Product Idea: USB Flash Drives

[dsimic]

I don't think the OpenSSD project ever planned to actually be a consumer device, rather just a platform for research. There's of course nothing wrong with that and it's extremely valuable, but it limits its use to others.

I agree that OpenSSD was probably made as a research platform only.  That's perfectly fine.  However, who's going to do some research on a hardware platform that pretty much cannot be purchased?

Oh for sure, the BL602 will be highly unlikely to end up in the final design - but we're not even going to be getting close to meeting the limitations of the BL602 in our first design I don't imagine. If we can get it working at any kind of speed, that's already useful.

Alright, let's take the first step with the BL602 as a PoC platform, if you agree.  Let's find out how the Quad-SPI interface on the BL602 actually works, how is it used on the software side, and if there any limitations to the total size of the SPI flash that can be connected that way.  Sounds like a plan?

Interesting. I think it would be good to have an OS and the USB decoupled, especially as we are looking to port. Using FreeRTOS for example would get us tonnes of platforms, leaving only the need to port the USB library. I linked also to a pretty good library above which supports mass storage.

It would be ideal to make the firmware modular, independent of the underlying hardware, and thus reusable as much as possible.  I'm unable to find the link to the library you've mentioned above in any of your recent posts...  Could you, please, post that link again?

I was looking for something like this https://www.hyperstone.com/en/USB-31-Con...-2129.html which is an integrated USB flash drive controller with some RISC core. The problem is that sourcing those in low volumes is usually pretty hard, Mouser seems to at least list them for 5-6EUR per piece, but I doubt that you can actually order only a few...

This looks very interesting.  According to Mouser, it is possible to have it ordered in low quantities.  Now, I wonder how could we get access to the API and SDK mentioned on the product web page?  Also, I wonder how far the "firmware customizations", as described by the manufacturer, can go on this controller?