[MinnowBoard] MinnowBoard MAX announcement

[Scott Garman]

On 03/31/2014 10:28 AM, Ken Tait wrote:
> Scott,
>
> you guys are spending too much time on new boards and basically
> abandoning those of us that bought the minnow.
>
> I see no lures out there, so this board has little to offer me if I
> can't get a PCIe option. Ya I know the hype but I cannot buy any lures..
>
> As an ex Intel guy I can tell you with certainty you are shooting your
> foot off here. Raspberry and beagle are strong because of stability and
> user support..I see none of this from intel. You can't just make the
> hardware and walk away.

Hi Ken,

First of all, I really appreciate your feedback on this, and I can 
understand where your frustration is coming from. I have forwarded your 
email to the MinnowBoard development team at Intel and CircuitCo.

CircuitCo sells their expansion boards through boardzoo.com, and it's 
true that as of now, there is only the Break-out-Board Lure listed. I've 
personally seen and used some prototypes of the Lizzy Lure, which adds 
mSATA and mPCIe ports to the original MinnowBoard. I really hope that 
Lure will be released soon, but I can't commit to any specific timetable 
on that at the moment.

One thing I want to point out though is that the MinnowBoard is an open 
hardware board so it can empower anyone with a financial or technical 
interest in developing Lures. And by way of example, we've learned that 
PatternAgents developed the Hula Poppy Lure to enable connectivity with 
many different kinds of Pmod boards:

http://www.patternagents.com/projects/Hula_Poppy.html

We hope that by embracing open hardware we can foster more of this sort 
of thing. That doesn't mean we can't do better, though.

As for not having the same stability and support as RasPi and 
BeagleBone...well what can I say - we're a much younger project, and 
with our price point being relatively higher than those boards, we're 
not going to have the same size community. The price issue, btw, is a 
major motivator in us moving forward with a second board.

All that I'll add to that is that as a technical evangelist and 
community manager for this group, I'm open to ideas on how we can 
support this community better. Just don't assume that because I work for 
Intel I have a staff of dozens and a huge budget to make things happen. 
This is very much a grassroots effort, and yet one that is ideal for the 
open source hardware and software model.

Thanks again - I've cc:'ed David Anders of CircuitCo in case he has a 
few things to add.

Scott

-- 
Scott Garman
Embedded Linux Engineer - Yocto Project
Intel Open Source Technology Center