Product Idea: USB Flash Drives

[dsimic]

Sorry for lack of reply, for some reason I didn't get a notification...

No worries, I've also experienced a couple of forum alerts that disappeared on their own.

Sure, but we can get support from the community. Also any improvements/fixes also benefit the community. I imagine we will need a more powerful controller, but I think the BL602 is a great place to start. Even getting something working at a slow speed will be a massive achievement.

Perhaps we look at this differently - we're not aiming to build the final product, merely a proof of concept? If it even half works and we start to get some interest, I think we could attract more support.

Hmm...  Let's recall the OpenSSD project, which pretty much remains to be a proof of concept, simply because it's impossible to buy the required hardware and have an OpenSSD "instance" running on one's desk.  Thus, as a proof of concept, OpenSSD hasn't gained a lot of traction; as we know, only an inexpensive product that can be purchased by pretty much anyone has the potential to gain a lot of traction in the community.

Thus, I agree that the BL602 would be a good starting point for making a proof of concept, but it would remain at that level (i.e., a schematic, a bunch of code, a few pictures, and some benchmarks) until it becomes a final product.  However, if you agree, a BL602-based storage device would be just too slow to become a viable product that can have a price tag on it.  Very few people would actually buy it, out of which at least 10% wouldn't understand the purpose of the device, so they would leave very bad reviews and effectively thrash the whole project.

Please, don't get me wrong, I'm not a negative Nancy.  I'm just trying to look at the whole idea from as many points as possible.

Hacking about on a Cortex-M7 will be non-trivial... I've done this sort of work before and it took a lot of engineers several months getting even a basic framework up and running reliably.

Nobody said that it would be trivial.   By the way, please have a look at the AltOS, which might serve as a good starting point.