Re: Huge White Elephant in the room

[Alex Freed <alex_news@mirrow.com>]

AMart79196@gmail.com wrote:
> If I may join in on the fun here for just one minute...
> I have held out on purchasing one until some results come in.  That
> being said, I have followed the posts here and have seen promises
> after promises.
> Now, from the above quoted text, how is it possible to send out a
> production card, tell everyone it's finished with excuses of customs
> delaying it, then coming out and saying that it's still not working.

Just in case you don't quite understand how this design works, it is a
piece of hardware (FPGA and support) plus a configuration that can
be considered roughly equivalent to an embedded program. You start with
a prototype of the hardware and develop the "software" for it.
You fix whatever problems found and send the corrected design into 
production (or another rev of a prototype). Then *after* you get back 
the board from the customs you run tests to make sure there are no more
problems. And if there are, you fix them.
If this is done in an industrial environment with a number of engineers
working on it full time, you can expect to start shipping in say 6 month 
after the design starts. To be on the safe side you tell the customers 9 
month and in most cases actually ship in 12 month.
If you have 2 engineers working full time (and overtime) on something 
else, like the day job and mix in kids, wives and natural disasters the 
schedule doesn't get much shorter.

The only reason we have announced the project a while ago was that we 
needed to know how many boards to order but we actually *REFUSED* to 
take pre-payments knowing that there may be delays and glitches.

> Maybe its me, but I am confused as to what the story is myself.

Hope you understand a little better now.

> I for one has already seen on in person, held it in my hand.   I love
> the concept--and have said that this should have been done by someone
> 10 years ago.
The FPGAs of the right size at the right price were not available even
5 years ago.

> But the sad truth is that a non-working card was demoed at Kfest2009

Right. Never give in to the marketing team and never show a product 
before the full QA.

-Alex.