[Arm-netbook] A10 EOMA-68 CPU Card casework

[lkcl luke]

On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 3:23 PM, lkcl luke <luke.leighton at gmail.com> wrote:

>> also, now that there are kickstarter-alike sites for eu/uk projects,
>> will you start collecting funding or keep on your own?
>
>  well, one of the "rules" is that there must be a well-established
> community surrounding the project.  so it would be necessary to
> pressurise kickstarter because they believe that 75+ people on IRC and
> 250+ people on a mailing list that has been around for over 2 years is

 correction, i just checked: _300_ people on the mailing list.
hellooo everybody, *waves* :)  so.  yes.  we definitely need someone
to spear-head a kickstarter-alike effort.

 oh wait - did you mean just "set something up"?  right.  ok.  so far,
we've not actually needed any kind of "funding" - even crowd-sourced
funding.  normally, the crowd-sourced funding goes into "development"
of the product, where in this case, there's strictly speaking no
*need* for that, because the PCB companies are happy to do the PCBs
knowing that they will make money from doing so; Titoma are happy to
do the cases because they are excited about the concept and are happy
to make and supply them; and once the boards are available, people can
just buy them and that is between the sellers and the buyers.

 also, once we (qimod) have a couple of samples, we will then be in a
position to demo them and at that point we have a pre-arranged deal in
place to convert a couple of laptops (one is a very cool 14in
magnesium alloy design) to EOMA-68.  it's a laarrrrge company, who are
a bit fed up of the cut-throat nature of doing computing products, and
want something that's a bit easier for them to manage.

 so _that's_ kinda taken care of as well.  but, yes: at this point,
once at least one EOMA-68 CPU Card is available, i think it's then
definitely appropriate for people to put up kickstarter-alike sites or
even use kickstarter itself to crowd-source the funding for
development of I/O Boards and chassis and the associated casework.

 why?  precisely because the hardest part - the CPU Card - will have
been done already, and thus the amount of funding required as well as
the risk involved (creating a simple 2 or 4-layer PCB) is much less.

 so.... yeah.  we'll get there :)

l.