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From my POV the companies were happy to see people experiment with their designs and SoCs but they just didn't have the resources to put the necessary amount of
by joezydeco 4y ago
From my POV the companies were happy to see people experiment with their designs and SoCs but they just didn't have the resources to put the necessary amount of customer support forward.
In my many argumen^H^H^Hdiscussions with RPi users here and elsewhere, the counter-argument for Pi has always been the community support is excellent. And, yes, it is. When you aren't large enough to get a TI or NXP FAE to answer your email then having a robust community is great. But it was built ground-up from all the RPi fans having the object in their hands and little else to do with it.
When TI dropped OMAP I left for Freescale, now NXP. I've been developing on i.MX for well over a decade now and have really enjoyed it. Their foothold in automotive has allowed them to keep growing the line and branching it out in different ways, more so than TI or Broadcom will.
- pclmulqdq 4y agoNXP does seem to be the next good vendor of ARM SoCs (i.MX and QorIQ are both pretty impressive lines). The idea of "community support" is kind of interesting - it clearly had an effect here, but I'm not so sure how they got it. I guess the foundation just made it very easy for people to talk to each other about RPi projects, while TI put you on some forum in a dark corner of their website.
- Rediscover 4y agoQorIQ is seriously impressive, except for the enclosures for the official dev kits. Pop the lid and toss it in the bin - it will be much quieter.
- joezydeco 4y agoNXP has been doing solid work with ARM for almost 20 years now. Their LPC line, which they had before the Moto/Freescale acquisition, is a solid workhorse set of SoCs. I've done many projects with the LPC17xx (Cortex-M3) family and they all come out pretty great. And I believe you're right about the community support. The RPi groups have been run by actual owners and enthusiasts, whereas the factory support forums in my experience have been minimally maintained with almost no interaction from anyone at the actual companies.