microcat - The ultimative ARM based handheld game console

DarkestEx · August 18, 2015, 09:47:57 PM

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on August 18, 2015, 09:05:22 PM
Welcome aboard adekto. My suggestion for crowdfunding would be to wait until you got a prototype with a design/case done, so that way people are easier to convince. That's of course if you need crowdfunding at all. Also good luck on this project, I'm glad that you are both slowly getting your parts together.

Oh we will need crowdfunding in any case.

adekto · August 19, 2015, 06:32:31 AM

thank you guys for your intrest aswel
we have spend about 400 euro's on prototyping parts at the moment

Dream of Omnimaga · August 19, 2015, 06:38:12 AM

Darn, that's a lot of money. That is partly why I always hope that people who work on such project are experienced enough to achieve their goals and have enough free time to work on it. It sucks if all money spent into a project goes to waste.

Also, one suggestion I have for this project would be to ensure that it can be worked on as a solo project. That way, if, for example, you or DarkestEx became unable to work on any project for three years due to school and had to drop out from Microcat development, then you could at least continue alone. In the past, I saw many projects (physical or software-based) die because one of the team member disappeared with important parts of code)

adekto · August 20, 2015, 08:49:24 AM

il keep that in mind.
i was wondering if any of you people know any european pick and place fabs. im just mainly looking to get some price's since atm we plan to do it by hand (for 50 ish units that be fine but more it becoms like a big problem to do by hand)

p4nix · August 20, 2015, 08:59:24 AM

Depending on how open the microcat's hardware is planned to be, you could manage 'trusted' 'solder slaves' through a kind of microcat shop - private people selling microcats they assembled following some quality guidelines. But that might be hard to achieve both in a organisational and a juridical uncritical way.

adekto · August 20, 2015, 09:31:46 AM

yea i see where your coming from but then again it probebly more trust weurthy to get a profesional company on bourd for that
dealing with multiple indipendants and probebly sending to the costumer derectly cant guarantee that the product works and is made to spec, and we will only get the blame from that

the idea of making a kits and supplieng resellers like that might be a way to go, but for the current version we arent making it opensource hardware (mainly for copycat reasons)

DarkestEx · August 20, 2015, 10:34:24 AM

Well about openness, we will be releasing the schematics, but we won't release the PCB files to prevent cheaper copies. Also eagle costs a freakkin 140EUR with student discount

Dream of Omnimaga · August 22, 2015, 04:57:35 AM

If I was you guys I would avoid getting this product assembled by multiple companies. This will cause too much issues I think and if something doesn't work then they'll blame each others for damaging each others' work or stuff like that.

And yeah if I was you I would wait before releasing the schematics, in case your work gets stolen or something for money. Of course if you ever became too busy to work on it then you could release what you have, though.

DarkestEx · August 22, 2015, 04:21:04 PM

Quote from: DJ Omnimaga on August 22, 2015, 04:57:35 AM
If I was you guys I would avoid getting this product assembled by multiple companies. This will cause too much issues I think and if something doesn't work then they'll blame each others for damaging each others' work or stuff like that.

And yeah if I was you I would wait before releasing the schematics, in case your work gets stolen or something for money. Of course if you ever became too busy to work on it then you could release what you have, though.

Well I don't see any issue in releasing the schematics. Making them takes time, but is nowhere as costly and time expensive as ruling out a 4 layer PCB.
So we will never release the PCB files. But releasing the schematics is fine and allows people to understand the console more and develop expansion modules for it and maybe even hack it.

Other news is that we now have two great people that joined our team and help us developing the software:
@Cumred_Snektron and @gbl08ma
They're awesome

Dream of Omnimaga · August 22, 2015, 04:24:07 PM

Awesome to hear. Will they also participate to the discussion and share updates here?

gbl08ma · August 22, 2015, 08:41:06 PM

I may, at least for the bytecode virtual machine part. And I already participated in the discussion.

But at this point there's still so much to be done and we're still experimenting a lot, so it's hard to come up with concrete updates. For the VM part, it's probably easier for people to follow the activity on https://github.com/microcat-dev/claw-vm for the time being.

Snektron · August 23, 2015, 08:48:58 PM

I'll try to do some updates too, but i don't really have big projects for it yet. I made a Setup utility and a claw bytecode syntax for notepad++ though.

Unicorn · August 25, 2015, 04:18:34 AM

Awesome! I expect a great thing from you guys....

Dream of Omnimaga · September 01, 2015, 02:31:29 AM

Quote from: gbl08ma on August 22, 2015, 08:41:06 PM
I may, at least for the bytecode virtual machine part. And I already participated in the discussion. But at this point there's still so much to be done and we're still experimenting a lot, so it's hard to come up with concrete updates. For the VM part, it's probably easier for people to follow the activity on https://github.com/microcat-dev/claw-vm for the time being.

Cool to hear. I was more wondering since certain developers like the Ndless team and other Nspire developers posts all progress on Github/Bitbucket/etc exclusively and this happens with other platforms as well (although it's more common with the Nspire). Although Ndless team has to hide that info from TI at all cost, so I think they have a case there. But otherwise developers tend to not get as much community feedback that way. On the other hand it's generally better to avoid hype, to avoid giving false hopes to people in case the project takes longer than expected or never comes to fruition. Anyway good luck to everyone

DarkestEx · September 08, 2015, 03:38:11 PM

So we made some progress and changed the hardware specs quite a bit.

Basically the console now has 16 bit instead of 8 bit graphics, 680mAh battery, RTC, full speed USB 2.0 host and slave, high speed SDIO interface, real binary code loading instead of vm (either directly from SD or through RAM), 512 KB Flash (instead of 256), 128KB RAM (instead of 32), 120 MHz (instead of 48)

And here comes the best: the price stays!

Also it will be fully hackable and reprogrammable. You can use it for almost anything else!