Right now, the people on this list are the ones I’ve wanted for the beta program. Not all of the people on this list are active, unfortunately, but the signal-to-noise ratio here is pretty good right now.
Question: Any objections to opening up this list to other posters? Alternatively, what about simply making it where only the ‘beta’ folks go unmoderated for a while and be a bit strict on the moderation of other posters? Thoughts?
I wonder if the signal-to-noise ratio will exponentially dive down with questions such as “when will the board be available?”. Would it be out of question to wait until near public release/availability of the board?
I think it is fine to go public with the list. To cut down on the mailing list noise, a stickied thread with answers to the typical questions is a good idea. How much it costs, availability, PRU info, kernel/distro info, etc. Or, better yet, a sticky that points to an elinux wiki page that can be updated with the information all of the time, rather than tacking on post after post to a stickied thread.
So, I guess it comes down to a decision on who the mailing list will serve
best. Tech support for end-users, or tech reference for hardware/software
tinkerers. Lock it down and you'll favor the power (beta) users, but open
it up and you'll favor the desktop users. My recommendation is to provide
posting privileges for beta users and read-only for the rest of the world
until the board goes to public release.
When I think of the users for the X-15, I see them falling into one of three camps:
1. People that just want to use it as an ARM desktop to tinker around with.
2. People that want to design hardware and software to interface with it. These would be the same type of folks playing with the PRUs and building custom external boards (like BBB cape boards).
3. People that want to use the X-15 as an EVM of sorts to consider the pros/cons of its feature set for commercial product development.
I suspect #3 will be fairly quiet on the list and a small subset of users overall. #2 will ask a lot of questions regarding technical aspects of the system, which the elinux wiki can help with. #1 will be the same Linux desktop questions that you'll always see ("Why won't my mouse work?", "How do I change resolution?").
Andrew
I think taking it open would be fine. BTW, there was a recent hackaday article on the X15 which surprised me since I thought this wasn’t released yet.
You can start talking freely about it starting today without causing any angst.
Just to be clear, the DSP cores are for what? Audio processing? Same question for the PRU cores.
And I assume the four Coretex-M4 cores take over when the board goes into power save mode. Am I right or am I mistaken?
sigh … yeah, up to 45 GMACs/second, just for audio -.-
Matthijs
[1] yeah I understand you want those people too from a commercial point of view. They can be annoying at times though…
We’ve confirmed that this archive is now visible publicly, but I’m holding off on enabling the public to join without an invite until we’ve got our FAQs covered and can maintain a good signal-to-noise ratio. Thanks.