just evaluation boards, but to create a full ecosystem around the boards?  Is their profit margins truly so slim that having less than half a dozen employees to set up and support a whole ecosystem is too expensive, compared to the goodwill/long term profits engendered?  It seems to me that most manufacturers are still stuck to pretty limited business models, where they try to extract value out of their customers at every single turn, from tools (compilers and environments) to documentation (by requiring them to register, so their information can be sold to advertisers, or at least used internally in advertising), and that PJRC and various Arduino board manufacturers are actually exploring the business models open source allows.  (Atmel being the odd one out, in my humble opinion; I've never liked Microchip's approach, and worry about that a bit now.)

Unfortunately, hobbyists don't generate enough revenue to justly this.       Having seen the "inside" of one of the largest MCU vendors,   this will never happen. Why?   Because the the paying customer who will be issuing large purchase orders want real evaluation boards with IO broken out.    Most of these customers get direct support and start working on their own boards very early.      The sales due to hobby stuff barely a blip on a spreadsheet.

Is their profit margins truly so slim that having less than half a dozen employees to set up and support a whole ecosystem is too expensive, compared to the goodwill/long term profits engendered?

Because those 6 people are dedicated to solving problems for large customers who will spend millions on parts for a single PO.         What goodwill are you thinking of developing?   Most customers are willing to pay for solutions and outcomes.   Most of the negative feedback on the dev tools are not price or cost of compilers.     It is all about showing the MCU in a working configuration with as many IOs provided as possible to test customer configurations.         


There is zero chance any semiconductor company is going to dedicate a half dozen engineers to support a $20 dev board "ecosystem" for hobbyists.   The economics simply don't make any sense.   

[langwadt]

A better question is, why hasn't any microcontroller manufacturer employed somebody like him, to generate not just evaluation boards, but to create a full ecosystem around the boards?  Is their profit margins truly so slim that having less than half a dozen employees to set up and support a whole ecosystem is too expensive, compared to the goodwill/long term profits engendered?  It seems to me that most manufacturers are still stuck to pretty limited business models, where they try to extract value out of their customers at every single turn, from tools (compilers and environments) to documentation (by requiring them to register, so their information can be sold to advertisers, or at least used internally in advertising), and that PJRC and various Arduino board manufacturers are actually exploring the business models open source allows.  (Atmel being the odd one out, in my humble opinion; I've never liked Microchip's approach, and worry about that a bit now.)

how much more than something like STMs Nucleo do you want?

[Nominal Animal]

It is just a common pattern: get their minds while they're young, and they're yours forever.
Just look at the mindshare Arduino has garnered, even though it is technically/technologically pretty crappy.

Remember: I am not an EE, and don't know what it looks like on the professional side.  I only see how the companies treat hobbyists and open source developers.  Do not be surprised, if my understanding of the professional side of electronics design is completely wrong; just correct me, please.

[SiliconWizard]

It is just a common pattern: get their minds while they're young, and they're yours forever.
Just look at the mindshare Arduino has garnered, even though it is technically/technologically pretty crappy.

Very true, that's why many vendors have partnerships with universities, and even give away stuff for free.

[rstofer]

A better question is, why hasn't any microcontroller manufacturer employed somebody like him, to generate not just evaluation boards, but to create a full ecosystem around the boards?

Well, we had (and still have) mbed.org and they originally developed the ecosystem for the NXP LPC1768.  Now the project is owned by ARM and many boards are included.  STM32F Nucleo boards are well represented, for example.

I have always liked the original LPC1768 version.  It's reasonably fast, does ethernet by just adding a MagJack and the TCP/IP library is based on lwIP.  The only part I really care about is the Berkeley Sockets interface and it works really well.

Online tools is a concept that I support but many want to use a local toolchain.  No big deal, try Rowley CrossWorks or even gcc (because CrossWorks is based on gcc I believe).  Once the binary is created, just drag and drop to the board.  The board itself looks like a USB Mass Storage device.  Drag and drop works well.

