So does this mean the "at industry rates" assembly cost per MDAC2 PCB going to be about the same as the P&P contribution per streamer PCB.
The current pricing I have "at industry rates" based in margins for other projects are over twice the cost of the Streamer sponsorship.
When you say "offer something now" AFAIK you still need the rest of the funding for the P&P machine (or have I got that wrong ?).
I meant offer a design that I can see being ready BEFORE the MDAC2 itself as we are not relent on mechanical items and components sourced from China - the Streamer PCB can be built without such complexities. It was ALWAYS the intention to hand build a few streamer PCB's so we could get a few units out to those who would start software development ahead of MDAC2 being shipped.
If you achieve funding the rest of the P&P machine by selling some designs (as I understand it) is there a risk of changing priorities (your time to support your customer etc..) affecting MDAC2 delivery in 2017 ?. Sorry just a question as to understand what the impact might be.
Ideally I could offer the Detox design, a vairent of MDAC2 or the Streamer PCB so I could run any new "projects" in parallel, but the current "solution" I have on the table is a couple of new designs although they would pay more... but I'm reluctant to go down this route as I simply dont have the time - I would get Jarek to do most of the PCB design once I'd completed the schematics, but its would still take much time away from my core projects (MDAC2 etc). This is why I'd prefer / considering other options.
So the streamer PCB assembly has priority over the MDAC2 assembly - would it not be better to finish the MDAC2 and add the streamer later.
Well, the streamer is being completed in parallel with the MDAC2 mainboard - being a digital design I need only draw up the schematics and help Jarek with the PCB component layout, system concepts and interfaces then he can design the board with just alittle help and suggestions from me. "We" will have the PCB completed by Tuesday / Wednesday!
Given the streamer software will run an an RPI-3 and the software interface to the streamer PCB is just USB audio, "software development" can be done (at least most of it) on an RPI3.
Basically yes - BUT there are some small but significant differences with the hardware as we require some "dual purpose" I/O pins that on the RPi board are used for other secondary functions (like the Ethernet Reset pin on RPi is shared with a pin we need for a secondary I2C port) - a few small details like this that will require modifications to the system drivers. Also the RPi does not have an onboard RTC...
Our clocking structure is very different to the RPi board as on our streamer ALL clocks (CPU, USB, Ethernet, HDMI, PSU etc) are synchronised to the audio master clock and as far as I'm aware this is the ONLY Streamer design where such care has been taken with the Clock structure to prevent uncontrolled clock "beating".