XCore Exchange

You guys (mods) might also want to clear up some of the mixed up dev kit posts from here also, especially when it was an edit rather than a quote as it makes for confused reading for anyone coming to this post later ;-)

regards
Al

Mods are working in it. I might delete this post when done/ Lilltroll

phalt wrote: As for creating new development kits, I believe that is another question that I can bring up with the sales and marketing as you made a good point for it. Our dev kits at the moment are just the bare bones without and I/O to play with out of the box.
Considering the main market for the dev kits is companies wishing to develop applications on the board I assume they have all the I/O stuff they need.
But I don't see why an extra product couldn't be made bundled with a bunch of I/O components!

So why is it a low speed on the forum nowadays? I do not believe that it is the XMOS chips itself that doesn't stand up to the competition.

It seems to be very common; when companies release a new MCU/DSP chip they also release:
A low prize starter kit - just to find new potential customer.
A higher prized dev kit, with all I/0 and maybe all standard connectivity - to make customers who hooked on the solution, making a proof of concept prototype with that - before making a dedicated PCB and go to production.
Sometimes competitions with the new chip.

With that people start to use a new chip very fast in different way. Beginner or advanced.

Nowadays XMOS has a lot of code on github, more or less "ready to go"
They have a many good kits for developers within audio, but the code-base is larger than that.

What maybe is missing is some hardware out of the box, that can be useful in many ways (I/O), IF , XMOS is searching for a wider base of customer to the forum beyond audio.

Personally I miss some hmmm, "teambuilding", making XMOS people feel connected into projects maybe.
It is very easy to commit code into github, but that is only for advanced users with XMOS programming experience.

Bringing this back on track to the competition ideas then, I'm writing down a list of things that I'll present at our next web team meeting as ideas and suggestions from the community. So far I have:

• Software and hardware separate competitions
• Dev kits as prizes for software
• Alternative prizes or an amount, such as $100 of xmos kit for winners of more advanced competitions
• Better rewards for github and tutorials wiki contribution
• Smaller, more frequent prizes such as xmos swag
• Different level competitions so everyone can enter
• Previous winner picks new competition to add some variety

Anything else you'd like me to add?

If we are talking about how to do good value high performance dev boards ST's latest sets a good precedent :

http://www.st.com/internet/evalboard/product/252419.jsp

Less than a tenner UK price (£9.26 @ Farnell)

(feel free to move this to the dev kits post I put it here because I couldn't see it yet, sorry to pull this thread off-topic)

regards
Al

Folknology wrote:If we are talking about how to do good value high performance dev boards ST's latest sets a good precedent :

http://www.st.com/internet/evalboard/product/252419.jsp

Less than a tenner UK price (£9.26 @ Farnell)

regards
Al

That's a great toy. They're certainly priced to get one hooked, probably subsidised: the drug-dealer model :D I'm hooked. I applaud any efforts to get people off 8051 clones.

Max

Why not build upon the "Activity Points" prize by adding tiers; you have one for 512 points, why not 1024, 2046, etc?

I like the idea of a "solve the problem" style competition, although I can see it being easily dominated by one or two experienced users.

Skeksis wrote:Why not build upon the "Activity Points" prize by adding tiers; you have one for 512 points, why not 1024, 2046, etc?

I like the idea of a "solve the problem" style competition, although I can see it being easily dominated by one or two experienced users.

Too many rewards for activity points ask for spammers :-)

Bianco wrote:Too many rewards for activity points ask for spammers :-)

True, but that issue is already being invited, I can't image that adding a few extra tiers would exacerbate the problem, if anything they'll be weeded out in their attempts to hit the requirement for the first prize.

It wouldn't matter much at the moment anyway.
There are still giveaways for the first 50 to reach 512 points.
People with more points are usually already more active.

Mmm, that's a fair point.