Lots of boards...

https://os.mbed.com/platforms

[thm_w]

It also happened again to my brother when he designed a couple of kits for 3D-printers, and yet again he lost time and money because his kits got cloned and sold on the internet. Who did defend his rights? He was a student, so -yet again- nobody did.

Can you link to said kit being sold?

I know we have an example here with Dave having open sourced some of his projects such as the µCurrent. But it has gotten cloned a lot now, and I wonder how much he really manages to make out of this? I'm sure if his whole business revolved around it, that wouldn't get him very far. And still, this is a bit different kind of product IMO: it's in the "precision" category, so serious users may feel more confident buying the real thing instead of a cloned version that could contain fake ICs. But for a simple dev board? Most users don't give a damn, they'll buy whatever is cheaper as long as it appears to work.

ucurrent is sold out everywhere, not sure if that tells you anything or not. But yeah his whole business doesn't resolve around it, its a huge stretch to expect this.
He sold about 1,200 in the kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/eevblog/current-gold-precision-multimeter-current-adapter

A better question is, why hasn't any microcontroller manufacturer employed somebody like him, to generate not just evaluation boards, but to create a full ecosystem around the boards?  Is their profit margins truly so slim that having less than half a dozen employees to set up and support a whole ecosystem is too expensive, compared to the goodwill/long term profits engendered?  It seems to me that most manufacturers are still stuck to pretty limited business models, where they try to extract value out of their customers at every single turn, from tools (compilers and environments) to documentation (by requiring them to register, so their information can be sold to advertisers, or at least used internally in advertising), and that PJRC and various Arduino board manufacturers are actually exploring the business models open source allows.  (Atmel being the odd one out, in my humble opinion; I've never liked Microchip's approach, and worry about that a bit now.)

I agree it would be a good investment.

Look at Atmel, what funds have they put into Arduino? Basically nothing, even though it turned out to be huge.
These companies are often clueless, or at least focus elsewhere, "dev board" is not a money maker so why invest money into it. "Samples" department does not directly make money so why offer them. etc. Maybe all their employees are busy solving problems for their top 10 customers. The kind of people that order 1mil+ quantity. The compiler thing also has only started to turn the past few years, TI went free, others I'm sure as well.

[L1L1]

If you're designing and selling your boards for a living - how the hell can it work if you release the whole thing as OSHW? If the boards become half successful, they will quickly get cloned in countries where costs are dramatically lower, will get sold at half the price or less, and you'll be left with no business. How could it ever work? I'm all ears.

You may not have heard of them but there are companies like Adafruit or Sparkfun that do exactly that: they sell OSHW for a living. They publish design files, schematics, and source code, all under open source licenses. According to Wikipedia, in 2015 Adafruit had 45 Million USD in revenue and over 100 employees.

[brucehoult]

You may not have heard of them but there are companies like Adafruit or Sparkfun that do exactly that: they sell OSHW for a living. They publish design files, schematics, and source code, all under open source licenses. According to Wikipedia, in 2015 Adafruit had 45 Million USD in revenue and over 100 employees.

As well as those, Seeed Studio has been reported with the following revenues:

2008: $4.1m
2014: $10m
2016: $30m

[Gribo]

TI sells their dev boards at cost, and many times, you can get them for free in a conference or a seminar.
They also provide support for these boards.

[SiliconWizard]

If you're designing and selling your boards for a living - how the hell can it work if you release the whole thing as OSHW? If the boards become half successful, they will quickly get cloned in countries where costs are dramatically lower, will get sold at half the price or less, and you'll be left with no business. How could it ever work? I'm all ears.

You may not have heard of them but there are companies like Adafruit or Sparkfun that do exactly that: they sell OSHW for a living. They publish design files, schematics, and source code, all under open source licenses. According to Wikipedia, in 2015 Adafruit had 45 Million USD in revenue and over 100 employees.

I have heard of them. I know about Adafruit's history a bit more than Sparkfun's, but still not much.

Note that I actually asked how, not who.

