Product Idea: USB Flash Drives

[barray]

Absolutely, we could implement numerous features.  Not necessarily in the first open-hardware device, but the key would be adding new features over time.

Right, but we could likely add them to the hardware in such a way that we are able to test them if we can get the other parts working correctly. But that's a minor detail anyway.

I've tried reaching TL Lim and Luke multiple times, using pings in forum posts, private messages on the forum, and email messages.  Other forum members tried pinging them as well.  No response at all, which is very strange to me.

Maybe they have given up trying to stay on top of communications whilst there is a parts shortage, I bet 90% of emails are people asking "when will X be back in stock?".

Even making a dozen of prototypes wouldn't be exactly trivial.  Sourcing various components in very small quantities is much more difficult and expensive than it may seem at first glance.  Adding flash chips into the BOM would only make things more difficult.

Well this is why I suggest using BL602 as a base as that would cover the majority of the components as we have a community created build system for the device too. We would just be creating a 'hat' for the device, which should reduce development risk. Regarding the flash chips, luckily the pinout tends to be the same, so we could hot-swap for other chips that happen to be available. As long as we refrain from anything chip specific we should be fine, but worst case we could just have hardware specific builds (something I guess we cannot avoid anyway).

Edit: Please, note that I might be able to produce a very small batch of post-prototype devices, but not before the awful COVID-19 pandemic is over, which will hopefully be sooner than later.  Clearly, the emphasis is on "might".

In any case, things should become much easier once this period of time passes!

Edit #2: The OpenSSD project looks very interesting and seems to provide useful resources.  Also, their presentation looks rather promising.  Though, the provided source code looks weird and rather useless.  Of course, it could very well be that I'm missing something.

The SSD part is still very much "in the future" for now... But I have seen the OpenSSD project before. From what I can tell it's mostly dead? From my understanding, their platform is more about developing a board they can experiment with for research - rather than ever aiming towards anything that would end up in the hands of consumers.

Edit #3: The "pagemap.c" file from the OpenSSD codebase actually looks interesting, but it seemingly contains no "magic".

This would be the part I would be most confident with - the part I wouldn't be is the actual communications protocol they use. NVMe for example is quite complex. An open source implementation of this stuff would be ridiculously valuable.