[Tinkerphones] Fernvale Kits - Lack of Interest - Discount

[Paul Boddie]

Hello,

I saw the following article mentioned on the #neo900 IRC channel yesterday. 
Here's an excerpt:

"The lesson learned here is probably that even a technically very exciting 
project backed by world-renowned hackers like bunnie doesn't mean that anyone 
will actually ever do anything with it, unless they get everything handed on a 
silver plate, i.e. all the software/reversing work is already done for them by 
others."

http://laforge.gnumonks.org/blog/20180929-fernvale-discount/

The context is the technology for a low-cost phone which is covered by this 
article:

"Thus empowered by our fair use rights, we decided to embark on a journey to 
reverse engineer the Mediatek MT6260. It’s a 364 MHz, ARM7EJ-S, backed by 8MiB 
of RAM and dozens of peripherals, from the routine I2C, SPI, PWM and UART to 
tantalizing extras like an LCD + touchscreen controller, audio codec with 
speaker amplifier, battery charger, USB, Bluetooth, and of course, GSM. The 
gray market prices it around $3/unit in single quantities. You do have to read 
or speak Chinese to get it, and supply has been a bit spotty lately due to 
high Q4 demand, but we’re hoping the market will open up a bit as things slow 
down for Chinese New Year."

https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297

Indeed, I remember the original article that was posted on the topic of "The 
$12 “Gongkai” Phone", presumably using a related Mediatek SoC:

"The electronics consists of just two major ICs: the Mediatek MT6250DA, and a 
Vanchip VC5276."

https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?page_id=3107

Maybe I missed the Fernvale announcement or something, but I'm not sure I 
agree with assertions that people need everything handed to them or they just 
won't bother. I have messed around with products where things weren't exactly 
made easy, and I imagine that others on this list have been in the same 
position.

While I appreciate the reverse-engineering work done to get the Fernvale stuff 
out there, there comes a time when people just want decent documentation and 
to get the feeling of working with the vendor, not against them. Indeed, this 
is more or less admitted in the announcement article:

"I’ve reviewed business plans of over a hundred hardware startups by now, and 
most of them are using overpriced chipsets built using antiquated process 
technologies as their foundation. I’m no exception to this rule – we use the 
Freescale i.MX6 for Novena, which is neither the cheapest nor the fastest chip 
on the market, but it is the one chip where anyone can freely download almost 
complete documentation and anyone can buy it on Digikey. This parallel 
constraint of scarce documentation and scarce supply for cutting edge 
technology forces Western hardware entrepreneurs to look primarily at Arduino, 
Beaglebone and Raspberry Pi as starting points for their good ideas."

I imagine that there are people would embrace immersion in Chinese mercantile 
culture, and it seems to have been fashionable for people to go on "shopping" 
tours of Shenzhen to pick up all the good stuff. But I don't think that this 
helps to form the basis of a sustainable, collaborative project, at least 
outside the referenced "gongkai" culture operating in China. Digikey may be 
"overpriced", but at least you know what they have and that they will sell 
things to you, as opposed to this from the original phone article:

"Of course, you can’t just call up Mediatek and buy these; and it’s extremely 
difficult to engage with them “going through the front door” to do a design. 
Don’t even bother; they won’t return your calls."

I think it is great that Bunnie and friends made this more accessible and that 
Harald tried to make it more widely available. I get the impression that 
Bunnie finds prototyping boards with surface mount components cheap and 
convenient, which is rather different from the experience of those of us who 
have a more casual interest in hardware experimentation. Offering a suite of 
boards that could be used to make a product really is rather helpful.

But what then? Such projects require a range of different skills to move 
decisively in any direction, and the perceived skill level required to be 
productive can be intimidating. I can imagine that someone as accomplished as 
Bunnie or his collaborators and peers might not recognise this, which makes it 
all the more important that such projects continue to benefit from the input 
of those who initiated them. Looking at the Fernvale project page...

https://www.kosagi.com/w/index.php?title=Fernvale_Main_Page

...I see that the boot environment made available hasn't seen much attention 
for three years, the operating system for four years. I wouldn't blame the 
creators for not continuing their work - we all have other things to do - but 
it suggests that the audience was not sufficiently engaged to want to 
contribute to the effort. Then, they probably wondered if the thing had any 
future.

When messing around with the Ben NanoNote - another hardware effort that was 
underappreciated while you could still buy one - there were several things 
that I as a regular software developer had to familiarise myself with in order 
to do anything: decipher datasheets (in terse, not always readable, language), 
study bootloader code, learn the basics of interfacing peripherals, understand 
processor architecture specifics. And so on, up through the operating system 
kernel, low-level user space mechanisms, eventually arriving at something 
people might be comfortable working with normally.

But that was a product delivered with a complete software distribution. My own 
experiments are unnecessary from the perspective of using what was already 
delivered, but they provide an insight into the work that went in to getting 
that product delivered. Few people have done low-level hacking with that 
product, but the effort that went into code and documentation makes it 
approachable for people like me. Anything less, and I wouldn't be surprised if 
nobody gave a product a second look.

So, no-one without the experience, patience or skills is really very likely to 
just pick anything like Fernvale up. Things like Arduino and Raspberry Pi are 
popular precisely because the ecosystems are well-established and there is 
always likely to be someone who also wanted to do the same thing as you might 
be thinking of doing. I think some people in the open hardware realm like to 
ridicule these initiatives, but they could learn a few things from them about 
building communities and demand for their own work.

Also, the chances are that you will be able to go and buy more Arduino and 
Raspberry Pi products next year and the year after: a sustainable supply is 
important, too, particularly if someone thinks there might be opportunities in 
working with those things, making products for them, and so on. Again, it is 
all about finding the audience and establishing some kind of roadmap. Sadly, 
this never really happened with the NanoNote, which was also ahead of various 
trends in a number of ways, and I imagine that the same applies to Fernvale.

Anyway, that was longer than it probably needed to be, but I think that there 
are some lessons to be had about why some projects, great as they may be, 
don't really seem to get any momentum. I might have been tempted by one of 
these Fernvale kits if I didn't have enough other things to look at, but maybe 
someone here realises that it was what they had been looking for all along.

Paul