[Arm-netbook] Crowd Sourcing Proposal

[luke.leighton]

On Tue, Oct 9, 2012 at 7:18 PM, Brendan Sleight <bms.debian at barwap.com> wrote:
> New thread was "FPGA and Bitcoin Mining"
>
> On 8 October 2012 19:11, luke.leighton <luke.leighton at gmail.com> wrote:
>>  then, amazingly - i'd completely forgotten about this, who the heck
>> wrote it, it's brilliant.
>> http://rhombus-tech.net/allwinner_a10/crowd_funding_proposal/
> Thanks, was a few months ago, but that would be me.
> http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/pipermail/arm-netbook/2011-December/001329.html
>
> Feedback is welcome it is a bit of a straw-man at the moment. It is
> not necessary pitched at people in this list, more pitched towards
> people that would buy at $35 level (heck or even the $5 sticker
> level).

 right - $35 is approximately the cost of the components (CPU priced
at appx $12.50, 1gb RAM @ appx $4.50, NAND @ appx $6 - the rest all
adds up and there are about 80 components).

 so we'll need to add at least a nominal margin, bringing the cost up
to say $49 ex VAT.  that margin is what will cover the NREs.  $2500
for doing the first 10 PCBs (wits-tech has them already, we need to
get them populated now, at sample-level costs).

 we *might* not have to pay for the 2nd redesign which would be a good thing.

> Complete guess at the funding levels required for each stage.

 you're not far off.  it's about $2k for a PCB run, funnily enough
it's not so different whether it's 10 units or 100.  10 units it's
necessary to do the SMT components by hand; 100 they use a machine for
most of them and do the connectors by hand.

> Plus
> another set of guesses for how many cards are available at each stage.
> I would be grateful if someone with more knowledge needs to have a
> guess at the time frames of each stage.

 about 3 weeks for the redesign... yep, let me fill things in, at
least in some approximate fashion.

> Also I need someone to offer to do the work for - "* A testing CPU
> Card, with your choice of Debian Packages loaded by a Debian Developer
> - $250" as well as "Stable CPU Cards, with working OS image."

 due to their demonstrable and amazing level of committment i'm
nominating amery and hno for sure.  cnxsoft as well, i feel.

>  I am happy to get stickers printed and posted.

 great!  yes please!

>>  ok, here's the page where we need people to commit to helping out:
>> http://rhombus-tech.net/allwinner_a10/crowdsource_funding/
> I added my name.

 you're a star brendan.  we still need people, really, to say if
they're prepared to help do the promotion side.  i know many people
have kindly helped out informally on e.g. slashdot articles, and so on
- i'd feel more... comfortable knowing that people are committed to
promoting.

 that's what will make this successful, i feel.  people telling their
friends, contacts and so on.

 /peace

l.