Andrew and all,
The one thing I was hoping to have in place before sharing schematic and PCB layout files was to have a really good engagement plan. By engagement plan, I essentially mean the definition of the Beagle Board project goals and what type of business arrangements we’d entertain, such as endorsing the sale of cases, including certain features, or turning over manufacturing. Instead of waiting for these things to be perfectly clear, however, I’d like to just get the thoughts out there for some dialog.
All Beagle Board peripherals and side products are welcome, as are “competing” projects that make use of the design. The goal of Beagle is to illustrate the capability of the OMAP3530 device at a cost point where most interested people can experience it. Beagle is meant to get those who are interested in OMAP to work in the open, enabling us all to get along a bit faster or further in our designs. Beagle is not meant to be a substitute for the system-on-module offerings that are tremendously beneficial to getting a product to market quickly, without a lot of up-front costs, but instead more for software developers, students, and hobbyists who don’t plan on making more than one of their hardware setup.
If someone wants to put a case around Beagle and call it a product, great. To be successful selling that product, they would need to add some value, such as a particular set of bundled software, additional peripherals, or some cost reduction. We don’t want to be in the business of controlling this market. There are some really great manufacturers out there that understand the needs of community developers, system developers, and end consumers. We’d like to avoid disrupting their business plans by setting any misleading expectations. Now that Beagle is being broadly announced, it seems best to keep any product or manufacturing discussion out in the open. It is understood that this isn’t something many people are comfortable with–to a great extent because it requires talking about things that you might not ever deliver, thus hurting your brand and reputation. While this is a dangerous reality, getting real community feedback on your plans is also good–and we really don’t want to OWN Beagle. Our only concerns are that no one does it harm and that can be assured by making sure that plans for Beagle are discussed openly. Harm to Beagle is defined as something that would prevent those interested from being able to get/afford one, but making a better product than Beagle is in no way considered harmful. Beagle is intentionally incomplete, yet still flexible enough to enable exploration.
Editing the website is welcome. This is a tough one for many people to swallow, but at least I am confident that this is a self-policing activity. I would have been quite happy if Bridge Worldwide would have added features to the website and then advertised the fact that they did so (they are a nice group of talented people). Perhaps that is a bit easier to appreciate than the idea that I’m fine with people editing the website to add essentially advertisements for their OMAP3-based designs, services, and products. I see that as a benefit to the community. I also think that this particular community is sufficiently active to recognize insincere behavior that would result in more bad press than good. Do what you can and take credit for it, but nothing more. There’s nothing wrong with that. (Web content edits are desired to be git patches sent to this mailing list, similar to the Linux kernel patches.)
Further, it is fully expected that for someone designing their own system they would purchase the OMAP35x EVM (http://www.ti.com/omap35x) and utilize the hardware expansion options and documented support channels. Developing a board is a complex task that will cost you thousands of $US. The EVM is still quite reasonably priced for developers interested in building their own hardware.
BeagleBoard.org would obviously not handle returns and repairs for boards not manufactured under Gerald’s supervision (or delegated supervision).
All this said, here you go…
These design materials are NOT SUPPORTED and DO NOT constitute a
reference design. Only “community” support is allowed via resources at
BeagleBoard.org - discuss.
THERE IS NO WARRANTY FOR THE DESIGN MATERIALS, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED
BY APPLICABLE LAW. EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE
COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE PROGRAM “AS IS”
WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING,
BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. THE ENTIRE RISK AS TO THE QUALITY
AND PERFORMANCE OF THE DESIGN MATERIALS IS WITH YOU. SHOULD THE
PROGRAM PROVE DEFECTIVE, YOU ASSUME THE COST OF ALL NECESSARY
SERVICING, REPAIR OR CORRECTION.
We mean it, these materials may be totally unsuitable for any purposes.
http://beagleboard.org/hardware/design
Please let us know what luck you have in shopping for PCB makers and assemblers utilizing these materials.
Thanks and best of luck,
Jason