Parallella Pre-Order Shipping Update
parallella.org
parallella.org
That is not the way business is done. They should have either made the kickstarter price higher or more backers or they been honest upfront in that pitch that the product needed additional seed money not coming from kickstarter. Rather than lying to your backers for over a year about the nature of the delays.
None of this is how you make friends and I wont deal with them again. They offered me a refund in November which I never got but at least they finally shipped my boards. This is one kickstarter backing I regret, not because I don't want the product but I don't want the guys who make it in business anymore. I don't want companies that behave this way to be rewarded, such levels of dishonesty (and potentially IMO criminal activity and certainly a breach of Kickstarters conditions) just should not be rewarded with success.
Really, this is the sales pitch? Moral: don't let engineers write your marketing copy. Customers don't need to hear how close to disaster the transition to production was -- it reflects poorly on the end product.
I would have said, "We're now about to ship a product that meets our own high expectations, and we're ready to share it with you." You know, something encouraging.
Yes, that may be the intent, but not all buyers of such products are engineers themselves. Some of them are nontechnical and know what to look for, but have to make snap judgments based on the minimum of information.
> ... not vapid marketing copy.
The author of the linked article certainly succeeded in avoiding vapid marketing copy. :)
I'm guessing this is especially true with this board because of Kickstarter exposure and coverage. I think that the ones bought by the non-engineers will end up dusty in desk drawers next to a thousand Raspberry Pis.
It does seem like there have been some unfortunate events but I honestly believe the team is putting in their best effort to get this thing off the ground. They've had some hangups, and some preventable mistakes. It's the nature of innovation, and nothing they should be ashamed of or try to hide.
There have been more unfortunate kickstarter projects that could not deliver (like a measurement tool from senic). I don’t mind their honesty either and also think I learned something from their struggle. All the best to their future initiatives.
Isn’t that what kickstarter is for?
My first impression (from just looking at it and not powering it on yet ...) is that the board feels like what Raspberry Pi should have been. The Z7020 is a pretty serious chunk of FPGA. I'm not convinced that I believe that their ASIC is any more powerful than the big chunk of programmable logic that's sitting right next to it, though I suppose that for some DSP-like applications, there could be a pretty clear win.
On the other hand, I supported it because I like the idea of a crowd-funded tapeout, and wanted mostly just to help prove that that would be a successful strategy. It's not clear to me that I'll ever have time to actually power one on, let alone do much playing with it...
Has anyone written any code for it yet? How would you describe the experience of programming for it?
I'll show myself out.
None of them have turned up on the "show us your parallela" thread yet unfortunately.