I work for a large product development company here in the US. We don't design our own WiFi modules, but we design a lot of things that could _use_ WiFi modules like this. So I'm playing with Carambola to get a feel for it. (I'm not _yet_ Linux proficient - but I'm going to get there!) Before I can recommend that we use it in our products, I'm curious about the background of Carambola and 8devices in general.

How big is the company? How long have you been around? What other designs have you done? Where did you get the experience necessary to design such a sweet little module? Is this just a hobby business? (seems not - very nice module)

And Carambola: was it designed for a specific client, and then made available to the public? Were there many prototypes before the unit that is now for sale? Is it manufactured locally, or only designed locally?

Thanks for any insight into the context and background of this little guy-

*Brian

Carambola primary was developed like hobby project.Our hardware and software engineers works for much bigger RF design company in Lithuania.We are developed a lot of RF projects based on WiFi and WiMax technologies from 900MHz to 24GHz.
Today several companies in the USA use Carambola in big quantities for their own projects.

How did you end up getting the ralink chips? I have tried making stuff in the past and it seems impossible to get chips from broadcom, realtek, ralink, etc which is quite frustrating!

Even if I quote them a purchase of 10,000's of units (I would never use that many ), I get little to no response. It seems they are only interested in catering to big-name consumer electronic companies.