I recently did an embedded job where we essentially used a mkrzero as our dev board. It saved us a ton of time on writing the firmware, since we didn’t need to wait for and debug prototypes. And the final schematic took way less time as well, since we could reference the mkrzero for things that might require guessing what the datasheets actually require.
There’s a lot to be said for having a commercial product with multiple revisions to avoid painful guesswork.
Re:Raspberry Pi 4 PCIe bridge “chip”
by HeyLaughingBoy on Thursday July 02, 2020 @09:57AM
(#23713132)
The Rev4 I referred to in this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23680157 used an OSHW board as a reference for a chip I had never used before and I was able to incorporate the Arduino library for it. Just brought the new hardware up yesterday. OSS/OSH saved me tons of time.
I have an STM32-based controller board next to me (I'm a firmware developer) and I had originally suggested that instead of us spinning up a custom board, we use a BeagleBone or RPi Compute Module and build out the I/O and take advantage of all the OSS out there. I got a lot of pushback that I wasn't willing to fight (I said it a couple years ago with the same results), but if we had gone that route, the entire project would have been done months ago. Same would have been true the first time I brought it up on that other project.
Sure the Pi's are cheap and attractive, but it's the ecosystem that provides the real value. And these days, with software usually being the main cost of the project, you can't beat OSS.