I don't know exactly what their business model is, what their sources of revenue are (beyond selling boards). But I know they definitely do a lot more than just design and sell stuff. They have a lot of online and offline presence. This all takes a lot of people and energy. Certainly not something you can pull off if you're a single-person company. And I don't quite know how Adafruit managed to get there from scratch, but I suspect there is a factor here: being there at the right time. Compared to when they started, I think it would be much more difficult to start this kind of business now, and the probability of having one's products quickly cloned was much lower than it is today. Their current situation doesn't tell much about how they got there. Of course now they have all this presence AND a ridiculously gigantic catalogue of products, they have just so many that even if some get cloned and sold at lower prices, that won't even tickle them.

[L1L1]

If you're designing and selling your boards for a living - how the hell can it work if you release the whole thing as OSHW? If the boards become half successful, they will quickly get cloned in countries where costs are dramatically lower, will get sold at half the price or less, and you'll be left with no business. How could it ever work? I'm all ears.

You may not have heard of them but there are companies like Adafruit or Sparkfun that do exactly that: they sell OSHW for a living. They publish design files, schematics, and source code, all under open source licenses. According to Wikipedia, in 2015 Adafruit had 45 Million USD in revenue and over 100 employees.

I have heard of them. I know about Adafruit's history a bit more than Sparkfun's, but still not much.

Note that I actually asked how, not who.

I don't know exactly what their business model is, what their sources of revenue are (beyond selling boards). But I know they definitely do a lot more than just design and sell stuff. They have a lot of online and offline presence. This all takes a lot of people and energy. Certainly not something you can pull off if you're a single-person company. And I don't quite know how Adafruit managed to get there from scratch, but I suspect there is a factor here: being there at the right time. Compared to when they started, I think it would be much more difficult to start this kind of business now, and the probability of having one's products quickly cloned was much lower than it is today. Their current situation doesn't tell much about how they got there. Of course now they have all this presence AND a ridiculously gigantic catalogue of products, they have just so many that even if some get cloned and sold at lower prices, that won't even tickle them.

I guess this discussion should probably move to the "open source hardware" section :-)

You are probably right: these companies probably started at the right time, in the right place. On the other hand I think their success is also built on the quality of their catalogue and their support.

Nathan Seidle, the founder of Sparkfun, has a great talk on the business open-source hardware, including dealing with clones:

[SiliconWizard]

I guess this discussion should probably move to the "open source hardware" section :-)

True. It was interesting to see this from our perception of the POV of the Teensy boards' author though, rather than as a general discussion without real examples.

You are probably right: these companies probably started at the right time, in the right place. On the other hand I think their success is also built on the quality of their catalogue and their support.

Yep. As I said, there needs to be much more than just selling hardware to pull that off. Not something that can be easily done for a small business. And for a bigger one, it pretty much needs to be dedicated to that IMO, and not just release OSHW as if nothing happened and get on with business "as usual"...

Another point, as I also talked about, is the contribution factor. Again, whereas for software it's working well and the benefits can be rather obvious, it's a lot less from this POV for hardware. A lot fewer opportunies for contributing to OSHW compared to OSS (not saying there is none, but clearly a lot fewer). So this is hardly an incentive to do it, whereas it is for OSS.

Nathan Seidle, the founder of Sparkfun, has a great talk on the business open-source hardware, including dealing with clones:

I'll watch this, thanks.

[Nominal Animal]

It is also important to realize both SparkFun and Adafruit target the hobbyist market, not the professional market (except for proof-of-concept and idea exploration aspects for professional developers, I guess).

While a big company like TI can reach a lot of professionals at a conference or trade show, and raise developer interest there, they almost completely miss the hobbyist market.  As these smaller companies have shown, there is a valid business niche in targeting hobbyists.  Exactly how that is done, I do not know, but I do recognize a few key aspects looking at them.

My earlier point was just an observation that it seems like me that using that hobbyist niche as a way to establish a presence in the mind of those that will eventually become EEs and gadget designers ougth to be worth the financial risk, because as Microsoft has shown in the software world, just getting the mindshare early is sufficient to grab most of the market.  Even when your product is not superior technically, and you acquire new product families through business acquisition, not in-house development.  As SparkFun, Adafruit, Olimex, Watterott, and others have shown, this market niche in itself is profitable; it is just completely different to how larger companies like Texas Instruments and Analog Devices are used to operating.

