[ChuckMcM]

There is, of course, a huge difference between making a few things, and having someone manufacture a few thousand things. It is interesting to see people learning these skills under such pressure. Perhaps there is an opportunity here for a training class on manufacturing.

I was a bit confused about their comment on the display "We tested every available (non-proprietary) display we could get our hands on." At their volume most manufacturers would hand over details of connecting to their display.

[kryptiskt]

> At their volume most manufacturers would hand over details of connecting to their display.

You'd think so, but I have had a hardware firm refuse to let me look at the data sheets unless they got a commitment to an order of 300,000 chips. And that was even though I tried to flash working-for-a-big-player-in-the-business credentials.

[ChuckMcM]

Interesting, in the past I've had the manufacturer require an in-person meeting at the facilities (which is basically their way of fact checking I guess) before coming through but for components never had them require a PO first.

On a funny/related note back when I worked at Google and was looking into compressing air during windy periods and then feeding it back through compressed air motors for energy and cooling, I tried to get specs and pricing from MTI, the French company that Tata Motors was said to be buying their motors from. In spite of being from Google and offering up the possibility of a very press worthy installation they wouldn't even give me the time of day. I figured they didn't actually have anything at that point and since Tata didn't ship their car for several years I continue to hold that belief. (I don't even know if Tata ever shipped their car, one option was buying cars and just taking out the engine)

[kybernetikos]

I got one of the early pandora consoles ( http://www.openpandora.org/ ). They had some previous experience in the field and ended up shipping around a year after their original estimate. I think even the revised estimate for the occulus is quite optimistic.

On the other hand, the raspberry pi guys did a lot better than I expected.

[glomph]

How was that in the end? I got the impression that by the time it was out it was almost irrelevant, given how far everything else had advanced.

[kybernetikos]

Not quite irrelevant. The specs were on a par with the other things that were out when I got mine because they'd been very ambitious.

In terms of relevancy of course, the specs aren't all that it's about, having proper gaming controls and a qwerty keyboard in such a small device means that it's an entirely different kind of thing to almost everything else that's out there, and that's still the case. It's hard to overstate how important good controls are to the enjoyment of playing games. I certainly missed my train stop playing Speedball II (emulating the Amiga) and ended up miles away from home...

[glomph]

Thanks.