Product Idea: USB Flash Drives

[dsimic]

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?".

It could be the reason.  Actually, I really hope you're right.  However, their lack of communication with the community is bad for everyone, and nobody knows when the pandemic will be over so the manufacturing and parts availability could start returning to normal.  Thus, simply ignoring the messages isn't a very good solution.

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).

I'm not sure that the BL602 (block diagram) has a NAND flash interface?  The BL602 specification states that it contains an Intel IP core for the SPI flash interface, intended for storing firmware (hence the XIP/execute-in-place feature), which would be too slow for a storage device.  However, I think that it shouldn't be a problem to select an appropriate low-cost microcontroller with an ARM Cortex-M0 core, a NAND flash interface, and a USB interface.

Another possibility for the partial source of parts could be to use an appropriate commercially available USB flash drive to harvest a couple of key parts, the flash IC and the case.  Sourcing those two parts in very low quantities would drive their prices very high.

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.

Exactly, the goal of OpenSSD is to provide a platform for research, development and education, with no intentions of creating an actual product for end users.