Product Idea: USB Flash Drives

[dsimic]

In theory it could still be connected to the QSPI bus if it's not attached to a DMA buffer or we dynamically allocate DMA buffers to QSPI devices? If re-mapping DMA is fast then this shouldn't be so bad. (This assumes that my four SPI device limit is based on the number of DMA buffers.)

Also if we are running memory mirroring, we could perhaps write to two devices at the same time. The data lines should look identical anyway (it might get complicated if we get bad blocks, but we can cross that bridge later). This would reduce the number of "unique" QSPI devices and increase throughput.

All that could be doable, but it all depends on the way quad-SPI IP core actually works and presents itself.  More information should be available from the publicly available source code; I guess it's time to dig into it.

Well we would eventually want to move towards a single PCB anyway, so perhaps once everything else is working then we can move to a faster board. I still believe there are options to squeeze more speed out of the device though as mentioned above.

I believe a new baseboard would be something much more within Pine64's remit as they will have some internal vision with roadmaps that consider the larger picture, including production.

I also think it's worth seeing what comes of this RISC-V SBC (PineOne?) in a few months as we learn more, it might be too overpowered or just right.

I would like to see Pine64 onboard this project/initiative, but for some reason they remain silent to the community inquiries, as we've already discussed.  Regarding the new RISC-V SBC, the whole thing sounds really good; it should bring "full-fledged" RISC-V to the masses.

Maybe, but I think such a hat could make the BL602 into some cool projects even at such a low speed, like an MP3 player or micro-server for static files, for example. Or the memory could be used for storing video for some CCTV like IoT device in a circular buffer. I'm sure having a lot of memory attached to such a device could already be interesting, even if the transfer is slow via USB.

I hope you're right and there are more people sharing the vision and excitement.  For example, it could also be used as a WiFi wardriving device or a WiFi IDS sensor capable of storing packet dumps locally.