I bet (but could be wrong) that the FOSS/OSHW approach is a big part of successfully operating in that hobbyist niche; that it is part and parcel of building a successful "brand" in the hobbyist market.  Because of how different the operations are in the professional business world, I believe successful application of FOSS/OSHW there is necessarily different, probably "less pure" because of practical reasons.

However, what I keep harping about here, is that that does not mean that the big business approach is the only one that works.  There are different business niches, and I believe PJRC and others have shown that mixing proprietary and open approaches (specifically, keeping all interfaces open and documented, but some inner details proprietary) has the widest variety of business niches it can be applied in.  It is pretty important to notice that the Linux kernel itself has a very similar practical approach: the developers don't demand the internal details of the devices, or sources to the firmware binaries that auxiliary processors or microcontrollers run on various devices; it is the interfaces that are the key, and that all code run by the main processor is open source so that developers can examine, understand, and fix any issues.  Also, not many users realize how stable the userspace-facing binary ABI of the Linux kernel is.  (Except for idiotic subsystems like Alsa. But that's a different story.)

It is important to look at the bigger picture, future opportunities, existing successful businesses, and so on; and that making sweeping claims like "a business cannot survive on OSHW/FOSS" are nonsensical, similar to claiming that everybody must speak English, because <reasons>.

As to those who believe the largest companies are the most important, I'd like to point out Mittelstand in Germany, the strongest EU economy: SMEs account for 35% of total business turnover, but about half of the total added value.

[Nominal Animal]

If you happen to be in Finland or nearby, Mandu has Teensy 4.0s from PJRC for 22€ apiece.  Just got two myself to play with .

[hansd]

Another option https://www.seeedstudio.com/Arch-Mix-p-2901.html

[ralphrmartin]

Buyer beware. I just bought one, supposing that all of the libraries for the previous models would work. They have not all yet been ported, e.g. the only USB functionality provided for now is Serial. I didn't see any statement about this on their website (nor, therefore, when they hope to have them ported by). I'm a bit miffed and feel this is rather misleading.

[Nominal Animal]

I just bought one, supposing that all of the libraries for the previous models would work.

I should have been more clear in my first post, as I was fully aware of this; and not just say that there are sharp corners left.  Me fail English once again.
It was a very similar situation when Teensy 3.0 was Kickstarted.  (Even the NXP iMXRT1062 chip in the Teensy 4.0 is very new, released only this year I believe.)

I agree, PJRC could and should have informed buyers much better.  I think they should also redo the store web pages; they're puzzling to navigate.

You can follow the progress of the support at Paul's GitHub account, especially the cores repository (for commits to master).

For what it is worth, the extreme speed of this thing has produced quite new problems.  For example, the serial monitor in Arduino is not fast enough, especially on Macs, to keep up: the serial monitor just freezes after ten minutes or so on Macs.  In particular, I believe Teensy 4.0 is the very first microcontroller with proper Arduino environment support that can/will do actual high-speed USB data rates (480 Mbit/s including USB transmission overheads, so about 48 MiB/s).  (Currently, the speed is not yet optimal.)

I'm a bit miffed and feel this is rather misleading.

Completely understandable.

The USB HID types all use full speed USB (12 Mbit/s) -- and HID devices are limited to 64,000 bytes per second each anyway; one max. 64-byte packet every millisecond --, so I am a bit puzzled why you need those slower modes with such a fast microcontroller.  (It also explains why only high-speed USB is implemented thus far: supporting different speeds on different endpoints is probably quite hairy.  I just hope that it does not mean that USB serial + HID can only be supported at full speed; I haven't checked out the iMXRT1062 datasheet to find out, though.  That datasheet itself was not available freely on the web until a month and a half ago.)

