call me dorothy and slap me silly, but can't such a fund go toward the 'consumerization' of one of the existing industrial VMEbus/VPX SBCs hosting mpc86xx? those are some excellent boards. or would the companies making those be utterly uninterested?

to clarify, i don't mean for us to try to 'buy out' and 'open' an existing industrial SBC design, but rather to approach the maker and ask them to design a consumer version of one of those, at a lower BOM: consumer-grade components, removal of certain components (clerly no need for a back-plane in a consumer design), reduced number of ports, etc. and i'm speaking here of the board design alone, once genesi have that, they could arrange their own component deals with freescale et al, for any potential production runs.

Because they're not consumer boards?

You mean something like this, right?

http://www.gefanuc.com/products/2147

It would be cheaper to design a board from scratch. With such high integration on the MPC8610 and the peripheral requirements above an SBC/Comms board (external SATA chips etc. which aren't present on those boards) you would end up with nothing like the original board.

Genesi can architect this design much faster and more cost effectively than industrial-oriented companies can. We have the design experience for a desktop board..

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Matt Sealey

ok then, glad to hear genesi could do a from-scratch desktop design for cheaper. just to make it clear: my originally supposition was not that genesi did not have the experience ( duh ;p ) but that a from-scratch design could be more expensive.

apropos, that SBC you linked to features SATA ; ) admittedly, most other SBCs don't.

Definitely not. After you reach a certain level of complexity, stripping back a board to build it back up again is more time consuming than laying everything down from libraries.
The first milestone for building a board is always to create design libraries and modify existing ones to the specifications. Once you have those you can build any board out of those components once you match pins up between them. Then you do the signal routing and make sure there are no timing problems. All in all an entire design may be done in less than 12 weeks with the right experience, and the cost is entirely based on time..

Since Genesi have the ability to go from scratch to prototype to low-volume production (1000s per month) and provide firmware and BSP, which is sort of rare in the industry to do the whole thing, costs are brought down this way, too.

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Matt Sealey

good to hear that, Matt. let us know when the funding opens.

It is up:

http://www.power2people.org/projects.html

R&B :)

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http://bbrv.blogspot.com

now that's some really good news!

any alternative-to-paypal payment methods?