[Sketching12] Help me fix Texas Instruments

Tue Jul 24 15:20:35 PDT 2012

To contribute some recommendations that don't involve OSH...

As a company that makes powerful embedded processors that could potentially
offer affordable toolkits, TI could make the following improvements:

- Offer libraries for a GCC compiler rather than IAR workbench. While you
can port code written for IAR to a GCC equivalent, it takes time and that's
something I don't have a lot of.

- Understand that not all users are Linux experts. I found the BeagleBoard
nearly impossible to use for this reason. Perhaps I should have just
avoided BeagleBoard in the first place for this very reason.

As far as tools that I don't see readily available (and please feel free to
offer suggestions if you know of such tools) that TI could make:

- Super simple ability to play audio.
- Support of polyphonic audio playback.
- Ability to process audio data (DSP, etc) but expose simple high-level api
to accomplish this.
- Plug and play LCD with powerful graphics libraries (or better use
Processing or Javascript or something else familiar to create visual UIs)
- Some ability for computer vision with fairly easy to use API.
- Stupid simple network APIs

For now it's cheaper for me in terms of time and $$ to buy a mac mini to
accomplish these tasks. Would be nice to have something smaller and cheaper
that runs on batteries at some point. I thought BeagleBoard / BeagleBone
would be the answer, but they are far from it. Way to complex for what I'm
looking for and I don't have the time or knowledge to create a "yet another
toolkit" solution in this area :)

-jeff

On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 5:03 PM, Rob Faludi <rob at faludi.com> wrote:

> Digi, Radio Shack, Intel and many others are *definitely* interested in
> the maker/designer/innovator community. Actually I also spent an hour on
> the phone with State Farm today too, on the topic. Best as I can determine
> it, these companies are all for real. But that doesn't mean they fully
> understand us yet. And we need to understand them too. After all it's at
> least as complicated being an investor-owned multinational enterprise as it
> is to be a hackerspace.
>
> It sounds like TI is interested in the community part of what we offer.
> Not sure how much open-hardware matters to them one way or the other. I've
> met hardly anyone outside of our little circles that have even heard of it.
> Open software yes; hardware, not so much yet. So I'd doubt there's much
> fear around it in commercial circles. You gotta know it to fear it. But
> even then, it's not a very scary thing. Electronics manufacturers have
> published technical specification and schematics for years, so OSH will be
> more evolutionary than disruptive. And hey, if it moves product in this
> economy, anyone who has to do a quarterly earnings call is going to fall
> down and worship it!
>
> Best of luck Kipp, to you, your presentation and those thirsty penguins.
> --Rob
>
>
> On Jul 24, 2012, at 3:47 PM, Kipp Bradford wrote:
>
> This is all incredibly helpful, not just for my conversation with TI, but
> maybe more for creating mutually beneficial strategies for large
> corporations in general (Radio Shack?).
>
> I don't think turning around a battleship is possible, and it might not be
> beneficial in the long run for the OSH community. I'd like to see TI be
> wildly successful with their battleship, but maybe drop a couple
> hovercrafts into the water that are well-resourced and serve our needs. I'd
> be very happy with 1% of a $14B company devoted to open hardware.
>
> Here's where I make some strange analogy to battleships and
> torpedo-weilding hovercrafts piloted by desert penguins, but I'm not going
> to go there.
>
> Cheers,
> -Kipp
>
> On Jul 24, 2012, at 3:12 PM, Andrew Fisher wrote:
>
> I'll chime in on that one as well as I've hit the same point as CTP I
> don't have enough time left for "yet-another-whatever" unless it completely
> addresses a hole in how I'm doing something so I overcome inertia. TI don't
> seem to deeply engage or interact with the OSH community and see that their
> interactions need to be based around flogging a particular product. If they
> took a more engaged stance then sales and product would come as they'd see
> the issues that actually exist and then design to fill the hole...
>
> Great to meet all of you at my first Sketching as well!!
>
> Cheers
> Andrew
>
>
>
>
> --
> Andrew Fisher
> http://about.me/ajfisher/bio
>
>
> On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 4:36 AM, Christopher T Palmer <ctp at ctpdesign.com>wrote:
>
>>  Not to overstate the obvious (re Alicia's response), but are we not
>> talking about the electronics manufacturing equivalent of asking an oil
>> tanker to do 180 degree U-turn? Is there respect at the corporate level for
>> open source hardware? The whole notion has to give them willies down to
>> their very bones. I know that there are people in these companies who get
>> OSH, but they aren't always (ever?) the people in charge.
>>
>> For my part I had sent my earlier reply to just Kipp, but I'll share it
>> with everyone here. This is the case for me, and I thought I was the only
>> one until I started hearing this from my colleagues more and more. I don't
>> want to learn yet-another-language, in yet-another-IDE, on
>> yet-another-tool. I simply don't have the time/brainspace/passion for it. I
>> have stuff to do, art to build, students to teach. And when I do learn a
>> new language (even though I really don't want to) it'll be something that
>> takes me in an exciting direction I can't already go - for instance
>> Processing, or MAX/MSP, or some such. I know people who love love love to
>> dig into a new programming language, but I am meeting more and more of us
>> who just don't.
>>
>> What I have no idea about is if there's enough people like me to cause a
>> shift, or if there will always be plenty of the other clamoring for the
>> ever new.
>>
>> CTP
>>
>> ps - SO AWESOME to see you all in Portland last weekend!
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> At 11:12 AM 7/24/2012, alicia wrote:
>>
>> Second, they've been very reluctant to admit that the MSP430 Launchpad
>> took any inspiration from Arduino, although some engineers who worked on
>> the product will tell you exactly that, the company as a whole denies it
>> and treats Arduino as a 4 letter word.
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 10:35 AM, Kipp Bradford <kb at kippworks.com> wrote:
>>  I have an opportunity this Thursday to tell the TI senior
>> microcontroller folks how to better serve our community. The 900 people in
>> the room will include the Pandaboard folks, BeagleBoard folks, MSP430 team,
>> C2000 team, and more.
>>
>> What would you like to see from TI?
>> What do they do well for us? What could they do better?
>>
>> Send me an email and I'll incorporate your interests into my talk!
>>
>> Thanks,
>> -Kipp
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