[Freedombox-discuss] Kickstarter's initial goal was reached

James Vasile james at hackervisions.org
Thu Feb 24 15:14:19 UTC 2011


On Thu, 24 Feb 2011 03:52:30 +0000, Philip Hands <phil at hands.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 23 Feb 2011 14:22:02 -0500, James Vasile <james at hackervisions.org> wrote:
> ...
> > The problem with numbers is they imply precision that doesn't always
> > exist.  There is no detailed hidden budget.  $500K is an estimate of the
> > resources it would take to actualize the vision.
> 
> Hi James,
> 
> If I had that money to spend on such a project, I'd probably burn some
> of it on getting a decent hardware design sorted out, and publish it as
> an open design to encourage its production (a la Arduino).  The little
> plug computers that exist all seem to be either anoyingly broken in some
> minor (or major) way, or rather too expensive to have mass appeal.
> 
> One feature I'd definitely want to include if designing from scratch
> would be the ability to draw its power from USB phone chargers (on the
> basis that we're going to be knee deep in the things soon) and the
> ability to use two of them, so that (given that they're cheap & nasty)
> the Freedombox can send you an email pointing out that one of its PSUs
> has died.
> 
> Just an idea -- it might well be easier to assume that android phones
> are going to end up cheap enough, and use one of them as the hardware
> though, since that gets you economies of scale without any effort on our
> part.
> 
> Cheers, Phil.

Phil, these are good and creative ideas (two PSUs!).  Maybe you could
add them to the wiki?  If we can start pooling these ideas in a central
place and refining them together, all this creativity might just add up
to real progress!



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