[SiliconWizard]

Yep, that's not very nice of PJRC.
That said, the software part is basically open source. So I don't necessarily blame PJRC to have released the board early. Among early users, some may very well help with completing the support libraries... but yes PJRC should have stated so clearly.

This is a very common practice though... the worst being with all those SBCs. Most often they are released with only partial software support, partly broken Linux distros, etc. And you have to wait until that gets better, and they are definitely much more complex so writing libraries/drivers yourself is a LOT more complex, sometimes even impossible due to the lack of documentation. So... you don't have it too bad with PJRC...

[westfw]

the serial monitor in Arduino is not fast enough, especially on Macs, to keep up: the serial monitor just freezes after ten minutes or so on Macs.  In particular, I believe Teensy 4.0 is the very first microcontroller with proper Arduino environment support that can/will do actual high-speed USB data rates (480 Mbit/s including USB transmission overheads, so about 48 MiB/s).

Not that a "terminal" display was ever meant to go >>6Mbps (the sort of data rate achievable with older-generate native-USB Arduino-like boards) (and the Arduino Serial Monitor is hardly "optimized"), but shouldn't SOMETHING in the path be self-throttling?  This is USB, which has thousands of pages of standardization, not just some wire where you dump bits...  (sigh)

[Nominal Animal]

Yeah.  The first 4.0 beta boards (around Christmas) used the iMXRT1052 chip, and the first beta boards with the actual iMXRT1062 chip were manufactured in mid-April, just five months ago.  And, like I said, the manual wasn't freely downloadable until a month and a half ago or so; before that, it was under an NDA.  Making it pretty difficult for any users to help with the software side.

For example, Defragster and KurtE are just contributing users (with quite a few contributions to the Teensyduino core I liked to above), they don't work for PJRC.  (There were a couple of dozen frequent users on the forums that got free beta boards, but that's about it.)  So yeah, users do help a lot, as the only proprietary bit is the bootloader, and the rest of the software is free open source.  Stoffregen contributes a lot to the Arduino environment, too, and not just within the Teensyduino add-on.  It is pretty telling that even Teensy 2.0 is still supported by Teensyduino; ten years after it was introduced (in 2009).

For what it is worth, I do expect the software support to get to parity with the earlier Teensies; but "when", that depends on what kind of unexpected issues crop up, especially with the iMXRT1062 datasheet being version 0.1.

Not that a "terminal" display was ever meant to go >>6Mbps (the sort of data rate achievable with older-generate native-USB Arduino-like boards) (and the Arduino Serial Monitor is hardly "optimized"), but shouldn't SOMETHING in the path be self-throttling?

As far as I know, it is the application that gets stuck, or possibly the Mac USB-serial kernel driver.  Restarting the Arduino Serial Monitor continues to show the output from the Teensy 4.0.  Note that the USB serial interface does provide the info on whether data was received or dropped; but the microcontroller program can simply ignore that (and usually do).

I do have a Teensy 4.0 right now, so I could write and run some microbenchmarks on send, receive, and roundtrip USB serial bandwidth on Linux, if there is interest.  (Note that thus far, the USB stack is not optimized yet, as only the high-speed USB serial interface type is implemented.)

[maginnovision]

I've never really used too many of the libraries outside of the I²C library but the contributors mostly have their one or two libraries they "own" and then anyone and everyone works on the rest(Sometimes just Paul). There are so many libraries that I'd suggest you follow along in the forums, or GitHub. Forums have ways been my preferred way since you can follow progress even between commits. I have not bought a 4.0 yet as I dont actually have a use for one so haven't followed along to know where any of the development is at.

[cgroen]

Yeah.  The first 4.0 beta boards (around Christmas) used the iMXRT1052 chip, and the first beta boards with the actual iMXRT1062 chip were manufactured in mid-April, just five months ago.  And, like I said, the manual wasn't freely downloadable until a month and a half ago or so; before that, it was under an NDA.  Making it pretty difficult for any users to help with the software side.
.

I don't think so. I made the first 1060/1064 designs almost 7 months ago, and there were UM and datasheets freely available on NXP site. Also the SDK has been around for longer than that I think ?