English Amiga Board - View Single Post

ali-b · 09 September 2021, 17:16

Now that Claude has a physical prototype to work on, we're discussing how production is going to happen as the parts involved are considerably harder to build than the OG PiStorm. almost certainly the way forward will be contract production as already there's an interest list of ~350 units.

Probably 20% of those weren't serious or only if it was the same sort of price as the O.G pistorm (spoiler alert, it will probably be a good chunk more expensive as it's not as simple) and there's probably an equal number of interested parties who never filled out the interest list. basically it wouldn't be unreasonable to get enough made to hit the kind of volume where the unit price becomes attractive.

This will certainly be some kind of pre-order as nobody has 20k lying around to front for this kind of thing. we'll try to avoid kickstarter but will probably need to use some kind of crowdfunding or pre-order platform or another.
by getting the initial batch made up front we'll hopefully avoid the mess we had of the scalpers when the project first went viral, just as core components became hard to get.

Also... this is literally really really early days. Claude hasn't even started work on the firmware, just getting to bringing the board up, booting the Pi, flashing some test firmware making sure everything works at an electrical level as designed. I think he found the obligatory "first bodge wire required" days after submitting the board to the factory.

As I said on discord, this is still a loooooooong way off an even alpha level product. don't expect to hear anything until next year about pre-orders.

Also to address what someone said about the TF1200. As I understand it, the TF1200 is not a generic A1200 to DIP64 adapter but will be doing a special Buffee specific translation to multiplex the 32-bit bus transactions over the DIP64 16-bit interface that buffee will then expand back into 32 bit bus transactions. Only Buffee will be able to de/encode this multiplexed protocol so no, you won't be able to put a PiStorm 16 into a TF1200

-AKA ABrugsch

09 September 2021, 17:16	#14
ali-b Registered User Join Date: May 2014 Location: hampshire Posts: 67	Now that Claude has a physical prototype to work on, we're discussing how production is going to happen as the parts involved are considerably harder to build than the OG PiStorm. almost certainly the way forward will be contract production as already there's an interest list of ~350 units. Probably 20% of those weren't serious or only if it was the same sort of price as the O.G pistorm (spoiler alert, it will probably be a good chunk more expensive as it's not as simple) and there's probably an equal number of interested parties who never filled out the interest list. basically it wouldn't be unreasonable to get enough made to hit the kind of volume where the unit price becomes attractive. This will certainly be some kind of pre-order as nobody has 20k lying around to front for this kind of thing. we'll try to avoid kickstarter but will probably need to use some kind of crowdfunding or pre-order platform or another. by getting the initial batch made up front we'll hopefully avoid the mess we had of the scalpers when the project first went viral, just as core components became hard to get. Also... this is literally really really early days. Claude hasn't even started work on the firmware, just getting to bringing the board up, booting the Pi, flashing some test firmware making sure everything works at an electrical level as designed. I think he found the obligatory "first bodge wire required" days after submitting the board to the factory. As I said on discord, this is still a loooooooong way off an even alpha level product. don't expect to hear anything until next year about pre-orders. Also to address what someone said about the TF1200. As I understand it, the TF1200 is not a generic A1200 to DIP64 adapter but will be doing a special Buffee specific translation to multiplex the 32-bit bus transactions over the DIP64 16-bit interface that buffee will then expand back into 32 bit bus transactions. Only Buffee will be able to de/encode this multiplexed protocol so no, you won't be able to put a PiStorm 16 into a TF1200 -AKA ABrugsch