Hello everyone,

I was wondering who was in charge of the Carambola Wiki, is the Wiki managed by someone in the community or is it controlled by 8devices? The information on it appears to be quite outdated and interesting information is hidden in the forums. The forums also have a weird bug where you can't search for what it deems "common terms" - this is ridiculous, especially when you're trying to search for "power" to get threads that talk about power consumption and how to reduce it.

Anyway, the Wiki could use an update. Feel free to chime in and indicate what you would like added/modified, my personal favourites are:

1. MMIO commands to disable Ethernet interfaces for lower power consumption. Also indicate power consumption levels in various scenarios (mentioned in the forum as well).
2. Interfacing with the bare board (how to connect USB, how to connect Ethernet MagJack)
3. Where to get an updated WiFi driver and how to install it to get rid of the issues in WiFi STA mode
4. How to update U-Boot to make it accept Kermit firmware uploads over the serial port (if a dev board is not available)
5. What repositories to use (OpenWRT defaults or 8devices hosted ones) for opkg?

Thank you,
Razvan

There are still a few topics in the Wiki that haven't been written yet (Like in the Hardware section there are the topics Registers, I2C, SPI, GPIO, I2S). Most of these topics could be filled with the knowledgebase in the forum. So I think it'd be ideal if the Wiki was opened to at least some forum members, or if forum members had a way to submit Wiki articles and changes/updates to the 8devices guys for reviewing and to add them to the Wiki.

I find your topics very important as well, especially USB (which is giving me quite a headache sometimes). The most asked newcomer questions revolve around the serial communication and updating the firmware. So I'd want the articles dealing with that to go into more depth on the subject. So people will know what to do if they didn't buy the dev board.

Other than that I'm very interested in details about the I2S interface and how to use it in Linux as an audio device.

Is anyone at 8devices in charge of support on these forums? Don't get me wrong, I love the board and I know it's cheap and probably not making them a lot of money, but at times it looks like it's been abandoned by its manufacturer altogether. Look at these forums, questions go unanswered for days or weeks and issues are left hanging (firmware upload over serial, WiFi drivers, etc).

I would happily pay a bit more for the board if it came with a bit of support from 8devices. Right now, although it fits into our project almost perfectly, I'm a bit reluctant to go ahead - at this rate, 8devices might decide that it's not worth it any longer and discontinue it in a few months. We're also evaluating the Electric Imp device and while I don't like their cloud model much, they do offer great tech support and their forums are "alive".

Razvan (the Carambola enthusiast ).

Hello Gedass,

I appreciate your answer. As far as I understand, what you're saying that the Carambola is pretty much an unsupported product, not suitable for commercial deployment (given that 8devices sees it as a "leisure time" project and won't offer support unless the 35 developers it employs have nothing else to work on). That's too bad, it's a great little device, but the community around it is either too small or not mature enough to support itself. If none of the 35 devs can spare 30 minutes a day to update the wiki and answer questions from developers, don't expect them to just bite the bullet and go commercial with you ... they will most probably be left with a bitter taste and move to one of the other platforms and never come back to 8devices (commercially or otherwise) in the future.

But it's your business after all, so you're free to do whatever you think would bring you additional clients and money. I'm just a bit disappointed, that's all.

My take is carambola is the product of a part-time gig from a number of engineers. You can't blame them for what they're able to put in, because like most of us, they probably have full time jobs working on something else. The reason why they don't work on it full time is simply because it doesn't pay as much as their full time jobs. So, until crambola really takes off and they sell enough to quit their jobs to work on it full time, what you see is what you get right now.

But money talks. So let's suppose those of us carambola customers can tell 8devices that we can commit to X number of units, I think 8devices will be very keen to listen and definitely kick in some more time to support the product.

What do you say? Any one in?

I wasn't asking anyone to work full time on this, I realize that the Carambola is not a money maker for them at this point. But if it is to become one, they should at least do their best to keep the community informed and help developers trying to come up with commercial products based on their board.

This is a job for 1 developer for maybe 30 minutes a day (probably even less given the volume of questions/answers in the forum these past few months). If there's nobody willing to spend that much time talking to the developer community, I would avoid using their board for anything commercial. They are apparently spending time on developing the next generation Carambola (Atheros-based, possibly called Citramona??) so I understand that supporting the existing Carambola must be "boring" for their developers . But we can't have the board crashing due to faulty WiFi drivers when they clearly indicated they had a solution for this and had the proper drivers to make the board rock solid stable. They've also mentioned (twice!) on the forum that serial-based Kermit firmware upload was available - but the U-Boot shipped on the boards still doesn't support it. As a client, this doesn't make me feel very comfortable.

Regarding volume, let's hear it from 8devices - what would it take to get the Carambola from a "leisure time" project to a fully supported project at 8devices? Is it volume? A higher price per unit? We can't commit to any volumes until we figure out if the Carambola is a good fit for our project - in the past, we've bought similar boards in the range of 1000 per year, I'm not sure if this would make the Carambola more supported or if this is peanuts for the 35 developers they have on the payroll.

Cheers,
Razvan

Answer is very simple.If you are unhappy with our products please don't use them.

I see that you're very open to suggestions Gedass... oh well ... I guess I'll go back to not using your products.