On 1/11/2013 10:36 AM, Darron Black wrote:
>
> The chip vendors' board support packages generally leave a whole lot to
> be desired... and the board vendors almost always just package that up
> and ship with minimal tweaking for correct pins, etc.  If the upstream
> chip vendors can't bother to fix drivers in a timely manner, what hope
> do the massively smaller board vendors have?
>
>

Support is everything, there is only so much a chip manufacturer will do=20
to help with an issue if you are not a 100,000 part buyer.  I didn't get=20
a pi simply because I found it too limiting in access to all the ports=20
and what I needed wasn't something with HDMI or that market segment. I=20
prefer hardware that has very few I/O already mapped out to another=20
function. I often find boards that look good on the surface but then=20
find out later that I can't do what I want because they have used a pin=20
for something to make their board work.  I want boards where everything=20
is totally open so I don't have to guess about anything provided.

I have been using boards from embeddedarm.com and have been pretty=20
happy. They provide good support and the ftp site is open to downloading=20
just about anything you need from manuals, to driver sources. Their=20
boards can't compete fro price with the pi , averaging from 1-$200 per=20
board but the support makes up the difference.


Mark


--=20
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