Cristian Paul Peñaranda Rojas wrote: > I would be good consider more options
Do you have any specific chips in mind ? > before making a choice that > breaks board compatibility again in the future. Well, this would hopefully be the last major change for a while. As far as I know, the nRF51822 is "as good as it gets" in terms of supporting BTLE. The openness angle still has to be explored (i.e., it seems that nobody has done this before), but the documentation looks good and they even got rid of the silly registration requirement that had annoyed me in 2014. The motivation for using AT86RF23x (802.15.4) in 2013/Mk1 was that I knew of no BT(LE) solution that wasn't entirely closed. The obvious drawback of that choice was that 802.15.4 isn't compatible with anything else, so you need a dongle on the "PC" side - which kinda sucks, particularly if using a smartphone or tablet. Then I found the CC2543. I knew at that time of Nordic, but they seemed to be rather closed (much like the other chip or module makers). After that, I was hoping that the design was ready for the next phase and thus didn't want to revise the RF chip decision, but that changed when the battery problem made it clear that major changes would be needed anyway. Now is a good time for making this kind of change: the next design is already reasonably different from its predecessor (different battery management, dual MCU, different geometry), so a new board version will be needed anyway, and any change that has to be introduced later will be significantly more costly than making changes now. We also have some ~6 boards with a CC2543. So even if the nRF51 should prove to be a total disaster, it would be relatively easy to limp back. Furthermore, Anelok has to find funding very soon or I won't be able to continue working towards actually making this a product. After plan A (crowd-investment), and plan B (OTF) have failed miserably, plan C would be crowdfunding. This means that there will be a tight schedule with very little room for changes once the campaign succeeds. Plus, I think it gives a better impression if there aren't lots of loose ends at the time of starting a campaign. I know that one can just not mention that endless to do list and all the basic research still waiting to be done, but perhaps the world doesn't need another myIDkey or Zano :) - Werner _______________________________________________ Qi Hardware Discussion List Mail to list (members only): [email protected] Subscribe or Unsubscribe: http://lists.en.qi-hardware.com/mailman/listinfo/discussion
