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On Sun, 10 Aug 2014, bad apple wrote:
On 09/08/14 22:16, Gordon Henderson wrote:a bunch of really informative stuffNow you've kind of put me off. I know that I want one of these, but I do NOT want the sort of hassle you've been dealing with. I'm pretty confident, but "I had to unsolder that and buy a full-size one" are not words I want to see. I can probably do that, but I don't want to. I'm a software guy, not a hardware guy, and if I spend a lot of money on some cutting edge awesome tool I categorically do not want to have to take a soldering iron or even a screwdriver to it to make it deliver even 50% of what is promised on the blurb. Screw that.
They do offer a ready built LaOS board for a few euros more. Since I have been soldering stuff for over 35 years now, it didn't seem an issue for me.
I want to defend these guys, but it's hard - it is a community effort - the biggest issue is that their community is smaller than the local LUG community. At the Paignton Jam yesterday we had a 2.5% turnout. (ie. 5 of us out of ~200 mailing list members)
The other issue that I might have been able to solve is that of the µSD cards, the 1-bit SPI interface is optional - and from what I can tell, cards over 2GB in size do not have the 1-bit interface. the mBed controller only has an SPI (1-bit) SD card interface... (Pi uses the 4-bit interface)
Irritatingly, my subconscious is still nagging me. Cut stuff. With lasers. Buy a laser cutter. You know you want one. I'm probably going to take another 12 month rain check on this. There is a whole lot of insanely awesome things that I check up on every year or so to see if they've got realistic (like solar panels: I got them a few years ago just before the government kick backs expired) and more often than not, I'm disappointed. Flying cars, etc. To disarm my materialistic desires, I simply reloaded the page a couple of times: Operating System: Windows XP (only) Are you kidding me?
That's the way it is. China still has a huge investment in XPEven the supplied controller board is ~10 years old (with the chip tops sandpapered off so I can't work out the CPU) My guess is that these were actually designed and possibly built over 10 years ago and have been sat in a warehouse in China for all that time.
There is an updated version of the software, but I wasn't going to pay £1000 more for it. It runs under Win8 but still needs the security dongle (a different dongle to the one I have!) That's the main reason I wanted the LaOS board - there really isn't any other choice - although I did contemplate reverse engineering the USB protocoll between the XP box and the machine to see if I could re-implement it from a Linux host. It seemed easier to just buy the LaOS system.
Of-course, now we have local community expertiese... So if anyone wants to get one and go down the LaOS board route, there is someone in Devon with prior knowledge... Maybe we run our own hackathon to build them up :)
Gordon
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