This link was apparently posted to HN two days ago when
it was published but with the boring title
"Neo900 2016 Week 47". I think there is probably someone
on HN interested in looking over it, so I posted it to
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13002613
with a better title hoping someone who should see it sees it,
though the time of day might be bad and even though
I tried to use a better title it might still be too
vague to attract any attention. I looked over the
schematics myself but I don't have any input for the
Neo900 guys, being just a second year EE student
(also, though I'm interested in electronics and
microelectronics I'm still going to go the path
of the power subdisipline as has been my plan
since before I started).
I heard about this way back in 2014, why hasn't neo900 progressed much? It seems like Xunlong is able to turn out new boards based on the A20, H3 and H5 in a matter of weeks at a price point of $7 to $35, with the Linux sunxi community building a fully free stack for them in rapid order.
Why has it taken so long, and additionally cost so much to produce a single board? I feel like a project like this needs to just partner with a Chinese business like Xunlong and specify what they want & with what chipset, like how the OrangePi Plus 2E was built.
If there is demand Xunlong will build a board (or if they think there is demand), the only sunk costs they seem to have are the minimal inventory they have on hand.
Board design is all in house, they're the original designer of quite a few non-Raspi SBCs on the market today, that being said they have just a handful of employees.
That might be the first hardware crowdfunding I ever buy into. I've got a seething rage at just about every aspect of current phones and a huge nostalgia for Nokia's early smartphones.
Physical keyboard? Yay. Messages in natural language are one thing, ssh'ing into a machine or writing code is an entirely different topic.
Open systems thrive with exactly the kind of software I use almost exclusively. I can live without any mobile games - srsly, get a handheld or build one yourself[1] - and I don't use many other services I couldn't find alternatives for.
You're dead right on the games front. You can get a GBA for ~$20-$40, and have 100s of games that are a hell of a lot better than most of what sees release on mobile.
I pre-ordered as I am a very happy OpenPandora owner. It's a full Linux (especially now that I have Debian on it) and I can VNC or SSH with tablets and phones to it. When closed it consumes very little battery, it has tons of games and I can do full dev on it. The only annoying thing for me is an ARM thing; GHCi still doesn't seem to work on ARM, but that's a minor annoyance and last I check it is close to getting there.
Edit: to be honest; the Pyra is almost perfect for me (when using it with a $30 Android tablet as monitor it is very close). Currently my perfect all day computer would be a 10 inch tablet running (native) Linux with a stand, 3g and 15+ hrs battery life. I really like the MS foldable mobile keyboard but the only Linux ready stuff are full laptops or chromebooks. The chromebooks have no 3g unfortunately.
