[MinnowBoard] My Initial thoughts on the MinnowBoard Max

[David Rolfe]

Hi,

Bearing in mind the revolutionary ideas behind the MinnowBoard Max, and the fact that these boards are now starting to arrive in the hands of ‘end users’, I have to say that I am quite surprised at the lack of general information available, and indeed the absence of even a general discussion forum anywhere…. and I have not even found an unboxing video on You Tube yet… or seen one for sale on eBay!

It is possible of course that I am completely missing the point here, but I am placing this product in the same league as the Raspberry Pi, the Beagle Board together with other recent updated SOC boards such as the Banana Pi, Cubieboard etc.

These are all so called development boards, which (as a basic example) just require a power supply, a USB keyboard/mouse plus a monitor, and of course a suitable operating system or Linux based ‘distro’ to turn them into a simple personal computer… as I assume can the MinnowBoard Max, and thus have also caught the attention of the home hobbyist, or small computer enthusiast.

That being the case I would have thought that a few ‘fanboy’ or ‘enthusiasts’ websites would have appeared by now, together with third party offering of such items as cases, cables, power supplies, pre-programmed micro SD cards etc. Not everyone will be interested in this sort of thing of course, certainly not the more advanced developers, but there are a lot of no so experienced prospective customers out there who certainly would be… me included!

Perhaps it is still early days or possibly the MinnowBoard Max is not really suitable for use in this way, although I sincerely hope it is!

Please don’t take this as a criticism of the manufacturers in any way, but I genuinely cannot understand why there is not a lot more coverage, in one way of another on the ‘web’ of this board, or even some initial reviews! Personally, although I tend to follow developments in this area fairly closely, it was only a few days ago that I really became aware of the MinnowBoard Max for the first time.

I am sure that I am about to be enlightened though!

Regards,

David
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.elinux.org/pipermail/elinux-minnowboard/attachments/20140812/7f5fa8d7/attachment.html>