PiSmasher Pricing

[Alejandro]

What will happen to orders placed for the $95 PiSmasher before the $195 MSRP was announced? At $390 total, Snickerdoodle black is starting to be less of a value proposition than other boards if one isn't interested in all the peripherals.

[Cousins]

Sorry that wasn't clear. Everyone who ordered a piSmasher (at whatever price they paid) will receive a piSmasher. We'll send out a clarification update next week.

I'd be curious to hear which features and peripherals you (and others) do or don't find valuable, or if you're more referring to competitive solutions that are collectively more compelling. We are working on a "solution" to those who don't need anything other than HDMI out and USB, but if you have specific features you're willing to pay for and others you aren't, we're open to any and all feedback you might have!

-Ryan

[Alejandro Argueta]

Awesome, thanks for the quick response.

I'm primarily interested in distributed computing with debuggability and power profiling, so my priority for features is:

1. JTAG, Gigabit Ethernet as absolute must

2. Ease of scoping power consumption via test points or ICs (Ex ZC702 has shunt resistors with sensing circuitry) is desirable, better yet if I can expose this to the Zynq for on chip dynamic power consumption throttling.

3. HDMI out/USB/Headphone (esp mic in) could be useful for integrating with IoT, Google Assistant SDK etc.

4.  Other stuff (buttons, switches, common headers, etc.)

Right now Snickerdoodle & PiSmasher gives way more of these things than most reasonably priced competitors, but one of the big deciding factors is delivery date, ex: do I take the reduced feature set but a concrete delivery date with a Digilent Arty Z7-20 or wait for the better platform that is the Snickerdoodle combo?

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[Cousins]

Ok got it - thanks, Alejandro. Re: delivery date, the good news is we finally have hardware in it's (mostly) finished form; the only changes from here out would be minor routing/signal edits so our transition to production will be nice and quick. There really aren't any special manufacturing considerations to worry about (see: snickerdoodle) so that should go smoothly. Can't give you a firm date quite yet :( but we should know more in a week or two once a) the last of the snickerdoodle assembly issues are resolved and b) the piSmasher is fully brought up.

-Ryan

On Thursday, June 1, 2017 at 2:08:42 PM UTC-7, Alejandro wrote:

Awesome, thanks for the quick response.

I'm primarily interested in distributed computing with debuggability and power profiling, so my priority for features is:

1. JTAG, Gigabit Ethernet as absolute must

2. Ease of scoping power consumption via test points or ICs (Ex ZC702 has shunt resistors with sensing circuitry) is desirable, better yet if I can expose this to the Zynq for on chip dynamic power consumption throttling.

3. HDMI out/USB/Headphone (esp mic in) could be useful for integrating with IoT, Google Assistant SDK etc.

4.  Other stuff (buttons, switches, common headers, etc.)

Right now Snickerdoodle & PiSmasher gives way more of these things than most reasonably priced competitors, but one of the big deciding factors is delivery date, ex: do I take the reduced feature set but a concrete delivery date with a Digilent Arty Z7-20 or wait for the better platform that is the Snickerdoodle combo?

[Sean Blakley]

On a personal level I like the idea of more available I/O pins, perhaps at the expense of the extra ethernet port routed through programmable logic.  I do like the added HDMI & audio I/O options, but I find the extra ethernet port to be somewhat for my applications.

I do have a question though, is the 16 pin "expansion I/O" header (labelled J19, I believe) controlled by the ARM processor or programmable logic?  If it's the processor, what functions do the pins possess? (SPI/ I2C, UART, general I/O, etc)

[Cousins]

Thanks, Sean - that's helpful to know. Unfortunately it wasn't quite as straight forward as an 'Ethernet for I/O' tradeoff. We actually went through quite a few rounds of back and forth re: maximizing the flexibility to trade I/O for, say HDMI, in the field. 

Ultimately it wasn't practical and the platform needed a bit of focus. That's not to say of course you couldn't break/multiplex the exposed I/O out to another mixed signal I/O card or something of that nature to give you all the I/O you'd (practically) ever need - which is also something we've worked on. But this was the best overall balance we could come up with.

The 'expansion I/O' is tied to the processor. The exact pins are still somewhat TBD as we're likely going to be moving a few connections around to simplify things from an electrical and IP/software perspective. This will be implemented on the "final" version of the piSmasher (i.e. the one that ships).

-Ryan

[br...@visual-av.com]

Ryan, This afternoon would be a great time to get a PiSmasher update. It's been a couple of weeks now. Please include an estimated shipping time frame for Alpha customers. Thanks, Bryan

[Cousins]

Hi Bryan,

Apologies for the radio silence - I was holding out to see if we would be able to get everything working before today, but that didn't pan out.

We're still wrestling with the Ethernet interface(s), but inching towards having that validated. The last two items are HDMI and audio, but those "should be" much more straightforward (we already have a test for HDMI and can pull from some reference designs on the audio). 

Hopefully this weekend will bear some fruit...

-Ryan

[br...@visual-av.com]

Ryan, is it time to break radio silence again? Been 3 weeks since last update. I'm sure we would like a piSmasher update. Thanks, bryan

[Cousins]

Yes, that crossed my mind at 1a last night when I thought my head was going to explode from a gnarly sinus infection I've been battling. Once it subsides and I'm able to put together at least two consecutive, coherent thoughts/sentences, I'll post another update. Sorry for the delay.

-Ryan